wrongness
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About being wrong…
I wrote four posts under the theme of “Things I was wrong about”, so I thought I’d reflect on that mini-series. Firstly, a few people commented that it was unusual to see people talking about where they were wrong. So much of academia, and ed tech in particular I suspect, is populated by “See, I told you so!” claims. It’s perhaps not surprising that people don’t talk about times they were wrong, after all much of your career is a reputation business. As I mentioned in the first post, it’s probably no coincidence that I wrote this series after I had taken semi-retirement and reached a certain stage in my…
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Things I was wrong about pt 4 – AI
After admitting I was wrong about QR codes, the death of the VLE and the democratising power of social media, we’ve arrived at the inevitable one I suppose. I want you to insert the biggest sigh you can imagine here – <sigh>. This is an example of when some knowledge can be a bit disadvantageous. I have a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, from back in 1994 and I joined the OU as a lecturer in AI. So, yeah, I should know a bit about it. I was however, largely dismissive of it, partly because I was grounded in symbolic AI (expert systems and the like), and had not really monitored…
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Things I was Wrong About Pt3 – The democratisation of social media
(Remember FriendFeed?) Following on from QR Codes and The Death of the VLE, I offer the third in my potentially never-ending series of Things I Was Wrong About. This one requires more of a serious face. In a week when the richest man in the world is using the global communication platform he purchased to undermine the government in the UK, promote the idea of civil war and push right wing ideology, the very idea of democratisation through social media seems naive and ludicrous. But reader, imagine if you can the heady days of 2007-2010. Web 2.0 is in its heyday and we are considering the concept of digital scholarship…
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Things I was wrong about pt2: The Death of the VLE
I expect Tom Farrelly and my Irish ed tech friends will have a chuckle at this one as the people at ILTA once published a special issue on how the VLE is Not Dead. It was basically a gentle academic roast. It was deserved because in 2007 (!), I foolishly declared, “The VLE is dead”, because I was all excited by the prospect of loosely coupled tools, PLEs and EduGlu. This post is as much as why I was wrong about them taking off as I was about the persistence of the VLE. There was a lively debate on “the VLE is dead” at the 2009 annual ALT-C so I…
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Things I was wrong about: Part 1 QR Codes
As an antidote to the tech gurus pontificating about how they’ve been warning/predicting X for years, I thought I’d consider the things I have been wrong about over the course of my career. The list of all the things I have been wrong about is quite extensive, so I’m limiting it to ed tech here, which still leaves a substantial amount. It’s a more interesting perspective in many ways, why did I think some things would or wouldn’t take off, or they developed in a manner I didn’t predict? Boasting about your failures is not always conducive to developing a successful career, but now I’m of a certain age, it’s…
