I’ve been working in technology and higher education for so long that sometimes I forget that I have a background in environmental science. This morning I was listening to Curious Cases with Hannah Fry and Dara O’Briain, the show was all about bubbles, soap bubbles. At one point the pair talked about giant space bubbles!…
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Toxicity and Responsibility: Is it time to reassess institutional engagement with Twitter (X)
About a year ago I left Twitter (or X), a decision based on concerns about the platform’s increasingly toxic environment. The decision was right, and has been borne out by the recent far right riots in the UK, where misinformation, outright lies, and the way in which the platform as allowed racists and nazis to…
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If you set a minimum standard…
… that’s what they’ll strive for. I was recently asked how I would change something to make the accessibility elements more in line with inclusive principles. The honest answer is I don’t know. The problem is that the purpose of the thing was to get people to change things, to change practice or technology etc. And…
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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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They Have a Fight, Triangle Wins
(this blogpost co-authored by Lawrie Phipps Donna Lanclos) (this post originally appeared on Donna’s website – but yanno – #interwebs!) The last time that Lawrie Phipps and I ran a digital mapping session at the Jisc digital leadership course, early in 2018, we had just finished answering all of the questions we usually fielded once…
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Who wants change?
Image by Alan O’Rourke This week I have been preparing for the second residential of the Jisc Digital Leaders course. Whilst the course is premised on role of digital, digital is actually a lens through which we look at institutional strategy and practice. We started off the course with a brief framing of digital and…
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Rhubarb Strategy
Last week was both dreadful and energising. On Monday I travelled to Manchester to run, with colleagues, the second residential of the Jisc Digital Leaders course. It felt like a successful course, but we were viewing it through a strange lens; as we did our welcomes on the 23rd May the events of the 22nd…
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Strategy is multimodal
One of the things I hear working with leaders in organisations is “I need to write the <insert term> strategy” — it doesn’t actually matter which strategy it is, or what flavour of a strategy it is. When you start working at a certain level, you have to start writing strategies, or parts of strategies;…
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Development not Training: an approach to social media for leaders
The Jisc Digital Leaders course is running again in May. Whenever we have run the course we have always had lots of questions about social media, especially Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin (sic). These three particular platforms perhaps embody one of the key issues – and causes of angst – for many people both working in education…
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This post has no title…
…just words and a tune I was re-reading Marcus Ellliott’s blog post last night, “Singing along, but I don’t know the words” seeing if I could spot any more spelling mistakes ;-). It was nice to be included on a list of “contemporaries” such as that. I started thinking about what are the common elements…
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