After reading about the “tyranny of participation” the other day, I looked into some more literature citing Gourlay (2015) to possibly get some ideas of how to encourage cognitive engagement without assuming what that would look like from the outside.
Fitton et al. (2026) describe a the difficulties that teachers describe in working with a project aimed at decolonizing the curriculum, and that might partly explain why there is so little progress on decolonialization.
Since listening to Gerry’s defense of his PhD thesis the other day, I have been thinking about partnership a lot, and how we need to practice partnership also in order to practice democracy. And I vaguely remembered having seen an article where the typical “ladder” is wrapped into a circle, so that rather than being […]
Very intrigued by that title, especially since I just wrote about student engagement as something positive, that all universities claim to want! Gourlay (2015) describes that traditionally, student engagement is described as behavioural, emotional, and cognitive engagement with a learning situation (and possibly beyond), other people in the context, and the content — often set […]
Why is it that even though most people agree (and most university policies state) that active student engagement is desirable, there are still large lecture theatres being built? Loughlin (2025) explores the “theory of action”, which distinguishes between what people or organisations say they do (for example in mission statements or policies; “espoused theory”) and […]
No matter how sick I am of GenAI, this is a cool paper! Magnani & Clindaniel (2025) look at lots and lots of GenAI generated texts and images — both generated with a generic prompt and with one specifically asking for scientifically correct representations — depicting Neanderthal behavior and compare it to what science actually […]
Last week, I had a great day listening first to the trial lecture and then the defense of Gerald Decelles III’s PhD thesis, and it was so inspiring! Both his trial lecture and defense were such excellent presentations that I have to compile my notes into a blog post to process my thoughts. In the […]
While some people see big potential in GenAI to make learning and teaching more inclusive — by leveling the playing field through providing people with personalized instruction and support that they might otherwise not get — it is of course not as easy as that. GenAI is only as good as the data it is […]
Late last year, we had a “Transformation Thursday” lunch on philosophy of science, led by a colleague. Now we will follow up on that with a journal club on Nagatsu et al. (2020)’s “Philosophy of science for sustainability science“.
It is really difficult to know if students have learned what we wanted them to learn, and especially when we have to collect evidence of that learning for a valid assessment — the best we can do is look for proxies that we take to stand for bigger and more complex outcomes. But “[t]he proxies […]
I am still deep in my asynchronous online learning phase, and the paper by Yang et al. (2026), “Applying a Think-Pair-Share (TPS) Structure to Asynchronous Online Discussions (AODs): A Mixed Methods Study”, looked super interesting!
In an old blog post, I wrote about the importance of facilitation/teaching presence in the context of the pandemic and people teaching on video calls from their homes. In there, I refer to one article that refers to lots of older sources, and I think now I finally read one of those…
Ignoring for now that an important aspect of a teacher giving feedback to students is what it signals about the relationship — that the teacher cares enough about the student and their learning to invest time and energy into understanding the students’ thoughts and figuring out how to help them improve — how good a […]
Several of the advantages of asynchronous learning really came through for me while watching a recording of the Centre for Online and Distance Education’s webinar on “the power of asynchronous learning” (watch on youtube). First — that I even had access to a recording of this seminar and had not just missed it because I […]
When the picture in the featured image (a screenshot from the presentation of Alasdair Skelton’s presentation of his book “Our time: Finding Hope in a Climate Crisis“, watch the recording on youtube!) came up yesterday at the beginning of my lunch break, I felt it in my stomach. I don’t know anything about the coastline […]
Somehow there is often talk about educational ecosystems and everybody seems to have an intuitive idea of what that means. I decided I needed to find some references that actually provide definitions or at least more context, and that wasn’t as easy as I had thought! I am summarizing two papers below, though.
What we believe about climate change often does not depend on what we know about climate change, but on what people around us believe. This makes it really difficult for climate scientists to make their warnings heard and acted upon by people outside their own bubble. In their article “Who do we trust on climate […]
