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X-terminate
I know I should have done it ages ago, but I’ve finally decided to leave Twitter and deactivate my account. Yes, I know you can make all the “it’s not an airport you don’t need to announce your departure” gags now – but I’ve written about Twitter pretty consistently over the past 16 years so it would be strange not to comment on the end of that identity. It’s been a tough decision. I’ve been on that platform for over 16 years, pretty much every day. I formed friendships through it, found interesting connections, discovered new resources, explored different perspectives, and had a lot of fun. I was so enamoured…
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An OU Farewell Transmission
As they say, some personal news. The OU has been offering a round of voluntary redundancy, which I decided to apply for, and have been accepted. I will therefore be leaving the OU after 29 years. However, I’m doing what in the UK is known as a “Nadine“, ie announcing my departure and then not actually leaving for ages. In order to meet various commitments I’m not actually leaving until June 2024. So that leaves you plenty of time to compose either a moving eulogy or just the right side of legal slur for my departure. The reason for announcing it with soooooo much notice is that higher ed (and…
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The strange self-sabotage of HE
A fairly constant trend I’ve seen, but one that seems to be increasing in regularity and levels of farce, is the ability of higher education institutions to undertake forms of self-sabotage. This occurs in a number of increasingly inventive ways, but is always defined by the same characteristic of creating its own obstacles for outcomes it wants to realise. Universities increasingly come to resemble Fight Club’s narrator beating themselves up in a car park and then wondering how they got all these bruises. One way this is realised is through an over-obedience to policies. I mentioned previously the lack of resistance from senior management, but it’s also seen through just…
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30 Years of Ed Tech – 2023: Twitter Diaspora
Since the 25 Years of Ed Tech book finished in 2018, I have been writing an annual addition at the end of the year. The reason I started the 25 Years series was to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of ALT. This year they are celebrating their 30th, so I’m writing this one early in honour of the ALT-C conference next week. Digital diaspora is a term that has been used variously to describe diaspora from physical communities using the internet to stay connected and to describe black participation online. This Washington Post article uses the phrase to highlight how black communities that used Twitter effectively for coordinating protests and raising…
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August round up
Now that I no longer have a school-aged child that necessitates taking leave over summer, August has become one of my favourite work periods. The OU doesn’t operate conventional term times, so people take their leave whenever they wish, but summer is generally quieter, and the number of meetings drops away. What remains is something akin to what I always imagined being an academic would be like – working on writing, reading, developing interesting projects, walking the dog while pondering deep things. We had a face to face (!) GO-GN meeting over a couple of days this month, planning the next phase of the project. This included revisiting our social…
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Your social media choices, as 70s disco tracks
Let’s play an imaginary game (it might actually be real for some of you). You are applying for a large research grant, and one of the work packages relates to dissemination and community building. Beyond the standard conference papers, academic articles and workshops, there is an assumption that there will be a strong online element. What platform or approach do you write into your grant? For the past decade or so, the go-to answer would be a Twitter account, probably with associated website and maybe a YouTube channel. The other bits may vary, but the Twitter account was often the sine qua non in getting engagement with a project beyond…
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Lost about lost men
Like many of you I read the article in Washington Post about men being lost. I don’t disagree with Christine Emba, particularly the point about men behaving weirdly, and I don’t bring any expertise to these thoughts beyond 50 odd years of being a man. But I don’t get why men are lost? I get why grifters such as Jordan Peterson want to push the idea of a crisis in masculinity, their careers depend on it. But in reality, what’s lost is the restriction of having about two different ways of being a man, replaced with myriad possibilities. While I do understand it will be different if you live in…
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Rise up, Vice Chancellors, rise up!
(Not aimed at any person in senior management in particular, just the sector in general) Like many of you I was tired, angry and infuriated by the recent Government announced crackdown on poor quality degrees. This was widely, and correctly, interpreted as an attack on arts and humanities. which typically don’t perform as well on the criteria of employment in ‘professional’ jobs. Creatives are often self-employed, take time to establish a reputation, and so on. Also, it’s part of the ‘war on woke‘ because those subjects are all wokey-lefty, dribble, dribble. One saving grace of this Government however, is that rather like a sloth performing brain surgery, they combine extremely…
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July round-up
My “doing it for the newsletter” monthly round-up of activity and random bits for July. It’s been a bit of a disjointed month, because after returning from the Eden conference in Dublin at the end of June, both Maren and I came down with covid (no-one else from the conference seems to have been inflicted so probably an airport/plane thing). It was as rough as the first time around, a reminder that it’s still there and still carries a punch. I made sure to take time off work this time around though – last time I soldiered on attending Teams meetings and I think that meant it lingered around longer…
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The Emily Carr, Mattiusi Iyaituk & Tom Thomson approaches to AI
(with apologies to real experts in Canadian art, and probably all Canadians. And artists.) Here comes an extended, and possibly inaccurate attempt at developing an analogy for how we approach new technology such as the internet and now, AI. How the perspective of Western Art came to interpret the landscape of Canada is, I’m suggesting, analogous to how higher education can come to understand the new landscape of an AI rich internet. Before we delve in, it’s important to note that Western Art, like higher education, is only one perspective, and a problematic one. But the point here is how any established area tries to understand something that is new…
