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Vinyl of the year
End of the year posts inbound! Starting off with my vinyl selections of the year. I bought a lot of records this year, hey, it was 2021, whatever it takes. I’m restricting choices here to a) records I own and b) that came out this year. I’m too much of a radical, free thinker to go with a top 10, so I’m going with some random categories instead. Pop is art dammit – Claud: Super Monster. Claud is the type of artist who might have chosen political punk or avant-garde for their outlet, but instead has selected the perfectly crafted pop song as the artistic form of choice. Classified as…
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25+ Years of EdTech – 2021: MS Teams
via GIPHY Despite the book 25 Years of Ed tech finishing with 2018 (aww, remember 2018?), I’ve kept it going with one entry for each year since. The criteria for selection was the year I think they became significant, in that people talked about them a lot. And inclusion does not denote approval (hence the presence of blockchain in 2017). 2020 was predictably the online pivot. By choosing a more specific technology in MS Teams for 2021 I am continuing this theme, but the focus is now perhaps on longer term trends and what the choice of Teams denotes. Of course, Teams has been pretty significant in education for a…
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The urgent need for the UK Open Textbook pivot
It seems that the online pivot may prove to be the point at which UK Higher education becomes interested in open textbooks. A few years ago we carried out some research on the UK Open textbook project. looking at differences between North America (where the idea of open textbooks had taken off to an extent) and the UK (where it hadn’t). There were some cultural differences which accounted for this, for instance the cost of textbooks in the UK did not form such a substantial percentage of an undergraduate’s overall expenditure, and UK academics tended to use a range of textbooks on reading lists, rather than specifying one. This lessened…
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Putting the Meh in MOOCs
First up, exciting news! GO-GN have published their annual research review. Led once again by Rob Farrow, this contains reviews of a number of papers in the open education space. It’s not intended to be an exhaustive literature analysis, but rather a selection of articles that we think cover some of the main areas. They are reviewed by members of the network and it’s an excellent example of the many hands makes light work principle of co-production. It’s worth a read all the way through for anyone interested in OER or OEP. For the review I took on three MOOC papers. Individually they were all fine papers, and well written…
