To the keepers of the flames

I’m late to all this, but I have recently started getting back into vinyl records. I got a cheapo turntable for my birthday (from me, I always know what I want). I’ve ben picking up the odd album since then. Mainly I’m restocking the albums I used to own – I gave these away in the mid-2000s because I hadn’t played them for about 17 years, and they were in the garage, getting warped and mouldy. “I’ll never play vinyl again” I thought, “my music consumption has shifted to digital. I’m not one of those muso nerds who goes on about the quality of the listening experience with vinyl.” And while that is true for the majority of my listening, I listen to Spotify most of the time, I have come to enjoy the practice of putting on an album.

Similarly, I like proper beer. Microbreweries and real ales are commonplace now, but when I was a young chap, it was all lager, lager, lager. Again, the CAMRA people banging on about real ale seemed alien to me. Now, I wouldn’t go near a pint of Fosters.

This highlighted to me the importance of those people who maintain core principles while the rest of us rush off to the new thing. You will undoubtedly have your own examples (that are may be a bit less, erm, blokey). Which brings me onto the recurrent themes of this blog: open education, digital scholarship, and our current times. Keeping the flame can also be read as doggedly refusing to change, and that’s not always a good thing. But if you remove these example from their artefacts then what they’re really about is a persistence of core beliefs (diversity in beer types, appreciation of music as ritual). This to me is the way to approach digital scholarship – how does it help us maintain the academic values we cherish? Similarly, as I argued with OER as educational heritage, we’re going through an anti-knowledge period (alternate facts FFS). But it will come round again, and our role is to cling to the core values of education and not metaphorically throw away our vinyl and drink lager.

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