Colin Simpson’s ed-tech must reads of the week

How to make your teaching more interesting from Times Higher Education. The digital age has made it hard to be bored, with entertaining stimuli everywhere. This has arguably raised the bar for getting and keeping students’ attention. Creating more engaging learning experiences can also lead to deeper and more authentic learning, so this collection of suggestions from THE can benefit everyone. It ranges from the use of humour and curiosity to teaching presence and a host of tools to consider.

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The billion dollar industry helping students cheat from ABC Radio National. Professor Phillip Dawson and Kane Murdoch are featured in this rich half hour episode of Radio National’s Background Briefing that shares some of the human stories behind technology enabled cheating in Higher Education. Well worth a listen.

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Cheating in Academia With Artificial Intelligence Writing from Medium. Continuing on the academic integrity theme, this detailed piece from a University of Pittsburgh student offers an in-depth exploration of how some publicly available AI tools can be used to generate written work by students and at what kind of quality. More than the quality of the outputs though, what I found alarming was the blasé mindset of the student, essentially advocating that it is a legitimate tool for students because institutions don’t have any policies around their use.

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I am just tired of people in other fields thinking they are inventing online learning from Stephanie Moore (Twitter). Poor research practice can be found in all fields but education and technology seem to attract more than average. Stephanie Moore from the Journal of Computing in Higher Education sparks a fascinating discussion from her tweet about people trying to publish in this space without reading any of the growing body of literature. It includes some useful suggestions for journals to visit before you say there is no literature.

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The importance of choosing the right keywords for educational technology publications from AJET. Once you’ve done that, this editorial from the editors of the Australasian Journal of Education Technology might be helpful. It explores keywords used in more than 300 articles in the journal in recent years and offers suggestions for maximising searchability and citations.

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

 


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