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Metaphors podcast round-up
Because I figure I spam my socials enough with blog posts, I haven’t been announcing each podcast episode release. I’m opting for the mid-spam option then of rounding up some recent episodes in one post, as a reminder that it exists mainly. You can find all the episodes and links to your preferred podcast platform here. In chronological order here are the episodes and some thoughts on them: Why metaphors and ed tech – the intro to the book really, setting out why metaphors are of interest themselves, and why I think they’re useful as a means of framing educational technology. This was before I pilfered the good mic from…
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The problems with tech companies as infrastructure
None of what I am about to relay is new, but it’s enlightening when you have a small personal experience that momentarily lifts away the curtain to demonstrate the broader significance of a trend. So, on the one hand this story is “man had to wait slightly longer for a taxi, boohoo” and on the other it is “foretaste of troubling social trend.” You can decide. Last week I visited my daughter who is studying for a year abroad in North Carolina. Being ice hockey fans we went to see the Carolina Hurricanes (twice) in Raleigh. The PNC Arena where they play is a few miles out of town and…
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What’s in a name? Early internet metaphors
My friend and all round good chap, Rajiv Jhangiani, dropped me a message asking for my favourite current metaphor about the web for a talk he is giving. This set me thinking about some of the early labels we used for the internet and the web, and what they tried to convey. If you are old enough, cast your mind back to the late 90s when the web (and wider awareness of the internet more generally) was still new, and we were trying to understand what it was, and what it could do. Metaphors are very powerful in this respect as they provide a bridge from the familiar to the…
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My kingdom for a reviewer #2
As much as I like a challenging TV series or film, I also sometimes prefer to watch “cosy TV”, ie something largely without menace, tension or requiring thought. It was in the search of such a viewing snack that I came across Professor T on ITV. It features Ben Miller as a Cambridge Prof who aids the police in solving crime. You can probably write the episodes yourself (or get an AI tool to do it). It features laugh out loud representations of academic life – the Prof only teaches one class it seems, who he treats disdainfully and can create random assessment for, he occupies a huge office of…
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The Metaphors Podcast
The last piece of my online identity revamp has been to explore doing a podcast. Yeah, I know, very late to the game. In 2056 I’ll start my TikTok channel. The truth is, I played a bit with them in the first flush of enthusiasm in the 00s, but they never really took for me. I think we all have the social media form that best suits our preferences or talents. Long form blogging is my thing. Audio wasn’t it for me, mainly because I have a fantastically boring voice. I remember doing media training once and after doing a pretend interview in which I felt I had responded like…
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An online presence health check
In my earlier post I was trying to sell the idea that (higher ed related) blogging is experiencing a resurgence. This is partly a justification for myself (and to my line managers), because I’ve been on study leave for 2 weeks. Study leave basically means you have a reason to say no to about 50% of the usual meetings. I’ve been writing a research bid, but I’ve also been using that clearer space in the calendar to update my online presence. This has included: I’m not sure if any of these make much difference, but I would argue (vigorously even) that it is a good use of anyone’s time in…
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The newsletter as RSS
My post about blogging prompted some comments on RSS. I loved RSS, it seemed like magic, you could just pull stuff in from different places, subscribe easily, aggregate feeds. Your blog reader was a little daily newspaper of quality content. It was the essence of what the web was made for. I blame Twitter for killing this magic, increasingly people didn’t promote, or even know their RSS feeds, and social media became a much more effective way to distribute content. RSS often operated in the background still but you rarely saw the little RSS icon on people’s sites any more. Various RSS readers failed or were killed off, and the…
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Blogs are back baby
There’s an adage that goes something like if you stay still long enough, you’ll come back into fashion. I think that time is coming for blogs. And if it isn’t I’m going to pretend it is anyway. My rather vague reasoning for this is based on the following thoughts. These are not researched, just my impressions and I’m very aware that in social media impressions can vary wildly. Twitter is a mess. The trolls are back in, it’s run by a temperamental man-baby, they are talking about changing the free nature, there are technical issues and doubts about its long term viability. Even if all this pans out, a certain…
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Rough(y) times at Athabasca
As someone who works at the UK Open University, I feel an affinity with other distance and open ed institutions globally. I have a particular affection and respect for Athabasca University, Canada’s version of the OU. I have known many smart people who work there, and admired their innovation in undertakings such as challenge exams, Athabasca University Press and IRRODL. So it has been particularly galling to see the political overreach of the Alberta Advanced Education Minister, Demetrios Nicolaides in demanding staff relocate to Athabasca and they reverse their online mode of working. That was bad enough, but was eventually settled, but this week with a callousness Alex Jones would…
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Too much bloody vision
There’s a scene in This Is Spinal Type where they visit Elvis’s grave and after some failed harmonising, Nigel says “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”, to which David responds “Too much. There’s too much fucking perspective .” It’s a line that often comes to mind, replacing “perspective” with whatever there seems to be a current abundance in. Recently this has been “vision”. It’s a strange one, because I think we all say we want a clear vision from any leader in an institution. Maybe it’s just me, but I currently feel Vision Fatigue quite strongly. We have an overall University set of priorities. Then we have…
