personal
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An OU Farewell Transmission
As they say, some personal news. The OU has been offering a round of voluntary redundancy, which I decided to apply for, and have been accepted. I will therefore be leaving the OU after 29 years. However, I’m doing what in the UK is known as a “Nadine“, ie announcing my departure and then not actually leaving for ages. In order to meet various commitments I’m not actually leaving until June 2024. So that leaves you plenty of time to compose either a moving eulogy or just the right side of legal slur for my departure. The reason for announcing it with soooooo much notice is that higher ed (and…
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Vinyl of the year
End of the year posts inbound! Starting off with my vinyl selections of the year. I bought a lot of records this year, hey, it was 2021, whatever it takes. I’m restricting choices here to a) records I own and b) that came out this year. I’m too much of a radical, free thinker to go with a top 10, so I’m going with some random categories instead. Pop is art dammit – Claud: Super Monster. Claud is the type of artist who might have chosen political punk or avant-garde for their outlet, but instead has selected the perfectly crafted pop song as the artistic form of choice. Classified as…
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Academicing with depression
D and Me I’m going to blog some thoughts on being an academic with mild depression – I have no framing if that constitutes a big revelation or a ‘whateva’ moment, but thought I’d write it anyway. I say mild, I know it’s not a competition, and I know people who have really severe, debilitating illness far worse than mine. While I don’t suffer from bipolar or to anywhere near the same degree as Carrie Fisher, I can relate to her statement that “Imagine having a mood system that functions essentially like weather—independently of whatever’s going on in your life.” While a bout can be caused by some (often trivial)…
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Ranking Full Stop
Ranking Roger of The (English) Beat passed away yesterday, which caused me to reminisce about my first ever gig, seeing them play at the Rainbow in 1981. I posted a thread on Twitter, but then lay awake for much of the night recalling other details, and also just how alien the 1980s seem to today. So forgive an old man his nostalgia, as I flesh out that experience a bit more. It was May 1981, and I had just turned 14. Living in Waltham Abbey, we are both part of London, but also on its periphery. A mate & I had been fans of the Beat since their first album…
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What I learnt from being a student
Yesterday I submitted the thesis for my MA in Art History at the Open University. I completed the MA in History a couple of years ago also, so I’ve had about four years of experience of being a part time student. At the risk of being like one of those ‘woke’ pieces where proper students will scream “yes, we’ve been saying that for years!’, here are some of the things I’ve (re)learnt, from the perspective of being an educator while also studying: Everyone should do it – I don’t mean study a subject for career development (although that’s nice), the content isn’t the important part. Do it for the experience…
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Edtechie review
After books and films, here is my look back at my year of blogging. As with last year, I set out to average one blog post a week. This post makes 51, so only one short. This year also saw 10 years of blogging for Edtechie, and so still blogging at a reasonable rate is testament to how much blogging forms part of my work and social environment. And one thing that has been shown this year is that it is as vibrant a community as ever, despite all the recurring pronouncements of the death of blogging. On a couple of occasions my blog became host to what Maha Bali…
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Yours, in despair
The unthinkable has happened and Britain has voted to leave the EU. The nation stared into the abyss last week and I had hoped that would be enough to make it pull back, but no, it seems that 52% of my fellow Brits decided the abyss looked just fine and plunged in. I feel for my European colleagues who work and live in the UK. They must feel very uncertain about their future now in a country that has shown itself to be so aggressively anti-European. This is a personal post, I’m not going to dissect the campaigns or implications here. I feel lost. It is not just the decision…
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A year of films – the good, the bad & the unsubstantiated
Continuing my review of my annual goals, my last post looked at my ‘book a week’ challenge, this one will see how I fared with my ‘cinema visit a week’ challenge. Warning: Not ed tech related and may contain occasional swears. First up, I rather early on decided it didn’t have to be an actual cinema visit. I watched films in a variety of ways: cinema, on an aeroplane, via on demand, etc. But it did have to be a film on current release. I watch a lot of films, so I probably saw three times this number of other movies. I just about managed it, with a couple of…
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A year in books, with pointless charts
At the start of the year, I set myself a number of goals, so by way of end of year round-up, I’m going to review how I’ve done against these. I realise this is a) self-indulgent and b) of absolutely no interest to anyone else, but hey, blogging. First up, my goal of reading a book a week. I enjoyed Jane Rawson’s post at the end of last year “My year in books, unnecessarily charted“, so thought I’d just do a wholesale copy of that idea, rather than, you know, anything original. I set myself the goal of reading a book a week. This sounds easy, but days soon get…
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Just the twenty years
This month marks twenty years since I started at the OU. In five years time I get a clock. I know you’re thinking ‘he doesn’t look a day over 30’ – oh, you’re not. Anyway, time for some reflection, and as I said few posts back, I think those of us in ed tech in particular (but all of society to a large extent) have been through such rapid change that we take it for granted now. So here is a brief ‘my life in ed tech over the past twenty years review’. When I joined the OU I said at the interview “I’m interested in this internet thing. Have…
