Work and working – Page 4 – Music for Deckchairs

The value of bad ideas

Kate Bowles May 5, 2013 17 Comments

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s. … Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic! It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Risk

Own goal

Kate Bowles April 21, 2013 9 Comments

It’s been a dramatic and painful week around the world, and a week for scepticism about the value of “breaking news”. Here’s Australia’s contribution to the world of redundant announcements, from our busy Minister for Everything*, Craig Emerson: Abbott says no need for Gonski funding reforms –smh.com.au/opinion/politi… via @smh — Craig Emerson MP (@CraigEmersonMP) April 21, 2013 No one’s surprised at the news that if elected Tony Abbott will hang on to the cuts made to higher education without passing…

Being an academic, Change management, Higher education, Risk, Student engagement

More or less

Kate Bowles April 14, 2013 8 Comments

From a purely technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. Max Weber, weirdly enough, in the Australian Government “Report of the Review of the Measures of Agency Efficiency“, March 2011 Whether it was efficient or inefficient, I’ll leave it to you to decide, but I think you’ll agree that only death is truly efficient. Life…

Being an academic, Change management, Higher education, Risk

Circus skills

Kate Bowles April 7, 2013 10 Comments

What gets you into it is a love of books and idealising wisdom. What keeps you there is exhaustion and rank fear. … The academy has become the circus. “annamac”, comment, There Are No Academic Jobs and Getting a PhD Will Make You Into a Horrible Person, Slate magazine I’ve been thinking about what it feels like to be working in a university at the moment, particularly one that’s focused on change. Change is an easy project to pursue, and…

Change management, Narrative practice

Clinical strength solutions

Kate Bowles March 13, 2013 4 Comments

How do you gain consumers’ trust? By listening to them and knowing exactly what they want. And by turning this knowledge into innovative and compelling products. (Beiersdorf, brands overview) The thing about jetlag in America is that it leaves you stranded in the middle of the night with nothing to do but watch middle-of-the-night American TV. And so last night I learned about “stress sweat”, which is apparently a much worse kind of sweat than the regular kind. To protect…

Change management, Edtech and online learning

Visions always belong to someone

Kate Bowles January 25, 2013 16 Comments

The awkwardly titled Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in a Digital Age that was released this week has generated a ton of coverage, which is interesting given its niche provenance. An apostolic group of North American educational stakeholders, including some very high profile names, got together and co-authored a fairly wordy document about the values and entitlements that we might protect in the name of online learners. What I’ve found useful is that most of the people involved…

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

Under pressure

Kate Bowles November 29, 2012 7 Comments

It’s week one again, and I’m up late reading students’ introductory posts at the start of a mostly online course. They don’t know each other, and in sharing photographs and writing publically about why they’re taking the course, they’re showing quite a bit of trust in strangers that they haven’t met in person, including me. This care that they show each other is really why I still choose to work online, after a year immersed in the blither of techno-futurism,…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Edtech and online learning, Rankings

With friends like these

Kate Bowles September 27, 2012 6 Comments

Here’s a little grenade-with-the-pin-out that was rolled towards Australia’s university lecturers today by the Minister for Communications, Broadband, and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy. Under the alarmist heading that Australian Universities Must Adapt, Senator Conroy popped this question: “What is a lecture worth if the best lecturer in the world at MIT is online for free for all to access?” Really—that’s it? After all we’ve heard about MOOCs revolutionising higher education, it comes down to this crude bit of cost-benefit…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Higher education, Student engagement

It’s not you, it’s me

Kate Bowles September 25, 2012 26 Comments

So, I signed up for a Coursera MOOC, and almost immediately the experience turned into Lucy and the Chocolate Factory. It’s a scene that suckers itself onto almost any stressful situation. Lucy and Ethel take a job putting chocolates into wrappers. It’s a conveyor belt scenario, and the task itself is simple; the challenge is to keep pace. Lucy’s enjoying herself, messing about. But one stumble leads to a recovery problem, and before they know it Lucy is eating chocolates…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education

The revolution might be televised

Kate Bowles July 22, 2012 8 Comments

The first time I watched the awful EPIC2020 videos I was so irked by everything about them that I never went back to look carefully at the details of their campaign to reform higher education. But now I have, and I’m beyond irked. I’ve been boosted into the realm of appalled fascination. They’re going to “shatter the paradigm that the future will be anything like the past as well as facilitate discussion and accelerate actions to bring about the transformation of the…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education