ASCILITE2021 Conference Day 1 – notes on the fly. (Now with my presentation)

Opening keynote – Prof Sarah Pearson, Uni of Queensland

Oh joy – we are looking at Education Technology through the lens of venture capital.

Oh – not even ed tech from what I can see.

Holistic ecosystems – probably the most valuable part of the session.

Oh Jesus Christ – someone refers to themself as a Netflix for education. (I am pretty sure I have heard the same thing from senior leaders – now I know where that came from, I guess)

There’s some other stuff about needing more women in STEM – sure, obviously.

A systematic approach to learning design for supervisor training in a specialist medical college – Jorge Reyna, Santosh Khanal, Victoria Baker-Smith and Ellen Cooper

Common issues coming up – resistance from educators to spending time in actually working on their learning design

That session finished and I’m just jumping from one session to the next like I’m flicking through tv channels.

Ok, so this presenter of a short paper has 80 slides and is showing them in Presenter view. Bless.

Powerpoint slides with text about insitutional claims

I like that he has a bow tie

I haven’t completely tuned into this but I think I need to read this paper.
Benchmarking educational quality – an independent analysis and alternative approach – Stanislaw Paul Maj

One session to go now before mine – feeling nervous

Implementing Learning Analytics: The Journey To Improve Teaching and Learning at five Australian Universities – Jo-Anne Clark and David Tuffley

Factors associated with edvisor perceptions of their work being understood and valued are not what they seem – Colin Simpson and Jessica Frawley

Huh, that title actually is kind of clunky. I wanted to have a Twin Peaks reference. I should probably listen to people more. 🙂

Ok, me now.

Ok, I got through that – I have a VERY unacademic style – but folksy?

Managing Career Transitions into post-secondary Learning Designer Jobs: An Australasian Perspective – Michael Sankey and Jack Sage

(This is kind of a reboot of the webinar they ran for us last week)

I have my doubts about this next session but lets see how we go

Well, the TELedvisors Network hosted a group to identify technology themes. We agreed that “Increased use of learning technologies” is so vague as to be ridiculous. And also, just, duh.

And that’s a wrap for day 1

Ed Tech must reads – Column 14

First published in Campus Morning Mail on Tuesday 16th November 2021

Professional Development Opportunities in Educational Technology and Education via Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes has been a go-to source for information and opinion about online learning for decades. He is also one of the originators of the idea of the MOOC. In this post, he shares a comprehensive Word doc list (147 pages) from Clayton R Wright of Ed Tech/Education conferences, seminars and workshops of note between now and 2024. (I did still manage to find one that isn’t on the list – that’s at the end of this column – but you had better believe it is comprehensive)

Teaching like a Master(Chef) – Using MasterChef as a model for effective and ineffective lesson design from Medium

Reality TV shows provide us with hours of content every week of ‘real’ people engaging in challenging practices right at the edge of their capability for our viewing pleasure. In some cases they are thrown into a task cold but more commonly they are supported in different ways that can offer us insights into wider learning and teaching practices. James Bullous explores (UK) Masterchef in this engaging post, ranging over Discovery learning, Cognitive Load Theory, feedback, modelling, motivation and more.

25 more real-world examples of Virtual Reality from E-Learning Provocateur

This post is a couple of years old now but given recent buzz about Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), it’s worth revisiting as a handy source of exemplars of innovative uses of the technology in education/training, healthcare, marketing, gameplay, ‘travel’ and storytelling.

Brain Implant Translates Paralyzed Man’s Thoughts Into Text With 94% Accuracy from Science Alert

Something that is a little further down the road from practical application in the classroom but nonetheless fascinating is this story that draws on an article from Nature. Researchers have been able to capture thought-to-text at a rate of ~18 words per minute with high accuracy. The mind boggles.

EdTechPosium 2021 – Canberra, Friday December 10th

EdTechPosium is a one-day conference with a practical bent covering innovative uses of educational technologies in ACT universities, TAFE and schools. Once known as MoodlePosium back when Canberra education institutions were collectively a Moodle shop, it is a great opportunity to connect with the dynamic local Technology Enhanced Learning community. Keynote speakers include chief Moodler Martin Dougiamas, ANU PVC Education & Digital Prof. Maryanne Dever, Ed Tech guru Natalie Denmeade and Astrophysicist Brad Tucker. For $90 including dinner, it’s hard to go wrong.

Ed Tech must reads – Column 13

First published in Campus Morning Mail on Tuesday 9th November 2021

Examination of the SAMR model for effective technology integration through an adaptive leadership approach from i-Managers Journal of Educational Technology (Paywall)

The SAMR (Substitute – Augment – Modify – Redefine) model offers a framework for increasingly sophisticated uses of a given technology in learning and teaching. It is underused in education and particularly in areas responsible for planning educational transformation, but Heatherton and Trespalacios (Boise State University) offer some useful suggestions for its application. While the article does focus on the K-12 sector, their suggestions are easily applicable to Tertiary education as well. Their discussion of the need for flexibility in a space where change has become a constant is equally valuable.

About Twitter Spaces from Twitter

Spaces is new, relatively unheralded functionality on Twitter that enables live audio conversations. It seems to be Twitter’s response to the mobile app Clubhouse, extending some functionality natively to desktop and laptop users. (It is possible to listen to the audio there but not speak). I stumbled across a Spaces session hosted by medical researcher @upulie while idly browsing Twitter one evening and was struck by the tool’s potential for innovative use in teaching and educational CoPs.

Using head mounted display virtual reality simulations in large engineering classes: Operating vs observing from Australasian Journal of Educational Technology

The recent palaver about Facebook’s ambitions in the Mixed/Virtual Reality (XR) ‘Metaverse’ prompted some discussion about one of the biggest practical issues faced by institutions, access to and management of sufficient hardware. Seven scholars from Engineering at UWA explore whether everyone actually needs to have a go to benefit in this handy AJET article from earlier this year.

Microsoft Teams enters the metaverse race with 3D avatars and immersive meetings from The Verge

While we are talking about XR and the metaverse, it’s worth noting that Microsoft announced last week that they plan to bring their own toys (Mesh and HoloLens) into their communication and collaboration platform Teams next year. The most notable functionality in this would seem to be the ability to be represented by an animated avatar in Teams meetings. Given that one of the struggles of Zoom classrooms in the COVID era has been the cameras-on/cameras-off debate, with students feeling over exposed but teachers wanting connection and non-verbal feedback, avatars may offer a middle ground if they work well enough.

Simulating a university Twitter thread from @BryanAlexander

Bryan Alexander is an ‘education futurist’ and one of the more engaging speakers I have seen in recent years. He recently posted on Twitter that he was planning a seminar for his students which would involve a game simulating a university over the next decade. He called for suggestions of random events for them to grapple with. The responses were wide-ranging and at times hilarious.

Ed Tech must reads – Column 12

First published in Campus Morning Mail Tuesday 2nd November 2021

A heutagogical approach for the assessment of Internet Communication Technology (ICT) assignments in higher education from International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (Open Access)

With students increasingly identifying as online content creators, and the slowly evolving nature of academic publishing, it makes sense to harness Internet platforms in their education. Lynch, Sage, Hitchcock and Sage here outline some formal structures to support a more self-determined form of assessment, where learners are as mindful of the external audience for the resources they create in their courses as they are of their teachers. This article offers a comprehensive guide to the theory behind this approach as well as some exemplar rubrics. The only issue that I would possibly take is the breathless excitement about this as a new mode – not to toot my own horn but I had my students posting blogs for assessment a decade ago. Perhaps without the rich theoretical framework though.

Bringing Clinical Simulation & Active Learning Strategies into the Classroom During COVID-19 from Healthy Simulation

Medical disciplines have long been leaders in the adoption of technology enhanced learning and teaching, with a particular need to be able to give learners as much authentic practical experience as possible while also being safe and logistically feasible. In this informative but brief post, Amy Curtis describes the practical changes that were required in a university nursing program in the South East US in response to COVID19.

Administrators are not the enemy from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Brian Rosenberg is the President in residence of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and pulls no punches with this strongly worded cri de coeur – the subheading is “Faculty contempt for nonfaculty employees is unjustified and destructive”. It isn’t a long read but covers a decent amount of ground about academia, from the primacy of expertise to toxic behaviour in hierarchies.

Introducing design thinking online to large business education courses for twenty-first century learning from Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice

Vallis (USyd) and Redmond (USQ) discuss the application of design thinking principles that are, in essence, a more human centred angle on problem solving, in teaching business disciplines. They interview academics and student in a first-year course in this case study to delve into its usefulness in this practice and find some handy benefits.

Opinion: There’s nothing appealing about the Metaverse from Game Developer

When Facebook is in the news it can be easy to tune out these days but this opinion piece from Bryant Francis about Mark Zuckerberg’s rebranding of the parent company as ‘Meta’ and their roadmap for a remarkably Second Life-like all encompassing virtual social world is worth a read. While this isn’t about the educational applications of such a space, it points out a number of the logical flaws and so-what questions that aren’t yet being discussed enough.

Ed Tech must reads – Column 11

First published Campus Morning Mail, Oct 26th 2021

Team-based quizzes on no budget from Amanda loves to audit

Australia’s favourite lecturer on auditing, Amanda White at UTS, integrates technologies into her teaching to inspire and engage her students. In this post, she shares her approach to creating weekly branching quizzes that are taken firstly individually and then in small groups to create opportunities for collaborative learning via multiple attempts. She discusses how she has created a solution that bypasses LMS quiz limitations but which retains accountability.

Support Designer-Teacher Collaboration in Educational Game Design Using Learning Science Principles from Ma and Harpstead, CHI-PLAY 2021 proceedings

A common concern held about educational technologies is that the tech is prioritised about the pedagogy. This work in progress from Ma and Harpstead (Carnegie Mellon University), presented recently at the Computer-Human Interaction in Play conference outlines their work on educational game design support frameworks linked closely to evidence based learning science principles. Given the potential of educational games to create rich, authentic learning experiences, this work shows great potential.

Vale Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from Jane McGonigal (Twitter)

For people with an interest in learner engagement, motivation and productivity, the loss of Csikszentmihalyi last week was a sad moment. His 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience developed the idea of a ‘flow state’, the sweet spot between challenge and skill where people find themselves fully absorbed in an activity. This has been highly influential on education and game design and games in education. The comments below this tweet from McGonigal, an influential figure in serious game design thinking, offer a taste of the impact his work had.

UTS Video Meetup #10 Podcasting, Live-streaming and designing educational media Tues Oct 26, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm (AEDT)

This video meetup this afternoon features academics and learning designers from a range of organisations presenting about using educational video (Mark Parry, AISNSW), live-streaming on Twitch (Jamie Chapman, UTAS), Learner generated digital media (Beverley Myles, OpenLearning) and podcasts as learning and teaching resources (Fidel Fernando, Macquarie Uni).

Towards a taxonomy of assessment types – webinar/workshop Thurs Oct 28th 12 noon (AEDT)

Hans Tilstra (Keypath Australia) leads what should be a lively set of activities intended to lead towards a meaningful taxonomy of assessment types in modern tertiary education. This is the final ASCILITE TELedvisors Network webinar for 2021 and caps off a stellar year of these events.

Ed Tech must reads – Column 10

First published in Campus Morning Mail, 19th October 2021

Watch Party Lectures: Synchronous Delivery of Asynchronous Material from Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education

Something that I’ve noticed recently in online conferences is an increased use of pre-recorded presentations. My initial response to this was a sense of feeling somewhat ripped off, but in better sessions I have realised how well this can work. Presenters are freed up to engage in simultaneous chat as the video plays, answering questions and following the audience down new discussion paths that would not be possible in a synchronous session. Emily Nordmann (University of Glasgow) is one of the leading lights in scholarship of lecture capture. This paper with her colleague Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel describes their recent use of this innovative approach with lecture “watch parties” with students. Once lecturers get past the strangeness of watching themselves, they and the students report real benefits from this mode of teaching.

Platinum (LMS) picks for 2021 from Craig Weiss

I’ll preface this with a large caveat that I am wary of anyone who describes themselves as “the most influential person in the world for learning systems” and whose evaluation criteria include being signed up to their own business’s “Customer Excellence Pledge”. That said, this list of 30 Learning Management Systems (LMS) recommended by Weiss offers a handy resource for anyone exploring options in the LMS space and it covers a range of organisational contexts. I recognised just one name on this list, D2L.

Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows from MIT Technology Review

It’s no secret that Facebook has an oversized grasp on the world’s psyche but this report from the MIT Technology Review still manages to chill in terms of how effectively this is misused. In 2020, 19 of the top 20 “American” Christian pages in terms of views were based in troll farms in Eastern Europe with suspected ties to Russian Intelligence. These aren’t even pages that people have signed up to, simply those that Facebook presents as ‘related content’. More than anything, stories like this highlight the urgency of embedding digital and media literacy and critical thinking in every level of the education system.

12 ideas to refresh your teaching in less than 10 minutes from The Educationalist Alexandra Mihai draws on a range of resources in cognitive psychology and faculty development to provide 12 brief activities (and wider practices) to bolster student learning in classes. Ranging from keeping the lesson plan visible for signposting/contextualisation to retrieval practices and activating prior knowledge, these are all things that can be picked up with minimal preparation.

Ed Tech must reads – Column 9

First published Campus Morning Mail 12th October 2021

This Former English Prof Built and Sold a Company: Here’s What She Learned from Roostervane

One thing commonly discussed about education technology companies is how well they understand the experiences and needs of teachers and students. One thing commonly asked of academics is how applicable their skills and knowledge are to ‘the real world’. This quick read from Roostervane, a Higher Ed oriented careers site talks through some of the experiences of someone that moved from academia to ed tech and offers suggestions for those interested in this path.

Discussion on consistency in online course design from Neil Mosley (Twitter) 

Ideas of ‘academic freedom’ in terms of how courses should be designed and taught often butt heads with usability principles and institutional priorities when it comes to online learning. This debate is well captured in a tweet from @neilmosley5 and the subsequent string of responses that cover ground include standardisation of courses, Geocities, cognitive load, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and some rather tortured analogies. Well worth a read to tour the many perspectives.

Student Guide to the Hidden Curriculum from the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education

Starting tertiary study can be a confusing experience for students, particular those who are first in family. There are labyrinthine systems to navigate and new terminology and concepts that are often treated as assumed knowledge. What is a PhD, a journal article, peer review? This guide, while UK-centric, offers clear and well-written explanations designed to support new students in this new world. I absolutely wish I’d had something similar when I started uni. (Thanks Thao for sharing)

Call for contributions – Innovation in Higher Education Assessment in COVID19 from JUTLP

The Journal of University Learning and Teaching Practice is an open publication hosted by the University of Wollongong. They are currently calling for contributions to an upcoming issue relating to innovation in assessment in the time of COVID19. Abstracts are due by Nov 1.

The Dreambank from University of California, Santa Cruz

Most of the time, hearing people recount their dreams can be a little tedious. They don’t fit conventional story structures and the details can be somewhat liminal. This site however, from psychology researchers at UCSC, captures brief (~100 words) retellings of more than 20,000 dreams from people aged between 7 and 74 over decades. It also includes discussions between the researchers and dreamers about the dreams. I spent way too long trawling through these one evening but it is a marvellous window into the minds of people we’d never otherwise hear.

Ed Tech must reads – Column 8

First published in Campus Morning Mail 5th October 2021

Go8 unis challenge anti-plagiarism software merger from Financial Review

While ‘text-matching’ or ‘similarity checking’ are probably more accurate terms for what tools like Turnitin and Ouriginal (formerly Urkund) do, they are the big two companies in the academic integrity / anti-plagiarism space. The announcement earlier this year that Turnitin planned to acquire Ouriginal raised some concerns in the sector about the impact that this may have on competition, support and innovation. The ACCC started an investigation in July and this article about the submission from the Group of Eight universities nicely sums up some of the issues.

Interaction in asynchronous discussion boards: a campus-wide analysis to better understand regular and substantive interaction from Education and Information Technologies Journal

Discussion forums have been a mainstay of online learning for as long as we have had online learning. Used well, they contribute to social, teaching and cognitive presence in a space that can sometimes be isolating. In spite of the time we have had to develop our use of forums as teaching tools, their efficacy varies wildly. This journal article from Gasell, Lowenthal, Uribe-Florez and Ching draws on the wealth of analytic data now available in the LMS to see how forums are used and whether there is an optimal level of teacher engagement. It’s largely quantitative but still offers some insights and suggestions for faculty development.

Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash from CNN Business

For a good few decades Adobe Flash dominated interactive multimedia content online. This was also true of many educational resources, and when support for Flash finally ended at the start of 2021 – the ‘Flashapocalypse’ – there was a significant body of work done in education institutions to ensure that resources were converted. Fortunately, the writing had been on the wall for some time. This CNN business article describes the impact on the wider web and particularly the strategies that have been used to preserve a wealth of rich online media that could be lost with the (virtual) flick of a switch.

Digital disruption in the time of COVID-19: Learning technologists’ accounts of institutional barriers to online learning, teaching and assessment in UK universities from International Journal of Academic Development (pre-print)

Learning (or education) technologists are most commonly professional staff responsible for supporting the effective use of technologies to enable better learning and teaching. They bridge IT departments and teaching centres, holding expertise in both spaces. Unsurprisingly, with the rapid pivot to technology enhanced learning since COVID19, they (we) have been busy helping institutions move to the ‘new normal’. This study from Watermeyer, Crick and Knight explores this shift through the eyes of these people on the ground and captures their insights into what has changed, whether this change will endure and why. It does not pull punches.

The meme is the message from Taraneh Azar

Part of Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the world wide web was that it would be a home for creators as much as consumers. In some ways, memes as easily created, constantly evolving pieces of micro-content have realised that vision. Taraneh Azar is a student at Northeastern University that has built an incredibly rich resource outlining some of the history, theory, concepts and exemplars of memes and meme culture. It’s a rabbit hole but always interesting.

Ed Tech must reads – Column 7

First published in Campus Morning Mail 28th Sept 2021

How Dx Powers the Post-Pandemic Institution from Educause   

We started with UX (User Experience), moved on to LX (Learner Experience), and now the ed tech world is talking about Dx, which appears to stand for Digital Transformation. (Don’t ask me why). Meaningful change to learning and teaching involving technology requires an approach encompassing technology, pedagogy and institutional culture. In the absence of a large body of academic research or models relating to how these kinds of educational change projects work at scale, a lot of these kinds of projects lean on generic IT project management strategies. This post from Educause, and the rich resources that it links to, presents discussion and frameworks for undertaking Dx specifically in educational institutions.

Why captions are everywhere on TikTok: ‘Glasses for your ears’ from Los Angeles Times

With some reports indicating that people now spend more time watching videos on TikTok than YouTube, it’s worth keeping an eye on the ways that the format of video content on this platform is evolving. This article from the LA Times dives into the widespread use of text captions – both automatically and manually generated – to augment video content on TikTok for all users, for a variety of reasons. While educational institutions still largely use captioning for accessibility and research findings about the impact of them on learning is mixed, the fact that it is becoming commonplace for people to turn captions on for Netflix as we multitask while viewing shows suggests that more thought needs to be given to text in videos in education.

Why are hyperlinks blue? From dist://ed Mozilla blog

While they aren’t always blue and underlined, the default setting for a link to another page in HTML is resolutely underlined blue. In our years online, we have doubtless seen tens or hundreds of thousands of these links and seldom given this a thought – it is simply a convention of the web. This deep dive from the people at Mozilla (creators of the Firefox browser) travels back to the origins of hyperlinks in the 1960s and traces the design decisions that led us to this convention.

An OPM Debate: 11 Colleagues in 32 Tweets from Inside Higher Ed

Online Program Management (OPM) is a rapidly expanding sector in Higher Education that is not widely discussed. In a nutshell, they are businesses outsourced by institutions to provide services including learning design, course building and student recruitment, support and administration, among others, in the online course space. In Australia, this includes Kaplan, Keypath and OES. I recently came across this post from 2019 that summarises a Twitter discussion about OPMs between executives and academics in the US that still has some relevance. It crosses a range of issues including HE values, where innovation comes from, who pays for risk and how academia and industry see each other.

Stem Mixer from Courtney Barnett

Courtney Barnett is a big-name Melbourne indie-music darling with a new record coming out. She’s done something interesting to promote this, putting up a virtual mixing desk allowing fans to play with a new song (or an old one) by isolating different instruments, looping sections, and raising and lowering levels. Tools like this are great for teaching people how audio production works and creating opportunities to play while doing so.  

Ed Tech must reads – Column 6

First published in Campus Morning Mail 14th Sept 2021

The iceberg theory of EdTech: One Laptop Per Child from Gaurav Singh (Twitter) (5 mins)

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is a cautionary tale about what happens when well-meaning thought leaders with compelling pitches for ed tech don’t do due diligence and actually ask the people on the ground if their idea will work. OLPC was a project to manufacture and give robust, crank powered laptops to young learners in the Global South to help them eLearn out of poverty. This Twitter thread from @gauravsingh961 forensically works through the details of the failure of this project as a case study against the ‘tech as silver bullet’ mentality.

How Learning Technology Can Help from Education…technically (6 mins)

Rolling out a learning technology is only part of many when it comes to good digital education. The Scottish pivot to online learning in Higher Ed due to COVID19 was the focus of a recent government taskforce there, and Chris Kennedy discusses the vital support component of it in this blog post. While there was a sensible decision to lean heavily on JISC resources, he notes the virtual absence of input from expert professional support staff, subsequent proposed cuts in support to achieve efficiencies, and an expectation that educators will add a suite of digital learning capabilities to their quiver in their free time. In terms of understanding how some of the powers-that-be understand 21st century education, this post is eye opening.

How dark patterns trick you online video from Dark Patterns (7 mins)

User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) has come into its own as a discipline in the last decade or so in helping us to understand how we use the web and how to design better and easier interactions. The shadow side of this – “Dark Patterns” – sees business and designers exploiting these principles to make users do things that they didn’t mean to using design tricks and cognitive science. This video explains some of these common tricks and the site overall offers some valuable tips to deepen our digital literacy.

“The end of Blackboard as a Standalone EdTech Company” from Phil on EdTech

While the title of this article veers toward the dramatic, the recent merger of the Blackboard LMS company and Anthology, a company with products on the student management, enrolment and retention side of things is kind of a big deal. This article walks through the details of this merger with somewhat of a business focus but it also discusses possible implications for particular platforms and institutional users. Given that Blackboard still has approximately a third of Australian LMS market, this is something useful to stay on top of.

Games for Change Asia Pacific Festival Oct 5th – Oct 7th

On a slightly more cheerful note, the expanded Games for Change festival is coming up in early October. This free online event offers more than 80 speakers talking about different ways serious games, game-based learning and other associated technologies are being used in tertiary education and beyond to help build a better world. It includes a mix of presentations and interactive workshops.