Kate Bowles – Page 16 – Music for Deckchairs

Rankings

Kate Bowles August 20, 2011 0 Comments

One of the odd features of messages sent to us by our colleagues in administration is that their signatures are showing the work of some pretty committed corporate decision making to advance the brand in all circumstances, even in the very small print at the bottom of an email. It’s a bit like academic colleagues who have taken to listing their latest publication and leadership roles at the foot of every correspondence, a move whose target audience isn’t entirely clear….

Higher education, Rankings

All those in favour

Kate Bowles August 14, 2011 1 Comment

It’s beginning to annoy me that every time I enter a committee room, I see the same faces, just as they see me. Two things about this bother me. First, as as proportion of the total workforce, there’s a really small number of academics who are willing to do this sort of backstage work. This is work that’s vital for a university to tick along, and in principle academics like the idea of sharing the governance, just to make sure…

Being an academic, Higher education

Actual results may vary

Kate Bowles August 7, 2011 1 Comment

Here’s another quick finding in the tealeaves of educational technology prediction. Providing you can get through the argot of the deals, mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and patent showdowns, sometimes you find yourself face to face with the poetry of the safe harbor statement. It’s hard not to read it over and over to check that it still says what you think, and that it says it so beautifully. The safe harbor statement is a get-out clause currently derived from the Private…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

Shy?

Kate Bowles August 1, 2011 1 Comment

Here’s one for the “learn something new every day” box. Last week Middle Seaman, via More or Less Bunk, alerted me to the idea that “the shy cannot learn.” It’s an intriguing diagnosis, not to mention very bad news for shy people everywhere, and I went off in search of its origins. Like any aphorism in translation, the exact deficit represented by shyness is really a matter of the intent of the original, and I’m not here to argue about…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Student engagement

Grumpy

Kate Bowles July 29, 2011 0 Comments

Australians love to win things, but we’re going to have to content ourselves with a silver medal in a sport that has yet to trouble the Olympics—we’ve come second to Italians in being grumpy customers. Apparently, we’re divided against ourselves on this issue. What makes some Australian customers grumpy is that other Australians are bad at giving service. According to this morning’s news report, Brett Whitford, the executive director of The Customer Service Institute of Australia—who must know a bit…

Being an academic, Higher education, Student engagement

Extraordinary company

Kate Bowles July 19, 2011 0 Comments

Higher ed tech writers are chewing the cud over the not very surprising news that Blackboard is partnering up with major content publishers Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, John Wiley & Sons and (last year) McGraw-Hill, and that McGraw-Hill itself is now friending everyone in the LMS world. The language of this new set of deals is that of the soothing murmur: students will now be able to transition seamlessly from Anywhere U via their LMS to centralised content repositories managed by Big…

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

Birds in our sleeves

Kate Bowles July 9, 2011 0 Comments

Underline everything, I’m a professional in my beloved white shirt (The National, ‘Squalor Victoria’) One of the troublespots of shared governance in higher education institutions is the tone to strike in corporate communication with students. Is there a business unit that can stalk them on Facebook without seeming creepy? Who should follow their tweets? What happens to the brand if they’re dissing us to their friends? We don’t even know how to communicate with them officially, given that we’re institutionally…

Being an academic, Higher education, Student engagement, University marketing

Suits and punks

Kate Bowles July 7, 2011 0 Comments

A few more thoughts from the world of LMS vendor demonstrations: A big LMS is now typically so big, and can do so many things, that a vendor with a two-hour timeslot has to make some tough choices. Which are the hero tools, the unique selling points, the defining parts of the proposition? Which are the has-been features that look like the other guy’s stuff? At the moment, the answer to the former seems to be content builders, assessment workflow,…

Edtech and online learning, LMS evaluation, Risk

Going forward

Kate Bowles July 5, 2011 1 Comment

One of the challenges facing a higher education institution trying to choose a new learning management system is the blind taste test that passes for product demonstration. Typically this involves being hustled through a demo site that’s been populated with made-up students in imaginary classes exchanging imaginary one-liners with each other via a discussion board, while imaginary academics set up imaginary course content, and the whole thing flows through to imaginary gradebooks or generates imaginary tracking reports. Because the number…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk, Student engagement

Author: Kate Bowles