Asides
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Tell me lies about ed tech
In school one of my favourite poems was by Adrian Mitchell, entitled ‘To Whom it May Concern’, it centred around the refrain ‘Tell me lies about Vietnam‘. It came to mind this week, when I read Audrey Watters’ post The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology. So here, for a bit of fun, and in appreciation of all the work Audrey has done over the years, is a remix of Mitchell’s poem for ed tech. Don’t tell me it doesn’t scan, I did it in 10 minutes, okay? I was run over by AI one day. Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way So suck up all my…
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Live like common people
You can file this under “I know you know this already, but let me rant”. “Normal people”, “the real world”, “the university of life”, “ivory towers” – I have a list of cliches people use when talking about academia and higher education, which cause a mental (if not actual) eye-roll and immediately invalidate the point being made. See the comments section of any article about universities in the Guardian or Daily Mail, and it is only a matter of time before one of these pops up, giving the poster the basis to dismiss any claim. They used to just irritate me, but I’ve come to see them as not just…
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Bruno’s Last Walk
In the autobiography I will never write, a chapter will surely be devoted to the dogs of my life. From the Jack Russell who used to push me around in a trolley when I was a baby, to the cross breed rescue dog my wife and I got as an obvious, but unbeknown to us, trial run for having a child of our own. Amongst these, standing as the most loyal and singularly devoted, will be Bruno, the Staffordshire Bull Terrier I adopted from Cardiff Dogs Home 3 years ago. As some of you may know, this was just after my divorce. I wasn’t sure I could manage a dog…
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Alone in Blogistan
One of the books I read last year was a happy confluence of factors. The book was Hans Fallada’s war time tale of quiet German resistance, Alone in Berlin (aka Every Man Dies Alone). It related to the political situation and rise of the right (the frothing demand of British newspapers to crush opposition to Brexit was straight from this era), a trip my daughter and I took to Berlin, and my academic interest in online communication. And it is this last element that I’ve been pondering on and off since reading it last October. For those who don’t know the story, it follows the tale of a nondescript Berlin…
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The privilege of risk
Another of those values that has seeped into everyday life from start up culture is the cherished status of risk. You know the inspirational quotes people like to post on Twitter “the biggest risk is not taking a risk”, “those who will not risk, will not win” etc. And I get it, personally and professionally it’s useful to take risks. But I’ve also been struck by how this deification of risk is really a proxy for justifying privilege: I deserve it because I was willing to take the risk. But risk is itself, often a privilege. The research that concludes that entrepreneurs don’t have a propensity for risk, they just…
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The lesson of Mabon’s Day
This is one of those “thoughts I had while walking the dog that I might as well blog before I forget them” posts. It concerns a little known holiday in Wales, and the relevance this has for (educational) technology. Mabon’s Day started in 1888, around the South Wales coal mines, in which the 1st Monday of every month was declared a holiday. Named after the Lib-Lab politician William Abraham (who was better known as Mabon) who fought successfully for the miners to have this holiday. His argument was largely that they were physically exhausted through labour, and thus could not devote time to intellectual pursuits. A day a month would…
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DashLearn – the Amazon Dash for Learning
[Following on from my piece on Pokemon Go, this week’s thing is Amazon Dash, so getting in with a “for learning” piece before anyone else. And in case it isn’t sledgehammer obvious, it’s parody] “This month has seen the launch of Amazon Dash – easy buttons to order everyday items that has completely revolutionised shopping. Amazon understand that we live n a modern, high tempo world and need to take instant action. Sadly, this attitude has not permeated the ivory towers of education, where 100% of lectures take place exactly as they did 200 years ago. While the internet disrupts every aspect of society, it is impossible to find a…
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Robotisation will follow digitisation’s path
Robots aren’t really my area of expertise, but they’re this year’s thing, in movies and the news. This BBC article “Will machines eventually take on every job?” is fairly typical. However, I have followed the impact of digitisation over the past couple of decades, and I think the implementation of robots will follow a similar path. The difficulty is to tread the path between determinism, utopian and dystopian views, and excessive extrapolation. Also, there is a tendency to forget that pesky human nature in all of this. But we are well down the path of digitisation of a previously analogue world now, and this offers some useful lessons I think.…
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Steve Jobs isn’t your role model
Others have written about this, so I’m not saying anything new here, but it’s my blog, so I get to vent when I want, and I’m amazed at how much of this Steve Jobs as role model stuff still persists. It annoys me when I continually see articles along the lines of “Steve Jobs did X, so if you want to be successful, you should too.” The rather explicit assumption in all of these is that being like Jobs is a desirable thing to be. So recently there was a spate of “Steve Jobs did a lot of his thinking while taking a long walk, so you should do walks…
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MOOCs as Eddie Murphy
File under: pointless things that occur to you while walking the dog. My daughter came across Beverley Hills Cop on TV the other day, and then worked her way through a range of Eddie Murphy films. She quickly discovered what the rest of us learnt back in the 80s. Most Eddie Murphy films are not very good. Murphy has undeniable screen presence, and when he’s not on screen these films are just interminable. But for a few years anything with Murphy in it was a guaranteed hit. I came to the conclusion that what happened was that a lot of average scripts had sat around without any real backing, because…
