Digital Garden
A collection of growing thoughts on higher education, edtech, and the future of learning
Different Students, Same Chatbot
At Monash Online, researchers gave the same AI-powered Socratic chatbot to a group of postgraduate computer science students and watched two entirely different learners emerge from identical software. One student used it the way most of us use a search engine: ask a narrow question, take the answer, move to the next topic. The other directed it: asked it to connect ideas across weeks of material, pushed back when an explanation didn't add up, caught it in a mistake, and pulled new concepts back into their own disciplinary context (de Barba, 2026). Same model, same interface. What separated them wasn't the tool.
The Courage to Wander
As a native Flemish speaker, I am often disarmed by the way my neighbours in the Netherlands use language. They have a distinct knack not just for coining brilliant terms, but for casually dusting off older, deeply resonant words that I had entirely forgotten existed. Together, these words capture the messy human reality of work, cutting straight through standard corporate jargon.
A Pilot Is a Decision Wearing a Question
Every university I know is running AI pilots, and I think that is right. Experimenting is how we work out when, how and why these tools belong in our teaching. It is part of the negotiation, and some of the most useful lessons I have seen came from small trials that went a bit sideways.
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