literature – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Currently reading Byrom et al. (2026) on “Responsibility and other dangerous ideas: who cares, who can, and who should in higher education”

mglessmer — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:37:15 +0000

In the context of mental health and higher education, who has a duty to care and what does care even mean? Byrom et al. (2026), in “Responsibility and other dangerous ideas: who cares, who can, and who should in higher education“, distinguish three ways to approach care: A moral drive to care: most people are […]

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Currently reading Suter et al. (2026) on “Experimenting for impact: Combining research with advocacy for climate stability”

mglessmer — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:12:34 +0000

Suter et al. (2026) argue that given the urgent need for action against climate change (and seeing that pretty much all available research shows that it doesn’t influence researchers’ reputation or credibility to be activists and scientists, those are not excuses!), more people should combine activism with at the same time figuring out what works. […]

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Currently reading Shen & Tamkin (2026) on “How AI impacts skill formation”

mglessmer — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:12:10 +0000

In the preprint “How AI impacts skill formation” by Shen & Tamkin (2026), study participants are learning a new Python library either in a control condition or with an “AI assistant”, and researchers observe how the participants prompt AI during learning and measure completion times and quiz scores after learning. They find that “AI-enhanced productivity […]

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Currently reading Most & Clout (2026) on “Education As The Lighting Of A Fire: Personal Connection Strikes The Match”

Mirjam — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:04:04 +0000

I see statistics on social media every day about 1 in 3 young people who say that there are topics they talk about with an AI but not with another human. And almost all our students report that they use AI for learning, because they aren’t being judged, they don’t feel like they are bothering […]

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Currently reading Monger (2022) on “Teaching oceanography by engaging students in civic activism”

mglessmer — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:38:39 +0000

How do we teach for sustainability when the class is huge and there is a lot of content to be covered? One really nice example is described by Monger (2022), who is “teaching oceanography by engaging students in civic activism“. In their class with >1000 students, Monger (2022) teachers introductory physical, chemical, biological, geological oceanography, […]

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Currently reading Zeivots et al. (2026) on “Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education”

mglessmer — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:28:02 +0000

When browsing Zeivots et al. (2026)’s article “Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education“, one sentence caught my eye: “Students could see how their input mattered without the expectation that every suggestion would be enacted“. Since I am currently really interested in partnership and negotiations there, I then had to read […]

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Currently reading Lodge et al. (2023) on “It’s not like a calculator, so what is the relationship between learners and generative artificial intelligence?”

mglessmer — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:20:06 +0000

Intriguing title! Lodge et al. (2023) discuss a “quadrant typology of human and machine interactions for education” with the two axes individual-to-collaborative and extending-to-offloading. Calculators fall into “cognitive offloading“, meaning it’s individual and offloading. They explain cognitive offloading, writing “At the core of these approaches is that basic cognitive functions are subcontracted out to technology, […]

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Currently reading Bedeker (2026): “Navigating the university PedTech Wonderland: a Freirean critique of technology-enhanced learning in higher education”

mglessmer — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:17:09 +0000

I have been thinking a lot about what platform to host our MOOC on and how that decision locks us into a lot of things, for example to certify completion of the course and with that requirements to use quizzes and peer-review, but also more generally the ways in which participants can interact, can navigate […]

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Thinking about AI resistance

mglessmer — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:37:50 +0000

I keep coming back to Karen Costa’s question “What if the critical #AI skill for our era is not how to use it, but how to resist it?” In the Poulidis et al. (2025) chess study, 40% of those who learned with AI and could press a button to get help said that in hypothetical […]

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Currently reading Lawrence et al. (2024) on the “Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement”

mglessmer — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:53:25 +0000

Let’s read about everybody’s favourite topic: The polycrisis! Here, I am summarizing a framework that takes “polycrisis” from buzzword to useful concept. Lawrence et al. (2024) start by pointing out that the “perfect storm” metaphor (that is often used to describe the mess we are currently in as a coincidental “bad luck” of lots of […]

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