Professor Michael A. Cowling

What if the most powerful thing about having technology in the classroom isn’t the big flashy moments — it’s just that it’s always there? Happy Wisdom Wednesday, a little late this week, as I was lucky enough to spend the morning at the Apple Future Skills Summit 2026 here in Victoria, hosted right here in the Apple Foundation Program at RMIT Learning Space at RMIT University.

The theme that kept coming back for me across the day was ubiquity. Glen Storey opened with a great showcase of Apple tech enabling new approaches to teaching through small, everyday changes — not grand transformations. Nicole Dyson then shared compelling research showing that simple formative feedback interventions, enabled by tech already in students’ hands, can make a measurable difference particularly for less academic learners. And Tuck Leong brought it forward, exploring how these ideas translate to university and the future of work.

That’s pedagogy before technology in action, and it’s what gets me excited about the work we’re doing at the Hub for Apple Platform Innovation (HAPI) at RMIT. Are you seeing this in your own classrooms — that the small everyday uses often matter more than the big implementations? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. 😊

Feel Good Friday and wanted to take a moment to celebrate a little achievement, which is my first paper with over 1000 citations, our ChatGPT Leadership paper with Joseph Crawford and Kelly-Ann Allen in the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice!

This one floors me a little, I feel like it wasn’t long ago I was celebrating 1000 citations across ALL my papers and now this one paper has 1000+ on it’s own? I guess it shows how much people care about GenAI as a technology. Also worth saying thank you to anyone that cites it, that means you not only read it but also thought it worth mentioning in your own paper! Thanks. 😉

Also funny is that whilst it’s over 1000 for me, it’s still just under for Joey and Kelly, which is odd because neither is a combined paper. I guess it’s just the vagaries of the google algorithm! So there you go, a little self serving for Friday I guess, but I thought worth celebrating. 😉 Have a good weekend all!

Did you know that only 37% of Australian Year 10 students meet national standards for digital literacy, despite most of them using technology every single day? For Wisdom Wednesday this week I thought I’d share this report from ABC Australia News reporting on the recent NAPLAN results and they’re pretty alarming!

As I’ve often said on this feed, using technology and understanding technology are not the same thing. The NAPLAN extension NAP-ICT test asked students to create digital presentations, analyse data, design algorithms, and navigate online safety scenarios. These are skills that go well beyond scrolling a screen, and they struggled. This is precisely why I believe pedagogy before technology has to be our guiding principle: access without capability is not digital literacy.

So what does this mean for how we teach? I’d love to hear from educators on the front line — are you seeing this gap in your students? And for those of us in higher education, are we inheriting it? Let me know in the comments below! And happy Wednesday all. 😉

Australian students record worst tech literacy results on record Australian students have recorded their worst-ever results in national tests that measure digital literacy, with just 37 per cent of year 10 students and 50 per cent of year 6 students assessed as proficient.

Isn’t it nice when someone you look up to seems to have the same ideas as you? 🙂 For Feel Good Friday this week thought I’d share this video of Steve Jobs (founder and former ceo of Apple of course!) responding to a question just after he came back to Apple in 1997.

The question is about Apple sunsetting a piece of software (OpenDoc) but Jobs answered with a great reply focused on how this is actually above customer experience coming before technology. And those of you that know me know how much I talk about “pedagogy before technology” so it was nice to see Steve say something similar. Or as Michael Sankey once put it, don’t let the technology tail wag the pedagogy dog! 😉

Anyway, in typical FGF style I’m going to try and let the video stand for itself, but if you’ve got any views on PBT, customer experience or just weird dog metaphors, let me know! And have a good weekend all, you earned it. 🙂

Steve Jobs Insult Response - Highest Quality Steve Jobs handling a tough question at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference. He had just returned to Apple as an advisor and was guiding sweeping change ...

Dinosaurs and planets and floating metallic balls, oh my! Yesterday was a very long day for Hub for Apple Platform Innovation (HAPI) at RMIT but also a great opportunity to put lots of people in Apple Vision Pro and teach them about spatial computing! Seems super appropriate for Wisdom Wednesday, right? 🙂

It started with a workshop for RMIT University I Belong, which supports First Nations students to come to university. Along with Ace Authors, we taught 38 students a little Xcode and RealityKit, and deployed to iPhone, where they got to see those floating metallic balls! And then we put them all in AVP as well so they could see it immersive with planets and space as well. Thanks to Steph Worladge, Ishaan Vikas and Adrian Chai for helping out.

And then it was down to the RMIT STEM Hub for Digital Innovation VxLab for the Melbourne XR Meetup, where there were 70+ (by my count!) XR passionate practitioners and academics who I got to sell on how high fidelity spatial computing is. And bonus, even though I Belong had no photos (privacy), I got plenty of those guys playing with dinosaurs! 😉 And thanks to Joshua Newn and Kennosuke Shimizu for being there to represent HAPI for us. 😉

What lands more eyeballs, virtual dentistry, virtual dinosaurs, or virtual ping pong? That’s the question for this weeks Feel Good Friday, where I want to celebrate a great day at ACS Foundation’s Big Day In Melbourne 2026, where my intrepid student volunteers (Amogh, Ishaan & Zoe) from the Hub for Apple Platform Innovation (HAPI) at RMIT helped put 500+ students in Apple Vision Pro. 😉

We demoed apps from HAPI as well as those from the App Store, and to answer the question the winner was probably virtual ping pong, but dinosaurs came a close second! Plus we got to see how young people interact with immersive technology and also talk about positive uses of tech, so all in all a great day! 😉

Thanks to Kerrie Bisaro for inviting me, Timothy Wiley for being my partner on stage (and letting me play soccer with a robot!), and Karin Verspoor for letting me be involved (and also doing the opening!). Look forward to being involved again next year, and happy Friday all! ;)

Is GenAI changing the relationship between teachers and students? That's the question in today's Wisdom Wednesday hump day reading, a piece for Times Higher Education Campus by my CQUniversity Australiaversity colleague Dr Meena Jha and University of Technology Sydney Amara Atif considering whether we've gone from educator to auditor.

It's definitely an interesting question to ask, especially given the focus on Academic Integrity that we've had w.r.t. GenAI over the last three and a half years (!), but I hope the answer is that we'll soon settle on new assessment methods and metrics that fit AI into what we do, as well (by extension) giving students the skills they need to be what my university calls "AI-ready graduates". Because I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to educate than interrogate!

But anyway, as always Meena and Amara put it much better than I do, so go and check it out and let me know what you think. Has GenAI changed our world of education forever, or will we turn it around (perhaps on that circular wheel I keep talking about? ;) ). And have a super week all, it's only a few days to the weekend now!

GenAI has turned teachers into auditors When educators have to police how students use AI, and gatekeeping adds to the workload and emotional toll, teaching loses its joy, write Meena Jha and Amara Atif. Here are ways to reclaim the role of educator

ONE WEEK TO GO! Super chuffed that our short course for the new Apple Developer Institute for Professionals in Indonesia kicks off in just seven days, and is officially SOLD OUT, with all the seats filled.

In it, Ace Authors and I (Michael A. Cowling) will cover lessons we’ve learnt from HAPI and other places on managing an app development project, with an Apple twist of course given our experience and where it’s hosted.

Thanks so much BINUS University and Apple Developer Academy | Indonesia for collaborating and organising logistics for us, and if you’re one of our participants we’ll see you next week. 🙂 Can’t wait!

Big day at The University of Melbourne this morning for the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) Design for Learning symposium, just a short tram ride from work now! 😉

Looking forward to a keynote by Sue Bennett as well as a panel and our own Pecha Kucha and others for our Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice special issue on DBR. Plus of course lots of coffee and networking!

Back with more soon I suspect on what I learnt, but for now enjoy my squint-y morning photo outside the Woodward conference centre. Happy Friday all! 😉

(and yes for those wondering, I think this one ticks off another uni on my Melbourne uni bingo card, I’ve been to Uni Melb lots but not since joining RMIT University I think. Huzzah!)