Digital Garden
A collection of growing thoughts on higher education, edtech, and the future of learning
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.
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.
Is the Oral Exam a GenAI Quick Fix?
Smart glasses can already read a live transcript, generate an answer, and float it an inch above the wearer's own eyeline, invisible to anyone looking at their face. Nick McIntosh put it bluntly on LinkedIn: "smart glasses have quietly dissolved the one assessment format everyone thought was AI-proof" (McIntosh, 2026). The format institutions dug up specifically because it felt unhackable lasted, in practice, about as long as it took a wearables company to ship a product.
When Should Your Local AI Ask a Bigger One for Help?
A cookbook problem, and a rebuild I love physical books, cookbooks very much included: the stains on the pages that mark the recipes actually worth…
When Did “Visionary” Become a Bad Word?
Someone called me visionary in a meeting recently. I said thank you, the way you do, before realising it was a polite way of parking my ideas. The praise felt complicated. It was like being handed a description of myself that I recognised, yet I couldn't quite shake the sense that it doubled as something less flattering: a polite way of saying my input didn't need dealing with just yet.
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.
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