"In shadowy, silent distance grew the iceberg too": universities, technology, work and life
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…
Continue ReadingWhat 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…
Continue ReadingWhat 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…
Continue ReadingIt’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…
Continue ReadingA 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…
Continue ReadingThe 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…
Continue ReadingSometimes 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,…
Continue ReadingIt’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…
Continue ReadingFrom Lindsay Tanner’s “adapt to eLearning or die” speech to Australian higher education, to Adrian Sannier’s soothing evolutionary metaphors to spin Pearson’s arrival as a predator in the LMS ecosystem, all sorts of people are drawing on the history of everything-until-now to figure out where we might be going with edtech. It’s evolutionary thinking, baby. I’m now trying to figure out how to make sense of the latest move that joins up Pearson and Knewton to deliver content, platform and analytics….
Continue ReadingAcross so many realms of their operations, universities really like countable things. We like metrics and tables and charts and the sparkling virtuosity of key performance indicators marching across a spreadsheet. We like performance to be scored, we like impact factors and citation indices, and we really love rank. We even tabulate the emotional intangibles of workplace culture like “satisfaction”. Among other things, this leads to the slightly odd moment when university staff are surveyed to find out how they…
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