Learning Technology – The State of the Nation ALT ( Association for Learning Technology) Scottish Regional Special Interest Group⤴

from @ Experimental Blog

This is a part report on proceedings at Stirling and an annual report from the special interest group. The hybrid gathering at Stirling was our 2nd event of the academic year. 

In early May, we held an online 'Two Stars and a Wish' event looking at the broad trends within the Scottish learning technology landscape.  

At Stirling, we focused on public bodies, policy, and sector initiatives related to learning technology. 

The agenda and links to presentations are on the agenda and in the event Padlet. Special thanks to all who joined us at Stirling and or online. 

My own short takes on items. 
Forgive any of my own bias and dig into the links and notes for your own take on proceedings. 

  • Jisc Innovation Hub is a great central venue - many thanks, Jason Miles-Campbell, for hosting us.  
  • ALT - Looking forward to seeing the new version of CMALT, OER26, and ALTC in Cardiff. Great to have Susan Martin, CEO, along virtually and look forward to seeing her in Scotland at future events. 
  • Education Scotland: Great updates on guidance and support going into schools to support digital learning and AI guardrails - learners will be arriving at Colleges and universities with ever-heightened expectations.  Still a challenge: national policy implemented with 32 different local authority flavours. 
  • College Development Network - some really good work is going on developing staff skills around AI - overall sense that students, particularly, have been terrified by some institutional messaging and that AI use has not perhaps moved on from the assumption that it allows more than sophisticated web searches. 
  • Jisc has so much great support, which is too often not being used or overlooked by the sector.  I particularly like the digital benchmarking surveys of institutional digital transformation. 
  • Some great updates from Scotland's Tertiary Enhancement Projects delivered in conjunction by QAA and CDN. My view would be useful with a bit more focus on digital. 
  • Lee Dunn, Head of Scottish Digital Academy, laid out Scotland's Digital strategy and the critical role that Colleges, Universities, and learning technologists have in delivering this.  They are, among other things, advocating an open educational approach to developing and sharing resources. There was also an open invitation
 "Anyone wishing to get involved in the discovery work and planning for OER and the Model of Professional Learning can email digitalacademy@gov.scot, and we will note their interest, reaching out to them once we’re ready to engage." 
  • Theo from QS (Qualifications Scotland ). The consensus Policy needs to move fast, but it must remain equitable and grounded in what educators and learners actually experience. Guidance is basically sound, but still misinterpreted by teaching staff.  Qualifications Scotland cannot change the assessment landscape on its own. 
  • Rosemarie gave a good update on SCAITEN - still looking for some institutional reps with focus on taking an ethical tertiary approach to AI .
  • Caroline brought it back to practical application, showcasing "The Stirling Approach" to blended learning. Seeing how Stirling intentionally weaves these digital tools into curriculum design and delivery created a useful debate. 
Finally, my thanks to the ALT Scotland steering group.  We have been following a similar schedule for the last five years;  steering group meetings in autumn and spring, with events scheduled around March/ April and one in June. I've got some new volunteers for the steering group who I will introduce at first meeting in the autumn. 

Teacher Agency for Interdisciplinary Curriculum Making⤴

from @ The Interdisciplinary Learning Network

Sent on behalf of Dr. Ramsey Affifi at the University of Edinburgh

You are warmly invited to a public lecture I have organised, and hosted by the Teacher Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy Hub at Moray House School of Education and Sport, as part of the Stewart Alan Robertson Lecture Series, funded by the Robertson Endowment:

Teacher Agency for Interdisciplinary Curriculum Making

Speaker: Professor Mark Priestley (University of Stirling)
Date: Thursday 25 June 2026
Time: 17:00–19:30

Location: In person at G.1 Paterson’s Land, EH8 8AQ, and online on MS Teams

Agenda

17:00–17:30: Registration and refreshments
17:30–18:30: Sharing practice from PGDE tutors: IDL and curriculum making
18:30–19:30: Speaker: Professor Mark Priestley

This hybrid public lecture will explore teacher agency as a central feature of interdisciplinary curriculum making for social and environmental sustainability.

The event opens with a panel of Moray House tutors who will share insights from their work supporting student teachers to engage in interdisciplinary learning (IDL) curriculum development.

In the second half, Professor Mark Priestley will respond to the panel, drawing on curriculum theory, policy, and practice to examine the role of teachers as curriculum makers in the Scottish context. His response will foreground ecological understandings of teacher agency and highlight the critical importance of interdisciplinary approaches in addressing complex global challenges.

Full event details are available on our website:
🔗 https://edin.ac/42i2KhW

This is a free, hybrid event, and registration is required. Please register via the Eventbrite link on the webpage.

About the Speaker

Professor Mark Priestley is Professor of Education at the University of Stirling. His research interests focus on school curriculum theory, policy, and practice, particularly the processes of curriculum making across different layers of education systems. He was Lead Editor of The Curriculum Journal from 2018 to 2024, is a member of the Scottish Government’s Curriculum and Assessment Board, and is Co‑Convener of the EERA Network 3 (Curriculum). His publications include Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach and Curriculum Making in Europe: Policy and Practice within and Across Diverse Contexts.

For any enquiries, please contact MHSES-REI-Events@ed.ac.uk.

We hope you can join us.

Ramsey

Theme Retirement News⤴

from @ Glow Blog Help

Glow Blogs offers several themes to change the look and functionality of sites. In the same way as plugins, we rely on third-party, usually open source, developers.

Both themes and plugins need to be regularly updated.

Updates aren’t only for new features updates also keep everything working well together. We regularly update WordPress itself, and themes and plugins need to keep pace with those changes. Outdated add-ons can cause your site to slow down, behave oddly, or stop working in parts.

If a theme or plugin stops being updated we have to assess it and in many cases remove it from the system. For example, back in 2020 we removed a dozen themes from the system that had not been updated for several years.

Currently we have three themes that are being considered for retirement , Yoko, Agama Pro & Make.

As in the previous retirement we will be taking a staged approach:

  1. Advising you not to use these themes.
  2. Disabling the option to select these themes for new sites or to change to these themes. If your site already uses one of them, it will be unaffected at this point.
  3. Retirement (further down the line) with plenty of notice, we’ll retire the themes fully and help users move to a supported alternative. This is still a long way off, and we’ll communicate clearly before anything happens.
Retiring Blogs Themes
Retirement News on Glow Connect

For the moment we would advise against choosing these themes. Yoko is a simple theme and many of the other themes are suitable replacements. Twenty Sixteen is, in our opinion, particularly suitable for a classic news or blog style site. We have guide to moving from Yoko to Twenty Sixteen.

Agama Pro and Make will be a bit more difficult to move from. Both offer custom layouts. Make in particular has a lot of unique ways to change layouts. These will not convert easily if you just switch the theme.

Fortunately most of the features of these themes can be replicated in the the Block Editor and Site Editor with block themes. We would recommend Twenty Twenty Five for this. We will have further advice on moving on from these themes in the future.

Agama Pro is a very opinionated theme, this may make it difficult to move to a more modern theme . We would not recommend choosing it.

The Make theme has its own page builder. You cannot use the newer Block Editor with the Make theme. You can use the older classic editor or Make’s own Post Builder. Be careful when choosing the Make theme, it allows advanced page layout in its page builder but you will not be able to use blocks. It is also difficult to convert content created with Make’s page template to other themes. Some converted pages do not work at all.

Please get in touch if you would like more information.

Oyster Catcher Oil⤴

from

We’re spending a few days at the cottage at Ross Priory this week, working in beautiful surroundings. So for today’s TDC here’s a pic I took yesterday afternoon while reading and watching the wildlife.

Oyster Catcher Oil
Oyster Catcher Oil flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2026-06-17 14:09:01⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Likes We Ran a Huge Social Experiment on a Whole Generation. It Turned Out to Be Terrible | Pootlepress by Jamie Marsland.

Like:

“Wait. You knew it was damaging mental health, sleep, attention and social development, and your response was… to give younger children even more access?”

And we will say:

“Well, yes. But everyone else was doing it.”

A clear succinct run over social media & the young. Personally I think there might be something in making the vendors made efforts to fix social media but at least there seems to be some movement.

Areas of Confusion in Cognitive Science, part 2⤴

from @ Memory and Metacognition Updates

Just to briefly mention before I start that a recent marketing email about discounts came from Substack, not from me! These updates will remain free, so supporting it is entirely voluntary.

In a recent post, I raised some areas of confusion in cognitive science. These are not outright neuromyths, perhaps, but they are areas where people may take a good idea and misinterpret it.

One possible result is an oversimplification of the research that leads practitioners to apply a particular technique only in one situation where it could apply to many, thus missing out on its full benefits. An example raised last time would be assuming that retrieval practice (see update #36) can only be applied via a quiz.

Worse still, a lethal mutation may result – a distorted version of the technique that is less effective, not effective at all, or actively harmful to learning.

The key idea here is that if we are going to apply evidence to education, the way that techniques are put into practice must stay faithful to what the evidence actually shows.

Last time I wrote about three issues: retrieval practice, interleaving, and cognitive load theory. Below are two further areas that can cause problems.

Image via Pixabay here.

Issue 4: Is it really dual coding?

Dual coding has become widely known as a cognitive science technique in education. It is also rather notorious for being easily misinterpreted and conflated with learning myths. Consider, for example, this post by Megan Sumeracki: ‘Dual coding vs. learning styles’.

Rather than replacing text or complex ideas with visuals (as may be recommended to people who are mistakenly viewed as ‘visual learners’), the point of dual coding is that the visuals are in addition to text (the clue is in the name, really!).

Further, the visual needs to be processed, with the processing providing support to understanding. Again, it’s not really dual coding if the learner does not need to make sense of both the text and the image, and can ignore the latter:

  • Bad application: A pretty illustration on a Powerpoint. This does not lead to dual coding.

  • Better application: A diagram or animation showing how neurons connect together. The visual supports meaningful understanding, enhancing information that the student can learn from the text.

Issue 5: Getting spacing wrong

Compared to interleaving, the spacing effect always strikes me as a pretty simple idea. One of the most common questions I am asked is, “How long should we space things out for?”. This depends on various factors, but in general, the greater the spacing, the better!

A bigger problem arises when people think that spacing is just about putting gaps into their schedule. When a student is studying for exams, for example, they may assume that studying an hour from 10–11 a.m. and then another hour from 2–3 p.m. is better than studying two hours from 10 till noon. That is not what the spacing effect shows. In many cases such a gap would be unnecessarily long, and could mean that the student’s study approach is inefficient! In short, spacing is more about when material is practiced, not about studying less overall.

As Nate Kornell says in this article, a similar flawed assumption would be that reading five chapters one per night is better than reading all five in one day. This might perhaps be true, but again, that is not what the spacing effect research shows. The effect is about practising the same content after a delay.

So, for example, if you want to practice a musical scale, the spacing effect helps to suggest how different practice sessions of the same scale could be scheduled

Of course, studying intensively is associated with other issues, too (fatigue, mind wandering, etc), but these are separate issues that would apply even if the practice was scheduled optimally.

(Read more on the spacing effect here: update #39).

I’ll sign off with some further reading on dual coding:

Paivio, A. (2006, Sept 30). Dual coding theory and education [conference paper].

I hope that helps. Again, I am not quite done on this issue – I will tackle further areas in a future post. I’d also love to know your thoughts and examples.

Hope you have a great week,

Jonathan

Last time: Getting Ready for College

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