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  • What’s it like to move from organising face-to-face conferences to organising online conferences?

    What’s it like to move from organising face-to-face events to organising online events? This is a short reflection on my experience after two Post-Pandemic University conferences.

  • Chomsky on Anarchism

    “That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”

  • Pragmatising Philosophy

    I wrote this on my old blog in 2007 a month after moving into a Sociology department to complete a second masters degree rather than starting my planned Philosophy PhD. It’s strange to realise that my intellectual sensibility was fully formed almost 15 years ago and the progress I’ve made since then has largely been…

  • A moment of violence

  • The psychopolitics of lockdown

    How are individuals coping with these conditions? What are the “small rituals, formulas, quirks” which they are relying upon? How are they making decisions about the future? What about the quarter of people who say their life hasn’t changed very much?

  • Imagining a decentralised social media

    If I understand correctly Twitter’s Project Bluesky investigates the possibility of building a decentralised social media in which protocols (rules facilitating communication) and access (the process of communicating) are separated in order to open up social platforms in a radical way

  • data.index

  • Part of me stays in the room where we met

    I remember the colors In your mysterious eyes Part of me stays In the room where we met

  • What has a year of COVID-19 done to knowledge production?

    In this new series of The Isolation Pod we’ll be discussing knowledge production after a year of COVID-19. We cover a range of topics in this opening episode from the affectivity of online teaching and the physical strains of digital scholarship through to the social infrastructure for scholarship and the opportunity to critically revaluate the…

  • Heterosexuality is a Construct

    Jesus Christ, I’m done with it, you narrow minded piece of shit, I’d sooner cut off my own dick than be like you. Did that make you uncomfortable, is your macho pride in trouble now, when you’ve beaten me up, then what will you do?

  • Never trust a Tory

    “Never trust a tory, they’ll betray you when it matters / They will scramble to the top and then they’ll kick away the ladder, hinny / Never trust a tory, or a tory in disguise, You can see it when you look them in the eye”

  • What do we mean by ‘post-pandemic’?

    What do we mean by ‘post-pandemic’? The term needs to be defined in parallel to established notions such as post-democracy, post-industrial and post-colonial.

  • The poetics of pandemics: why ‘living with covid’ gets squeezed out by ‘life after covid’

    I’m particularly interested in what this means for how we conceive of the ending of pandemics. As Jeremy A. Greene & Dóra Vargha point out in their contribution to Boston Review’s excellent collection Thinking in a Pandemic: “The history of epidemic endings has taken many forms, and only a handful of them have resulted in…

  • The latent utopia of Twitter

    It’s deeply satisfying to take something inchoate within your mind, what C Wright Mills called ‘the feel of an idea’, giving it form as you throw it out into the world and see what others make of it

  • What have we lost in the accelerated academy?

    A sense of loss pervades critical accounts of the contemporary academy. There’s little uniformity in what these accounts regard as having been lost, or explanations of how this was lost, but mourning nonetheless unites them in a critique of the university system we now work within.

  • What will hybrid offices look like?

    There was a really interesting feature in yesterday’s Protocol Sourcecode newsletter about a ‘flattening’ taking place as home offices become more professionalised while conferences rooms are becoming more virtualised to facilitate hybrid meetings. It makes the important observation that firms like Zoom are starting to pivot into this space in anticipation of hybrid offices becoming…

  • How will vaccine nationalism reshape globalisation?

    Once we dispense with the idea that vaccine rollout will be a deus ex machina which will take us back to normality (end the story so we can begin at the beginning) we’re faced with the question of what the world will look once we move into a situation of mitigated threat and an endemic…

  • Save us, the human existence is failing

    Save usThe human, existenceIs failing, resistanceEssential, the futureWritten off, the odds areAstronomically against usOnly moron and geniusWould fight a losing battleAgainst the super egoWhen giving in is so damn comfortingAnd so we go, on with our livesWe know the truth but prefer liesLies are simple, simple is blissWhy go against tradition when we canAdmit defeat,…

  • Navigating research revolutions: big data, open research and post-truth

    This is a session I’ve been running recently for doctoral researchers on ‘research revolutions’. It’s intended as an accessible overview to three major trends which are reshaping the research landscape. It went down well the first time I ran it but I’m trying to expand its implications for practice, as the idea for the session…

  • They set me on fire and I did a lot of burning

    And now the wind’s getting colder and the night’s getting cruel.But I don’t mind, I don’t mind if I’m with you.I paid for my sins til the blood filled the room.I don’t feel any better now.I don’t mind if I’m with you.Lend me your ear and throw me your rope.I was tangled up like spiderwebs…

  • A quick guide to academic podcasting during a pandemic (part 1)

    These are notes for Knowledge, Power, Politics students which I’m sharing in case they’re useful for other people The easiest starting point when planning a podcast is to identify podcasts which you’ve enjoyed. My favourite non-academic podcasts are QAnon Anonymous (a weird mix of citizen journalism, comedy and real time social theory), Novara media (a…

  • The space for learning design during a pandemic

    This is a great summary by Jonan Donaldson on pg 97 of Critical Digital Pedagogy of a trend we’ve all seen during the pandemic: With the rapid expansion of online learning over the last decade I have witnessed a tendency to translate classes into online modalities with designs closely resembling those of the face-to-face classes.…

  • Concepts for the new normal

  • Sociology On and Beyond the COVID-19 Crisis: An Online Symposium

  • The self under siege: the best introduction to modern continental philosophy I’ve encountered

    I watched this series of lectures by Rick Roderick around a decade ago and it remains the best introduction to modern continental philosophy I’ve ever encountered. I’m sharing it here (and pinning it) as a reminder for myself to rewatch it but also to encourage other people to watch it for the first time.

  • data.matrix

  • Eat the meek

  • The missing skill of technological reflexivity

    In this essay from Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection, Howard Rheingold recognises his “complicity in the creation of today’s digital culture” and “outright seduction by high-tech tools” (16-17). He suggests that the orthodox tradition of scientific thought has left us in a pre-scientific predicament when it comes to the application of technology: We lack a…

  • The responsibility of educators in a pandemic

    I thought this was brilliant from Ruha Benjamin, in the forward to Critical Digital Pedagogy, describing the responsibilities of educators. It applies more broadly than our present crisis but it feels even more pertinent against the backdrop of the pandemic: So, what are the responsibilities of educators and educational institutions in a context where this…

  • Craft and exploitation in the digital university

  • The socio-political makeup of the coronaskeptic movement

    This overview of the findings of this German paper is fascinating. It’s part of an insightful essay about the strange coalitions taking shape which transcend the left-right binary in a way I’ve come to think of as lumpen-libertarian. I particularly valued its focus on “the freelance media hustlers, movement messiahs, and entrepreneurial contrarians who have…

  • Preventing pandemics or preparing for them

    This essay from Richard Seymour intersected in a thought provoking way with my recent concerns about the securitisation of pandemic response. He explains how this paradigm involves preparation rather than prevention, in the senes of preparing for the inevitability of a range of disastrous outcomes rather than trying to bring about change which might foreclose…

  • An internet minute in 2020

  • Who’s to hold up the sky if not you and I?

    Who’s to hold up the sky if not you and I?So long, so long, so longWho’s to tame the volcanoes on mountains high?So long, so long, so longJust how long does it take to drink oceans dry?So long, so long, so longAnd someday we’ll say goodbye to goodbyeSo long, so long, so long, sail on

  • I got debts that no honest man can pay

    Well, I got a job and tried to put my money awayBut I got debts that no honest man can paySo I drew what I had from the Central TrustAnd I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus Now, baby, everything dies, honey, that’s a factBut maybe everything that dies someday comes backPut…

  • What does it look like when a health care system breaks down?

    I found this description by Mike Davis on loc 1073 of The Monster Enters helpful for understanding the particular pressures which a pandemic places on the healthcare system. In spite of the tendency to reduce this to a matter of beds within the system, as can be seen in the current conspiracy theory that the…

  • This new age of plagues is directly the result of economic globalization

    From Mike Davis in The Monster Enters loc 200-215: Since the discovery of the HIV virus in 1983 and the recognition that it had jumped from apes to humans, science has been on high alert against the appearance of deadly new diseases with pandemic potential that have crossed over from wild fauna. This new age of…

  • Post-Pandemic Scholarship: Some Initial Thoughts, April 22nd at 2pm GMT

    Are we all digital scholars now? Social distancing has normalised digital scholarship within higher education to an unprecedented degree, as what was called a decade ago ‘the coming social media revolution in the academy’ has now come to pass due to the disruption brought about by COVID-19 and associated public health responses. However, the radically…

  • The great sickly slums which will soon be screaming

    This is a chilling warning from Mike Davis in The Monster Enters. My understanding is this hasn’t been borne out by events since the time he was writing this (pre-June 2020) however I’d welcome any suggestions of literature on this topic which readers might have. It seems inescapable that the great sickly slums of Africa…

  • State capacity for decisive action in an emergency does not necessitate the suppression of democracy

    This is an important reflection by Mike Davis in The Monster Enters about the connection too often drawn between Chinese authoritarianism and the effectiveness of their anti-Covid action*. It’s one which comes readily because, as Alex de Waal has put it, “The infection-control state is Max Weber’s military–bureaucratic state on steroids, requiring uniform sanitary habits…

  • From the war on terror to the war on pandemics?

    There’s a brief aside towards the end of Apollo’s Arrow which was intended as innocuous but in practice is unsettling. Nicholas Christakis draws a comparison between the potential impact of COVID-19 and other crises which have had a long-lasting influence upon social life. From pg 322: The COVID-19 pandemic awakened Americans to the importance of…

  • The spectral character of Covid-19, or, will growing deaths undermine denialism

    This was another really interesting discussion in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis. He considers the particular characteristics of Covid-19 which have lent it an almost spectral quality in many people’s experience, lurking on the horizon of their lives as an immaterial threat. It’s easy…

  • A sober discussion of vaccine risks

    I appreciated the sobriety of this discussion in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis. I’m increasingly worried that we’re entering a situation where an understandable desire to avoid fuelling anti-vaccine sentiment (something which has the potential to undermine a vaccine-led resolution of Covid-19) will…

  • Defining a time frame: from the pandemic, to the intermediate pandemic to the post-pandemic

    I thought this was really interesting in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. I’m not sure I completely agree with these categories from Nicholas Christakis but I think it’s a useful undertaking to begin to conceptualise the contours of this transition. From pg 248-249: The pandemic: Let’s…

  • The relevance of Erich Fromm for online learning during a pandemic

    I was struck recently by how much Erich Fromm can offer in understanding online teaching. In his To Have Or To Be? Fromm distinguishes between two orientations to the world, the eponymous having and being, which manifest across the full range of human activity. The former is a matter of possessing, with a substantial subject…

  • Human culture and Covid-19

    From Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live pg 226-227: It was this cumulative culture that allowed us to teach each other things about how to cope with the pandemic when it first struck. Even if people had forgotten or did not know what to do, the knowledge…

  • A few thoughts about the anti-lockdown case

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last few days, as a result of recognising the sense in which the anti-lockdown case is sometimes dismissed as a matter of liberal common sense without a real engagement with the arguments. This is an initial attempt to seriously engage with the anti-lockdown views I’ve encountered…

  • Solutionism and Covid-19

    It’s hardly an original observation that Covid-19 has fuelled what Evgeny Morozov describes as solutionism i.e. the belief that technological solutions can be provided for even the most intractable social problems. However until reading the new book by Nicholas Christakis I hadn’t grasped how the labour involved in an activity like contact tracing would fuel…

  • The variation in the R rate between infected individuals

    From Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis, pg 52. I found this really useful for getting my head around how outbreaks are dispersed as a consequence of physiological, behavioural and social differences between people who are infected: This variation in R0 across individuals in a population…

  • The technological strength yet evolutionary weakness of human civilisation vis-a-vis SARS-CoV-2

    From Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis, pg 29-30: The world is quite different now than it was during prior plagues; today we have exceedingly dense cities, electronic technology, modern medicine, better material circumstances, and the ability to know what is happening in real…

  • The institutional health of Sociology in the UK

    I’ve been under the impression that Sociology’s institutional health has been declining in the UK for some time: less A level students and less undergraduates means less capacity for the discipline to reproduce itself institutionally. It turns out this is a great example of the necessity of continuing to check, as I’d assumed the negative…

  • What comes after Trump?

    Much of the commentary on the possibility of post-Trump Trumpism has tended to focus on the possibility of a much more competent populist emerging to lead this movement i.e. one who is disciplined, strategic and serious in contrast to the impulsive and instinctive character of the outgoing president. However this passage from Zizek’s Pandemic 2!…

  • The tremendously efficient writing of Slavoj Žižek

    While I’m on the subject of Slavoj Žižek, I thought it was worth recording how sections of his Pandemic! 2 reproduce his Hegel in a Wired Brain (oddly combining acknowledgments he is ‘drawing’ on that book while straight forwardly copying & pasting at least one paragraph). But most of the book is seemingly reproducing posts…

  • Is Slavoj Žižek slowly becoming Christopher Hitchens?

    I was interested to see that Žižek’s bio statement has changed on his latest book. He’s no longer framed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ (a designation I’m struggling to find a source for) but rather as a contrarian of the sort personified by Christopher Hitchens: Slavoj Žižek is one of the most prolific and…

  • Take only what you need from it

  • The insidious sexism of Modern Family

    There are lots of criticisms which can be made about Modern Family, as a distinctly old fashioned show dressed up in a superficial liberal progressivism. It’s nonetheless been a guilty pleasure of mine and I’ve been rewatching it during this grim coronic winter. There’s one aspect which stood out to me during this time which…

  • Theorising socio-cultural change: a note on the casual contemptuousness of John Milbank and Adrian Pabst

    I just stumbled across this extract I recorded from John Milbank and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue. There’s a confident contemptuousness to this passage which unsettled me at the time, expressing a belief that they can read back the spiritual condition of people they encounter through a brief glance at them on the street.…

  • Physical distancing and intensified social connectivity

    From Slavoj Zizek’s PANDEMIC! 2 loc 575: Physical distancing as a defense against the threat of contagion has led to intensified social connectivity—not only within quarantined families but outside of them (mostly through digital media)—and outbursts of physical closeness (raves, partying, etc.) have erupted in reaction to both: the message of the rave is not…

  • A note of caution about posthumanism in education

    One thing I’ve been gradually noticing since I joined an education department a few years ago is how influential posthumanism is within education vis-a-vis other theoretical perspectives. I wouldn’t suggest this is anything other than an impressionistic judgement, based on the journals I choose to look at and the topics which stand out to me,…

  • Some thoughts on the political economy of Covid-19

    “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” ― Antonio Gramsci This quote from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks has been a mainstay of social commentary grappling with the longer term implications of the financial crisis of…

  • I’m in love with the night

    I’m in love with the nightEvery breath of this house creakingI’m familiar with the cold and the windows and the doorsAnd the sound of my heart beatingBeating in and out of time

  • Some critical thoughts about the post-digital

    I’ve always been slightly sceptical of the concept of the post-digital. Firstly, it seems to defeat its own deflationary ambitions by defining itself in epochal terms. I’m not convinced it can help us overcome hyperbole about ‘the digital’ if it’s implied that we’ve entered a new era predicated on this moving into the past. I…

  • I miss Gaslight Anthem so much

  • Why can’t history leave us alone? I want to return to my bubble

    I’ve been preoccupied by a phrase used by Anand Giridharadas in his most recent newsletter. As he puts it, some people are clearly “wanting to be left alone by history for a little while”. It points to the hyper-mobilisation which characterises contemporary society, as well as the exhaustion which can follow from this. As Trotsky…

  • The intoxicating immediacy with which we can now act on the feel of an idea

    This section from pg 2 of Rupert Wegerif’s Dialogic: Education for an Internet Age captures something of my preoccupation with what C Wright Mills called ‘the feel of an idea’. The immediacy with which we can act on this feeling has been vastly increased by the affordances of digital technology: Thinking and writing with the…

  • A rough draft of a new intellectual biography

    I’m digital sociologist based in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, where I lead activities within the Culture, Politics and Global Justice Cluster and work as an embedded researcher within the Digital Learning Working Group. I direct the Post-Pandemic University project which is an international network comprising an online magazine, podcast hub…

  • The Co-Production of Platforms by Users: A Case Study of Higher Education

    I’ve enjoyed reading Twitter: A Biography very much. I came to it after myself and Lambros Fatsis finally submitted The Public and Their Platforms to a publisher, which is a shame because it resonates with and would have helped us further develop the arguments in our book. At the heart of these is the question…

  • A conversation with Phil Brooker about Programming-as-Social Science

    In this podcast, we talk to Phillip Brooker about Programming as Social Science. This approach to social inquiry involves using programming as a toolkit for social research, facilitating a style of inquiry above and beyond particular research methods. At a time when we’re dependent upon digital platforms for the core operations of the university, with…

  • Two approaches to musical performance

    I thought this was a really interesting analysis which captures a split in my own musical tastes, as an interest in provocative music co-exists uneasily with a desire for collective experience through live music: Afro-American music is still cherished for its tragic yet affirmative sense of life. But it got shoved aside in the late…

  • I’ve got two books coming in 2021

    The first is The Public and Their Platforms co-authored with Lambros Fatsis. It’s a rethinking of the public sociology debate from the ground up, built around the critical realist sociology of platforms I’ve been developing over the last few years. This was so hard to finish but I’m really enthusiastic to see what people make…

  • What is a platform?

    I thought this was great from Jean Burgess and Nacy Baym’s new book on Twitter. On pg 15 they take issue with the view of platforms as “a single ‘technology’—a static object that can be cast as a causal agent of societal change” arguing that “A closer look reveals a more emergent, dynamic truth, one…

  • Platform-based elicitation methods in qualitative research

    This section from Jean Burgess and Nacy Baym’s new book on Twitter caught my imagination as a research method. It reminded me of this recent paper in The Sociological Review which used Facebook activity logs as an elicitation method. On pg 26 Burgess and Baym describe how they showed participants their Twitter timelines in order…

  • A Conversation with Neil Selwyn: Do We Need a Digital Sociology of Higher Education?

    What significance has been accorded to digital technology within the sociology of higher education? For a long time it’s seemed the tendency has been to treat this in terms of the application of technology within specific subdomains, in a way that obscures the connections between them and their role in a broader institutional transformation. However…

  • What can social reconstruction teach us about imaging post-pandemic society?

    Early 20th century social science was driven by a vision of social reconstruction, described here by John Scott and Ray Bromley in their Envisioning Sociology, loc 323: What would a 21st century post-pandemic reconstruction look like? What role would social science play?

  • The Digital Condition: an informal discussion group

    The Digital Condition is an open discussion group, organised by myself and Milan Stürmer, building on last year’s experimental project to inquire about the digitalised experience of the pandemic. For each meeting there will be a short article and a series of questions posed in advance, with the session being an open forum for raising…

  • Outflanking Platitudes: Theorising the Pandemic

    I thought you might be interested in this new podcast series I’ve started. It’s the audio diary of a social theorist during the pandemic, with self-consciously rough thoughts, speculations which haven’t quite reached the status of work in progress. Mostly short thoughts from me but I’ll have conversations with other people as well. It will involve meta-reflections…

  • The films I’ve watched in the last 3 years

    With the imminent demise of cinema, it seems like a good time to share this list of the films I’ve seen since July 2018: Hotel Artemis Generation Wealth Annihilation Under the Tree Ant Man and the Wasp The Escape The Heiresses Mad to be Normal Moneyball BlackKklansman Apostasy Cold War Searching American Animals A Simple…

  • Are you reading this blog?

    I turned off comments almost a year ago when I deleted my Twitter account, in pursuit of a less overwhelming digital existence. However I realised recently this has obliterated the sense I had of people actually reading this blog, as opposed to stumbling across it via the google footprint which has accrued over ten years…

  • This machine eats normativity

    In his recent book of essays, Will Davies draws a comparison between securitisation and digital platforms. From pg 15-16 of This Is Not Normal: These are just some of the ways in which the credit derivative and the platform have transformed our political world in the twenty-first century. But there is more to it than…

  • The light we steal when we learn

    This extract from Danielle Allen’s superb Why Plato Wrote brought to life an issue which I’ve found myself returning to endlessly over the years. On pg 26 she talks about the Socratic disdain for writing and the capacity for teaching seen to inhere within them. When Socrates says that a written text can be no…

  • Zygmunt Bauman’s early career as a professional ideologist

    From pg 136 of this new biography from Izabela Wagner: One of his most important tasks, which he performed frequently, was writing political texts with the objective of communist indoctrination. Producing such literature required good historical knowledge and a background in the Marxist literature, with mastery of ‘classics’ such as Lenin’s work. Long office hours…

  • The epochal theorising of Zygmunt Bauman

    I thought this was a great account of Zygmunt Bauman’s style by David Beer in his newsletter. It’s the same quality which can be found in the trilogy of books by Giddens in the early 1990s which, along with Bauman’s oeuvre, facilitated my transition from philosophy to sociology. These works excited me because they provided…

  • The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, Rupert Brooke

    God! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England’s the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of THAT district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester. For Cambridge people rarely smile,…

  • The lumpen-libertarian uprising

    From this disturbing piece by Richard Seymour: A glance at the crowd shows it to be younger and more heteroclite than one would expect. The heavily armed protests in the US mostly resembled outings of a Duck Dynasty fan club. Granted, in these English displays, there is the inevitable quorate of Nazis, QAnon supporters, flag…

  • Hold your own

    When time pulls lives apartHold your own When everything is fluid, and when nothing can be known with any certaintyHold your own Hold it ’til you feel it thereAs dark, and dense, and wet as earthAs vast, and bright, and sweet as airWhen all there isIs knowing that you feel what you are feelingHold your…

  • The Masterplan

    I’m not saying right is wrongIt’s up to us to makeThe best of all the thingsThat come our way 😷 #Covid19 😷

  • Winter is coming

    If the bad times are coming, let ’em comeLet the death drum break the slumpBefore the once young braves succumbThe fickle flicker of desire expiresIf the bad times are coming let ’em come, let ’em come 😷 #Covid19 😷

  • The growing divide in educational technology

    From 25 Years of Ed Tech by Martin Weller pg 169: There is in much of ed tech a growing divide, particularly in evidence at conferences. One camp is largely uncritical, seeing ed tech as a sort of Silicon Valley-inspired, technological utopia that will cure all of education’s problems. This is often a reflection-free zone,…

  • The suspended futures of Covid-19

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the temporality of the Covid crisis. There was a suspension of time during lockdown, in which a national unit attempts to stop to the greatest extent possible without self-destructing, constituting a pretty unique act of (partial) demobilisaiton. However this was just the first act, leading to a much more liminal…

  • Post-Pandemic Digital Scholarship

  • Hold your own

    When time pulls lives apart Hold your own When everything is fluid, and when nothing can be known with any certainty Hold your own Hold it ’til you feel it there As dark, and dense, and wet as earth As vast, and bright, and sweet as air When all there is Is knowing that you…

  • Are we seeing a turn back towards the Open Web?

    From today’s Protocol newsletter: There’s a clear trend here. I’ve talked to a lot of folks recently about the return of blogging, the rise of Substack, and what it means that people are branching out on their own again. Medium clearly understands the underlying goal behind that trend, which is that creators want a place…

  • It’s easy to forget the thrill of self-publishing, given the dark banality of social media in 2020

    From Martin Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech pg 16: By 1995, the web browser was becoming reasonably commonplace, with Netscape dominating. With Facebook pages and WordPress sites created at the click of a button now, it is difficult to remember the effort but also the magic in creating your first web page using hand-coded…

  • The strangely coherent eclecticism of our inner experience

    From Timewatch by Barbara Adam pg 15: The multiplicity of awarenesses, choices, memories, considerations as well as the trust in technology and expert systems were all present at the same time. Yet, despite this simultaneity, there was sequential order. Nothing was jumbled. Nothing happened backwards

  • Fragile movements and social media

    This thoughtful essay by Richard Seymour offers a great summary of what I’ve written about as fragile movements, as part of a really interesting reflection on why Black Lives Matter hasn’t exhibited the same fragility: In recent years, political movements and trends have come (and sometimes gone) with unprecedented speed. To name just a few…

  • The infinite lecture hall model

    This is a really helpful account in Martin Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech about the enduring appeal of online education to university managers. The powerful vision of the ‘infinite lecture hall model’, in which provision can be scaled indefinitely to a vast distributed audience, promises a revolution in the economics of education. However it’s…

  • The campus as a learning infrastructure

    This section from Martin Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech is interesting to read in light of the last six months. On pg 24 he considers how the physical architecture of the university campus was designed to support certain kinds of interactions: Students were brought together in one physical location, over a tightly constrained time…

  • Best practice for communicating with delegates during online conferences

    I’m taking part in a panel at the European Consortium for Political Research tomorrow and I’ve been really impressed by their e-mail updates to participants. In effect there’s a daily newsletter with the following features: Invitations to share through a hashtag or six themed walls on their website Detailed guidance about how to take part,…