Nothing particularly interesting

When I was starting out in education, I really longed for an exciting range of technological solutions that could engage students from a distance, and encourage online interaction - or what we now refer to as MOOCs. It never seemed to come though, and as the years went by I found myself becoming disillusioned, and later disappointed. My faith in MOOCs as an educational solution wilted. I had believed that online courses could provide a level social playing field for students in a way that no other educational forum could - but when eventually the technology did start to be readily available, it didn’t seem to achieve what it promised. No matter what I did, I could not seem to get students to engage with it. They seemed fixed, rigidly, in a distrust of educational technology, and unwilling to take that leap of faith into the world of discussion forums and online chats. As the years went by, I began to understand why. These students were able to achieve everything tha...

This week saw my students undergoing their assessed discussions in a module on cultural theory. Since a central theme of this module is to explore popular culture and to apply methods of textual analysis to it (see Peter Childs’ excellent 2006 book, Texts ), this semester I took my students into the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford and invited them to explore that desperate hell-hole in the light of the theories and topics we had been exploring. I have done this kind of thing before, and it generally produces really exciting responses - and this time was no different. We had discussions about how some shops market the idea of elite bourgeois values to the masses as a material commodity rather than as a hegemonic power structure. We had discussions about how banks advertise themselves. We had discussions about paradox, the media and political power in The Hunger Games. The discussion which caused the biggest stir though, was the one which took for its topic a rath...

So I ended last week questioning the recieved wisdom about conjunctions.  I imagine like many educators, I have become habitually familiar with adding marginal comments on essays firmly declaring that you should 'never begin a sentence with a conjunction'.  In case you are unaware of the phenomenon, conjunctions are words which are designed to act as a pivot between the two clauses in a sentence.  Common examples are words like 'and' or 'but' (what we might refer to as 'co-ordinating conjunctions) or 'if', 'when' and 'because' (what we might refer to as 'subordinating conjunctions).  If you are still unsure of what we mean by conjunctions, you could do a lot worse that sit back and enjoy this masterful 1973 song: It's a wonder more people don't write songs about grammatical or linguistic conventions, isn't it?  Perhaps Justin Beiber's next hit could be 'Beauty and a Compound Subject', or perhaps Olly...

So this is the class I had been dreading.  What madness  came over me?  The idea that simply because I was teaching a module about consumer culture, that a field trip to Westfield shopping centre would be a good idea? Anyway, here we all are.  Or at least, here I am.  My students are merrily off gathering 'data' - although the odds are low that this is all they will gather - while I cower in a mainstream coffee shop.  So, since I am here, I thought I would record some of my own thoughts. I don't know exactly what the architectural intention was when they built this place.  You arrive from across a bridge which spans the vast Stratford International train station.  The while thing is tastefully lit and leads you round a gentle curve and over a gentle hill which each entice you into a collection of glittering buildings that squat like some half-buried metropolis on the other side.  Certainly there is no hint from the approach of the sheer siz...

Marxist Literary Criticism on Prezi

The Thick of It makes for increasingly uncomfortable viewing I have been thinking a lot about satire recently. This is partly because for only the second time in my life I am getting to teach a module on Augustan satire (one of my favourite topics). In addition though, it reminded me of a Twitter conversation I had with a couple of emminent literary gents about the satire of the latest series of The Thick of It . I was caught by the fact that one of these gents, writer Martin Wroe, was expressing exactly (but more eloquently) what I had been thinking myself - that the series appears to get darker each time, and in this series appears to portray all of humanity as posessing no redeeming qualities at all. When the infamously foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker accuses the leader of the opposition of having “all the charm of a rotting teddy bear by a graveside”, he could as easily be describing the show itself. If you are not familiar with the series (which was turned into the fea...

Today is turning into one of those days.  In the middle of working towards an institutional revalidation, pretty much my whole focus is currently locked onto a series of policy and regulatory documents in which I am writing all the various changes which have been agreed upon - which really means translating various minutes and discussions into appropriately 'regulatory' language which scrupulously avoids saying anything that contradicts a statement elsewhere in our regulations.  It involves laboriously cross-checking every sentence, and carefully scanning every punctuation mark to ensure that there is no obvious scope for misinterpretation. The task is, frankly, mind-numbing - especially the week after I finally managed to dodge my way back into a classroom again, and had such a delightful time re-meeting old students and welcoming new ones. One of the problems with regulations is that the mode of language which is used in them is so entrenched into a legalistic tone, that...