One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. Troilus and Cressida Co-authored with Donna Lanclos and Peter Bryant There’s been worry, anger, fear, snark, genuine excitement and lots of emotions in between and around those as responses to what educators need to do to interact with each other, and their students, now that we…
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We’re your friends
Having friends in Australia, I have been privileged to have conversations with many of them as they have struggled with supporting students through the Coronavirus crisis. I just wanted to post (with their permission) some of those messages here as a way of signalling some of the things that don’t get reported. The text below…
Read moreThe Tyranny of Innovation
Today (29th November) I sat in a room full of people who support teachers in further education*, they were earnest and honest and quite frankly a little overloaded in the size of the work they need to do, with little budget, and little support. And still I heard stories of people making great progress and…
Read moreCreativity and Innovation: #TESS2019
The Theme for eCampusOntario’s TESS2019 was Level Up Online Learning for Ontario: Experimentation and Impact It was a 2 day event, day 1 showcasing online learning from colleges and universities across Ontario in the form of presentations, panels, and ignite sessions, day 2 was a highly interactive, small group learning experience on H5P, a free…
Read moreChanging the narrative: bell curves and refusal
Donna Lanclos just gave a keynote on “refusal”. It sounds quite negative, but we’d been chatting about the idea, and refusal as act of engagement is something we see a lot of in the sector. Most often we dismiss it, consigning those who refuse change to “not wanting to change”, or “lazy”, or “they don’t…
Read morePostdigital: 10 years later, Algorithms and Agency
In our current postdigital world, digital does not serve the social, but through the manipulation of people, it is driving a particular kind of society, one that exploits the weaknesses and and fears of people; enables the rise of racism and xenophobia, and intensifying inequality.
Read moreA Session for #OER19 and coming back to Eire
OER19: what I am thinking, and what questions do I have? Myself, Bonnie Stewart and Dave Cormier are presenting this week at OER19. The Participatory Open: Can We Build a Pro-social / Pro-societal Web? We started talking about this session when I wrote a blog post about the UK Government’s approach to digital. Namely the…
Read moreMind the gap!
This has been on my mind for a while. It bothered me at the time, but I said nothing. And it is also inspired in part by Marcus Elliott’s post about non-overlapping magisteria Earlier in 2018 I was asked to speak to a group of senior professional services staff from across the higher education sector.…
Read moreOne week later!
First of all, what the hell happened with that blog post. I normally get a couple of hundred reads of a post in the first week, if I am lucky. The last post hit 1000 sometime around midweek, and whilst tailing off, it is still going. I guess the post had resonance. But the problem…
Read moreThe Darker side of Digital
Amid the noise of Brexit and our national obsession with the soap opera that is Westminster, BBC news last night reported a story about poverty in the UK. I expect that as both big parties play their Brexit games next week that story will will slip further and further away from the news cycle, just…
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