edtech
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Proctorio sponsor OEB, so it’s a no from me
via GIPHY Online Educa in Berlin is one of the biggest ed tech conference in Europe. I’ve been a couple of times and was going to attend this year, mainly for the gluhwein. But I see on their website that proctoring company Proctorio is now their platinum sponsor. I genuinely appreciate that running conferences is a difficult balancing act, made even more precarious in post-pandemic times when travel is still uncertain for many. Getting sponsors for a conference is often the difference between it being feasible and not. But equally, one must ask, what would it take for a sponsor to be deemed unsuitable? And for me, Proctorio are some…
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Proctorio – Unis as custodians
via GIPHY During the recent European Super League furore there was much talk of football club owners being ‘custodians’ of the game (see, for example Everton’s statement). This might be a romantic, quaint notion in a world of aggressive capitalism, but it captures something about being in charge of institutions that have been around for a long time, will likely persist beyond the current owners, and contribute to something larger in society. Universities and all HEIs occupy a similar role in society in many respects (although without the same pay as footballers it should be noted). The Principals and Vice Chancellors of these institutions are similarly in a custodian role…
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Educators are not risk averse and complacent
via GIPHY I know the article was clickbait, but this THE piece, entitled “Risk-averse academy needs to get on board with new tech” was a classic of a sub-genre that has been around for at least 30 years. It contained all the requisite elements of the “why are educators stuck in the past (unlike me)?” articles. These are: Based entirely on a small set of anecdotes – this one is based on using VR for a small group of students. Issues of scalability, access, privacy, replicability are too uncool to bother with. Uncritically embedded in start-up culture and language – the “cool factor was off the charts”, “Experimenting with truly…
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Woolf University – whither the blockchain?
via GIPHY Some of you may remember a few excited announcements back in 2018 about Woolf University, a startup that was, and I paraphrase, going to blockchain the shit out of higher ed. The founder described it as “Uber for students, AirBnB for Professors”, thereby combining two terrible business models in one unholy mess. David Gerard noted that by 2019 they had quietly dropped the whole blockchain tag, no longer describing themselves as The First Blockchain University. Founder Joshua Broggi had stated at the outset that “We literally could not do what we are doing without a blockchain,” so presumably it still figures in their system. Looking at their site…
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Digital mudlarking
I spend too long and for too little benefit thinking about ed tech as a field/discipline/subject/hot mess for it to be healthy. I am not as interested in the business of ed tech but rather what it feels like as a practitioner in a university or college. One of the things that often strikes me is that terms we use for other areas don’t quite fit: as we discussed before, discipline isn’t right, and that is how we tend to frame much of higher education. So I end up trawling around for metaphors, like suitcases. Here is another then, that of mudlarking. I was enamoured by the stories my mother…
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The Ed Tech suitcase
Some of you may remember the hoo-ha we had around Ed Tech as discipline a while ago (re-reading this, the comments are incredibly rich). The general feeling was that a discipline was ill-suited to ed tech for three reasons: a discipline ends up excluding some and prioritising other voices; ed tech is multi-disciplinary by nature; the way it operates is more networked and fluid. However, not being a discipline leaves it with some weakness, namely the kind of historical amnesia we see so often, and a vulnerability to commercial ed tech setting the narrative. So while it seemed that a a discipline wasn’t appropriate I wondered if there were better…
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Disruption’s legacy
Clayton Christensen passed away yesterday. I never met him and he was by many accounts a warm, generous individual. So this is not intended as a personal attack, and I apologise if it’s timing seems indelicate, but as so many pieces are being published about how influential Disruption Theory was, I would like to offer a counter narrative to its legacy. I think to give it fair credit, the initial idea of disruptive innovation was both powerful and useful. Coming as the digital revolution really began to impact upon every sector of our lives, people were looking for theories to explain the new logic of these businesses that seemed to…
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40 years of ed tech at the OU
My colleagues in IET at the Open University have published an open access book with the lovely Ubiquity Press people. It is free to download in various formats here (or you can buy the hard copy, order it for your library etc). It celebrates the work of the CALRG research group. I like a bit of ed tech history on this blog, which I think is interesting in its own right. But what I particularly like about this book is that they use this history to then consider future developments. So there are four themes, and each has two chapters: Foundations and Futures. As Ann Jones, Eileen Scanlon and Rebecca…
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Questions for the new kid on the block(chain)
via GIPHY There was an article in October’s Chronicle of Higher Education entitled How Blockchain Technology Will Disrupt Higher Education. (It’s in the Chronicle so of course you can’t actually access it, even my university library access does not permit the current edition to be viewed. The Chronicle – where articles go to rest in peace). Now, I’ve knocked blockchain before, but my problem with this article is not so much the blockchain part, but rather that it is indicative of the almost wilful historical amnesia that besets so much of ed tech. In the article the author, Richard DeMillo, claims that blockchain will disrupt (no, I’m not going to…
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The rootless ed tech units
One common complaint when I hang around with ed tech/learning technologist people (to be fair, we have a few) is that often universities don’t know quite what to do with them. They know they want them, but they’re not quite sure what for. If you look at where learning technology units are placed in organisational structures, this uncertainty is highlighted – sometimes they are aligned with the library, other times they are part of IT, or inside the education faculty, or sit on one side under the direct aegis of a PVC. My own unit, IET at the OU, has been reviewed at least six times since I’ve been there.…
