"In shadowy, silent distance grew the iceberg too": universities, technology, work and life
I don’t feel like I’ve been doing a lot of refusing lately. Lee Skallerup Bessette, ‘Refusal‘ 1. It’s 2019, I’m sitting at a thing, and a senior university leader is addressing us with a vision. My attention is drifting, I’m cold and I’ve had too much coffee. The vision seems familiar. And then there it is: “We think the casualisation problem will be solved by AI in about 15 years or so.” It’s like hearing a breaking plate in the…
Continue ReadingIf they’re not in a position to support themselves, then there is the alternative for them to return to their home countries. ‘Time to go home,’ Australian PM tells foreign students I’m floored. The PM is talking about my actual day job. I don’t know where to start. Maybe it began yesterday, when I was meeting online with a Vietnamese student who has begun her PhD here in Australia, investigating whether international students’ attitudes to environmental issues change when they…
Continue ReadingUK 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,…
Continue ReadingHere come the planes They’re American planes. Made in America. (Laurie Anderson, O Superman) Being a terrifically slow learner, I’ve signed up for another MOOC. In my defense, I enrolled a while back and forgot, and now it’s come around just as I’ve been forced to admit that there are only so many chocolates you can eat or stuff down your cleavage before it all falls over. So now I’m in with x thousand others, trying a constructivist MOOC focused…
Continue ReadingBen Wildavsky has a message for Australian universities. He’s the author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World, just out from Princeton U. Press. He’s keen to promote the benefits of free trade in higher education, not least of which is that “knowledge is not a zero sum game”, and that if we create more of it in one country, we don’t lose it in another. Somehow this is calling to mind the joke about…
Continue Reading
