Music for Deckchairs – Page 12 – "In shadowy, silent distance grew the iceberg too": universities, technology, work and life

Guarding the well

Kate Bowles May 26, 2012 18 Comments

Something I learned in high school history has come back unexpectedly while I’ve been brooding about Jonathan Rees’ opposition to MOOCs and his views on what they threaten. A couple of miles away from the place where I grew up is this beautiful Iron Age hill fort: Within the inner circle are the remaining stone foundations of an original castle, and—critically—the well that stored water for the whole settlement. Soldiers controlled the resources in the middle, and the villagers and…

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

Scare tactics

Kate Bowles May 11, 2012 11 Comments

OK, so clearly there’s a move on in the world of elearning conferences and events to shake academics out of our usual torpor. As everyone knows, we don’t have much to do, and what we do pull off shows not a skerrick of imagination or even rudimentary competence. So let’s get the email about Blended Learning 2012 out of the way first. The event seems like a reasonable affair, but it’s clear that the pricing structure doesn’t anticipate someone like…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, University marketing

Learning from failure

Kate Bowles May 6, 2012 7 Comments

The problem with edtech evangelism is that it assumes the most valuable lessons are learned from other people’s success. This is why our lives fill up with stories of exciting tools that have transformed this that or the other thing. Exhausting, really. Given the importance of failure to innovation, it’s interestingly rare to find blogs, lists, journals, or conferences focused on failure, in any field. The Ten Most Awful Mistakes in Online Course Design. Ten Tools I’ll Never Try Again. …

Change management, Edtech and online learning, LMS evaluation, Student engagement

Flip this

Kate Bowles April 25, 2012 4 Comments

Here’s an innocent little grenade-with-the-pin-out question rolled into the conversation about whether TED-ED has provided us with a whole new way of engaging students by moving content out of class time: on the same day, Plashing Vole is asking whether we shouldn’t be making attendance at conventional university lectures compulsory? It looks like exactly the kind of retro thinking that academics get accused of, given how much we hear about flipping, collaborative learning, students as producers etc. It could be dismissed…

Higher education, Student engagement

Any colour you like, Australia

Kate Bowles April 11, 2012 5 Comments

To the indomitable Australia, where the dynamics of change and choice cause individualism to be the force for doing, and freedom an urgent state of mind– Art Linkletter, LinkLetter Down Under, 1968 So, there’s been a bit written about the Blackboard acquisition of NetSpot in Australia and Moodlerooms in the US, focused on the philosophical integrity of the open source project. To a lesser extent it’s got people thinking about whether the LMS as we know it is going away,…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

The hardest part

Kate Bowles March 28, 2012 3 Comments

OK, so here’s a quick follow-up on yesterday’s post about Blackboard’s complex rebranding of itself as an open source visionary. Phil Hill thinks this isn’t the key point, and I feel that he’s right. As I mentioned yesterday, Ray Henderson has issued a significant challenge to higher education, in the form of an offer “to solve the hardest problems in education, comprehensively.” Educators are really familiar with being the experience of being told that we have a problem that someone…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Student engagement

Punctuate this

Kate Bowles March 28, 2012 4 Comments

Here’s how timezones work. Australia perpetually wakes up a) ahead of everyone else and b) the last to know what happened overnight. And so it is with today’s discovery that while we were sleeping, Blackboard executives were tearing off their business suits and putting their underpants on over their tights in order to jump out of the phone box as crusaders for openness in education. Specifically, in the flurry of press releases about the acquisition of MoodleRooms and Australia’s own…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

Stuck in the middle

Kate Bowles March 7, 2012 9 Comments

There’s something bothering me about the interesting project pulled together by Jeff Young at The Chronicle, intended to demonstrate that today’s college students are bored with yesterday’s lecturing tactics. In January, Jeff asked students to video their thoughts on the traditional lecture experience. Here’s his compilation of some of their responses: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBwiX8EwBGs] I don’t particularly disagree with anything the students say, and I really like that they took the trouble to video their thoughts and send them in. Honestly,…

Risk, Student engagement

People we like

Kate Bowles February 15, 2012 5 Comments

Right at this moment I’m failing to feel sympathetic towards colleagues who’ve made university marketing communications their career. Please understand, if you’re in marketing, that none of this is personal. As an academic, I know what it’s like to have my professional practice be the topic of everyone else’s reformist idealism. And I do appreciate that my own employment depends on the work you do year round to ensure that there are students for me to teach. In fact, I’m…

Higher education, Student engagement, University marketing

Hope’s temper

Kate Bowles February 13, 2012 1 Comment

Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. … Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. (Henry Giroux, 2004) The Adjunct Project is one of the most important outcomes of the recent US summit on precarity in higher education. Behind it is an impressively…

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