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2017 blog review
This is not an edtech review of the year (why do that, when Audrey does it better than anyone?), but rather a review of my own blogging over the year. First up, some stats: Number of posts: 50 (including this one) Comments: 202 (including ones from me) Visitors: 231,081 Visits: 2,123,507 (mainly bots plus me) I try to blog on average about once a week, so maintained that pretty well. I don’t have a strict policy on this (eg, blogging every Thursday afternoon or something), but the rough goal does prompt me to blog on occasion when I feel there’s been a gap. And in the way of the unpredictability…
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The zone of proximal depravity
In the digital era it’s always a difficulty to discern the difference between behaviours that have always been present, but we just notice them differently, and those that are fundamentally changed by the digital environment. Often it’s a bit of both. One such aspect I’ve been thinking about recently is our exposure as individuals to extreme views. It’s one where I think the digital world has caused a significant shift for all of us. In the analogue world, it’s been usually pretty easy not to find yourself exposed to extreme views, or targeted by extremists, or caught in the middle of a conversation with fascists, terrorists, conspiracy theorists, and assorted…
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The Digital Scholar revisited
I’m writing a paper at the moment which is revisiting my 2011 book The Digital Scholar, and asking ‘what has changed since then?’. Back in 2011, although elearning had entered the mainstream with widespread adoption of VLEs, much of the focus was on the potential of digital scholarship. A number of studies at the time indicated that adoption of new technology by academics was cautious and often greeted with suspicion. Proctor, Williams and Stewart (2010) summed up the prevailing attitude, finding ‘frequent or intensive use is rare, and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous’. Since then a lot…
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Annual film review
I didn’t get to see as many films this year as I’d hoped, but it turned out to be a pretty good year. After a few years where the blockbusters have been uniformly awful, this year’s batch contained some movies that finally understood their role as entertainment (Thor, Wonder Woman) and even had people discussing narrative structures (Dunkirk). Either side of these were films that, like my book choices, couldn’t be divorced from the current climate. Many of the films that follow were officially released in 2016, but I’m going on when they got a cinema release in the UK. So, here’s my top ten, because who doesn’t love a…
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Books, charts, blah
Because Christmas is the season to be selfish (that’s right isn’t it?) I continue my annual self indulgence in December of blogging some personal reviews of the year. First up the third of my books review with pointless charts. It’s been a really good year for my own reading with 51 books (I expect I’ll fit one more in before year end to make it one a week), so in this top ten I’ve excluded classic books I read or re-read this year, but that doesn’t mean these are all new releases this year. Swing Time – Zadie Smith. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters The Holocaust: A New History – Laurence…
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Innovating Pedagogy 2017
The Open University’s annual Innovating Pedagogy report is out, this time in collaboration with the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). It’s the sixth year we’ve done one (well done to Rebecca Ferguson and Mike Sharples on pushing this through). When we started the intention was to make it distinct from the NMC New Horizon reports by focusing on pedagogy. I think, to be honest, in those early ones there was probably a technology focus still, but as it’s progressed it has really moved away from this to more pedagogy, socially focused issues. I’d also add I’ve found it increasingly useful as a resource.…
