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Why does education hate itself?
Here’s a news story that doesn’t happen: A bank has appointed a former university Vice Chancellor as their new CEO, because they feel the expertise in running an institution with longevity and stability is what’s required. Ludicrous, right? And yet, the opposite occurs regularly. Higher education has an inferiority complex. It always feels like it needs to change, to be more like something else, to take radical lessons from elsewhere. But here’s the thing – education is not like newspapers, music, content industry, banking, software development or selling cars. It’s fucking odd, and unique. I mean, there are definitely things to be learnt from other sectors, just as every sector…
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25 years of EdTech – 1996: CMC
I’m revisiting the previous post on Bulletin Board Systems slightly here. One of the interesting things about this series is the way others are bringing great stuff to my attention. For instance, David Kernohan has covered much of this in better detail than I can (sometimes I hate that guy with all his knowledge stuff). The reason I’m revisiting Bulletin Board Systems with the concept of Computer Mediated Communication is that it’s a good example of how a technology develops into a more generic educational approach. CMC became a popular phrase around this time and represents higher ed really beginning to engage with online tools in a theoretical, conceptual manner,…
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Social media and the academic (through the medium of dog pictures)
Photo by Don Agnello on Unsplash I’m giving a presentation to OU staff on the use of social media. This was part of a broader social media training day, and they were interested in the potential impact of using social media. I chose to present it as a series of hypotheses. For many of these there is some evidence, but for a lot it is either very indirect, or we haven’t really gathered it yet. And just for the sake of it, I limited myself to only using pictures of dogs in the slidedeck. Because dogs. The hypotheses (some are more just statements if I’m honest), were as follows: Soc Med increases student…
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25 years of EdTech – 1995: the Web
Before someone jumps in and says “actually the web was invented in 1989”, this series isn’t about when they were invented, but when I feel they became relevant in ed tech. So don’t be that guy. It’s now 1995, in my personal history this is the year I joined the Open University. At the interview I said “so have you thought about using the web to deliver courses?” I think they interpreted this as me knowing more about it than I did, but hey, I got the job. The web browser was becoming reasonably common now, with Netscape (*sniff*) dominating. I won’t go all nostalgic about the early promise of…
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25 Years of EdTech – 1994: Bulletin Board Systems
Continuing my 25 years of Ed Tech reflections, it’s now 1994. The web is just about to break in a big way, and the internet is gaining more interest. One of the technologies that old ed tech hacks like me go all misty eyed over is the Bulletin Board System. These were popular for the nascent discussion forums online, and mark the first real awareness of education to the possibility of the internet. They often required specialist software at this stage, were text based and because we were all using expensive dial-up, the ability to synch offline was important. At the OU (I was yet to join) they were experimenting…
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The Digital Scholar – ebook file
I’ve been doing some writing on revisiting my 2011 book The Digital Scholar. I’ve also got a couple of presentations planned around it. But on checking I note that the imprint of Bloomsbury that published it, Bloomsbury Academic, is no longer functioning and the titles have been rolled into the main Bloomsbury catalogue. My previous links to the free version don’t work any more, and you have to dig pretty hard to find the free version on their site. I think open access publishing was something they experimented with when Frances Pinter was there, but now she has moved on to Knowledge Unlatched, they’ve quietly abandoned it. Of course, the…
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25 years of edtech – 1993: Artificial Intelligence
This year marks the 25th anniversary of ALT. I’m co-chairing the ALT-C conference with Sheila MacNeill, which celebrates this in September. This got me thinking about the changes I’d seen in that time, and so I’m going to attempt a series of blog posts that use this as a vehicle to explore the developments in ed tech over the past 25 years. It may end up like Sufjan Stevens project to write an album for every state, and I won’t get past two or three, but let’s give it a go. Also, in order to fit it in, there may be some twisting to fit a tech into a year,…
