Ed/Tech must-reads 180324

Don’t look back in anger (or anything else) from EdTechie

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” wrote LP Hartley in The Go-Between (1953). The recent sale of mega-Mooc platform Udacity to the massive ‘professional services’ (whatever that is) consultancy Accenture recently sparked some reflection in the ed-tech blogosphere. (Accenture announced plans to invest $1B in a fancy new AI driven online learning platform. (Good luck with that.)

Martin Weller discusses the lessons that we learn - or usually don’t but should - from looking back at the technologies that were going to change the world. Funnily enough, I do still think that GenAI is going to change something - but also that we are still a ways away from knowing what exactly.

Emerging plagiarism in peer-review evaluation reports: a tip of the iceberg? from Scientometrics

Meanwhile the enshittification of scholarly publishing continues apace, with more evidence that the ‘they should be paid for that’ peer review system is showing increasing signs of vulnerability to (old-fashioned) plagiarism. Piniewski et al. (2024) ran peer-review reports from 50 articles in 19 scientific journals through text-matching software and found strong evidence of malfeasance. They go on to consider the potential impact of GenAI on the peer review process, as well as offering some strategies, including running reviews through the aforementioned text-matching tools. (I don’t call them plagiarism-detection tools because that is not what they do, for the large part)

Improving online learning experiences: Five different insights from Neil Mosley

On a somewhat lighter note, this post from Neil Mosley doesn’t offer anything earth-shatteringly new, but it is nice to see these ideas for better online learning all in one place. He points out that nudges, not being fixated on video, emotional intelligence, mindfulness of digital fatigue, and making the space aesthetically pleasing can go a long way.

Be Inspired from Monash Teach HQ

Maintaining the nice theme, I recently popped back in to the showcase/exemplars section of teaching resources site at my old stomping grounds Monash Uni. It’s really coming along nicely - with examples of work from a wide set of disciplines ranging across co-design with students, podcasting, role play with ChatGPT and more. (And I thought that the place would crumble without me)