Higher education – Page 12 – Music for Deckchairs

Trust wipeout

Kate Bowles October 28, 2011 18 Comments

From Cap and Gown yesterday, this question: Can someone in universities please start thinking about cultures of trust and what creates them?? The urgency of the double question mark won’t seem out of place to anyone working in universities at the moment. Across the academic-professional staff divide, or in the ways that academics and students talk about each other, or in the tense and often bitter exchanges between management and unions, there’s a tone that’s ungenerous at best, and openly suspicious…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

Edtech and the evolutionary arms race

Kate Bowles October 25, 2011 3 Comments

In 1944, in response to a question about whether there could be a “purely American art”, Jackson Pollock said this: The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd … the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any country. It’s a famous move in the history of exnomination that plays differently, I think,…

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

Analyse this

Kate Bowles October 23, 2011 3 Comments

Like Jonathan Rees, I’m really trying not to arc up in response to each inflated claim about technology’s power to save education from its own dismal, maladjusted, unimaginative future. Maybe it’s the EDUCAUSE effect, but it’s a whole keg party of edtech Kool Aid out there at the moment, and I’m feeling like someone’s disapproving mother. The problem is the tsunami of corporate PR from edtech large and small that goes well beyond spruiking individual products, and extends to a generalised Mexican…

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

Open is as open does

Kate Bowles October 20, 2011 1 Comment

Openness: everyone’s at it. All of a sudden higher education is a hive of managed promiscuity, and it’s only a matter of time before we’re all throwing our keys into the fruitbowl. First Pearson announce (and, at last, demonstrate) their new “free, open, easy, amazing” OpenClass. Now Blackboard have announced a more open approach to content developed by academics and hosted on Blackboard sites. As Audrey Watters points out quietly, the game-changing technology here is … a ‘share’ button. What…

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

One professor at a time

Kate Bowles October 18, 2011 6 Comments

I’m still worried about the missed potential for edtech entrepreneurs large and small to engage in more substantial dialogue with educators at an earlier stage in their thinking. At the moment, the pattern of bringing a mostly non-negotiable product to the RFP table involves both parties in an awkward clash of expectations that Joshua Kim has aptly described as a “bake-off”, and that certainly has reminded me of MasterChef more than once. So the award for persistence in communicating with…

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

Waiting for disruption

Kate Bowles October 16, 2011 17 Comments

This week’s excitement has been the announcement by Pearson of their shakeup of the LMS experience. On the OpenClass website, where we’re told in very big letters that this is all Open, Free, Easy and Amazing, the promotional video starts with Adrian Sannier, Senior VP, making the big claim that the LMS “as you know it” is dead. Sannier brings serious university research and administrative experience to Pearson’s push into the edtech market, and I’m confident that he knows what…

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

Way more than luck

Kate Bowles October 7, 2011 3 Comments

In the company of everyone, I’ve been listening to Steve Jobs’ commencement speech to the Stanford graduating class of 2005. Against the background of our humming anxiety about whether students are going to stop paying for their education and hang out auditing our open content for free, his story of learning calligraphy as a freelancing, freeloading, highly engaged college drop-out is full of institutional terror and promise. What if everyone does this? Given today’s understandable emphasis on his thoughts on…

Higher education, Student engagement

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