higher ed
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Say hello to PEE – your Personal Engagement Environment
I’ve blogged about the Twitter Diaspora, arguing that Twitter was a default place for many in higher education. Alan suggests that the Town Hall was something of a myth, and while there’s probably some truth in that, I would content that, during the 2010s, if you were in higher ed, and active in social media, then you had a Twitter account. You would likely have other platforms also, and maybe some you preferred over Twitter, but Twitter could act as a default engagement platform. That assumption no longer holds true. In a very timely special issue of JIME on social media, Apostolos Koutropoulos and 8 co-authors consider this fragmentation of…
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The price of process
(Photo by Natalie Cardona on Unsplash) Like Maren, I read David Sax’s The Revenge of Analog last month, and some points in it chimed with some other thoughts I’d been having around AI. The book makes the case around how analogue industries and formats have revived despite their apparent inevitable demise in face of digital alternatives. It is sometimes too keen to reinforce its won hypothesis and ignores counter points (the education chapter had me wincing in places for over-simplification), but overall it marks an interesting reaction to technology. It can be viewed in some respects as an argument against technological determinism, that despite all of these predictions of doom,…
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Don’t you want me? Questions to ask of new AI-VLEs
In my last post I was doing a backwards glance prompted by the Accenture-Udacity deal. In this one, I’ll look forwards. Apart from the MOOC angle, the other key aspect of the announcement was the investment in AI-enhanced learning environments. In terms of learning environments, the VLE/LMS has been the main player since around 2002. Prior to this there was a mixed economy, combining different commercial solutions, home spun set ups, open web tools. It was both a delightful cottage industry and something of a wild west. From the turn of the century the shift to an institutional wide, enterprise solution became inexorable until by the mid-2000s pretty much all…
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10 Lessons from Apocalypse literature
As you probably know I spend too much/nowhere near enough time reading horror fiction. I know some people feel that’s kind of juvenile, but after years of challenging myself to read difficult literature, I decided to just enjoy reading. Plus genre literature gets a bad press and people are generally snooty about it. All of which is a precursor to try and justify the number of horror related analogies cropping up in these posts. Speaking of which… I’ve been on an apocalypse literature riff recently – you know the sort of thing, zombies, vampires, ecocide, virus, mutant insects, more zombies. These were nearly all written pre-Covid and its interesting to…
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Meticulous informality of GO-GN
A few years ago, I used the term ‘meticulous informality‘ to describe what I liked about the ALT conferences. Maren has blogged how it’s a term we’ve discussed since occasionally on dog walks. Both parts of the term are equally important for participants in an event: informality encourages participation and suggests equality; meticulous means care and support. One without the other is not sufficient – just meticulous can be stuffy and hierarchical, and solely informal can be chaotic and confusing. Without it being an explicit intention, it captures our approach to GO-GN also. Having just hosted the largest GO-GN workshop in Edmonton, I know how much time and care goes…
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The Post Office lessons for ed tech
I expect we’ll see a lot of these types of posts so I apologise in advance for bandwagon jumping. For those outside the UK, there has been a recent TV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which has dramatised the Post Office scandal, where hundreds of sub postmasters were falsely accused (and convicted) of fraud because of a faulty accounting system that was rolled out in the 00s. The TV series has caused fresh outcry, actions and recriminations, and is probably one of the most important drams made in the last decade or so. Like many people I had vaguely followed the story, but not until the TV series…
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November round-up
I’ve had one of those months that has been superficially busy, but when I look back on it, I can’t point to anything particularly significant. Sometimes it’s just about doing the work I guess. One thing I did do was, along with some colleagues, complete an interesting internal project on community amongst open degree students. Creating a sense of community, or belonging, is important for students, there’s plenty of evidence that student who make those connections tend to persist in their studies, for example. It is more difficult for distance education students, obviously, as a lot of that community arises pretty seamlessly on campus. It is even more difficult to…
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Don’t be excellent
There is an understandable focus on quality and excellence in higher education – we have centres of excellence, the Research Excellence Framework, the Teaching Excellence Framework. Excellence or death is the unwritten motto. And I get it, a Centre for Mediocrity might not make the same splash in a prospectus. As an aside, can we _all_ be excellent, it implies to me something above the ordinary, and if excellence becomes the norm, then that is then ordinary, and therefore not excellent? But philosophical semantics is not the point of this post, rather the continued pressure to always be excellent or striving for excellence can be counter productive. The message that…
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Here we are now, entertain us
Via Ted Gioia’s hugely informative newsletter I came across a report from entertainment data analysts Luminate looking at trends in Q3 of 2023. In it they claim that 50% of people’s waking hours is spent engaged in entertainment. 50%! They don’t reveal their data or methodology so I can’t say how valid that figure is, but they are serious analysts so it’s not plucked from the air. Don’t people work? What I guess this attests to is the portability of entertainment – you can be watching TV, listening to a podcast as you commute, work out or walk the dogs. Even at work you can be consuming music as background.…
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Exit strategy
Unsurprisingly, I’ve been thinking a lot about exits recently, what with Maren leaving ALT and me announcing my (not so) imminent OU departure. I’m going to start with an ice hockey example, so for those with an aversion to such things, you may want to skip a paragraph. Last year the Chicago Blackhawks let their franchise player Patrick Kane leave for the New York Rangers. Kane had been with Chicago for 16 seasons, winning three Stanley Cups. He’s nicknamed “showtime” and yet, he went to the New York Rangers for practically nothing this year. The reason? He didn’t want to go anywhere else but also Chicago wanted to give him…
