Digital Garden
A collection of growing thoughts on higher education, edtech, and the future of learning
Off the Books: The Invisible Influence of Educational Designers
A programme team accepts a change to their assessment brief from someone who has never taught the course, on the strength of a five-minute conversation. A year earlier, someone else in the same room proposed almost the same change and got nowhere. Same idea. Different person carrying it. That is what decided the outcome.
Growing Sideways as edvisors
When the university rolled out a new intranet, every staff member was auto-sorted into a department, a manager, and a job family, pulled straight from the HR system. Hers came back blank. Nobody in IT or HR could explain why, beyond agreeing that her job didn't sit anywhere the system had a box for. Someone finally asked, half-joking, what she actually did all day. Nobody in the room had a clean answer. That specific anecdote might be imagined, but the reality it describes is universally recognizable to anyone who does this work. That blank space, that lack of a clean answer, isn't a glitch. It is exactly what the role is built from.
Small threads, large transitions
We don't reason our way into new behaviour. We act, uncertainly and messily, and then make sense of it by telling a story about what happened. I keep coming back to this when I watch institutions respond to AI and other challenges. Sensemaking is retrospective. Strategy is prospective. The gap between them is where people get lost.
Een boekje over CTL’s
Centrum voor onderwijsontwikkeling, dienst onderwijsbeleid, educational development unit, of gewoon "die mensen van de pedagogische ondersteuning": hetzelfde soort team heeft per instelling een andere naam, en wordt centraal, decentraal of ergens daartussenin gepositioneerd.
Neither Top-Down nor Bottom-Up: How Universities Change Their Ways
The language of "top-down" and "bottom-up" runs through almost every conversation about change in higher education. It carries implicit moral weight: bottom-up sounds authentic and practitioner-led, yet also ungoverned and hard to scale; top-down sounds imposed and procedural, yet also coherent and capable of giving scattered efforts a shared direction. The distinction feels self-evidently useful.
When There Is No Expert in the Room
At some point, every conversation about GenAI in education lands on the same question: who is responsible for figuring this out? Senior leadership? IT? The faculty development office? A working group with a mandate expiring in June?
What Happens When AI Starts to Remember?
Up until now, I have only ever used AI chatbots as “simple” yet powerful tools. I give a command, and the system executes a task. I have never felt any urge to use them for casual chatting or in any genuinely conversational way. Because of this, the well-known "amnesia problem" of AI also never really bothered me.
The Space Between Panic and Purpose
At some point in the last two years, most universities will have convened a working group on generative AI. Some will have produced policy frameworks. Many will have run staff development sessions. A good number will have updated their academic integrity guidelines, published guidance for students, or commissioned an internal review. All of this activity is genuine, and some of it is genuinely useful.
The Personalisation Paradox
Earlier today I attended a webinar organised by the Community for Educational Innovation (a European Commission initiative) titled Educating to Thrive in the Digital World. One of the interventions was by Julian Estevez, Professor at the University of the Basque Country, who posed a deceptively simple question: Personalised education with AI — a myth? His presentation was brief introduction for a full argument, and it was the kind of thing that immediately starts pulling threads.
Hebben we de term “Onderwijstechnologie” nog nodig?
Mijn eigen diploma is in de Onderwijstechnologie. Januszewski en Molenda (2013) definieerden dat vakgebied als "de studie en ethische praktijk van het faciliteren van leren en het verbeteren van prestaties door het creëren, inzetten en beheren van gepaste technologische processen en middelen."