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Blog review 2020
At the end of last year I wondered if I was losing my blogging mojo. I had a plan to try and kick start it in 2020 with a 25 Years of OU series, reflecting on my 25th Year of working at the Open University. I completed this just in time for the end of the year. It was ludicrously self-indulgent and of little interest to anyone else, but now that’s it complete I am fond of it as a record of my own career at one institution. But, like everything else, my blogging plans were interrupted by Covid. When the implications of the pandemic became apparent for higher education,…
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Books, charts, lists, 2020
Now in it’s 7th year, my annual book post with bonus pointless charts and lists. One might expect that given that EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD WAS CLOSED, I would have read more books this year than last year. But I managed 59 this year against 2019’s high water of 93. Partly this was the impact of not commuting – a 6 hour round trip to Milton Keynes weekly certainly chunks through a number of audiobooks. But also habits changed and I didn’t devote as much time to books as previously. But more than one a week is acceptable. In terms of genre, I pretty much completed my transition to being…
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Films of 2020 (yeah, I know)
So, cinemas eh? The last film I saw before lockdown at the cinema was Birds of Prey. I then managed to pop to see Unhinged in the brief 5 minute window where cinemas were open again, before we went into local, then national, then sorta lockdown again. So, it’s. not going to be a bumper crop and some of the films I wanted to see eg Saint Maude, haven’t come out on streaming yet and I am too old to bother with torrents. Here are ten films then that were released this year, which I managed to see and weren’t terrible: The Hunt – the old people are kidnapped as…
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Best albums of the year (that I’ve purchased)
I’m restricting my top 10 to records released this year, and which I have purchased on vinyl, which means both of the excellent SAULT albums are excluded because they are tricky to get hold of, and one of my favourite albums, Michael Kiwanuka’s Kiwanuka was officially released in 2019 so can’t be included either. In no particular order then: Soccer Mommy – color theory. It was a fine year for dreamy, ethereal, cool female singer-songwriters. Phoebe Bridgers released the also amazing Punisher, which was an almost include, but in this ‘category’ I’ve opted for Nashville’s Sophia Allison whose second album was chill, slacker, edgy pop. Courtney Marie Andrews – Old…
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25 Years of OU/Ed Tech – 2020: The Online Pivot
via GIPHY A “2 for the price or 1” post! As part of the ongoing 25 Years of Ed Tech project, I do one post that is based around the ed tech of that year that would have been included (the book stops in 2018 – oh and while you’re here, remember to check out the audiobook and podcast series of the book). I’ve also been doing my 25 Years of OU series reflecting on my career over 25 years at one institution. For this final post in the latter, and the 2020 entry for the former, there is a crossover of these two series, it’s like the time Magnum…
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25 Years of OU – 2019: The Open Programme
In 2019 I became the Director of the Open programme at the Open University. The open programme covers our ‘Open’ qualifications, such as the Open degree. When the OU was founded, you could only get an open degree, there were no named ones. This was part of the deliberate policy to imagine a new type of university and education. The OU’s first VC, Walter Perry put it like this: “a student is the best judge of what [s]he wishes to learn and that [s]he should be given the maximum freedom of choice consistent with a coherent overall pattern. …this is doubly true when one is dealing with adults who, after…
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25 Years of OU – 2018: The OU crisis
via GIPHY And thus we arrive at 2018, a pivotal year in OU history. Under the leadership of then VC, Peter Horrocks, the OU was making the headlines for all the wrong reasons – regional centres were closing, staff were striking, the finances were in a bad shape and the people at the top were disconnected from staff and students. It all came to a head in 2018 with the VC finally resigning. I’m not a brave or particularly militant person, and I’m very loyal to the OU as an institution, so I refrained from joining in much of the criticism publicly. Privately though there were a number of underground…
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25 Years of OU – 2017: TEF
In 2017 I applied to be an assessor for the new Teaching Excellence Framework, and was appointed. I wanted to be part of it because I felt that the process would not represent a distance education establishment like the OU very well, and as someone who likes to promote widening participation I feared it would favour the usual Russell Group suspects. In the end, my role as assessor had little impact on those areas, the OU did a lot of consultation with the TEF team, although the metrics still proved problematic for us. Before I list some of the criticisms, I will also highlight just how well the process was…
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25 Years of OU – 2016: Being a student
One of the benefits of working at the OU is that you are eligible for a staff fee waiver to study OU courses. When I first joined I studied one module in Shakespeare, but since then I had always found reasons to postpone further study: I had a young child, or a big project, or was focusing on something else. Around 2014 the personal stars aligned – my daughter was now older, I was single and work was well established, so I studied over the next four years or so. I completed a Masters in History, and then, because MAMA are good initials to have after your name, I did…
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25 Years of OU: 2015 – GO-GN
I mentioned that the OER Hub was probably the defining research grant of my career, but GO-GN is probably my favourite. It is also the most fortunate to have come my way. It was set up by Fred Mulder from the OU Netherlands. Fred, who sadly passed away in 2018, was an absolute force when it came to pursuing funding for things he deemed good ideas. He had the belief that OER field would benefit from research, but as the field was in its infancy the research community needed support to grow. By establishing a global network of doctoral researchers the reach and impact of OER could be increased. He…
