Kate Bowles – Page 15 – Music for Deckchairs

To market, to market

Kate Bowles October 5, 2011 4 Comments

And then there are situations from which even the most sympathetic creative cross-sectoral partnerships with ed tech, big and small, can’t save us. University marketing, for example. Visual branding is a struggle between the obvious and the obscure, and this gets very tricky when universities are trying to decide how to represent themselves. Images of location and local environment score well, as do shots of students talking to each other animatedly, preferably in carefully selected groups that hint at a…

Being an academic, Change management, Higher education

Small is good

Kate Bowles October 4, 2011 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking back over the initial response I (and many other educators) had to Jarrod Drysdale’s heartfelt outburst about the story of his web app, Knack. He designed this to help teachers generate learner analytics that they might in turn use to agitate for change or demonstrate their accomplishments, and I’ve been engaged in a brief exchange of views on his blog on the way he reacted to its failure. First, I do think he’s right that in a culture that…

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

Anxiety of influence

Kate Bowles September 29, 2011 5 Comments

The 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…

Edtech and online learning

Here and now

Kate Bowles September 29, 2011 3 Comments

This week at Umeå University in Northern Sweden, I was taken to see a class being taught by videoconference. I’m familiar with this way of working; all the students seemed engaged and happy, and the teacher was relaxed and obviously very experienced. The room was a good size, and the class was discussing critical thinking. So far, so routine. But there’s something about the strange warping of distance and time that occurs when you can see someone sitting in a…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education

In the education space?

Kate Bowles September 28, 2011 3 Comments

“The education space” is an imprecise sort of street address that’s beginning to bother me. It seems to mean something more than itself: not the precise space within which teaching or learning actually occurs, but the larger territory of business operations that brings together all those with an eye on the profits to be had from the future of education as a peculiar hybrid of market and service. And this week, there’s been some agitation in the education space. Firstly,…

Change management, Higher education

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

Patched

Kate Bowles September 19, 2011 3 Comments

Tenured Radical is asking the question that should be required reading for every CIO, CTO, LMS suitor, and higher ed tech commentator: if computers are such a blessing to higher ed, how come their use is actively extending the working lives of their users to such a damaging degree? The series of events she describes will have elicited low moans of sympathy from all of us working in writing-intensive courses online: an innovative learning task set up to use a…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation

Competitive advantage?

Kate Bowles September 19, 2011 9 Comments

It’s not really my business, but it seems to me that the promise that competition delivers consumer benefits is in the “If I had a dollar for every time … ” category of overuse. Mostly this proposition seems to be based on the assumption that if I’m selling lemonade next to someone else selling lemonade, we’re going to compete for the lemonade market either by offering superior or cheaper lemonade, and either way, the passing parade gets a better deal…

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

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

One of these things is not like the other

Kate Bowles August 30, 2011 3 Comments

Ploughing through the Pew Research report on whether university presidents think the same as members of the general public when it comes to the value of online learning, I’m thrilled to discover that the opposite of online isn’t bricks and mortar any more. Such a relief, as this image is wearing out from its current overuse in Australian media commentary as a symbol of both capital investment in the physical fabric of universities, and cultural investment in traditional teaching practices,…

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

Author: Kate Bowles