Category: Reflexive scholarship and digital academic culture

Why do computational methods matter for education?

In an infamous article from 2008 the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine argued that ‘big data’ made the scientific method obsolete. While hype about the data deluge has become more nuanced since then, it is undeniable that digital data has led to profound transformations in social scientific methodology. Disciplines and fields such as Data Science, Computational […]

January 24, 2023
How do we stop social media making the academy even more unequal?

January 20, 2023
Generative AI and the future of assessment: an open discussion at the Manchester Institute of Education

This is an internal event we’re organising at the University of Manchester but I’m sharing it here to gauge interest in a subsequent public facing event: Since it was launched in November 2022, ChatGPT has enthralled millions around the world with its uncanny ability to respond to queries in a conversational manner. Its apparent capacity […]

January 20, 2023
The false dichotomy of digital hermits and digital champions

In a memorable turn of phrase Patrick Dunleavy once wrote about academic hermits “sitting alone on top of a pillar somewhere in academia and doing their level best to not communicate in any way with the outside world, or let any information about their work leak out”. It was informed by the findings of the […]

January 17, 2023
Social Media for Public Engagement: Opportunities and Dilemmas

January 17, 2023
The Use of Digital Artefacts in Teaching and Researching: Guidelines for Practice

I wrote these best practice guidelines with Haira Gandolfi at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education in 2020. We’re sharing them here in case others find them useful. The use of digital artefacts in teaching and researching presents a number of practical challenges relating to the administration of files which need to be stored, […]

January 15, 2023
Some thoughts about generative AI and the future of education

A few more thoughts which were swirling around in my mind as I’ve been thinking this through: So what do we do in the near term? I’ve not watched these yet but I’ve seen Charles Knight make some interesting comments about this on LinkedIn. The video below is one of a series which I intend […]

January 15, 2023
The increasingly hierarchical character of academic social media in 2023

I remember when it was possible to fill an event by just tweeting about it a few times from a highly visible account. It made organising events so easy and so much more fun as a result. Whereas now you need to share across countless social platforms and mailing lists. This is what happens when […]

January 9, 2023
Going on Strike from the Internet: A Plea for Disconnection

I spent the first two days of the recent strike disconnected from the internet. I unplugged my router and let my phone run out of battery before placing them both in a locked filing cabinet. I then put the key in the back of a cupboard for good measure, intending to put as much cognitive […]

January 5, 2023
How to enjoy reading social theory

I wrote recently about my route into theory after reflecting on why some people enjoy reading theory while others don’t. Taking inspiration from The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction I thought it would be worthwhile to share a little about how I navigate theoretical literature, some of which I’ve learned from others […]

January 2, 2023
Why we need a post-digital approach to the platform university

One of the virtues of a postdigital approach to technology within higher education is that it helps us unpick two seemingly contradictory stances: marginalisation and the shock of the new. There is a tendency to see technology as a contingent part of the research process which is peripheral to its core operations. For example the […]

December 29, 2022
What would a ‘social crash’ within higher education mean for the discovery function within the knowledge system

I’ve written recently about the possibility that we may be in the early stages of seeing a ‘social crash’ within higher education, in which the social capital lodged within Twitter dissipates because the service dies (or dwindles into Myspace-esque triviality) without those networks being reproduced in another forum. This might be because they get reproduced […]

December 8, 2022
Digital scholarship: from the soft problem of citation to the hard problem of authoriality

I’ve been convinced that podcasts have enormous pedagogical value for a long time. I’ve produced podcasts with students on a number of occasions, as well as using them in my teaching as a resource. However a concern I have relates to audio more widely and the scholarly habits required to work with it in a […]

December 7, 2022
The unconscious fluency of writing

This thoughtful piece from Richard Seymour captures something which fascinates me about the writing process. He describes this as an unconscious fluency which enables writing to work, even if writing is simultaneously a deliberate and purposive activity: I doubt anyone begins a piece of writing with the rules in mind. Writing is a conscious, effortful […]

October 8, 2022
Disrupting the post-pandemic university: an audio experiment

By Milan Stürmer and Mark Carrigan It has been widely observed that the pandemic led to an enforced digitalisation in higher education. Familiar modes of interaction like meetings, seminars and conferences came to feel strange to most as mediation through video conferencing platforms like Zoom became the norm. Reflection on this phenomenon tends to imply […]

September 27, 2022
The meaning of civics as the new world struggles to be born

I’ve blogged regularly over the last few years about what I’ve termed post-neoliberal civics and post-pandemic civics. These terms are conscious placeholders intended to designate a significant change underway in which, to Gramsci put it, “the new world struggles to be born”. It reflects an interest in the significance of education during the transition as […]

September 27, 2022
Podcasting in higher education

Podcasts have come to feel ubiquitous following the pandemic, with periods of confinement to the home for significant swathes of the population creating a hunger for engaging digital content. Their popularity had been growing for years before this, with many crediting the Serial true crime podcast in 2014 for helping the medium break into the […]

September 25, 2022
Should you write every day?

In recent months I’ve resumed my commitment to writing daily. I have been trying to write 1000 words each workday. These words end up in a variety of places. They cover this blog, short pieces, chapters, papers and book projects. It’s a practical response to suddenly having a lot more professional responsibilities than I’ve had […]

September 20, 2022
The privilige of academics during the pandemic

The organisational theorist Martin Parker (2021) compares the pandemic to “an acid eating away at the flesh” which enabled us “to see the bones of the social structure”. He highlights the “inequalities that mean some have to travel to work in care homes and fruit-picking fields, while others self-isolate and edit books”. The fact that […]

September 19, 2022
Some thoughts on technology in the post-pandemic university

One of the curious spectacles of the pandemic (which at least anecdotally it seems many have observed) is the figure of the gifted speaker who we have seen hold an audience in rapt attention struggle to engage or connect through digital media. The obvious parallel to this is the speaker who thrives through the mediation […]

September 19, 2022