Why Anthology Unraveled

Four years after Anthology Inc. acquired Blackboard as part of its plan to become “the most comprehensive ed-tech ecosystem,” the company is bankrupt and selling many of its parts. https://bit.ly/4362TFR

#AcademicSky #EDUSky #HigherEd

Report on Australian Higher Education finds:

🔹️ Council members have no lived experience of universities

🔹️ Council members have COIs with consultancy firms

🔹️ Council meetings are closed affairs that lack transparency

🔹️ Leaders' exorbitant salaries could not be justified

Another HOT TAKE on Australia's 2035 targets, but also a comment more generally on rise of climate "realism" and "pragmatism", where simply giving up on trying to stop us being killed by fossil fuels is presented as the Very Reasonable and Very Serious thing to do.

has anyone checked in on the harpers letter / campus free speech panic people

Numbers of the brightly coloured Gouldian finch appear to be dropping in Western Australia's East Kimberley.

Cool!

Now the media is reporting that "significant progress" has been made on the negotiations and final approval could be imminent "subject to new conditions".

What's different? Has the level of pollution that would damage the rock art changed?

Just deleted that Alan Moore course I linked to, as it appears to just be the Maestro course straight pirated - that it's been up there in parts for a year makes you wonder why it hasn't been pulled, but doesn't seem credible. If you want to buy it, it's here...

www.bbcmaestro.com/courses/alan...

This is an amazing video! The clarity is remarkable. Not many of us have this gift in academia.
Conceptual frameworks from decolonial and postcolonial theorisation presented in a capsule.

AI "boring history" slop has taken over YouTube and is particularly insidious because it flattens history and drowns out the tireless work of creators who have been integral to legitimizing YouTube as a place for high-quality history videos

www.404media.co/ai-generated...

News | Bristol Museum & Art Gallery returns artefacts to Larrakia People – ceremony held to mark repatriation of 33 culturally significant objects to Australia

Rossiter coined the term "Matilda effect" for when women's scientific work is attributed to men.

It was a twist on the "Matthew effect," famously attributed to Robert Merton, but actually studied jointly by Merton and his wife Harriet Zuckerman, who was denied co-authorship

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..."

Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ;

We really need more papers on this issue

“The study authors asked GPT 4o-mini to evaluate the quality of 217 papers. The tool didn’t mention in any of the reports that the papers being analyzed had been retracted or had validity issues.

In 190 cases, GPT described the papers as world leading, internationally excellent, or close to that”

"It's colonisation 101, going for us as a resource [but] failing to invest in understanding the tangible and intangible elements of our cultural priorities,"

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

By approving a 50-year extension to the North West Shelf gas project, the Federal Government has signed a death warrant for Australia’s most significant ancient artistic treasure.

Watch the full video report from @stephenlongaus.bsky.social
youtu.be/Bj9VOMKYxSI

Goddamn. What a sobering and poignant piece of conceptual art. What an amazing artist.

🚨 PostDoc Opening 🚨 The lab of Klaus Oberauer is looking for a new postdoc, starting end of this/beginning next year. Research focus is #cognition, #workingmemory, #methods and #computationalmodeling or anything in that direction. I cannot highlight ENOUGH how great it is to work in this lab 🥰🤓

Australia Admits All Those Animals Made Up theonion.com/austral...

I watched this with the kids on the weekend expecting it to be not good and it was actually great

"there is growing evidence that more intuitive visualizations, informed by psychological research, can help people make better sense of climate data."
thebulletin.org/2025/07/how-...

International students have not driven rents and inflation higher, RBA says www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07...

“Australia is continuing to collect more revenue from HECS fees than it gets from the PRRT."
- Richard Denniss, Executive Director

In 2023-24 Australian HECS/HELP revenue rose to $5.1bn while PRRT fell to less than a quarter that amount to just $1.1bn. @richarddenniss.bsky.social #auspol

Important new work (from Elisa Bandini,
@ctennie.bsky.social, @sofiaforss.bsky.social et al.) addressing an elephant in the room - how weird are our weirdest apes, and how is that skewing research efforts?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...