Monash U Archives announces “exciting news” (via Twitter yesterday). The excitement is the release of six new videos from its collection. They include “Caulfield Technical School Reminiscences” from 1979.

In Features this morning

CLAIRE MACKEN (RMIT) on growing education in Vietnam – there’s much to learn from the way people ride motorbikes .

with JO HOETZER and colleagues from ANU and Uni Wollongong on working with students to deliver employability and life-long, life-wide career management skills. It’s a new selection by Commissioning Editor Sally Kift for her celebrated series, Needed now in teaching and learning.

plus MERLIN CROSSLEY (UNSW) on the inevitability of the ATAR. “There are thousands of early offers out there but the ATAR and more sophisticated applicant ranking systems that aim to consider a student’s context and achievement relative to opportunity will always be with us.”

And in Expert Opinion

JASON POTTS (RMIT) on the power and potential of the blockchain for education, business –and transforming how society works (ep 21).

JS Australia starts work immediately with the National Skills Commission announcing yesterday it was passing the baton. The first JSA homepage is HERE.

Pitchbook (“empowers capital market professionals”) has a new ranking of the top universities based on alumni who founded venture capital backed companies

US unis account for 70 plus of the top 100, with a few Canadians and UK universities, a handful from Singapore, India and South Korea – and Tsinghua and Peking from China.

As to Australia, Uni Sydney leads at 78th in the world, followed by UNSW at 84, Uni Melbourne at 86 and Monash at 94.

This might impress, just not compared to Israel – which has six universities on the list, five in the top 50, Tel Aviv, (seven), Israel Institute of Tech (15), Hebrew U (31), Reichman (38) and Ben Gurion (45).

Stanford U is first with 1427 grads, raising $US 73.6bn for 1271 companies.

How to make students read? From The Educationalist

One of the most universal complaints that educators have about their students, regardless of the discipline, is that they “never do the readings”. For some, this is where the issue begins and ends. This thoughtful piece from Alexandra Mihai delves into some of the possible reasons for learners not engaging with readings and offers some useful strategies for sparking their interest. She reminds that academic reading requires learnable skills and that educators can ease this path.

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Strategic directions in the what and how of learning and teaching innovation—a fifty-year synopsis from Higher Education

Either learning and teaching innovation in the last fifty years has been so minimal as to fit into a fifteen-page article (with 4 pages of refs) or Griffith’s Rob Ellis has the skills to sum up five decades of increasing complexity succinctly. Happily, it appears to be the latter. The paper focuses exclusively on the discussion within this particular journal in this time, taking us from early calls for research into HE learning and teaching to the inevitable discussion of the pandemic response. It offers a rich overview of HE history.

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Moving to Mastodon from Steve Fenton

Now that his Muskiness has officially taken over Twitter, many of my on-line colleagues are looking around warily for what this might mean for our favourite on-line space. Having been a twit for 11 years, it would be a hard ship to abandon, so, for now, I’m just watching with interest. I know more than a few people are exploring Mastodon, the peace, love and mung beans alternative option. This article offers some useful advice for those considering the change. I also found this handy tool for re-following your Twitter friends, as long as they put their new username in their Twitter bio.

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Does the Educause Exhibitor’s Floor Plan Reflect Market Trends in HigherEd IT? From listedtech

Where there are large education conferences you will inevitably find people with things to sell. The US based Educause conference easily fits into this category. This clever piece of data analysis examines the amount of floor space taken up in the vendor hall by businesses in a range of categories to map broader trends in the sector. Among these we see conferencing tools, general consultancies, customer relationship management systems and general hardware sellers in the ascendent and LMS providers taking 1/7^th the space they did a decade ago.

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Slowroads from anslo

This is more something for a moment of zen than anything. Slowroads is a simple driving simulator – that looks a lot like a Tesla – taking you through picturesque procedurally generated landscapes in your web browser. You can drive yourself or just set auto-pilot and zone out for a little.

Colin Simpson has worked in education technology, teaching, learning design and academic development in the tertiary sector since 2003 at CIT, ANU, Swinburne and Monash University. He is also one of the leaders of the ASCILITE TELedvisors Network. For more from Colin, follow him on Twitter @gamerlearner (or @[email protected] on Mastodon, I guess)

Greg Hunt is appointed chair of Monash U’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health. Yes, that Greg Hunt the former federal health minister.

Elizabeth Lakey (Uni Melbourne) receives the U21 Fellowship for academic staff from Universitas 21, of which Uni Melbourne is a member

Sanjay Mazumdar is appointed ED of the Defence Traiblazer (Uni Adelaide, UNSW and partners), one of the previous government’s applied research projects. Dr Mazumdar joins from consultants KPMG.

Uni Wollongong announces emeritus professorships to, Paul Chandler (Early Start Research Institute), Andy Davis (Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences), Stephen Pyne (Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience), Wilfred Yeo (Medicine)