post-OU
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An OER24 transmission
I mentioned my visit to Cork to pull off One Last Job at OER24, which I am now safely and legally returned from. There I gave a fun presentation with Maren on podcasting and internet radio, and one on the afterlife of my 25 Years of Ed Tech book. The conference was excellent, with thought-provoking, engaging and warm keynotes from Rajiv Jhangiani and the double act of Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin. We had a compact, full GO-GN workshop the day prior to the conference. I like seeing new generations of GO-GN scholars coming through, there were few of the attendees who had been before and it felt like a…
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One last job…
Next week I head to Cork for OER24. While I may get invited to conferences once I leave the OU, this could well be my last one, and will definitely be my final one as GO-GN director and OU employee. That’s right, before I head off into the sunset, I’m going to do One Last Job, what could go wrong? In the manner of all One Last Jobs, a crack team has been assembled to pull it off. We have the GO-GN squad, running a workshop the day before the conference for a small team of explosive experts OER Researchers. As I’ve probably mentioned before, working on the GO-GN project…
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Follow the biscuits
There’s a bit of a mini-rant following but before we get to my ejection of the toys from the pram, I want to set out a general principle. If you want to know what people really value then follow what they do with the small scale stuff. All of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who want to disrupt school, or recommend dropping out of college? Watch where they send their kids to be educated. It’ll probably be some Montessori type institution with lots of face to face interaction, and then it’ll be an Ivy League university. As I’ve mentioned before, biscuits provide a useful metric for revealing what an institution values.…
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February 24 roundup
(photo shows Irwin DeVries, Audrey Watters, Brian Lamb and Rajiv Jhangiani in 2015) As February comes to an end, I feel I am entering the wind down phase of my Open University career, with departure scheduled for June. The replacement for my role on the Open Programme is being recruited, we’re planning for my last GO-GN workshop at OER24, and I’m handing over editorship of JIME. It leaves one in a slight liminal space mentally and work wise – I’m busy doing handover, and continuing workload, but I’m not required for planning things that will take place after I leave. It’s not so much that I have less work, but…
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Congestion of the brain or creative constraint?
I recently read an account of the infamous Victorian murder of three-year-old Saville Ken, investigated by Jack Whicher. At one point Detective Whicher is widely pilloried for his conclusion (later proven to be correct), and he resigns from the police, with “congestion of the brain” cited as the reason. The Victorians were big on congestion (at least three people die of congestion of the bowels in the book), with its hints of ethers and natural flows. Congestion of the brain could mean literal blood clotting, and a cause of strokes, or dementia, to a more symbolic, metaphorical congestion. It was cited as the cause of Poe’s death, probably as a…
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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…
