Higher education – Music for Deckchairs

Piecework

Kate Bowles July 11, 2012 4 Comments

I forget why exactly, but I’m on a daily email list for the US fast food industry. I’ve learned all sorts of colourful facts about change management practices and customer loyalty schemes, and it’s getting harder to avoid the conclusion that higher education institutions and quick service restaurants are marching to a similar drum. Mad Greens*, for example, is currently pitching for the same trifecta of improved service quality, compliance and productivity that informs most of the divisional workplans I’ve…

Casualisation of work, Higher education, Risk

Just not that into you

Kate Bowles June 10, 2012 25 Comments

New Faculty Majority Board Member Jack Longmate, writing in the NFM blog this week, thinks that there are fresh signs of “potential for traction in public policy thinking” in relation to the conditions faced by academics working off the career track in America’s higher education system. His optimism has been sparked by Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, who’s been speaking out against “casino capitalism”. Reich was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, and he writes on the…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Risk

Guarding the well

Kate Bowles May 26, 2012 18 Comments

Something I learned in high school history has come back unexpectedly while I’ve been brooding about Jonathan Rees’ opposition to MOOCs and his views on what they threaten. A couple of miles away from the place where I grew up is this beautiful Iron Age hill fort: Within the inner circle are the remaining stone foundations of an original castle, and—critically—the well that stored water for the whole settlement. Soldiers controlled the resources in the middle, and the villagers and…

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

Scare tactics

Kate Bowles May 11, 2012 11 Comments

OK, so clearly there’s a move on in the world of elearning conferences and events to shake academics out of our usual torpor. As everyone knows, we don’t have much to do, and what we do pull off shows not a skerrick of imagination or even rudimentary competence. So let’s get the email about Blended Learning 2012 out of the way first. The event seems like a reasonable affair, but it’s clear that the pricing structure doesn’t anticipate someone like…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, University marketing

Flip this

Kate Bowles April 25, 2012 4 Comments

Here’s an innocent little grenade-with-the-pin-out question rolled into the conversation about whether TED-ED has provided us with a whole new way of engaging students by moving content out of class time: on the same day, Plashing Vole is asking whether we shouldn’t be making attendance at conventional university lectures compulsory? It looks like exactly the kind of retro thinking that academics get accused of, given how much we hear about flipping, collaborative learning, students as producers etc. It could be dismissed…

Higher education, Student engagement

The hardest part

Kate Bowles March 28, 2012 3 Comments

OK, so here’s a quick follow-up on yesterday’s post about Blackboard’s complex rebranding of itself as an open source visionary. Phil Hill thinks this isn’t the key point, and I feel that he’s right. As I mentioned yesterday, Ray Henderson has issued a significant challenge to higher education, in the form of an offer “to solve the hardest problems in education, comprehensively.” Educators are really familiar with being the experience of being told that we have a problem that someone…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Student engagement

Hope’s temper

Kate Bowles February 13, 2012 1 Comment

Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. … Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. (Henry Giroux, 2004) The Adjunct Project is one of the most important outcomes of the recent US summit on precarity in higher education. Behind it is an impressively…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

Step right up

Kate Bowles January 15, 2012 3 Comments

I’ve been asked why I’m so bothered by the invitation to sit in a dunk tank as part of our orientation activities for new students. Surely dunk tanks fall into the category of harmless fun? Don’t they? OK, here are a few reasons, without even beginning to think about their resonance among students who’ve had enough of high school because of the bullying and are hoping for something better from higher education. First, this is how they’re promoted: Does Dunking…

Being an academic, Higher education, Student engagement, University marketing

The robot and the muse

Kate Bowles December 23, 2011 2 Comments

It’s that time of year. Predictions and lists everywhere, like the snow currently falling over Google, WordPress, bitly … (memo to northern hemisphere: look down very carefully and like Gulliver you will see the tiny little people from the other half of the world running around doing their Christmas shopping in shorts). It happens like this every year, but higher education has a particularly worried tone at the moment, which is no wonder considering the lack of restraint in the…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk, Student engagement

Is it time?

Kate Bowles December 8, 2011 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, Professor Frank Larkin reported for the L H Martin institute that staff-student ratios in Australian higher education are a bit worse than are commonly claimed. What makes this sensitive is the government’s ambitious target of 40% of 25-34 year olds being degree qualified by 2020. There’s some debate about the viability of this target, and the details are vague on exactly how this will raise national productivity unless we’re really prescriptive on what those undergraduates study, and what…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Change management, Higher education, Rankings