Jonathan Rees – Page 2 – Music for Deckchairs

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

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

Analyse this

Kate Bowles October 23, 2011 3 Comments

Like Jonathan Rees, I’m really trying not to arc up in response to each inflated claim about technology’s power to save education from its own dismal, maladjusted, unimaginative future. Maybe it’s the EDUCAUSE effect, but it’s a whole keg party of edtech Kool Aid out there at the moment, and I’m feeling like someone’s disapproving mother. The problem is the tsunami of corporate PR from edtech large and small that goes well beyond spruiking individual products, and extends to a generalised Mexican…

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

Waiting for disruption

Kate Bowles October 16, 2011 17 Comments

This week’s excitement has been the announcement by Pearson of their shakeup of the LMS experience. On the OpenClass website, where we’re told in very big letters that this is all Open, Free, Easy and Amazing, the promotional video starts with Adrian Sannier, Senior VP, making the big claim that the LMS “as you know it” is dead. Sannier brings serious university research and administrative experience to Pearson’s push into the edtech market, and I’m confident that he knows what…

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

Hidden values

Kate Bowles September 21, 2011 1 Comment

Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed feels that those of us who write about ed tech should mind our manners a bit. I want to like this argument a whole lot more than I do. The appeal to collegiality and respect is a winner, and I do agree that right at this moment it could be painful to be watching the global ticker feed on online learning if that’s your line of work, especially if you’re still at the startup…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation

Standards

Kate Bowles September 6, 2011 0 Comments

I’m struck by the coincidence of Jonathan Rees and Ferdinand von Prondzynski both writing, in different ways, about the significance to academics of being able to set their own compass. Not only do we hope to be able to research and teach in areas that are the best fit with our skills and principles, but we also prefer to work for institutions that are able to determine the best mix of features that suits their operating context. Whether you call this…

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

Houston, we need to talk about content

Kate Bowles May 18, 2011 2 Comments

One 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…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education

Online charlatans?

Kate Bowles May 12, 2011 1 Comment

Today the Sydney Morning Herald has lent its editorial elbow to the effort to figure out whether online learning represents the end of traditional university teaching, in much the same way that the Buggles taught us back in the 70s that video killed the radio star. They way they tell it, defeat is inevitable: In cyberspace, the ivory towers of academia are undoubtedly crumbling. Thrilling stuff. It’s like that middle section of The Lord of the Rings where everything has gone…

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning, Higher education