Login
I usually send out my newsletter at the end of each month. It’s just a collection of the posts published that month (you should subscribe if for some reason you don’t check this site every day). I thought it would be nice maybe to start each newsletter with some personal introduction of what has taken place over the month, and hey, I may as well make that a blog post. So here are some highlights and thoughts from June.
I went to the EDEN conference in Dublin, with Maren who was keynoting. Although I’ve been to a couple of conferences since lockdown, this was the first time meeting lots of international people who I hadn’t seen since the before times. It was a fun conference, lots of good talks, and well organised. I still feel as though my conference stamina is underdeveloped compared to pre-pandemic – it’s all that talking to people. And I’m not entirely sure I want to get back to that level either. Two or three a year seems a nice level now.
We gained a further round of GO-GN funding this month from the Hewlett Foundation, which is great news. This remains the best project I’ve worked on, and this year we celebrate 10 years since its founding.
I read 10 books this month, the pick of them was Fingers Crossed by Miki Berenyi (of 90s shoegaze group Lush). Her childhood is pretty messed up, and her account of the sexism of the music industry (particularly Brit pop) is scathing, but she tells it all with a dry sense of humour. After reading some male rock biographies, which think tales of blocking up toilets and hanging out with groupies are way more entertaining than they actually are, this was a refreshing entry in the rock biography genre.
It was also a delight to see Audrey Watters return with a Substack newsletter, Second Breakfast. I’ve paid up for a year, and it’s already a treat to have it ping into my inbox. I’ve missed her writing and insight.
AI angst continues to dominate much of the ed tech and beyond discourse. I’ve been in meetings at the OU where it is nothing short of outright panic, reminiscent of this scene:
Stay calm everyone.
I was at the EDEN conference this week in Dublin (excellent conference by the way, congrats to EDEN and the DCU team). Although I’ve done a couple of conferences, this was the first time seeing a lot of people I used to bump into regularly prior to the pandemic. It made me reflect that much of what happened during that time (2020-2022) is already fading from memory. This prompted me to look back over some journals I kept at the time, and I was right, I had forgotten most of the unusual work and roles we took on then, plus the stress of worrying about family, and the continual stream of lockdown variants.
Michael Ward at Swansea Uni started an interesting Corona Diaries project during this period, which capture much of this sense of anxiety, puzzlement, anger and uncertainty. My daughter even did some work inputting the entries. Looking through those and my own entries made me think we should share some of our experiences from the higher education perspective, before our human capacity to recover and move on means all those moments are lost in time, like tears in rain, or at least face masks in the bin.
So here are some edited highlights of my covid diaries, I’d love to hear yours:
18th May 20 I have 8.30 scrums most mornings now for the microcredential course. I wrote for this until 5.30
had a day that covered all my academic roles today – course author, senior manager, researcher, journal editor, administrator, speaker, fund raiser. Finished after 6
I finished at 6.30 and went outside for a neighbour’s socially distanced 70th birthday. Everyone in the street came out and they poured champagne in glasses we left at the end of the drive.
Long working day again but then I’m on leave. I feel the problem of having too many roles at the moment – they’ve all increased by 20% because of the pandemic so I’m failing on multiple fronts. Went to bed by 9.30 and slept for 9 hours.
I did a webinar this evening for EDEN with Catherine Cronin on use of oer in the online pivot, then had a quick meeting with people from COL on doing another webinar. It is the year of webinars.
27th Sept [daughter] has had her first week at uni, she has settled in well with her flatmates. In Glasgow and Manchester Covid has spread wildly through student halls and it’s surely only a matter of time before it hits them.
18th Oct We are likely to be entering a short ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown on Friday, for 17 days in Wales. Numbers have been rising and the hospitals are near to overload.
26th Oct [daughter’s] flatmate has been diagnosed with Covid, and [daughter] thinks she has it too. She rang me at 1.30 last night and today was in tears. It’s difficult enough learning to live with 6 strangers, but having to negotiate how they’ll all deal with pandemic and self-isolation adds another layer of stress and tension to it.
21st Nov I did an interview for the BBC and Natwest this week, both for web articles on the shift to online learning.
It’s been a busy week, we needed to get a microcredential course in presentation by tomorrow, which meant writing a week’s worth of work and doing some odd tasks.
6th Dec The Welsh government announced last Monday that from Friday pubs would close at 6 and not be allowed to serve alcohol. Most have sensibly decided that pubs not serving alcohol are rather pointless and have shut. I went to the pub last Tuesday, and that was it, no pubs for christmas or new years. There is a rumour that we will be going into full lockdown again on 28th December.
It was announced today that we’re going into full lockdown again on the 28th, and I rang my father today to say we’re not coming up before Christmas.
20th Dec Wales went into lockdown last night, unexpectedly and without warning – we had been told it was coming on the 28th. Shops are to close, no meeting up, no travel. It means I might not even get to see [daughter] over the xmas holidays. It plunged me into depression last night – not just the lack of contact but the necessity to keep finding ways to be positive, to dig again and manufacture methods of staying active, being supportive and restructuring the day.
13th Jan We’re deep in lockdown now, with around 1500 deaths a day, and 50,000 infections
I’ve had a few insomniac nights, getting 3-4 hours sleep each night, but it shouldn’t be a surprise really when ALL of this is going on.
17th Jan We’re still in lockdown now, I forget what it was like not to be in lockdown now. We’ve been in some variety of it since September and that was after a four month one.
I did a keynote for the H818 conference today. I’ve got another keynote on Monday for Belfast Met, and completed a review of e-learning rubrics for UNESCO this week.
Mar 14th (after getting a puppy) Yesterday I felt claustrophobic, trapped in one room mostly, still in lockdown, it felt like we’d been taken hostage by two canine terrorists
4th Apr I went to see [daughter] last week, as we’re now allowed to travel within Wales. We met up in Brecon and she walked Posey. I had my first vaccination jab on Friday. It was in a large leisure centre in Pentwyn. I found the experience strangely moving in its quiet efficiency.
I expect lots of you have more intense or interesting journals from the time, but I found it fascinating just how much of this I had forgotten.
I know, I know. There are few things more tedious than taking a popular TV show and applying it to a sector – there have been “Manage the Ted Lasso Way” and “The Ted Lasso method of Leadership” type posts aplenty. But hear me out. The angle here is more about the writing and how it relates to traditional TV than Lasso himself (and no, you don’t have to be a fan of the show).
So Ted Lasso ended last week, amidst a wave of pieces declaring that it was about time and it had in fact, been rubbish all along. I think TV critics sometimes fall in love with a series, and then become embarrassed at a later date at their weakness in showing humanity, so double down on the need for cynicism. You certainly saw that in pieces like this in the Guardian (they also bad mouth The Good Place to demonstrate their anti-nice credentials). I’m not going to defend it as TV, it was a bit corny and sentimental, and I think it had run its course.
But I think the critics miss how unusual it is in its writing. The Guardian piece bemoans that all the drama takes place off screen (eg Nate leaving West Ham), as if this is accidental. I see it as a deliberate and radical attempt to subvert our expectations of conflict and confrontation. Conflict drives so much of TV, and often lazily so. Nearly all of soaps such as Eastenders is driven by people doing nasty things to each other and shouting a lot. It’s stressful to watch. I had a similar reservation when watching the classic of the ‘nice’ genre, Parks and Rec. When the Rob Lowe character was introduced I was gearing myself up for conflict. I knew how this would go – he would be controlling, try to close them down, there’d be tension. But of course, that wasn’t what that show was about, and his character became an integral and likeable part of the show.
This is difficult writing – conflict is easy. The saying that happiness writes in white ink on a white page should be seen as a challenge, not an admission of defeat.
Which brings me to education. When people talk of a ‘pedagogy of care’ I think it can seem a bit woolly, maybe a bit hippy. But it’s actually a radical notion in the same way that producing a drama that centres kindness is radical. Gita Mehrotra talks about care as a pedagogical anchor, and says that “I especially had concerns about students not taking the course seriously, being seen as a push-over, or being perceived as an ineffective instructor.” This was during the pandemic and her focus on “flexibility, humanity, community care, and personal and family health” were reciprocated by students with greater engagement.
Rose and Adams remind us that there are implications for the educators also, with burnout, the tyranny of always on demand and over-demanding students as possible factors. In addressing the question “who cares for the teachers?” Maha Bali emphasises the institutional role in creating environments that facilitate this. Care begets care I guess.
In my last post I was asking the question (which Dave Cormier neatly summarised in the comments) “If AI is good at repetitive things, and we’re not going to do them anymore, how are we going to design things that aren’t repetitive?” The whole education system needs to look quite different. And similarly, using care as a pedagogical anchor raises big questions – what does assessment look like? How does funding work in such a system? What are the external quality assessments for care?
Like Ted Lasso, a pedagogy of care can look vague, even bland on the surface, but if you scratch that surface you find a beating heart of radical reform beneath.
Partly in response to the existential implications of AI, I have been pondering aspects of what humans are good at recently, and then how our society, institutions and infrastructure need to facilitate these. In essence, getting humans to do repetitive, formulaic work is done for, AI will do that (whether we think that’s good or not is probably not going to stop it happening). Maybe that’s ok, we were forcing people to become more uniform in their outputs and that isn’t playing to our strengths.
Humans are messy, inefficient, unpredictable and often wrong. Well, at least this human is. But most of what we really value comes from this process (which is not to underestimate the need for rigour, hard work and practice). I think this boils down to some form of ‘constrained freedom’. Absolute freedom can be overwhelming, but we often see the bets artistic and creative endeavours arising within some form of constraint – compare your favourite musical artist’s output when they were up against early limitations to when they could indulge themselves in endless studio time and guests. Or even, remember how well we used to craft tweets when we only had 140 characters? That was art.
On this aspect of creative freedom then I’ve encountered two resources recently that set me thinking. The first was a book on shedworking. It’s a middle class fantasy I know, but I love the idea of a snug, outdoor space. In the book lots of people who write, run small businesses or create art talk about the importance of this separate space, separated from the house and sometimes offline also. It becomes a space devoted to the practice they pursue there, and usually in a nice garden setting. The idea of a domain of one’s own takes some of this notion for the digital space. But I wondered what it would mean from an administrative, educational perspective? I don’t mean providing academics with funky sheds (although I am up for that), but rather cognitively, how do we facilitate this thinking, creative space that is slightly remote from the institution, and yet still within reaching distance? It’s important that the shed is not a car drive away I think, you get to it via a short commute across your garden. It still feels part of home, but is distinct. Academics used to have more private research time but this has been encroached upon by targets, administrative duties, research funding needs, etc. And it doesn’t just apply to academics, all university staff need this kind of space to freely explore aspects that will often, not result in anything productive, but will occasionally produce magic.
Which brings me on to my second resource. I recently watched I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, the film about Wilco producing their historic album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Famously they made the album, handed it over to the record company (Warners), who gave them confused looks and passed on it, releasing them from contract and giving them the album to take elsewhere. They eventually got it released by another record company (who ironically turned out to be a subsidiary of Warners, meaning the company paid for the album twice). It went on to become one of the most influential albums of the 2000s.
All that is a fun tale of sticking it to the man and artistic integrity, but what struck me most was early on in the film, the band are deconstructing and experimenting with their songs. It was this layer of experimentation that both confused the record company and helped make the album so successful. There are some straightforward beautiful songs on YHF such as Jesus, Etc, but often the song emerges from beneath distortion and fracture and then the process feels more like you the listener have helped uncover it (I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is a good example). This was intentional, and during tis process Jeff Tweedy comments that “There’s no reason not to destroy it, we made it. It’s ours to destroy and that’s liberating and exciting”.
This seems to me the essence of some form of creative freedom and the type of thing AI isn’t very good at. Like the shedworking example, it also set me thinking about what does the equivalent of “ours to destroy” look like in educational terms? Should we allow educators to have one course that they completely mess with? That is unmade from the convention? Would students love or hate this? Do we have the infrastructure that would even allow that? Think of all the quality frameworks, commercial pressure, peer review, etc and you’d have to say no, at least in the UK. But if this process of unmaking is what drives forward creativity then maybe we need to allow that kind of space.
I think I’m mashing together two subjects here that don’t really mix, but as the lyrics to Jesus, Etc puts it “you can combine anything you want”. Anyway, all together now – “I am an America aquarium drinker…”
As part of ALT’s 30th celebrations, there are some posts looking back to ALT-C’s of the past. I’ve chosen 2018, although it was not a great conference for me personally, an alternative title for this post might be “when life gets in the way of conferencing”.
It was a memorable conference for ALT, as it was their 25th anniversary. As a special conference it was chaired by the then President (me!) and Chair (Sheila MacNeill), and with Maren as one of the keynotes. It took place at the University of Manchester, which is a great venue, but, and this will become relevant, not particularly easy to access from Cardiff where I live. Leading up to the conference I had used the idea of celebrating 25 years of learning technology to do my 25 Years of Ed Tech blog series. I started this just for fun, but the idea came later to develop it into a book (we await the film rights being optioned). Without the conference I wouldn’t have thought of the blog series, and without the blog series I wouldn’t have written the book, and without the 25 Years book, I probably wouldn’t have written the Metaphors book. So I have a lot to thank that conference for (you might wish to blame it).
We had a great keynote lineup with Maren, Amber Thomas, and just before she went superstar, Tressie MacMillan Cottom. I had invited Tressie as we knew each other a bit from a previous conference and hanging around with Audrey Watters. I didn’t think we’d get her, so was delighted when she said yes, and I got to introduce her. We also had a fantastic gasta session hosted with gusto by Tom Farrelly as always, with Clint Lalonde’s presentation “When I grow up I want to be a learning technologist” talk a personal favourite.
To celebrate the 25 Years angle I had created a 1993 playlist (which was open to others to add to), which was played during the gala dinner. Sadly though, I was not present to witness this spotified triumph, which brings me onto my personal tale of “life getting in the way”. At the time I had a dog called Bruno, a 14 year old Staffie. He had survived two strokes, was largely blind, deaf and going senile. Although I mostly worked at home he was accustomed to me going away and always seemed to cope with it fine. Because ALT-C takes place in early September, I probably hadn’t put him with a dog minder since June and hadn’t really noticed an increased decline over the past few months.
The conference started on Tuesday and on Monday I dropped him off at the regular dog minders to head up to Manchester. As I was stepping onto the train I got a call from the dig minder saying Bruno was just howling in distress. I abandoned the journey and went to pick him up. Bless him, he was just walking round in circles, weeing and moaning. The result was that I got my dog walker to come in twice a day to sit with him (he was perfectly happy at home whether I was there or not, as he was familiar with the smells). I commuted from Cardiff to Manchester and back on the Tuesday to do the opening and again on the Wednesday to do the AGM, so I could be at home during the evening and night. I do not recommend Cardiff-Manchester as a daily commute.
Luckily Maren and Sheila took up the slack and covered for me, but it’s an example of how face to face conferences require a complex support system (earlier in my life it had been child care). When that fragile system goes wrong it can go wobbly. In some ways you could see this small example as a forerunner of issues that arose when the pandemic hit and we couldn’t meet physically. It was also an indication that Bruno was in rapid decline and he passed away a few weeks later.
So ALT-C 2018, a great celebration of everything the Association had achieved, an excellent line-up, but a personally tricky one to negotiate. This macro and micro perspective was a good reminder of this duality for all conferences and all attendees.
As with the previous version of this post, this is just a prompt to round-up recent episodes of the Metaphors of Ed Tech podcast. I haven’t been announcing each podcast episode release, apart from the ones with guests. You can find all the episodes and links to your preferred podcast platform here. In chronological order here are the episodes and some thoughts on them:
Jaws and Mudlarks – unsurprisingly the Jaws metaphor from the Metaphors book is one of my favourites. I use the Spielberg film to explore some of the reactions to the pandemic. Those beaches will be open for this weekend. I also talk about the digital mudlarks analogy for educational technologists, salvaging nuggets of value from each tide.
Internet design and digital resilience – two metaphors here that continue the theme of the reaction to the online pivot. The design of the internet as a robust system is compared with that of higher education is used to suggest some reactions that higher ed needs to take to be prepared for the next crisis. I try to rehabilitate the term ‘resilience‘ in the next metaphor, which has been morphed to mean something like grit and “it’s all your fault” basically. I return to the original ecology metaphor as a means of considering how higher ed institutions can think about their preparedness for tech developments.
Death Star Economics and Early Internet Metaphors – a couple of metaphors from the blog here that aren’t in the book. The first is a fun one, looking at the economics of creating a Death Star compared with training Stormtroopers to shoot effectively as a metaphor for investment in ed tech and staff at HEIs. The second is the recent post where I looked at early metaphors we applied to the internet when we were struggling to understand what this thing was like, and how they each carried different connotations.
OER23 special, with guest Maren Deepwell – the first guest! After OER23 Maren and I chat about some of the metaphors and themes from the conference. Definitely the most fun episode so far.
The dangers of metaphors – a short episode where, having been a cheerleader for the use of metaphors in ed tech, I explore some of the downsides and areas of caution.
Teaching with metaphors & fiction, with Eamon Costello – another guest episode! These are definitely the best ones. Eamon talks about some of his use of metaphors in teaching, and also comes armed with some heavyweight metaphors of his own.
Visual metaphors, branding and blogging, with Jim Groom – Jim and I talk about the visual metaphors we’ve developed with Bryan Mathers, containers as a metaphor for understanding tech, and runaway metaphors such as Edupunk. Why we haven’t been given our own morning radio show is a mystery.
Smart motorways and ed tech implementation – the last one of this series. A short episode in which I explore the recent post looking at smart motorways and lessons they hold for ed tech.
And that’s it for now. I’ve enjoyed doing the podcast and the low tech, do it yourself nature of the endeavour. It’s amateur hour and I love it for that. But I think I’ve run out of steam with me doing them on my own. I leant on a few people to do guest episodes, but I don’t like to pester people. So, if you want to appear on an episode, and talk about a specific metaphor or metaphors in general, drop me a line, I’d love to record an episode.
I did a mock viva for someone recently, and I shared lots of my views on a successful viva based ion examining around 50 PhDs over the years, so I thought I’d share them here. This relates to the UK viva system, which is usually an open-ended defence, with two examiners discussing the thesis with the candidate. Things vary quite differently elsewhere. These are obviously just my views, and I’m generally a ‘nice’ examiner, I want people to enjoy the experience and to pass. Most examiners I’ve met are the same, but one does hear the occasional horror story. So here’s my top ten tips:
Just my experience of course, mileage may vary. If you have a doctoral viva coming up, good luck!
I’ve attended a lot of AI talks recently (I mean, even if I tried to avoid them I would still have racked up a few). And here’s my hot take for education – just go for it. I don’t say this as an AI enthusiast, I find it quite boring and kind of soul sucking, but shouting loudly and hoping it will go away isn’t a viable strategy. As I argued in my last post, it has a strong inevitability factor, and lack of engagement risks doing ourselves and our students a disservice.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight to make it open, to avoid bias in datasets, and be critical of its output – we absolutely should. But also let’s bring it into the fold in higher ed. It’s a form of knowledge tool after all, why would we be against that?
There is a lot that could be good about it from a student perspective. AI infused higher ed may be more democratic – everyone has access to advanced smart tutorial bots, not just rich kids (although I’m sure capitalism will find a way to make it exclusive some how). Gone is the need for expensive textbooks that disadvantage poor students. AI tools can help students in many ways – Mike Sharples has a good table of possible educational uses in this UNESCO publication. They seem like good things for students.
We will need to teach students to critically evaluate and assess the quality of AI content as it’s going to be everywhere when they leave higher ed. Also how to make the best use of AI, for instance, developing skills in being prompt engineers will be valuable across all disciplines. Making the campus an AI free zone is the same as when we used to pretend students wouldn’t access the web. Almost every career or past time is going to be touched by it in some way, it’d be doing the dirty on our students to pretend that it doesn’t exist, like when we used to make them pretend they didn’t read things online and only in print.
If your assessment can be passed by AI, then change it, what comes out may be more meaningful for students. AI assistants that can help with navigating the University system will alleviate a lot of stress. Getting students to use AI as a tool might be fun and shifts the power dynamic around knowledge. Rethink your curriculum and discipline from an AI rich perspective. All of this is easy to write, but difficult and costly to do.
Then concentrate on the bits AI doesn’t do well. Focus on the social, the connections, the meta-cognitive skills, sympathy, care and human aspects of education, which have been affected by an over-systematisation of higher ed. Ironically the robots may make it all more human again.
To emphasise I don’t say engage uncritically, indeed that criticality and holding to account is a key reason to get involved. Otherwise a version controlled an determined by antisemitic idiots who own large tech corporations will be the only option. But there are real benefits for students to be had, I believe, and we need to be ensuring these are at the forefront of what universities do with the tech, because otherwise we’ll get sold all sorts of faux solutions to fake problems.
After fretting about it and how it can be stopped, I have now embraced the sweet bliss of surrender. I’m just not going to, you know, do any of the actual AI stuff, because it doesn’t really interest me. But there are plenty of good people out there who are excited by it, so have at it, we need you.
In Metaphors, I have a chapter about VAR (Video Assisted Refereeing) and Learning Analytics. In it I make the case that VAR got to the point where its implementation in football seemed inevitable. Everyone (fans, pundits, players, not sure about referees) wanted it – mistakes were made by refs, and then analysed in detail in the studio by pundits with access to multiple high definition camera angles. It seemed ludicrous that the ref, who was actually making the decisions, shouldn’t have the same access. I go into some of the problems with the actual implementation in the chapter, but I want to revisit that idea of ‘inevitability’ in this post.
The supposed inevitability of a particular educational technology is a tactic often deployed by those with a vested interest in its adoption. After all, what better marketing ploy than to have people believe that a particular product will be adopted regardless of what they do. It creates an urgency, not to say a panic, to adopt now, and invest heavily. “This stuff is happening whether you like it or not”, is the cry, “miss out and your competitors will be so far ahead of you, that you’ll never catch up.” If you get that belief circulating widely, then sit back and watch the bucks roll in.
Of course, nothing is inevitable – we could be hit by a meteor tomorrow, or collectively decide to revert to an agrarian existence. But some things are certainly more probable than others, and the inevitability argument can be made more strongly for them. Back in the 90s I made a version of the inevitability argument about the web in education. Not everyone agreed, but I think some form of online education adoption in education was pretty much guaranteed to occur at that stage.
Perhaps a way to think about inevitability, or likelihood, is to imagine five years hence from now. If you then rewind it to this point in time, in how many instances is that technology adopted widely in education? Sort of like Doctor Strange figuring out the probability of success for the Avengers in the multiverse. Discounting the more outlandish versions of the multiverse, where aliens land, or we get turned into mushroom infested zombies, play the mental game of how often that technology gets implemented. If it is the case in nearly every instance, without some major alteration to current society, then we can consider it largely inevitable. If a different set of pathways is easily imaginable, then less so. Note, this is different from saying whether you want it be inevitable or not, just how much likely it is to happen.
I think the web in 1995 comes out pretty consistent across these different futures, but other technologies I would say have a lower inevitability score, despite what their proponents claim. MOOCs for instance, weren’t really guaranteed to be adopted around 2008, they caught a particular wave of imagination. I wish OER had a higher inevitability score, and one can imagine alternatives where it is more universally adopted. Some form of mobile learning might also be argued to have a reasonable inevitability ranking. Blockchain? The Metaverse? I’ll let you decide.
My hunch is that inevitability is influenced by two main factors: how much the technology is developing regardless of adoption in education, and how much there is a demand for it by learners. Look at the web here, people were using it, many wanted to use it in education, and it was developing rapidly. All of this brings me onto the current inevitable ed tech du jour, generative AI. It scores high on both those factors: it is developing apace regardless of whether education gets involved or not. And students are using it widely, often despite barriers put in place by universities to stop them. So, yeah, whether we like it or not, I’d say it looks pretty inevitable for education in some form. In which case, better to be using it how we want, which I’ll come on to in the next post.
In the UK at least, the implementation of smart motorways has been a curious story to follow, and I think in its roll-out and reaction there is much that can be learnt for technology adoption across higher ed.
First up, what are “smart” motorways anyway? They are “a section of a motorway that uses traffic management methods to increase capacity and reduce congestion in particularly busy areas.” There are three types of them:
A lot of money (and traffic queuing due to disruption) has been spent on implementing smart motorways, but the rollout of the last category of ALR smart motorways was paused following safety concerns. The Daily Mail and Liz Truss are strongly opposed to smart motorways, which makes you feel there must be some merit in them. So let’s look at the issues and any lessons they may for ed tech.
Emotion can trump evidence – the first round of safety data reveals that of the three smart motorways types, the ALR ones are lowest for personal injury collisions, but highest for killed or serious injury collisions. So, it seems that they’re very good at controlling traffic to prevent bumps and shunts, but if someone breaks down and uses the hard shoulder to stop, then it can be fatal. But, ALL versions of smart motorways are safer for all types of collision when compared with conventional motorways. However, much of the reaction against smart motorways is an emotional one, people feel safer with a hold shoulder (I know I do), and it may be that no amount of hard data can overcome this.
From an ed tech perspective this means that you shouldn’t underestimate the emotional reaction to technology. This can be both simultaneously perfectly valid (getting killed on a hard shoulder), and irrational (the data shows they’re safer than the motorways you’ve always used). Ed tech can feel threatening and raise legitimate concerns (eg lecture capture and professionalism) but also be irrational (the lecture model was never that great to start with). Balancing these two takes careful negotiation.
The push and pull of ‘smart’ – adding ‘smart’ to something makes it immediately appealing to many people. Smart cars, smart phones, smart motorways. The combination of smart cars and smart motorways might well end up being safer and keep traffic running more smoothly, but removing the hard shoulder doesn’t seem very smart when you need it. For other people (eg Daily Mail readers), adding smart to anything may as well be calling it woke.
From an ed tech perspective we’ve witnessed the lure of the latest thing many times, with the ‘get on the bus or lose out” mantra for MOOCs, AI, learning analytics, etc. These can cause both camps to retrench to very pro and anti views. The language around this stuff is important.
Efficiency as priority – smart motorways are quite appealing to accountants and planners. There is this lane that is unused on nearly all motorways. We could increase capacity, reduce queuing, improve air quality simply by opening it up. Duh, why did no-one think of this before? But many systems need inefficiency built into them to deal with unexpected circumstances. You don’t need a hard shoulder, until you really need a hard shoulder. An inefficient system is not necessarily a bad system.
Higher education has a lot of inefficiencies in it, and the appeal of ed tech is often to eliminate or reduce these. Sometimes that’s useful, but often what appear to be inefficiencies are deliberately inbuilt systems of care.
Short-term solutionism – part of the drive for smart motorways is to alleviate road congestion. Part of the reason we have road congestion is because of a failure to invest in public transport and a nationalised system that makes it a priority and affordable. It’s simply easier and much cheaper to drive most of the time. However, when Daily Mail readers bemoan these bloody stupid motorways, how many are also calling for their taxes to be spent on public transport? So smart motorways are a part-solution to a problem, but they’re not the fix.
There are of course many ways we could apply this to ed tech. For instance, allying with third party content vendors may be a good fix for immediate online delivery, but doesn’t develop staff expertise.
Over-promise of a reasonable idea – in general, smart motorways are a sensible thing to do largely (although I’m not convinced by the ALR versions) and will be part of a more data driven network. But the promise of them has been oversold somewhat, at least in the short term, and there is a reaction against this.
Of course, we know that ed tech is never over-sold (ahem), but if it were to happen, then what might follow is a backlash and growing cynicism around ‘next big thingism’ instead of a more student-focused appropriate application mindset.
Smart motorways are probably a good idea in the long run, but they need to be implemented carefully and with an appropriate eye on the data, while simultaneously investing in better forms of public transport. You can slot in the ed tech equivalent and higher ed version into a version of that sentence for likely any tech (try it with ChatGPT for instance).
Open education is a term that has many interpretations. We mapped eight areas in this work, based on citation analysis. A lot of our focus tends to be on the individual module, for example, open pedagogy, open textbooks, OER, MOOCs, all operate at the level of the individual course. Other aspects, such as the Open University’s open entry to degrees, and open access policies operate at the institutional level. We have macro and micro levels of openness, but perhaps an absence of meso- level ones.
I’ve blogged about this before, but one aspect that I think is overlooked is openness at the curriculum level. On the open degree, we allow students to construct their own pathway, choosing from over 250 different modules. Given that the order in which they can be studied can vary also, then the possible permutations for degree pathways is considerable. There is a broad, thin spread of these – very few pathway selections with lots of students, but many with just a handful of students.
What this demonstrates to me is that we can never predict the choices that students want to make, and that are meaningful to them. And nor should we. Yet, we do this almost without question. There are of course good reasons for doing it in named degrees, building on foundations and further specialisation. Even with relatively free choice, there are restrictions – it is not helpful to set students up for failure by letting them take a 3rd level maths course if they haven’t studied any maths previously, say.
Increasingly however, there is a requirement for people with varied skills, and students want to create degrees that are meaningful to them. There is usually a good deal of administration and governance to negotiate if an institution wants to create a new named degree, in say, cryptocurrency. But an open approach to degree construction means such degrees can be constructed almost endlessly within a given qualification architecture. You are simply naming a pathway of existing modules.
For students it means flexibility to go beyond the usual narrow range of free choices, to step outside disciplinary boundaries, to construct degrees that they think will be relevant to their career or interests. They’re often ahead of the game here and can create these quicker than universities can construct formal degree offerings.
The whole degree is the unit that is most widely recognised in society. Although you can list different modules, employers are generally looking at the degree. But it is the area in which we generally offer the least amount of openness. This is partly a logistical function, the tyranny of the timetable means that if you are offering synchronous teaching, you cannot offer courses that rely on people being in two physical places at once. But online and hybrid learning is eroding the edges of this limit.
I think it also arises partly because of a fetishisation around named degrees and specialisms, and also a lack of trust in students to choose wisely. Although I love a named degree and specialisation, they are not the only show in town. And we trust students to take on a lifetime of debt to study, so maybe we should trust them to choose also?
Because I figure I spam my socials enough with blog posts, I haven’t been announcing each podcast episode release. I’m opting for the mid-spam option then of rounding up some recent episodes in one post, as a reminder that it exists mainly. You can find all the episodes and links to your preferred podcast platform here. In chronological order here are the episodes and some thoughts on them:
Why metaphors and ed tech – the intro to the book really, setting out why metaphors are of interest themselves, and why I think they’re useful as a means of framing educational technology. This was before I pilfered the good mic from Maren, so the audio quality isn’t as good. I’m finding my way a bit in this one.
The Internet Trinity – a short episode, drawing on this chapter. I like this idea of revisiting early metaphors we applied to the web (eg “we are all broadcasters now”) and re-examining them in light of what we now know. I did this again in a recent blog post with metaphors of the internet (eg the Super Information Highway) and how these shaped our thinking.
Castell Coch and Rewilding – I’m beginning to get the hang of it now, and this structure of two metaphors per episode is what follows. These are two of my favourites. First, how the castle near my house (I can see it from my home office window) acts as a metaphor for silicon valley investment in education, and the desire for credibility. Second, the application of the concept of rewilding to our use of educational technology in institutions and a move away from the VLE monoculture.
VAR and VLEs – speaking of VLEs… This episode riffs off the paper by Farrelly, Costello and Donlon to think about different metaphors we apply to the VLE and how we might all be sitting in a room arguing about it, but have completely different mental models as to the role it performs. The application of VAR (Video assisted refereeing) to football is a powerful metaphor I think for the application of technologies such as Learning Analytics (or ChatGPT) to education. I’m not sure I quite bottom it out though. I was watching football at the weekend and the question occurred to me that VAR was inevitable in many ways, but would many in football say it has improved the game or made it more enjoyable? The application of such technology forces us to question, what is the fundamental point of the endeavour in the first place?
Digital Natives and Uber for Education – rant time!
The Rebecca Riots and Hunter Gatherers – two rather involved metaphors. The Rebecca Riots were a series of uprising in West Wales during the 19th century against greedy toll-owners. They provide, in my view, the perfect metaphor for the deteriorating relationship between educators and academic publishers. The exclusion or diminishing of women’s contributions to hunter gatherer societies in early anthropology provides a useful perspective for much of labour in open practice. This is an example where my broad reach for metaphors leaves me a bit uncomfortable as I dabble in areas that deserve a much deeper dive and expertise beyond mine. I hope I have given the feminist perspectives in anthropology a decent and fair outing for the purposes of the metaphor.
Lectures and Haunted Houses – I’m not sure it counts as a metaphor, but I wanted to explore the manner in which the default model of the face to face lecture limits our thinking when it comes to online learning. I banged on a lot about this during and after the online pivot. I coupled this with a metaphor which isn’t in the book, that I blogged a few weeks back, regarding the empty lecture halls and the way this matches the haunted house narrative in horror fiction.
Music metaphors – I couple the Edupunk and Educator as DJ metaphors here, but also explore why music is perhaps an overpowering metaphor.
There are a few more in the production pipeline (if me mumbling into a microphone inbetween meetings can be labelled as such), but I’m up for more ideas. Have a favourite or indeed much hated metaphor relating to ed tech? Give me a shout and we can arrange a podcast chat.
None of what I am about to relay is new, but it’s enlightening when you have a small personal experience that momentarily lifts away the curtain to demonstrate the broader significance of a trend. So, on the one hand this story is “man had to wait slightly longer for a taxi, boohoo” and on the other it is “foretaste of troubling social trend.” You can decide.
Last week I visited my daughter who is studying for a year abroad in North Carolina. Being ice hockey fans we went to see the Carolina Hurricanes (twice) in Raleigh. The PNC Arena where they play is a few miles out of town and not served by any public transport that I could ascertain. So far, so very American. I went to see the Chicago Blackhawks several years ago, and they provided free buses leaving regularly which dropped people off in downtown. It was an easy, and friendly service – I’m not sure if they still operate it, although I think many bars provide a shuttle service.
The Canes however, don’t offer any such service. Instead they say they have ‘partnered’ with Uber. This doesn’t seem to amount to anything other than offering a pick up point and saying “off you go”. It was, predictably, quite chaotic after the game with a large group of people trying to order Ubers from the same point. Several issues arose. Firstly, there were several Ubers nearby in the car park, but they were refusing pick ups, so you had to wait for them to decline. Secondly, drivers often accepted, got half way and became stuck in traffic, then declined and turned around. Thirdly, people got desperate and started getting in unmarked cars that were offering lifts. Lastly, the whole place became snarled up so drivers couldn’t get in to take people away.
A lot of this is just the usual frustration of exiting a large event. It took us about an hour to get one, but we arrived back at the hotel safely, so ultimately it was just a bit inconvenient, not a crisis. But it points to several bigger issues I think. By ‘partnering’ with Uber, the PNC Arena effectively sheds all responsibility for transport. But Uber drivers, as we experienced, are under no obligation to accept a ride. This is quite different from a taxi rank, where taxi drivers are largely obliged to accept the next customer. The result is an overall lack of responsibility and ownership for broader social issues such as transport. It all falls to the individual.
Another issue is that it is very inefficient, particularly from the perspective of fuel and the environment. Having shuttle buses would be ideal and would move traffic faster, but even a row of taxis ready to roll would generate less waste in queuing to get to the arena for pick up.
As I mentioned i saw some people getting into cars that were offering a ride. This obviously raises a safety issue, but because of the responsibility avoidance mentioned previously, this is down to the individual and not related to the Arena.
I’ve written about the dubious economics and labour practices of Uber before, but I acknowledge they also provide a convenient option often (particularly in places that lack any public transport). And I met a few drivers who seemed to appreciate the flexibility and control they had over their working hours. So this is not to say that Uber is necessarily a bad option, but the same kind of “outsource to the dominant tech company” model is the type of proposal libertarians like to propose for education, healthcare, and up until last week, ahem banking. But my small experience was that the shining future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Still, I expect someone will be along to reinvent a bus soon enough.
Anyway, let’s go Canes!
My friend and all round good chap, Rajiv Jhangiani, dropped me a message asking for my favourite current metaphor about the web for a talk he is giving. This set me thinking about some of the early labels we used for the internet and the web, and what they tried to convey. If you are old enough, cast your mind back to the late 90s when the web (and wider awareness of the internet more generally) was still new, and we were trying to understand what it was, and what it could do. Metaphors are very powerful in this respect as they provide a bridge from the familiar to the unfamiliar. The “desktop” metaphor for computer interfaces for example helped people navigate things like file structures, deleting files, opening up applications, etc. It wasn’t perfect, for instance, you didn’t really delete files by putting them in the trash, but rather just allocated that memory space to be rewritten (and confusingly you had to eject files in the early Macs by dragging the disk to the waste bin). But for widespread adoption, this kind of metaphor was essential over Unix text interfaces (despite what the Unix geeks say).
With regards to the internet it had various terms and labels, and some associated with education which have their own uses and connotations. Let’s look at some and their relationship to education.
The Information Super Highway – originally coined to refer to the whole media ecosystem of satellite, cable TV and the internet, this term later became synonymous with the internet. It has two main positive implications: the access to vast quantities of information; and the the speed with which such information can be accessed. We take this for granted now, but being able to access information sources such as digital repositories instead of visiting libraries (or requesting photocopies) opened up new possibilities for education. Maybe we didn’t need to provide everything, but learners could find their own resources? The whole (rather cliched now) shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘Guide on the side’ role for educators is predicated on this fast access to lots of information. And it wasn’t fast by today’s standards, but still a ten minute download was a heck of a lot faster than a three week inter-library loan request.
A negative, or missed, aspect is that, although we can travel on highways, the metaphor implies a more broadcast, receptive model. The information on the super highway comes to you, but there is little suggestion of the more social, interactive nature of the web.
Still, it did sound very cool. One of the first elearning conferences I attended was called “FLISH – Future Learning on the Information Superhighway”. That made you think of a bright, exciting future. Maybe that was a negative implication also – it sounded too utopian and the sort of thing that would have more hovercars and fewer nazi trolls.
Infinite library/lecture hall – another phrase that cropped up in the late 90s was the idea of the infinite lecture hall or library. The appeal here was that physical limitations were removed, and the suggestion was that these were the only thing capping numbers. It is this model of lectures streamed to thousands that concerned writers such as David Noble and his Digital Diploma Mills. The idea got a glow-up with the advent of MOOCs – the M stands for Massive after all. It is getting another go around with the advent of AI and ChatGPT delivered education.
It is of course, a very content delivery model of education, and despite all this information being freely available, the validity of the human educator has remained remarkably persistent. But as with the Information Superhighway, it is the access to content that is emphasised here, not the participation.
But before we dismiss it completely, it did open up education and access to a lot of people who were prohibited from partaking otherwise. I always found Noble’s writing very elitist (even before the advent of the Internet, the Open University was demonstrating that many of his assumptions did not hold true). Open Access publications, access to libraries, datasets, etc have all been a positive for education, so this metaphor was not entirely sinister, even if it missed some of the significant aspects of the internet, and education.
Bulletin Board – I wrote about Bulletin Board Systems in 25 Years of Ed Tech. The metaphor here is of the cork bulletin board people that people could pin notices to for others to read. These might be images, notes for someone else, invitations, requests, notifications, etc. The Bulletin Board analogy also worked well for the dial up nature of the internet in the mid to late 90s. People could come online, post or access what they need, and then log off, just as you might pass a physical bulletin board at a specific time and place, but not be interacting with it continually.
The aspect of the Bulletin Board that really took off was discussion forums. The metaphor breaks down here a bit, but you were essentially posting a message on a public board. The BBS is the first of the metaphors we’ve considered that emphasises the dialogue, user content driven nature of the internet. Social media can be seen as direct descendent of the BBS, but not one which you would have predicted if you just had an Information Superhighway perspective.
The world wide web – ok, this one is a bit obvious, but also so commonplace now that we don’t see it as a metaphor any longer. Arising from Tim Berners-Lee’s work at CERN, the web metaphor emphasises the decentralised nature of the internet, and the interconnectedness of it. The world-wide part is the real deal breaker here, as with the information superhighway, it means access to documents, ideas, data, discussions, anywhere in the world. I will repeat: Anywhere in the world! It is hard to relate how much my mind was blown when I watched my first web cam slowly relay an image live from Hawaii.
The web is partly a technical metaphor to relay the decentralised network of servers. But I also think it has messy, more organic implications than the Information Superhighway. It will develop and evolve in unexpected ways, taking advantage of local contexts. An information superhighway is what the large media corporations want so they can control access, a web is what we little spiders build.
You may have some others from those early days. I think what these reveal is that all of them are true to an extent. This demonstrates the danger of metaphors, no single one captures all that you need. It also highlights the complexity of the internet and our relationship with it.
The last piece of my online identity revamp has been to explore doing a podcast. Yeah, I know, very late to the game. In 2056 I’ll start my TikTok channel. The truth is, I played a bit with them in the first flush of enthusiasm in the 00s, but they never really took for me. I think we all have the social media form that best suits our preferences or talents. Long form blogging is my thing. Audio wasn’t it for me, mainly because I have a fantastically boring voice. I remember doing media training once and after doing a pretend interview in which I felt I had responded like Nicolas Cage on an especially manic day, the trainer smiled sympathetically, saying “could you try being more varied and enthusiastic?”
Also, I am not good at reading a script (as Clint will attest after editing my audiobook readings for 25 Years of Ed Tech). That 25 Years of Ed Tech series that arose from Clint’s audiobook project and Laura Pasquini organising a podcast which was, in many ways, more interesting than the book, rekindled my interest though, as did the always fabulous Terry Greene’s Gettin’ Air podcast. And over the years I have become more accustomed to doing keynotes and just rambling about a subject. I was prompted to take the plunge finally by Maren exploring podcasting for her Virtual Teams book, so I just pinched all her hard won knowledge on getting started.
I have gone for the easy option, using Spotify’s Anchor. I realise this is mildly evil, but have sacrificed morality for ease of use. Sorry. I will say though, that Anchor is very easy to use, if a bit unsophisticated. You can register it in other podcast sites, so you don’t have to listen through Spotify.
What has allowed me to get started is to use the book Metaphors of Ed Tech as the basis. I generally take a metaphor from the book and speak around it for 5-10 minutes, then combine with another one to make an episode. As I blog about metaphors in ed tech quite a bit anyway, I figure there will be some mileage beyond the book also.
I’m not sure if it’ll be a long term thing, and of course, once I get offered the big bucks for adverts you can expect Proctorio endorsements in every episode, but it has been fun. It’s worth having a play with a format you don’t know well every now and then to see if it is a better fit this time around. Anyway, if you fancy a listen, head on over to the Podcast page.
In my earlier post I was trying to sell the idea that (higher ed related) blogging is experiencing a resurgence. This is partly a justification for myself (and to my line managers), because I’ve been on study leave for 2 weeks. Study leave basically means you have a reason to say no to about 50% of the usual meetings. I’ve been writing a research bid, but I’ve also been using that clearer space in the calendar to update my online presence.
This has included:
I’m not sure if any of these make much difference, but I would argue (vigorously even) that it is a good use of anyone’s time in higher ed to regularly do an online presence health check and try out new avenues. Mainly for all the reasons I mentioned in the post on blogs, having an effective online presence is an entirely respectable and valid aspect of an overall academic identity and like any other aspect it requires some tending every now and then.
My post about blogging prompted some comments on RSS. I loved RSS, it seemed like magic, you could just pull stuff in from different places, subscribe easily, aggregate feeds. Your blog reader was a little daily newspaper of quality content. It was the essence of what the web was made for.
I blame Twitter for killing this magic, increasingly people didn’t promote, or even know their RSS feeds, and social media became a much more effective way to distribute content. RSS often operated in the background still but you rarely saw the little RSS icon on people’s sites any more. Various RSS readers failed or were killed off, and the convenience of inbuilt reshare buttons took over. Back in 2018 people were saying it was time to head back to RSS, and it didn’t happen then, so I expect it won’t now either in a hurry.
But with social media fragmenting and people either turning away from it completely or using it less, the absence of RSS awareness leaves us with a problem – how do we get all this lovely blog content out there? I know some hardcore people will still adhere to their blog readers, and I salute you. It’s possible that RSS will have a relabelling and a resurgence as I’m arguing blogging is experiencing. But until then, all that precious blog content is going unread.
One approach is simply to blitz it. I’ve taken to sharing blog posts on Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook. I know, it must be very annoying for people who follow me in all those places. But it does get some reach. I regret to inform you that LinkedIn is proving to be quite good for engagement. And the app is not a total mess like the site.
Another approach which I’ve come round to is the Newsletter. I installed the Newsletter plug-in, and one option it provides is to create a newsletter from recent posts. You can automate this if you upgrade to a subscription account. I’m going to do it manually for now and see how it goes. I don’t intend to add extra content, just a monthly email of recent posts. That way you can just sit back and know that this quality (ahem) content will pop in your mailbox once a month. So pop over and subscribe if you feel that, on reflection, you really could do with some more email.
Progress is a funny old thing isn’t it? While I like my newsletter plug-in, it’s odd to move from the creative possibilities of RSS to, erm, email. And, yes I am very late to Newsletters What next you ask? Podcasts? Well, it’s funny you should say that…
There’s an adage that goes something like if you stay still long enough, you’ll come back into fashion. I think that time is coming for blogs. And if it isn’t I’m going to pretend it is anyway. My rather vague reasoning for this is based on the following thoughts. These are not researched, just my impressions and I’m very aware that in social media impressions can vary wildly.
Twitter is a mess. The trolls are back in, it’s run by a temperamental man-baby, they are talking about changing the free nature, there are technical issues and doubts about its long term viability. Even if all this pans out, a certain amount of damage has been done – people have migrated elsewhere, but perhaps more significantly, my sense is that a lot of people have just started engaging with it less.
There is a social media rethink occurring. I think precipitated by the above, but something that has been growing for years is a reframing of our relationship to social media. Is it a healthy or useful relationship? Is it a good return on investment in terms of time? Is it fun anymore? The danger for social media sites like Twitter and Facebook is not so much the deliberate rejection, but rather just the slow fade of enthusiasm. And once people start asking these types of questions more regularly, that fade gains momentum.
A recognition of the value of online identity. When I used to write about digital scholarship around 2010, it was often in the context of ‘why won’t those suits recognise the impact of us blogging kids?” Sort of Footloose with RSS. Now the impact of online identity is widely valued, recognised, utilised, exploited by all sorts of institutions then investing in some reliable online identity is not something that is frowned upon.
Blogging always suited education. There have been fantastically inventive uses of Twitter, podcasts, YouTube etc for education, but I always felt that blogging was the closest cousin to standard academic practice. It gives time to expand on thoughts as much as needed, to break free from the confines of formal academic publishing and engage in thoughtful dialogue.
Everyday work is often a bit rubbish. I’m not sure this has changed much, but the sense is that (in higher ed anyway) that work has often become more constrained, less creative, more precarious and less rewarding. A place to call your own is a welcome refuge in such a context.
The conclusion I take from all this (which I carefully assembled so I could draw the conclusion I want), is that there is a desire to have a core place on the net, that is not subject to the whims of billionaires, institutions or markets, where you can engage in a range of dialogue, from personal to professional, and that you enjoy revisiting. Ladies and gentleman, I give you, the blog.
(Look, even Brian has said he’s going to start blogging more frequently, that’s the sign we’ve been waiting for, assemble your blogging hordes now).
As someone who works at the UK Open University, I feel an affinity with other distance and open ed institutions globally. I have a particular affection and respect for Athabasca University, Canada’s version of the OU. I have known many smart people who work there, and admired their innovation in undertakings such as challenge exams, Athabasca University Press and IRRODL. So it has been particularly galling to see the political overreach of the Alberta Advanced Education Minister, Demetrios Nicolaides in demanding staff relocate to Athabasca and they reverse their online mode of working. That was bad enough, but was eventually settled, but this week with a callousness Alex Jones would admire, the Nicolaides installed board took the opportunity to fire President Peter Scott, while he was on compassionate leave, grieving the recent loss of his wife. This was seemingly without any consultation or warning.
I don’t have any inside information, I’m just going from the public appearance – because that’s the point, it’s the appearance that matters. And that appearance, to me at least, is of a heartless institution and senior management who are effectively puppets for Nicolaides. And that’s a very damaging perception, even if it may not be true behind the scenes. Who would want to work for Athabasca now? Who will want to stay there if they can leave? If they will do that publicly to the President when he is grieving, what will they do to you?
I’ve blogged about the different time cycles of higher ed and other businesses (notably tech companies) before. Higher ed operates along longer wavelengths, and this kind of institutional vandalism can take a long time to recover from. People remember, trust is lost, important institutional knowledge departs, and replacement is hard to come by. We often like to talk in terms of ecosystems in ed tech. It’s an over-used metaphor, but I’m going to borrow a lesson from ecology for an example here, bear with me.
The orange roughy is a deep sea fish, which was previously known as a slimehead. When it was discovered in vast quantities around New Zealand, something akin to a gold rush took place. It’s tasty and was in bountiful supply. The name was a bit dodgy, so in the best bit of rebranding since Erik the Red convinced a bunch of settlers to come live on a nice place he’d named Greenland, the slimehead was renamed orange roughy. Mmmm, orange roughy. With no prizes for guessing what happened, the roughy was overfished and was brought to near collapse. Some quotas have been introduced and planned fisheries rejected. It will take the roughy population a long time to recover.
Part of the problem, apart from the obvious greed, was that we simply didn’t know enough about the roughy. It turns out that it lives for a very long time (120 years), and may not reach sexual maturity until around 20-30 years old. But even then, more recent research reveals they may not do much of their reproduction until their 70s. So, if you take them out of circulation early on that has a lot of impact on future populations and they take a long time to replenish depleted numbers. They don’t breed in particularly large numbers, producing only about 10% of the amount of eggs of similar fish. They are simply not a very sustainable fish source because they take so long to breed and do so at low rates.
Returning to higher ed then, political intervention is often done for short term gain – we’ve seen this with numerous Conservative Ministers in the UK, and the Athabasca case is perhaps one of the most obvious direct examples of this tendency. But this action is done without knowledge or care of the environment they are affecting, or the potential long term consequences. Universities are institutions with long histories and long memories, and as with our friend the slimehead, careless action can take years to repair, or even worse, can result in collapse.
If you’re interested, Simon Buckingham Shum & Jon Dron have a petition against this political interference.
There’s a scene in This Is Spinal Type where they visit Elvis’s grave and after some failed harmonising, Nigel says “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”, to which David responds “Too much. There’s too much fucking perspective .”
It’s a line that often comes to mind, replacing “perspective” with whatever there seems to be a current abundance in. Recently this has been “vision”. It’s a strange one, because I think we all say we want a clear vision from any leader in an institution. Maybe it’s just me, but I currently feel Vision Fatigue quite strongly. We have an overall University set of priorities. Then we have research vision, teaching and learning plan, EDI priorities, Department plans, knowledge transfer goals, more local research theme, student support theme, business income targets, etc.
These are all good things. We want these things. But every single document you complete has to state how it will support the five (or whatever) themes of the [Insert topic] Vision. It is impossible, for me at least, to keep all of these in mind (and often they are assumed to be something you wake up every morning reciting so no need to remind you what they are). But also, it often feels completely fictional. We’re doing what we’re doing anyway and we find a way to match it to the existing vision. This is borne out when a new PVC or senior manager is appointed, creates a new vision, and we carry on doing the same activities, which now miraculously meet the demands of the new vision.
Maybe everyone has become too proficient at creating Vision Statements with priorities and targets. We said we wanted them, and now we have them in abundance. But for a while I’d appreciate a “we trust you, get on with it” vision.
I’m not sure what the solution is, as I’m guessing “I plan to have no vision” is not a winner at the job interview stage. But I think some acknowledgement that your vision is not the only one academics will be engaging with would be useful. Academics typically operate across many different roles – research, teaching, admin, scholarship, technical, public engagement, policy, etc. Vision switching is not a cost-free activity for an institution. I, like many of my colleagues, spend a lot of time relearning each vision whenever we have to engage with it and then often completing largely meaningless forms about how our current activity satisfies this.
Anyway, maybe it’s just January grumpiness. By the way, do you think I’ve used the word ‘vision’ enough in this post?
FreshRSS 