Ed/Tech must-reads (and watches) 180624

Understanding Australian higher education: The private sector - Webinar Recording from HERDSA Queensland

I’ve been aware of the existance of the private side of Oz HE for a while but this webinar featuring incoming HERDSA head Christy Collis and Raja Kannusamy was still quite the eye-opener. Framed as a quiz to make dropping a bunch of data more palatable, this is a fantastic way to learn about a sector three times the size of the public uni sector and the array of opportunities to be found there for work and research.

CRADLE Seminar Series: Second Handbook of Academic Integrity (2024) launch from CRADLE (Deakin) (Wed 24 Jul, 12pm AEST)

The more we learn about academic integrity - even aside from the GenAI Pandora’s box - the more it is clear that this needs our immediate attention. Fortunately clever people are on the case and Sarah Elaine Eaton (Uni of Calgary, Deakin Uni) is here to tell us about the 3 volume, 112 chapter saga that is the Second Handbook of Academic Integrity. (Have they tried just asking students not to cheat though?)

Necessary FUD? from Bionic Teaching

In the Ed Tech world, we want to encourage academics to find and use their own ways and tools to teach better. For practical reasons though, sometimes there are very good reasons for saying no - existing solutions, privacy, accessibility, security. This quick post from Tom Woodward (Virginia Commonwealth University) talks through the reasons that these factors can get in the way when you ask the Ed Tech team to install something new.

Accord Report - Teaching quality from MCSHE / Aus Govt Dept of Education

When the big Aus HE Accord report dropped earlier this year I noted that it was a little light on in the education quality department. This package of proposals generated from the folks at the Uni of Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Ed addresses this to a pretty decent degree across 71 pages. To be honest, many of the things recommended are things that I have been surprised that the sector wasn’t already doing or didn’t already have ever since I started working here. Minimum standards for learning and teaching, better metrics for measuring learning and teaching quality and mandatory teaching quals stand out. As with most things in the academy, nothing will happen until buckets of funding are provided but at least the question has been asked.

Dream Machine by Luna AI - making images videos from Twitter (X)

Easily my favourite thing about GenAI creations is when they go weirdly wrong. This series of posts shares outputs from a tool that extrapolates images into short videos. The author has taken some popular meme images, included distracted boyfriend and we now see what - in the computer’s mind - happens next. So wrong it’s right.