"In shadowy, silent distance grew the iceberg too": universities, technology, work and life
End of life illness stories come to this moment: the final period of waiting and staying awake. Sleeping mats on the floors of hospital rooms, dozing in chairs, holding hands, keeping shifts and vigils, hard choices, knowing what is to come. There’s an intense wish repeatedly expressed to get there in time: for the living to be present with the dying, to let them know that they are safe and cared for, and that those they love are safe and can…
Continue ReadingEven though I know what the reality is, it gives me hope, it gives me a purpose, it gives me something to do. However little time I have. — Myuran Sukumaran, Australian artist Here’s a story that ought to be filling us all with hope: a big tale of resilience, creativity, cooperation and opportunity, driven by a remarkable and gifted Australian. Look at him here: he is young, and healthy, and doing so much good. He has time left. If I was his mother watching…
Continue ReadingI suppose it’s like the ticking crocodile, isn’t it? Time is chasing after all of us. –J M Barrie, Peter Pan It’s highly probable that somewhere in the world today a child has been born that’s going to live to 150 –Joe Hockey, Treasurer Two thoughts. 1 Australian politics is frozen in mid backflip over the shark, and I’m still stuck on the Treasurer’s claim back in January that we need to shore up our public health system to prepare for Australians living to…
Continue Reading“We will do whatever it takes to make Medicare sustainable … If we don’t, with an ageing population, we will find ourselves in 10 or 20 years with a system that will collapse under its own weight.” Peter Dutton, Minister for Health, The Australian November 27 With things in the world as they are, two things to celebrate, and Australian health care reform. First, something really great: the women of Elcho Island mentioned a couple of posts ago succeeded in their…
Continue ReadingThere’s weeping. And then there’s anger.* For a year, Richard Hall and I have been tracking the ways in which higher education has become an anxiety machine, fumbling our way through this together using the metaphors of cycling, hamster wheels, technologies of pressure, instruments of shame. We’re not alone in thinking any of this. (See especially Melonie Fullick’s sustained critique of productivity from the perspective of mental health, the worm at the heart of academia’s vanity culture.) The rankings instruments that…
Continue ReadingGo son, go down to the water / And see the women weeping there Then go up into the mountains / The men, they are weeping too Nick Cave, “The Weeping Song“ 1. It’s a day for weeping, as it turns out. All over the place, so much grieving. Lives brought up short abruptly and in shockingly public ways right in the middle of being lived, and other lives ending privately with some warning. Barely born ones touching down lightly and leaving us at once and very…
Continue ReadingI met for the first time the essential questions of my own mortality … None of us have 300 years. The terror that I conquered in those three weeks left me with a determination and freedom to speak as I needed, and to enjoy and live my life as I needed to for my own meaning. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals Short version: it’s about this. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gGdDz6FPA&w=560&h=315] Please donate. Long version Last week was national Go Home on Time Day,…
Continue Readingfor so many this year, but especially for Audrey Watters I live in a very small Australian seaside community, with 5600 others. It’s within easy reach of major cities including Sydney, so we’re not exactly isolated. But the non-negotiable topography of Thirroul—ocean on one side, escarpment on the other—keeps commercial development at human scale. I can walk the length of the town. My kids all went to the local primary school. I know the local pathology collectors; I see the two of them at the shops…
Continue ReadingAll of a sudden it’s LMS week* in mostly-US higher education. Nudged by the imminent Educause annual conference, there’s a whole pop-up festival of reflection on why we still have enterprise learning management systems—and why we have the ones we have. Audrey Watters, D’Arcy Norman, Phil Hill, Michael Feldstein, Jared Stein and Jonathan Rees have all contributed to this thoughtful and detailed conversation; anyone who thinks universities just woke up one day trapped inside a giant LMS dome really should read each of these at least. And Mike…
Continue ReadingMany academics in their 50s might feel that they’re not ready to retire yet – but should they be forced out early? Well, of course, not all of them should. Anonymous, ‘Should Older Academics Be Forced To Retire?‘, The Thesis Whisperer Bullshit. Is this really the world we choose to live in? Is this a system that works? John Warner, ‘Calling BS … BS‘, Inside Higher Education I’m a fan of The Thesis Whisperer (“just like the horse whisperer—but with more…
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