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Does your MOOC have penguins?
It turns out that there are no less than three MOOCs on open education coming your way. George and Stephen are running one now, David Wiley's one ran last winter and will run again this winter. And very last, I'm running one next March. My one really arose through logic and not a desire to ape George or David (although I do that often enough). I was writing a block of the new Masters level course on Innovation in education, and my block was on open education. I have a strong 'learning by doing' approach, so it made sense for the students on this block to experience it as an…
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Prospect theory & the panopticon of debt
Last night, after Nick Clegg's semi-apology over student loans (see comedy version with honesty subtitles below), I got involved with a twitter chat with an economist from Demos. He argued (very intelligently) that the loan scheme would actually save the tax-payer $2.5K per student, and that it should be viewed as a progressive tax, and not debt. I don't know enough about economics to really counter his claim about the savings. It certainly appears that the Coalition were caught out by all universities charging the full fee, which would suggest it isn't being quite the financial success they had envisaged. But the fact/misleading rumour that it was unaffordable was only…
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Digital scholarship, tenure & barometers
I use this blog as well as our university repository system to keep track (and shamelessly publicise) those journal article things that your grandad told you about. I have a new article out in RUSC (the open access journal from the University of Catalonia). It has the snappy title of "Digital scholarship and the tenure process as an indicator of change in universities". You can access the PDF here through our repository, or at RUSC here. It's an extension of some of the stuff I covered in the book, and I'm making the argument that how universities respond to the challenge of recognising digital scholarship can be taken as a…
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Better angels of our edtech nature
Over the summer I finally got around to reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. In case you don't know about it, Pinker makes the argument that violence of all forms has declined – between states, domestic, national and criminal. It's a lengthy book, but he goes through the arguments very carefully and brings a range of research together to make a compelling case. What he does very well is take accepted arguments or facts and challenge them – for instance that the 20th century was the most violent one in history. He demonstrates how these are often based on a combination of a rose-tinted view about the…
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How to dismantle a sector, stage 2.
So last week, London Met university had their licence to act as a sponsor for overseas students revoked, so it can't teach its existing 2,600 non-EU students, or get new ones. This is unprecedented, and as well as being obviously distressing for those students, will send a loud message around the world about the UK's openness to overseas students. I think there are three interpretations as to why it occurred: LMUea culpa – it's all LMU's fault, they've been playing fast and loose with the immigration system and have been caught out. I'm sure there will be evidence of wrongdoing, indeed I would suggest the Government has been waiting for…
