Ning – Music for Deckchairs

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

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

In the education space?

Kate Bowles September 28, 2011 3 Comments

“The education space” is an imprecise sort of street address that’s beginning to bother me. It seems to mean something more than itself: not the precise space within which teaching or learning actually occurs, but the larger territory of business operations that brings together all those with an eye on the profits to be had from the future of education as a peculiar hybrid of market and service. And this week, there’s been some agitation in the education space. Firstly,…

Change management, Higher education