Category: General

It’s almost 2 years since we all went in to lock down. What a strange couple of years it has been. Although there have been significant markers of time, like the dates when we could see people outside, when we could go into family and friends house, when we couldn’t again, when we got vaccinated, when we (for some) had to isolate, I find the last 2 years a bit of a blur. And now, despite all the cries for getting “back to normal” it seems our world has just ratcheted up the crazy again.

Over these past two years we’ve all had to change our habits. We’ve had to get in to the new (for some) working from home habit, the not going out habit, the going for a daily walk habit, the keeping a safe physical distance from others habit, the washing our hands habit, the wearing face masks habit. These habits were of course strengthened by legal requirements. As these legal requirements are coming to an end, I suspect many of these habits will too. Never mind the vulnerable, never mind that covid infection rates are really high right now, we can just go back “to normal” and forget about those pesky, enforced habits.

Despite living through two years of a global pandemic, it seems that “society” hasn’t really learned from the experience. Our understanding about infection transmission doesn’t seem to have improved. This is despite us all being quite obsessed with COVID transmission data and mortality rates, and being bombarded with them across all media outlets.

The habits of washing hands regularly, keeping surfaces and public spaces clean, wearing a mask in enclosed spaces all seem to be diminishing now too. Never mind that they are really effective ways of stopping the transmission of COVID-19 but lots of other viruses too.

I’ve been thinking about my own habits too. During the first lock down, I made a very conscious effort to keep writing regular updates in this blog. I think this was partly to give me a focus, but it was also a determined effort to keep my professional profile active as part of trying to ensure that I had enough work to survive. I also had the freedom to write about issues that some colleagues in university didn’t.

I’ve always seen blogging as a habit, but I have noticed that this year I have been seriously getting out of that habit. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, I am just quite often at a loss about what exactly to say. It’s often difficult for me to write openly about work I am doing as it can be confidential and/or not really suitable for a blog post. I find I have less of the “I need to have a bit of a rant about this” moments which inevitably used to end up as blog posts. There are also so many “big” things happening in the world, that I often feel very small and insignificant, so writing anything seems slightly pointless.

Just now I wonder more and more about teaching and learning habits, and in turn managerial, and strategic planning habits. So many things changed over the past two years, what habits do we need to keep? Can we ever get out of the habit of endless meetings? Can we develop effective habits of flexible, accessible learning and working conditions? Will we change any of the “habits” of the curriculum? Will the habit of presenteeism win back its stranglehold? Will strategic thinking about HE have collective amnesia about the experiences of lock down?

Anyway this is more of a ramble than a coherent post (ah yes, dear reader, some habits will never change). But I’d be really interested to hear your views on your habits – what ones are you sticking with? Now we can go places again do you still go for your daily walk – or is there no time for that now? And in terms of your working practices what habits have changed?

Well dear reader, it’s been a while. I have been trying to write, I have a number of half finished posts that I just haven’t quite got round to finishing. With everything that is going on in right now, I just don’t have the words and energy to try and figure out what I really want to say. However, if I don’t hit that “publish” button soon, I fear I never will again. So, today I’m going to quickly share 3 good things I found out about this week.

1. I found out you can now embed ThingLink directly into Powerpoint. How good is that? I love a good ThingLink, and this add on just opens up so many presentation possibilities. Also thinking of students and student projects/presentations, it’s a great combination too for enhanced digital storytelling.

2. The findings of the ALT annual member survey are now available. I always think the annual ALT member survey give the real story of what is happening with learning technology across the sector. Big trends this year are the importance of student engagement for driving the use of learning technology, and the importance of other collaborative tools -it’s not all about Zoom and MS Teams. Worth an look.

3. Bryan Mathers has added another element to the remix machine – the remix o’meter! How many uses could there be for this meter? There’s already quite a few remixes available. Here’s mine.

So if you are looking for distraction this Friday, try any one of these 3 suggestions and hopefully they will distract you, and might actually be useful too.

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Dear Reader, I have to confess as we edge closer to the end of 2021 my relatively regular habit of blogging has lapsed. It’s been over a month since I last posted something here. Looking back over the year, I think my posts have been less frequent this year too. In 2020, and during the first lockdown I was pretty good at almost getting out posts weekly. Partly that was down to me wanting to share, to connect and I guess to ensure that I was doing all I could to maintain my online presence, and ensure that I was still getting work.

This year has been a bit different. It’s not that I don’t want to share , connect, to maintain my online presence. It’s more that some of the work I have been involved in hasn’t lent itself to sharing. That’s one of the sides to being a freelancer. So, although I still classify myself as an open educator, quite a bit of my work this year has been closed. That’s not to say I haven’t tried to support/instill/cunningly suggest open educational practices – it’s just that I can’t really talk about them at the time, or in some cases anytime.

My social media interactions continue to evolve. I am on Twitter less often. I feel the benefit of that. If I miss something, it’s fine. I’ve probably missed a lot this year. That said, it is still my “go to place” for connecting with my PLN, and I still find serendipitous connections and really useful stuff there. However, I have noticed that the tweets that I get most “engagement” from are the more shall we say, light-hearted, ones. That’s fine, I really enjoyed the international discussion about the best solutions to midgey bites in the summer! Some pretty heavy weight edtech people got very engaged with that. And of course, maybe my more “professional” tweets are a bit boring. To be fair, they probably are.

I think tho’, it might indicate something else. I know I look to Twitter for distraction and if I’m lucky inspiration. As we’re pretty much all still mainly working from home, I think Twitter this year has been more than ever that water cooler place. Somewhere you can escape the relentlessness of trying to get “back to normal” for a bit and reply to a random tweet about insect bites.

In contrast I have really noticed a change in my engagement with LinkedIn this year. Time for another confession, dear reader. To be honest, I always had a bit of a cavalier attitude to LinkedIn. I joined mainly because “everyone else was doing it”. I connected with people that I knew, but was never quite sure how to “use” it. The ability to share blog posts on my profile direct from WordPress was about as active as I ever got. As I moved to being a freelancer, that has changed. It is a professional space, and I have got work through people who have found me on it. But I have noticed over the last year in particular the LinkedIn App has got much better in terms of UI – I still find the web version quite frustrating.

I have noticed that I am getting (according to the stats it now shows me) a lot more engagement and views of my blog posts than I get on my actual blog site. So I have started to respond a bit more, and share more “stuff” there – yes those analytics have got me again! Maybe that’s the way it should be, and I’m glad that I can see the value of it now. But I have been struck by number of views on certain posts. Of course, I don’t know who accurate they are, and I haven’t tried to dig around to find out more. I wonder if you have noticed the same? Do we want to have “serious” conversations in “serious, professional” online channels? Ones that don’t involve midgey bites?

Also as my art practice grows, I am engaging with different networks in other channels such as Slack, and Instagram. I know that I am less engaged in some edtech/education communities than previously. The social media online presence for that is completely different and takes up time in a very different way. Open practice is different in that context too.

Professionally this has been a much better year than I expected. So thank you to everyone who has employed me. It’s been a joy to have been able work with former colleagues and friends like Helen Beetham, Phil Barker and Jean Mutton. It’s also been great to work with such a range of clients from UNESCO to UK universities to the IUA to smaller design companies. I’ve had some really fantastic opportunities this year and hopefully that will continue into 2022.

I will continue to share “stuff” here, but I am realising that my blogging is now evolving from my “professional memory”- before I became freelance, if anything important (to me) happened, I wrote a blog post about it – to something else. I’ll still share important to me “stuff’ but not everything that I am doing. It is an evolving practice to slightly misquote the very wise and wonderful Catherine Cronin’s description of open educational practice. Just what it is evolving into, I am still figuring out.

Thank you, dear reader, for your continued support over the year. I hope you and yours have a very Merry Christmas and a good, healthy and safe New Year and let’s see where 2022 brings us. I am making no predictions about that. I’ll end with some pointless distractions – some of the best bits from one of my favourite Christmas movies. Enjoy!

Warning, this post might not make much sense – no change there I hear you mutter, dear reader. Anyway there is something that has been niggling at the back of my mind for quite a while. It’s edging closer to the front, but I can’t quite articulate it yet. But I think I’m getting closer.

Like many, I have been equally dismayed/saddened/shouting at the radio/paper/tv irately, at at some of the wider narratives around universities during lockdown and now in this not quite post pandemic, not quite “new normal” phase we are in just now.

Last week Simon Horrocks posed this valid question in response to a tweet from an MP questioning why all universities weren’t providing “quality education”

Genuine question: what evidence is there that they aren’t? If there isn’t any evidence, this is just uninformed and helpful scaremongering. https://t.co/NtqVtB6ICy

— Simon Horrocks (@horrocks_simon) September 20, 2021

There seems to be a very common misconception that “quality education ” equates with face to face teaching, large lectures and of course end of year exams. Of course this isn’t always the case.

I have had huge sympathy with students over the past 18 months. They have had to cope with so much. There is no doubt that their educational and wider life experience has been disrupted. I also have huge sympathy with lecturers, researchers and all university support staff for much the same reasons.

There is no doubt that everyone wants to get back on campus. That is now happening to some extent in most unis. In the work I have been involved in over the summer with staff and students in the UK and Ireland, there has been a clear desire to be together again. We have all missed each other. It’s also been clear that the actual teaching and learning experience over the past 18 months, has actually been ok. It’s not been perfect – but then again was it ever? The main issues for students have been around the wider student experience, the impacts of lockdown on wider society, digital poverty and mental health issues. It was hard not having anywhere to go and not being able to meet and mix with people.

On the other hand having recorded lectures and open book exams appear to have been overwhelming popular with students providing greater flexibility and accessibility, and in many cases a reduction of stress. However, students have undoubtedly missed the collective experience of being at uni IRL. They’ve missed the spaces that campuses provide for formal and informal learning. They’ve missed the reassurance of being, as one student said to me, “confused together”, informal sharing and working things out and just being together.

Staff have missed students too. They’ve missed that human connection, they missed not being able to see their students, they’ve missed not being able to “feel”the atmosphere, understanding and confusion in online teaching spaces. They want to be with their students and colleagues again IRL.

And this is where my niggle starts niggling. As well as the overwhelming political and societal pressures to get “back to normal” and that have a quite outdated vision of smiling students in huge lecture theatres, there is now even louder pressure from the ed tech sector around data, datafication and increased personalisation of learning. The personalised experience seems to have greater urgency and weight as, of course, only through “data insights” can online learning provide the personalised experience that will improve . . . well everything and save the world, blah, blah – you know the marketing speak.

The recent merger/acquisition of Blackboard is a case in point. Ben Williamson has written an excellent post on the wider data, and ethical implications of this and the power of “nudging”. Is “nudging” going to be accepted as valid pedagogical approach? Or doesn’t that matter if it provides desired “achievement” levels? And will those levels automagically equate with a “quality” learning experience?

Anyway my niggle isn’t well formed enough to answer that. But it does seem to me that there is a growing contradiction between the drive for technology being focused on personalised learning when what we all (staff and students) want and actually need, are safe, meaningful, collective in person and online learning experiences. Ideally combined with more flexible, authentic assessments that are designed to ensure knowledge and understanding are at the fore, and so don’t need invasive surveillance.

We do need to have more nuanced conversations around quality in education (not just HE), but to do that we also need ensure that there is far greater understanding in wider society about just what a contemporary university learning experience is, and can be. It doesn’t need to be about “solutions” based on data, nudges and “personalisation”. It can must be one that understands and values the power of collective learning, of communities of practice, of trust and care, and developing learners who question and critique and don’t respond to homogenised nudges in the way that algorithms expect.

Warning: reading this post might cause involuntary jazz hands . ..

To take me out of my despair and anger about what is happening in the world this week (yes Texas, the US Supreme Court , Afghanistan, the omnishambles that is the UK government I mean you). I thought I’d try and focus on something that I can control and share.

In fact I’m passing this on from my good friend and former colleague Jim Emery. Jim has recently retired, and was telling me that he no longer has “to do” lists, he now has “ta da” lists. Changing the ‘o’ to ‘a’ has some subtle and and not so subtle – that’s the jazz hand bit – differences.

Starting with the subtle. Although I do like lists, sometimes they do scare me a bit too. At times it just feels like as soon as you tick/score one thing off, you have to add another one or seven. So maybe having a list that you create once you have done something – the “ta da” moment might be quite a good idea.

It seems to me that right now everyone has so much to do, that we never really take the time to appreciate what we have done. So maybe we should all build some time into our working week for a few “ta da” moments. Jazz hands are of course optional, but for me seem involuntary every time I say “ta da” outloud 😉