Nothing particularly interesting

Thiong’o, N. wa. (1992). Decolonising the mind: the politics of language in African literature . London: James Currey.

I was recently asked to give recommendations to someone who wanted some grounding in educational theory.  I gave the fairly standard response – all the big names.  After which I was mortified to realise just how stupendously white and male my recommendations were.

Educational technology is brilliant at many things - but one thing it is absolutely brilliant at is sharing and connecting.  You can share content across different platforms, you can share resources to students wherever they are, and you can connect to people in an almost infinite number of ways. This all sounds great!  But one of the things that has surprised me since starting work as a Learning Technology Adviser, is a brand of protectionism demonstrated by some academics.  Their driving concern when it comes to any educational technology is that no ‘outsiders’ should ever have access to their academic resources . The argument used to justify this concern is that they have spent a lifetime developing these resources, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to let any Professor Tea-Leaf nick them all just because they happen to be an External Examiner for the course, or another lecturer on the programme, or the Programme Manager or a student. After all, these du...

Satire on corporate monopolies in 19th-century America, targeting a railway owner who once famously said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." At my University we are currently discussing how to provide support for software that can help students and staff manage their references and sources.  There are of course many different options available on the market - some free, and some not.  During discussions I have made no secret of my preference for Zotero - which I believe offers the most intuitive and comprehensive functionality.  To this end, I have done some showcases of Zotero for various academics - which appear to illicit one of three responses from them: Oh, brave new world that has such software in it!  I had no idea - and I want it now! We already use it.  Have been for years.  So why are you telling us about it now? But don't we already have Mendeley in our official software catalogue? I fully expected ...

The other week I blogged about the myth that Moodle looks rubbish compared to for-profit VLE systems .  Along a similar vein, I have begun to wonder just how many people using Moodle realise the power they have right at the end of their typing digits?

It's TEF day .  A day that few people have really been looking forward to, mainly because there are unlikely to be many winner - but there sure as hell will be a lot of losers. When the whole TEF idea was announced, there were many aspects of it that I wholeheartedly supported.  The idea that Universities should be at least as concerned about their teaching quality as their research output was something that I cheered along with merrily.  Very quickly though, the whole plan became infected with compromises designed to over-simply a complex process by relying on just the data that already exists - rather than data actually designed to measure the very thing you are interested in. So. In just the same way that Ofsted can downgrade a school where pupils have a less than 100% attendance (thereby penalising schools that accept sick children), the TEF measures teaching excellence on the basis of: Dropout rates (penalising Universities committed to widening particip...

People working in low-paid jobs want more than just a pay rise from a degree The release of the Longitudinal Earnings Outcomes (LEO) always tends to cause groans and head-scratching among some academics.  The picture presented is a familiar one: Graduates who go for degrees in Business or Economics are more likely to earn bucket-loads, while those who go for Sociology will be - quite assuredly - not.  Those who teach courses on the lower-paid half of the scale suddenly begin to fear their courses will be closed down as a consequence. The problem is that when data like this is reported, it encourages us to think that salaries are more important to students than things like job security or job satisfaction - and this idea, I fear, is misleading.