Kate Bowles – Page 13 – Music for Deckchairs

Precarious

Kate Bowles February 7, 2012 8 Comments

Truth is forever twinned as having an incidence and carrying an import. Even sciences like medicine and chemistry so physically concrete carry significance for the soul. … Microscopes become tragic in what they may reveal. (Kenneth Cragg, The Order of the Wounded Hands, 2006) Well, here’s something concrete that has import for the soul. Higher education systems around the world have become dependent on the availability of a large pool of cheap labour who are prepared to teach students for…

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

Turtles hatching

Kate Bowles January 25, 2012 2 Comments

Amid all the excitement about whether or not Apple have revolutionized textbooks, or reformed the whole planetary education system, or are just pressuring schools and families to buy iPads,* my colleagues are planning to launch three hundred first year university students into public blogging. Might as well do this while everyone’s busy looking the other way. It’s a complicated decision in terms of future digital waste. And then there’s social risk. There are people who don’t want to be identified…

Higher education, Student engagement

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

… and the ugly

Kate Bowles January 6, 2012 0 Comments

What to make of this morning’s news that a senior academic in an administrative position breached anti-solicitation guidelines at the University of Sydney? Well, first of all, it’s not as colourful as it sounds. Noirish images come to mind, but the reality is more pedestrian. Faced with the need to boost enrolments, a department with an elite reputation based on a restrictive entry requirement made the decision to fish outside their exclusion zone. More than 100 students who had made…

Higher education, Risk, Student engagement

Knockout personality

Kate Bowles January 5, 2012 2 Comments

What a lot of brands are learning is that it’s not always necessary for an app to do something useful all the time. In fact, utilitarian apps are kind of boring. That’s not what consumers want from a brand they engage with. (“Adding brand personality to a mobile app is important“) It’s the eerily quiet week of the year for Australian universities. Across our campuses the Christmas decorations are being boxed up. It’s easier to park, and harder to find…

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

Following orders

Kate Bowles November 21, 2011 4 Comments

The police response to the UC Davis protests is rapidly becoming an issue on which it’s only acceptable to take one side. I’ve watched the pepper spray video over and over. The first time you see it, you do find yourself holding your breath, hand over your mouth. Many people have talked about watching it in tears, and I was one. I’ve read the commentary, I’ve followed the outrage on Twitter, I’ve shown the video to my daughters who, for…

Being an academic, Higher education, Risk

Stolen peaches

Kate Bowles November 15, 2011 4 Comments

Sometimes you find out about things that are so compelling that you know you’re the last to hear about them, and so it is this week with System D. As Robert Neuwirth explains this in Foreign Policy, it’s the French term used to describe the global shadow economy of the débrouillardise: “the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy”. System D is the aggregated economic activity of every unlicensed, irregular, back-of-the-truck roadside trader, every lemonade stall,…

Being an academic, Change management, Higher education

Going underground

Kate Bowles November 8, 2011 7 Comments

It’s Deleuze week here among the deckchairs, a problem I’m keen to sheet home to Michael Feldstein. I’m not normally a Deleuze reader—even in the brief moments of my life when I’m not thinking about what’s wrong with the OpenClass marketing strategy (see below)*—but the coincidences are piling up, including that a colleague has just pointed me to the 1990 conversation between Deleuze and Antonio Negri, on “Control and Becoming“. And in a genuinely rhizomatic sort of way, I’ve been…

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

Author: Kate Bowles