Edtech and online learning – Page 2

US/not us

Kate Bowles August 12, 2016 17 Comments

We need to have more conversations with people who are not us. Chris Gilliard, #DigPed, August 2016 1 It’s 5am. It’s dark outside, and cold inside. My daughter’s in the kitchen banging cupboard doors and making coffee. She’s up to watch the Olympics, and she wants company. Blearily we straggle out to join her and slump on the couch under blankets, trying to figure out what’s happening. Skeet shooting, what is that? Divers fall from the sky in apparently perfect synchronisation. They enter…

Edtech and online learning, Hospitable pedagogy

What would Stampy do?

Kate Bowles July 9, 2015 21 Comments

But we desperately want live lectures to work. We’ve done them for so long now that they seem a part of who we are. And we are tantalised by the mirage of thinking that if only everyone turned up, they would be a far more efficient way of teaching than the seminar or the tutorial. Desperately. So desperately that we are prepared to ignore the prodigious financial and environmental cost of heating or cooling large empty spaces. So desperately that…

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning

Stones only

Kate Bowles May 16, 2015 5 Comments

The purpose of Stonehenge is lost to us. There will always be debate about its meaning. Stonehenge Visitor Centre, Wiltshire I grew up in England, although I wasn’t born here. Here. I’m not in Australia, I’m visiting the country that isn’t quite home, with my Australian teenage daughter who isn’t quite at home here either, while we both try to make sense of the weave of family (her) and familiar landscapes (me) that make England part of who we are. Or…

Being an academic, Change management, Edtech and online learning

What next for the LMS?

Kate Bowles September 27, 2014 16 Comments

All of a sudden it’s LMS week* in mostly-US higher education. Nudged by the imminent Educause annual conference, there’s a whole pop-up festival of reflection on why we still have enterprise learning management systems—and why we have the ones we have. Audrey Watters, D’Arcy Norman, Phil Hill, Michael Feldstein, Jared Stein and Jonathan Rees have all contributed to this thoughtful and detailed conversation; anyone who thinks universities just woke up one day trapped inside a giant LMS dome really should read each of these at least. And Mike…

Edtech and online learning, LMS evaluation

Sightings

Kate Bowles July 11, 2014 15 Comments

Updates below In a bizarre coincidence, when I opened the book to scan the contents I found myself looking at the section about sharks. In particular, “surviving if you are in a raft and you sight sharks—”… I wonder if anyone would be interested in using this as a model for an edtech field manual for surviving the Higher Ed apocalypse. Jim Groom,”Survival: the manual” July 7 2014 Thanks to Jim Groom, I’ve been thinking about Jaws in this plainly bizarre week in the short history…

Edtech and online learning, Risk

History’s gifts

Kate Bowles February 15, 2014 14 Comments

My painting, my Dreamtime, nobody own it for me, nobody can stop this history painting. When I die, young people gotta take it over. That’s why all over the world we meet up, talk together and give history to one another. PFW* It’s late at night in the first week of a Coursera/Duke MOOC on the future of higher education, and we’re rattling through a remake of Robert Darnton’s history of four great information ages. This big history marches forward with…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education

Pieces of the sky

Kate Bowles October 20, 2013 13 Comments

None of this is inevitable — not MOOCs, not funding cuts, not the death of the giant brick-and-mortar research university or the death of the small liberal arts college, no matter how gleefully the libertarians in Silicon Valley rub their hands as they craft their hyperbolic narratives about the end of the university and the promise of education technology — all their stories about innovation and doom and profit. Audrey Watters, minding the future, 15 Oct 2013 “Normality’s threatened by the…

Edtech and online learning

That was quick

Kate Bowles September 20, 2013 4 Comments

In an educational institution, both the students and the staff have a choice of accommodating oneself to the existing ways of being and acting, trying to change them, or just deviating away from them, still staying in the community, but on the verges. When one is accepted inside an organisation, rules, policies and procedures are laid upon the person. Often the person is as if relinquishing the rights of acting certain ways while bound in a certain organisational space. Because…

Edtech and online learning

For all to understand

Kate Bowles September 19, 2013 3 Comments

UK universities should eagerly seize the opportunity to widen their impact and support the OU by contributing material to FutureLearn rather than getting locked into one of the US platforms. This is an arena where the UK has huge worldwide potential. (House of Lords, Grand Committee, July 24 2013) So FutureLearn has finally launched, to much hoopla. The Code of Conduct, which all users are required to accept in order to sign up, contains 13 items, and they’re mostly standard,…

Australia, Edtech and online learning, Internationalisation

Normality’s shadow

Kate Bowles July 28, 2013 11 Comments

Research has shown that those students (all of us, really) remember a new word or fact best when they learn it and then relearn it when they are just on the cusp of forgetting it. Area9’s instructional software uses algorithms to predict each user’s unique memory-decay curve so that it can remind a student of something learned last week at the moment it is about to slip out of his or her brain forever. Seth Fletcher, ‘How Big Data is…

Casualisation of work, Edtech and online learning