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 đˇ #Covid19 đˇ
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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 educationâs problems. This is often a reflection-free zone, […]
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 […]
Why is mass commercial social media ‘mass’ and ‘commercial’? This is a question I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in recent years as I’ve gone through a cliched journey from enthusiasm to sceptic. This hasn’t involved a fundamental shift in how I see social media as much as recognising that the qualities which […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
We often talk about blogging within higher education as if it’s relatively new, leaving us with the challenge of explaining and making a case for it to colleagues who might be sceptical and unfamiliar. This is a curious state of affairs given that blogs have been around for close to thirty years, even if the […]
The closing passage from Richard Seymour’s latest essay has been reverberating in my mind since I read it: Should we fail to posit the alternative, the constructive reworking of civilisation that is so urgently required, and that accommodates us to inhospitable nature, we do not get the boom years and centrist orthodoxy. We get harder […]
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.
I just came across the idea of inhabited institutionalism and I find it extremely compelling. Here’s an overview from a paper by Tim Hallett and Emily Meanwell: Inhabited institutionalism is a nascent approach that creates a conversation between Chicago-style interactionism and the new institutionalism in organizational analysis. (Bechky 2011; Haedicke 2012; Hallett and Ventresca 2006). Inhabited […]
From Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry by Caroline Lee pg 6. I thought this was a really interesting account of how the contemporary valorisation of debate goes hand-in-hand with a widespread sense of civic decline, with often negative results: Pure civic settings are in high demand in an increasingly apolitical and consumption-oriented […]
From Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry by Caroline Lee pg 36-37. Her book illustrates how public engagement professionals have a vested interest in this narrative, offering to facilitate participation in order to address this civic withdrawal: The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of concern for the decline of […]
I’m currently editing The Public and Their Platforms, a book I’ve co-written with Lambros Fatsis about the prospects for public sociology once digital platforms are ubiquitous. At the risk of sounding conceited, it’s a long and multifaceted argument which didn’t become entirely clear to us until we had completed the first draft. I’m trying to […]
