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Revenge of the kid’s art
As a (mainly) home worker, I’ve been tweaking my home office set up over the past few years until I’ve made it an ideal working space for me. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to online learning also, so here is an attempt to tease out some of that (probably unsuccessfully). First, I should stress that I know having a good space of my own at home is a privilege – I don’t have children at home, live in an area where I can afford a house with spare rooms, have a decent job, etc. This post is not to celebrate how awesome my office is (although it is…
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The Pedagogy of Crisis
One of the themes of the OER22 conference was “Pedagogy of Crisis” (I think this was Rob Farrow’s suggestion). I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently. I posted about the cost of living crisis, which follows the pandemic crisis, which came hot on the heels of the Brexit (or Trump) crisis, which arose in part due to the economic crisis of 2008. And climate crisis has been gaining momentum alongside each of these. I kept waiting for a return to normal, for crises to be done with. But I’ve come to the realisation (if not quite the acceptance) that we are in a state of perma-crisis now. If it’s…
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Ed Tech’s failure? Not so much
via GIPHY I came across this paper by Justin Reich recently, which has the title: “Ed tech’s failure during the pandemic, and what comes after”. In it he argues that many had been promising a lot from ed tech, and then during the pandemic when it had the chance to shine, the experience was pretty miserable for lots of learners. His claim is mainly laid against the ed tech hype merchants (Christensen et al) who have been promising some tech driven revolution in learning for so long, and the Mitra Hole in the Wall, autodidact myth. These are what I referred to as ‘rapture’ solutions – emphasising the need for…
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So, it’s about sharks, right?
In my previous post I talked about my uneasy foray into self promotion for my book, Metaphors of Ed Tech (did I mention I have a book out?). One key aspect of this is to have a clear visual identity. This makes posts on social media immediately recognisable and makes the book stand out from stock imagery photo type covers of young people pointing enthusiastically at computer screens. The GO-GN project has managed this better than almost any project I’ve worked on, through the theme of penguins, as drawn by Bryan Mathers. 25 Years of Ed Tech had a great Bryan cover (and remixer), so it was natural to call…
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Enduring self promotion
As you may be aware (I think I mentioned it once or twice), my book Metaphors of Ed Tech came out last week. Unless you’re a major author or published by a publisher with a massive marketing budget, it means a certain amount of self-promotion falls to the academic. For (some) academics this is extremely uncomfortable, and goes something like this “cough, oh, sorry to bother you, I appear to have published a book, it’s probably nonsense, no need to worry, thanks, sorry again”. Which is a shame because books take a lot of time to bring to fruition, and readers may even like them. I follow a Facebook group,…
