"In shadowy, silent distance grew the iceberg too": universities, technology, work and life
The police response to the UC Davis protests is rapidly becoming an issue on which it’s only acceptable to take one side. I’ve watched the pepper spray video over and over. The first time you see it, you do find yourself holding your breath, hand over your mouth. Many people have talked about watching it in tears, and I was one. I’ve read the commentary, I’ve followed the outrage on Twitter, I’ve shown the video to my daughters who, for…
Continue ReadingSometimes you find out about things that are so compelling that you know you’re the last to hear about them, and so it is this week with System D. As Robert Neuwirth explains this in Foreign Policy, it’s the French term used to describe the global shadow economy of the débrouillardise: “the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy”. System D is the aggregated economic activity of every unlicensed, irregular, back-of-the-truck roadside trader, every lemonade stall,…
Continue ReadingAnd then there are situations from which even the most sympathetic creative cross-sectoral partnerships with ed tech, big and small, can’t save us. University marketing, for example. Visual branding is a struggle between the obvious and the obscure, and this gets very tricky when universities are trying to decide how to represent themselves. Images of location and local environment score well, as do shots of students talking to each other animatedly, preferably in carefully selected groups that hint at a…
Continue ReadingIt’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…
Continue ReadingAustralians 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…
Continue ReadingHigher 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…
Continue ReadingUnderline 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…
Continue ReadingEnd of semester. Winter. Grading and student feedback, plus those odd moments that make you stop and think, like the shine on a wet pavement. Students who write and say that they appreciated being in class with someone whose first language wasn’t English because they learned something about a bigger world. Students whose first language isn’t English writing to say that it was being in an online class that made it possible for them to participate at all. Given the…
Continue ReadingI’m still brooding on Ben Wildavsky’s review of his trip to Australia for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Whenever a visitor says “Aussie” like he does, there’s a risk of a Bill Bryson moment. But this time the issue isn’t our wacky fauna, our laid-back attitude, or the many ways that Australian nature can kill you—it’s our acronyms. In a post-AUQA world, how will TEQSA make sensible use of the AQF, the ERA, the CEQ, the AUSSE, and perhaps the…
Continue ReadingThe “education vertical” sounds a bit more thrilling than it is. The first time you hear it, it seems to share the weird poetic syntax of “the body electric” and “the life everlasting”. It’s education, on an updraft. A bit of googling fishes up a turn of phrase that has more concrete aspirations. This vertical is both market and solution (“Callista cracks open education vertical“) and it continues intermittently to appear in the promotional talk of software vendors and government procurement….
Continue Reading