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 moreTag: Culture
A Provocation for Digital Leadership
On 6th December 2019 Jisc launched a Digital Leadership community. As the instigator of the Jisc work in this space I was invited to offer some provocations to kick the community off. I have been around the education technology space for a while, and I thought a retrospective on my personal pursuit of EdTech Unicorns…
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The 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…
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Changing 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…
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A 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…
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Mind 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.…
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The 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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Which tale is your EdTech?
If you do read what I write here, then you probably realise that conversations are big part of what I do, and where I get my ideas from. Amber Thomas gifted me another this week. We were discussing an edtech and she said “it’s like stone soup”. Stone Soup The story of the stone soup…
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Toward digital praxis: just thinking out loud
Introduction First of all this is just open thinking – I am looking for feedback. I started thinking in this direction when I started working with Donna Lanclos back in 2014. We co-authored a blog post where Donna wrote: In a post-digital academy, where presence may be seen as having value, understanding how an online…
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Today I am 50: I am birder
[caption id="attachment_8094" align="alignright" width="136"] “The Observer’s Book of Birds”[/caption] Today I am 50 years old. I am going birdwatching. I started birding (a term we use for birdwatching) in the late 70’s and I have always been an aspiring amateur naturalist. So what’s that got to do with this blog? My birding kit in the…
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