What I find particularly valuable in Dewey is his sense of how as an individual “passes from one situation to another, his world, his environment, expands or contracts” with the “knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow” (pg 44). The nature of this experience constitutes the conditions which facilitate or frustrate the individual’s flourishing.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
I found this reprint from Hubert Dreyfus quite inspiring to engage with again, over a decade since I read the original book. It feels more relevant than ever when considering the constraints of education during the pandemic, with the core challenge posed by Dreyfus of how much involvement can be established remotely being one which anyone teaching via Zoom will have felt over the last year.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
I’m taking part in a Students Jury on Online/Pandemic Learning tomorrow. I’ve been asked to prepare some ideas about what students should keep in mind when formulating recommendations for how their department approaches these issues for autumn term in 2021.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Social media has gone from fringe to mainstream in higher education within the last decade. A culture has developed around it which shapes how it is used by academics and how that use is evaluated. However a range of problems are emerging which that culture is proving unable to address. I explore these problems and suggest how we could reorientate social media culture within universities and why this is necessary.
Estimated reading time: 37 seconds
It distresses me how easily this can be explained in the terms of 00s cyberutopianism. Does Zoom somehow encourage racist attacks? Or does it simply lower the transaction costs sufficiently that scores of racists not quite motivated enough to attack physical events are now willing to do so.
Estimated reading time: 59 seconds
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 […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
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 […]
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
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 […]
Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
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 […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
In this fireside chat from the Australian National University’s Get #SoMe course, Mark Carrigan and Inger Mewburn discuss social media for academics, the challenges of digital scholarship and their significance when daily life is being transformed by Covid-19.
Estimated reading time: 22 seconds
For a number of years I’ve believed we urgently need a conversation about social media governance within higher education. This is a general term for a range of mundane issues which emerge from the use of social media by those within the university (academics, students, support staff, managers etc) in […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
This passage from Keri Facer’s superb Learning Futures (pg 21) captures why I’m so interested in education. I wrote a PhD on what I called personal morphogenesis: how we become who we are and how personal changes are bound up in social changes. The reason I’ve moved into education is because […]
Estimated reading time: 38 seconds
I found this a thought-provoking, if not entirely convincing, account by University of Bristol PVC Tansy Jessop on WonkHE: personalise learning, with students working at their own pace and thoughtfully going back to material in their own time trigger a shift from content-driven curricula (the idea of ‘covering content’) to […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
