Higher education – Page 14 – Music for Deckchairs

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

That’s right, we’re not from Texas

Kate Bowles June 29, 2011 2 Comments

End 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…

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Student engagement

What we’ve got here …

Kate Bowles June 22, 2011 0 Comments

As the Chilean ash cloud wafts through Australian airspace for a second time, we’re all thrown back into the science of prediction. What will it do next? Nightly news footage of passengers sitting in grumpy heaps in airports has drawn an unusual degree of national attention to Darwin. It turns out that we have one of the world’s nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers right here in Australia, and they’ve been putting on their good shirts for the TV cameras night…

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