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The Ed Tech suitcase
Some of you may remember the hoo-ha we had around Ed Tech as discipline a while ago (re-reading this, the comments are incredibly rich). The general feeling was that a discipline was ill-suited to ed tech for three reasons: a discipline ends up excluding some and prioritising other voices; ed tech is multi-disciplinary by nature; the way it operates is more networked and fluid. However, not being a discipline leaves it with some weakness, namely the kind of historical amnesia we see so often, and a vulnerability to commercial ed tech setting the narrative. So while it seemed that a a discipline wasn’t appropriate I wondered if there were better…
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Disruption’s legacy
Clayton Christensen passed away yesterday. I never met him and he was by many accounts a warm, generous individual. So this is not intended as a personal attack, and I apologise if it’s timing seems indelicate, but as so many pieces are being published about how influential Disruption Theory was, I would like to offer a counter narrative to its legacy. I think to give it fair credit, the initial idea of disruptive innovation was both powerful and useful. Coming as the digital revolution really began to impact upon every sector of our lives, people were looking for theories to explain the new logic of these businesses that seemed to…
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25 Years of Ed Tech book – get those pre-orders in!
Next month my book 25 Years of Ed Tech is published by the lovely people at Athabasca University Press. It will be available under a Creative Commons license, with the digital copy free. But, look at that lovely Bryan Mathers cover – wouldn’t you want a physical copy of that in your hands? If so you can pre-order via Athabasca site or via Combined Academic in the UK. I expect there will be a flurry of self-promotion over the next couple of months. Bear with me. I will reveal the highlight of the book now, which is its dedication, which screams “I have no friends”: To my two canine writing…
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Self plagiarism and self protection
I was away last week in a cottage in West Wales, trying to get some momentum on a book I am writing. The book is something around Metaphors of Ed Tech. It will be no surprise to anyone I’m sure that it will involve working up a lot of existing blog posts. Some of my friends (looks at Jim Groom and Dave Cormier) like to rib me about rehashing blog posts to make books, but there’s a lot to be said for it. So here is my “protest too much” justification. Jesse Stommel had a good thread on “self-plagiarism”: Self-plagiarism is a misnomer. It isn’t actually plagiarism. Why wouldn’t a…
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Innovating Pedagogy 2020
Sorry I’m a bit late with this, I’ve been writing (more on that in the next post). The annual Innovating Pedagogy report is out. As ever this is written by my colleagues in IET, in collaboration with another institution. This time it was the super smart gang at the National Institute of Digital Learning at Dublin City University. The report continues with the aim of focusing on pedagogic developments that are related to technology, but crucially not focusing on the technology itself. This year’s innovations are: Artificial intelligence in education Posthumanist perspectives Learning through open data Engaging with ethics Social justice pedagogy Esports Learning from animations Multisensory learning Offline networked…
