onlinepivot
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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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The educator covid diaries
I was at the EDEN conference this week in Dublin (excellent conference by the way, congrats to EDEN and the DCU team). Although I’ve done a couple of conferences, this was the first time seeing a lot of people I used to bump into regularly prior to the pandemic. It made me reflect that much of what happened during that time (2020-2022) is already fading from memory. This prompted me to look back over some journals I kept at the time, and I was right, I had forgotten most of the unusual work and roles we took on then, plus the stress of worrying about family, and the continual stream…
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The pandemic response and the OU
I’ve just had an article published in the OTESSA Journal, entitled “The UK Open University COVID Response: A Sector Case Study“. I wrote it last year as I was interested in the various actions the OU took during the pandemic. Lots of people in other unis came to us formally and informally seeking advice as they were required to shift their teaching online. You may remember I ran some drop-in sessions on different topics back in 2020. The OU also set up a research fund, developed teaching content and gathered resources on openLearn (most notably, the Take your Teaching Online free course). In the paper I categorised the different responses…
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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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Energy crisis and hybrid learning
First of all, the implications of the energy crisis for hybrid learning are waaaaaaay down the list of priorities. Many people in the UK are going to face incredible hardship this winter essentially choosing between food and heating ( this will happen elsewhere too, but the UK has uniquely managed to combine a set of factors such as Brexit, contemptuous leadership, lack of investment in renewables, a failed market approach, over-reliance on imported gas, etc to make this a real catastrophe). We have also seen many small businesses such as cafes and pubs facing incredible energy bill increases that mean they will have to close or start selling a cup…
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The fake online vs in-person culture war
via GIPHY If there’s one thing we’ve learnt over the past few years, it’s that the media and politicians love a fake culture war. There are several reasons for this: distraction (“Hey, why were you partying when we were all observing lockdown?” “Don’t worry about that, what about trans women using ladies loos eh?”); diverting blame (“Why is the NHS so underfunded?” “It’s all those greedy doctors”); making people feel superior sells (“Young people can’t afford houses” “Young people don’t work hard and save like you did”). No group is safe from a culture war it seems: migrants, women, POC, young people, LGBT people, poor people, liberals, etc. So, it’s…
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Good online learning – group work
Like many of you I’ve been getting rather exasperated by the “online = bad, face to face = good” narrative that seems to have arisen post-pandemic (Tim Fawns has a good thread on this by the way). So I thought I’d try a series on some of the ways in which online learning can be done effectively. I mean, I know it won’t make any difference, but shouting into the void can be therapeutic. They’ll be a mix of research and my own experience. First up, every student’s favourite way of working – group work! Going right back to the early days of e-learning, group work has always been a…
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Why do education secretaries hate online learning?
I mean, it’s weird, right? On the one hand, all Governments like to berate education for not fully preparing students for the modern workplace. They unveil plans about how they will be a modern, 21st century, digital economy. And yet, successive education secretaries have berated online learning, which one would think was an essential component in realising both of the previous aims. And not just offer up some valid criticisms around issues of retention or engagement, say, but they use terminology that portrays online learning as, at best, a lazy, cheap option and at worst, some form of abuse. Gavin Williamson exerted pressure on universities to return to face to…
