Mirjam Sophia Glessmer

Let’s read about everybody’s favourite topic: The polycrisis! Here, I am summarizing a framework that takes “polycrisis” from buzzword to useful concept.

I am still on the “tyranny of participation” trip, this time reading about students’ experiences in peer discussions and inequities in roles that students take on in those discussions. Generally, we assume that students learn through peer discussions, but we also know that not all students learn equally in that format. What are the barriers […]

Usually we like to think that self-regulation in feedback seeking and learning is a good thing: When students get stuck, they can ask for support that helps them overcome the difficulty and continue learning. This can become problematic, though, when students ask for hints too early and often, get used to that behaviour, and then […]

This is one of these texts that I wish I had known earlier: to give to students to help them understand their learning, but also to teachers as a super easy introduction to how to think about difficulties in learning: “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance […]

Initially, we were very excited to have the opportunity to produce a MOOC to be run on one of the biggest course platforms in the world — to gain visibility and status through being hosted there, to be able to use a platform that handles participant accounts and automated certification through quizzes and rubric-based peer-assessment, […]

Innovation seems to still be one of the favourite buzzwords around, and in teaching, it often means fancier technology, larger group sizes that purportedly have even better learning outcomes, and all of that, of course, based in evidence showing typically large numbers of some sort. In this framing, Thirkell (2026) writes, “[p]edagogical innovation risks becoming […]

As I am thinking more and more about the details of our upcoming MOOC on “Teaching for Sustainability”, I am less and less convinced that I actually want to have automated certification at the end. So Emerson (2026) on ““It Honestly Made Me Want to Work Harder”: Student Evaluation of Using Ungrading in an Online Asynchronous […]

Ok, now I am hooked on student engagement and what it really means, or, more importantly, should mean! So here are quick summaries of three more articles that I read to make sense of the “tyranny“.

The other day I wrote about a paper on “sycophantic AI” and its implications on human interactions, and I am reminded of that daily when I hear kids on the bus mention how they talk to “chattis” (which seems to be a common nickname for ChatGPT around here) about all kinds of topics (which is […]

AI detection products cannot produce output to reliably destinguish between an AI generated text and one written by a human, and they reflect biases (for example more often flagging non-native speaker texts — see also my recent post about the “GenAI writes like me” post). We’ve known that for a while now, so why summarize […]

Torgny told me to read this, so I did… I only skimmed most of the details of the US landscape of centers for teaching and learning, but I found it really helpful to read about the Hub-Incubator-Temple-Sieve (HITS) framework (short introduction of the four lenses also in the evaluation guide for centers for teaching and […]

Shreedhar et al. (2026) is a really important study on climate action and social media strategy: When you want to get people to do something (for example sign up for a talk), it’s much better to tell them to do it (“do not stand by idly!”) than to ask them for support, and it is […]

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 […]

Another fun GenAI article, today Cheng et al. (2025) on AITA stories and sycophantic models!

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 […]