Mirjam Sophia Glessmer

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 […]

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 […]

Such an interesting question! Here are three pieces of writing that are currently on my mind.

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!

Before Christmas, Rachel and I recorded an interview with my online teaching role model Niya Bond for OneHE, and it has been released now! What do you think?

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…