"In shadowy, silent distance grew the iceberg too": universities, technology, work and life
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…
Continue ReadingTo the indomitable Australia, where the dynamics of change and choice cause individualism to be the force for doing, and freedom an urgent state of mind– Art Linkletter, LinkLetter Down Under, 1968 So, there’s been a bit written about the Blackboard acquisition of NetSpot in Australia and Moodlerooms in the US, focused on the philosophical integrity of the open source project. To a lesser extent it’s got people thinking about whether the LMS as we know it is going away,…
Continue ReadingRight at this moment I’m failing to feel sympathetic towards colleagues who’ve made university marketing communications their career. Please understand, if you’re in marketing, that none of this is personal. As an academic, I know what it’s like to have my professional practice be the topic of everyone else’s reformist idealism. And I do appreciate that my own employment depends on the work you do year round to ensure that there are students for me to teach. In fact, I’m…
Continue ReadingIn 1944, in response to a question about whether there could be a “purely American art”, Jackson Pollock said this: The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd … the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any country. It’s a famous move in the history of exnomination that plays differently, I think,…
Continue ReadingThe discovery that Music for Deckchairs has been described as a top ten “Australian social media influencer” is surprising, to say the least. I know who has influenced me over a long time in the Australian online public sphere, and it’s not me. I’ve been blogging below the radar for less than a year, and have been on Twitter for precisely five minutes. In fact, I’m only on Twitter at all thanks to the colleagues who have travelled with me…
Continue ReadingFerdinand von Prondzynski, VC at Robert Gordon University, is asking why universities have been relatively slow to mainstream the innovative teaching practices that will match the speedy uptake of mobile and tablet devices by their students. As he puts it, technology-enabled learning shouldn’t be “the preserve of nerds”. The need to break out of the nerd enclave is critical for any institution hovering on the brink of committing to an enterprise-wide LMS contract. This is going to cost so much that…
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 ReadingOne of the features of Australian life that surprises visiting American students is that we’re watching the same movies and TV shows they just left back home, only with the neat variation that ours are seasons out of date. So they arrive at the airport having been told to expect novelties of all sorts (usually, some variation on kangaroos in the suburbs, laid-back anti-authoritarianism, a funny accent, and sharks), to find that they’ve stepped back in time to their own…
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