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Working harder for less
I realise this blog has been a bit whingy of late. This is my last whingy post, after this, sunshine and unicorns, I promise. I was chatting with (okay, whinging to) a colleague the other day, bemoaning the fact that we all seem to be working much harder, for less impact in higher education. I now regularly work during evenings, weekends and holidays. I don’t recall doing that so often since the days when I was creating T171, our big elearning course, in 1999. Then I was doing that whole “get up at 3am to fix problems” thing, but it was a big deal, it led to the OU becoming…
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Myths of academia
(Typical academic house) The Guardian runs a series called Academics Anonymous, in which an anonymous contributor writes about some aspect of academic life. It is occasionally enlightening, but has recently descended into clickbait style deliberate controversy. However, what I think some of the recent articles illustrate are commonly held misconceptions about academic life. They are so far off the mark in the current climate, that I suspect they were not written by academics at all, and are rather “bloke in the pub who went to the ‘University of Life’ anonymous”. But it’s worth looking at some of them just as a means of combatting some of the outdated perceptions of…
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The role of institutional memory
A couple of news stories recently made me reflect on the role of institutional memory. The first was the piece in the Guardian bemoaning that ‘unsackable’ staff may be making the roles of others more precarious (Aside: which universities still have unsackable staff?). The second was a news item that people are shifting jobs more frequently now, and that three years is optimal to stay in a post. I should state up front that I’ve been at the Open University for 22 years now, so this post is in effect is an exercise in self-validation. Particularly at the senior levels, I’ve seen a mixed approach in my time (“I remember…
