"In shadowy, silent distance grew the iceberg too": universities, technology, work and life
What do you stand for? Who are you? How can you know that—and operate from that position of power? bell hooks There are times that it’s hard to know what to say. Things seem to ask for a response, even just a raised hand to say “Here”. But how to start with this world? This week I discovered that the place where I work has a new brand tagline, and this is it: Stands For Purpose (It’s not that bad. My daughter’s primary school…
Continue ReadingThe home to be lived in generation after generation, the violin passed down … we cultivate the disciplines of care and attention in small, pivotal ways that have large, far-reaching effects on ourselves and others. Out of what is hidden we make the visible and then call it work; work that makes sense of the hours we are privileged to live. David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity Storytelling is for an other just as…
Continue Reading1. I’m still in Palo Alto, and I’m none the wiser about the street sign program that asks locals to look up and think about the meaning of their city.* I’ve now found eight different examples, and they’ve started to take on an anxious tone. The whole place feels like it’s worrying about something. Would you say that things in your city are better or worse than they used to be? Do you ever find yourself longing for “the good…
Continue ReadingI sewed once a day, keeping a record of when I worked and marking the breaks between each session. While it is evident where one session ends and another begins, I took care to tie the thread or hair from the stitches of one day to the stitches of the next, so that the line is continuous. The result is an image of my commitment and the time that has passed. Maria T D Inocencio, ‘In and out of time’…
Continue ReadingSo why are most universities monolithic, conservative, bureaucratic and resistant to change? F. M. Cornford’s splendid little monograph Microcosmographia Academica (1908) examines the “enemy of inertia” and finds that “there is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing”. While change is theoretically deemed to be a “good thing” by “change managers” – commonly known as vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors – those managers often encounter resistance from ordinary academics. Steve Olivier, ‘How to manage rapid change‘ Ordinary…
Continue ReadingThe Site is owned, operated and/or provided by RateMyProfessors.com LLC (“RMP”), a subsidiary of Viacom International Inc., which offers television channel or programming services (such as Internet websites, applications or other interactive services) and offers other products and services under various brands, such as those Viacom Media Networks brands listed here. RateMyProfessors.Com LLC Terms and Conditions He always has a piece of paper in front of his mouth when he talks which makes it hard to hear. He also hisses like…
Continue ReadingThere is a lot of activity that an academic undertakes that acts as ‘glue’ holding together the whole scholarly practice. Martin Weller, Scholarship Can’t Afford Itself, July 2015 But after what happened at the Tour, I need to prove myself on a bigger scale. Tejay van Garderen, 2015 Two stories about the glue that holds together the whole scholarly practice. 1. It’s 2007. I’m in my office. I’m always in my office. Looking back, I don’t remember much else about that…
Continue ReadingWe are in the shark’s domain … I am just lucky it wasn’t my time. Mick Fanning, Australian surfer So there’s an administrative thing that must be done, and if I do it, it’s worth a certain amount of workload time. But if the money is available to pay someone else to do it at an hourly rate, it’s given a bit more time. This is not because it takes less time for me to do it, but because it costs less per…
Continue ReadingA reply to Martin Weller But then along come MOOCs, and they’re all about the personality. Martin Weller, ‘The role of personality in education‘ Martin Weller, Professor of Education Technology at the Open University, is asking important questions about about the pros and cons of stripping authorial personality from higher education course and content design. In a sector shaped by the persistent anticipation of audit, personality is a bit of a handful. The hallmarks of personable teaching—improvisation, creativity, anecdote, all the idiosyncratic connections that an individual…
Continue ReadingBut we desperately want live lectures to work. We’ve done them for so long now that they seem a part of who we are. And we are tantalised by the mirage of thinking that if only everyone turned up, they would be a far more efficient way of teaching than the seminar or the tutorial. Desperately. So desperately that we are prepared to ignore the prodigious financial and environmental cost of heating or cooling large empty spaces. So desperately that…
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