Ed/Tech must-reads 260324

Professional development in the third space, AI avatars and upvoting in social annotation

Author

Colin Simpson
March 25, 2024

Aliens sit in a deep sapce dive bar

Hopefully you are here because you have an interest in technology and technology enhanced learning (but hey, it’s your email time) - and there is also a reasonable chance that you are one of the people working away in the third space (Whitchurch, 2008 - now) behind the scenes facilitating these things and making them better. Education technologists, learning designers, academic developers and so on. Or at the very least you work with these people.

This webinar, first of the year for the ASCILITE TELedvisors Network, explores the varied options for people in this space to engage in professional development. From HEA fellowships to formal quals, participating in communities of practice and more. Join me, Jess Frawley (USyd), Stephen Ablitt (Keypath) and John Vulic (UTS) for what should be a lively session. Bring questions!

Some of us can’t stay away from the bad place (damn it, I was there first) and there are still some valuable conversations to be had. Anna Mills kicked off an interesting discussion last week about the impact of teachers creating AI powered avatars for their teaching - or at least as chat bots. It covered a decent amount of ground - personally I’m still on the fence. I have seen this used powerfully for accessibility but I worry about losing human presence in the online.

Some online learning technologies that haven’t had the oxygen they deserve because of the pandy and now ChattyG are social annotation tools. These foster lovely asynchronous communication and collaboration around shared resources, potentially leading to the co-creation of new knowledge. This article from Li et al. (2024) examines the upvoting capabilities of these tools and their impact on learning. The ability to easily show support to peers appears to be a useful feature.