politics
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Disruption & the unenlightenment
Readers of this blog will know that I’ve often criticised the theory of disruption, and particularly its application in education. I won’t rehearse those arguments again, but it wasn’t until Trump and Brexit that I appreciated how much disruption had transcended its original form. Initially, when digital industry was new on the block, it provided a useful way of thinking about the potentially massive changes coming to many industries. And we can’t say that newspapers, music industry, photography etc haven’t been completely altered by the arrival of digital technology (although often Christensen’s disruption falls down under close inspection and better theories are available). But disruption it turns out is not…
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The US academic boycott
The travel ban on many people travelling to the US is, of course, against all normal codes of decency. In addition it is antithetical to the basic tenets of research (the free sharing of knowledge) and open education (removal of barriers). Like many others therefore I’ve decided not to travel to the US for any reason, including conferences, or even getting connecting flights. There are researchers I know who are banned from going. I’m not going to pretend academia under ‘normal’ circumstances is an entirely egalitarian system. There are many cultural and economic reasons why people end up excluded. But for a deliberate dual system to be instigated at the…
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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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Break my arms around the one I love
I’ve written before about my love of blogging. But post-Trump victory, I’m questioning everything. On the plus side it has seen a flurry of great blogging. With news forced to normalise it, and fake news a testimony to our ability to drown in comfort rather than face truths, blogs are the place to turn to for informative comment often. But on the downside, as David Kernohan points out, much of the grinding engine of paranoia and hatred is driven by these same tools and approaches. The ones I’ve happily championed for years. And more fundamentally I think we have to question the role of education, educational technology and educators now.…
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Acts of resistance
So I had the Trump chat with my daughter last night. It’s a useful way to frame your own reaction, as you have to balance the anger, depression and anxiety with some practicality and hope. She wanted to know what she could do, and I explained that one thing to remember is that time and demographics are against the Alt-right world order. In 10 years time Brexit or Trump would not have been successful (probably). And also their own incompetence and failure to deliver on their vague promises will be their undoing. So just getting through the next 5-10 years is a strategy in itself. In our discussion (it was…
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Let’s think inside the box
I’m interested in the way language influences our behaviour (without getting into linguistic determinism), and one aspect I think we’re witnessing is the seepage of Silicon Valley language and values into society. In the software world terms such as ‘radical’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘revolutionary’ are all used freely, and always with positive connotations. However, the same terms have now been taken up across society, and particularly in politics. Both Brexit and Trump could match those adjectives, but I would argue they are not positive forces. These are larger examples of a smaller phenomenon that values a radical new solution over an improvement to an existing one. Competence is a much undervalued…
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Brexit silver linings
Ok, this is my attempt to get out of the pit with this one, and find some positives. I don’t suggest all of these things will happen, but they might, as a result of the Brexit decision. They largely arise from the fact that it has been a disaster. Within hours the country was in financial and constitutional crisis, there was a Tour de France of backpedalling from Leave campaigners on their promises, it became apparent there was no plan and Britain had become the laughing stock of the world. By lunchtime after the victory the Brexit dream was dead, making it a contender for the shortest lived revolution in…
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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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Waking up on a Brexit morning
In order to get people to think through complex issues, one technique is to get them to envisage waking up the day after it has happened and imagining their feelings. Bizarrely, inexplicably, insanely, it seems that a British exit from Europe might actually be on the cards, so here is my attempt to imagine how I would feel on the morning of the 24th if that did occur. Note it is not an attempt to make reasoned argument (the Leave campaign seems largely post-rational and immune to any factual arguments anyway), but entirely a personal assessment. I think the emotions I would experience are as follows. Anxiety – most observers…
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Increased university costs and admin
One of the common themes you'll see when people complain about rising university costs is the increased cost of administrative staff. This is usually portrayed as simply greed, or laziness on the part of universities, for instance this Wall Street Journal article reports a 37% increase in admin staff from 2001 to 2012. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity has little doubt about the lack of value admin staff add, stating: "You can have a university without administrators, but not without students or faculty. The minimization of administrative costs and bureaucracy should be sought in any university reform. A few decades ago, few universities had more than a small centralized public…
