higher ed
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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…
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The strange self-sabotage of HE
A fairly constant trend I’ve seen, but one that seems to be increasing in regularity and levels of farce, is the ability of higher education institutions to undertake forms of self-sabotage. This occurs in a number of increasingly inventive ways, but is always defined by the same characteristic of creating its own obstacles for outcomes it wants to realise. Universities increasingly come to resemble Fight Club’s narrator beating themselves up in a car park and then wondering how they got all these bruises. One way this is realised is through an over-obedience to policies. I mentioned previously the lack of resistance from senior management, but it’s also seen through just…
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Rise up, Vice Chancellors, rise up!
(Not aimed at any person in senior management in particular, just the sector in general) Like many of you I was tired, angry and infuriated by the recent Government announced crackdown on poor quality degrees. This was widely, and correctly, interpreted as an attack on arts and humanities. which typically don’t perform as well on the criteria of employment in ‘professional’ jobs. Creatives are often self-employed, take time to establish a reputation, and so on. Also, it’s part of the ‘war on woke‘ because those subjects are all wokey-lefty, dribble, dribble. One saving grace of this Government however, is that rather like a sloth performing brain surgery, they combine extremely…
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Wanted – Frontier psychiatrists
Back when the internet (or at least the web) was still relatively new, it caused a lot of reaction. People dismissed it (it’s the new CB fad), pointed out it’s limitations (it’s so slow), or decried it as the portent of doom (the end of universities). Treading between these predictions and prophecies was a tricky business. It seems obvious now that it would go on to impact almost every aspect of society, but that really wasn’t the case back in the late 90s. Any, none, or a mixture of the futures so confidently outlined by detractors and evangelists seemed possible on any given day. This is fairly normal for any…
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Niceness is nice
I watched some of Glastonbury on the BBC last weekend, and like many people one of my favourite acts was Rick Astley and the Blossoms doing a whole Smiths set. It’s difficult to explain to people who have grown up in an internet age, how important groups like the Smiths were in the brash, money obsessed 80s. But then Morrissey has become increasingly right wing and it just means there is a shadow hanging over any listening experience now. But it’s impossible not to love Rick Astley, and so you could enjoy this set guilt-free and marvel at just how good those sings were. This is not a Smiths post…
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The radical Ted Lasso lesson for education
I know, I know. There are few things more tedious than taking a popular TV show and applying it to a sector – there have been “Manage the Ted Lasso Way” and “The Ted Lasso method of Leadership” type posts aplenty. But hear me out. The angle here is more about the writing and how it relates to traditional TV than Lasso himself (and no, you don’t have to be a fan of the show). So Ted Lasso ended last week, amidst a wave of pieces declaring that it was about time and it had in fact, been rubbish all along. I think TV critics sometimes fall in love with…
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Yankee Shed Foxtrot
Partly in response to the existential implications of AI, I have been pondering aspects of what humans are good at recently, and then how our society, institutions and infrastructure need to facilitate these. In essence, getting humans to do repetitive, formulaic work is done for, AI will do that (whether we think that’s good or not is probably not going to stop it happening). Maybe that’s ok, we were forcing people to become more uniform in their outputs and that isn’t playing to our strengths. Humans are messy, inefficient, unpredictable and often wrong. Well, at least this human is. But most of what we really value comes from this process…
