Month: January 2023

ILTA Winter online conference keynote: beyond blended

Last week Helen Beetham and I were delighted to give the keynote presentation at the ITLA Winter online conference. The conference provided us with a very timely opportunity to share the findings of the review of approaches to curriculum and learning design we completed for Jisc last year, but also some of work we are currently developing with Jisc in response to the findings and recommendations of the review.

Starting from the premise that everything is now blended, we are developing thinking around the different aspects of time, space, place and modes of participation that contemporary HE need to develop in order to support accessible, flexible and equitable learning opportunities for students.

Many thanks to everyone involved in organising the conference for giving us the opportunity to present our work. We really appreciated the engagement from all the participants.

There will be a longer post soon from me around some of our emerging thoughts, but in the meantime you can catch up with our presentation in the recording below.

And we’re back . . .

Apologies, dear reader, it has been far too long since my last post. I did mean to post before the end of 2022 but, well none of the dozen or so half written posts really seemed to have the need to be finished and published. The mass exodus from Twitter to Mastadon seems to have now happened. I couldn’t really think of anything else about the whole white, middle aged billionaire buys twitter and f***’* it up being a classic exemplar of everything that our neoliberal age supports that hadn’t already been said.

Whilst I and many of my peers have been lamenting the end of twitter in terms of our networking and sharing of practice, this post by @ImaniBarbarin did make me give myself a good talking too. I just lost one place of instant connection and comfort, so many disabled /chronically ill people  are facing a much great loss around connection and losing their voices.

As the new year starts, I’m looking forward to some f2f learning design workshops and continuing to work with Helen Beetham on a follow up project to the review we did of approaches to curriculum and learning design last year. There will be more to share on that in the coming months, but for now I’m just trying to ease myself back into things in this part of my life whilst balancing the other, artistic part of my life which is actually getting quite busy now.

I always appreciate, enjoy and find inspiration from Sherri Spelic’s Bending the Ark newsletter, and the one that dropped early this week was no exception. In this edition, Sherri shared how she left her laptop behind and reconnecting with friends and did “other stuff” over the holidays. I loved this phrase in particular:

I had a chance to remind myself that I am so much more than the words I put out for others to find.

https://bendingthearc.substack.com/p/bending-the-arc-january-2023

Yes, Sherri you are so much more than that. And thank you for reminding me and other that many of us are. I always have a nagging feeling in my head that over the last few years I haven’t shared as much as I used to. So I’m going to try and get more comfortable with the realities of my working life and sharing only when I have something useful to share. Not quite a new year’s resolution, maybe more of a reminder. And hopefully that won’t be too long.

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