Two years on from the initial panic around Chat GPT and student cheating we catch with Phill Dawson from Deakin’s ‘Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning’.

Phill reflects on what universities have got wrong in their responses to GenAI, and why this might be a good time to entirely rethink the notion of student assessment altogether.

Accompanying reference >>> Bearman, M., Tai, J., Dawson, P., Boud, D., & Ajjawi, R. (2024). Developing evaluative judgement for a time of generative artificial intelligence. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1-13.

We talk with Sonia Livingstone (Digital Futures for Children, LSE) about the ways in which EdTech and data protection policies often fail to protect children’s rights at school.

In particular we look at Google Classroom as an example of how policymakers, regulators and governments need to intervene more forcibly in the EdTech marketplace.

Accompanying reference >>> Livingstone, S., Pothong, K., Atabey, A., Hooper, L., & Day, E. (2024). The Googlization of the classroom: Is the UK in protecting children's data and rights? Computers and Education Open, 100195.

Pekka Mertala (University of Oulu) talks about a new exhaustive analysis of nearly 1900 articles that charts the evolving use of the ‘digital native’ concept in academic literature.

We talk about the history of the idea of ‘digital natives’, why the persistence of the idea is damaging, and how we need to actively campaign against its future use.

** this is the final episode of Season One of ETS ... we will return in September! **

Accompanying reference >>> Mertala, P., López-Pernas, S., Vartiainen, H., Saqr, M., & Tedre, M. (2024). Digital natives in the scientific literature: A topic modelling approach. Computers in Human Behavior, 152, 108076.