Musings about life in retirement from academe
Being an optimist sometimes seems to require a degree of dogged determination. It can be necessary to hang on, sometimes for years, in the hope that things will be right in the end. Those of a more pessimistic persuasion would probably describe it as delusion rather than hope but that’s the core of the difference between the half-full and half-empty...
USQ 23 Things is into its second week and the topic is Twitter. The post for this week provides a basic description of Twitter, suggests ways that it might be used for academic work, and explains how to get started. Our task is to join Twitter (done some years and 6000+ tweets ago), follow some new people from the 23...
I just got back from from listening to Penny Carnaby from Lincoln University in New Zealand talking about Embracing the Digital Paradox! Exploring the impact of the Canterbury Earthquakes (a natural disaster) on scholarship, learning and teaching. That was mostly about the aftermath of the Canterbury/Christchurch earthquakes, the roles played by digital media in providing support for people immediately and more...
December 5 – 8, with support from the Faculty, I attended ascilite 2010 in Sydney. ascilite is the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education. I have been a member since before I attended my first ASCILITE conference at Wollongong in 1998 although I have managed to attend only the 1999, 2000, and 2005 conferences since then. Somewhere...
David Jones has posted an interesting piece about how he sees an alignment between the third way popularised in politics and what might be needed in education: The need for a third way « The Weblog of (a) David Jones. He lines up the conservative/republican (in US terms) block with the traditional approach based on teachers doing their own thing...
READ MORE Dealing with complexity – David Jones & the third way for education
At the 29 July meeting of Academic Board there was discussion of a proposal to change the document describing qualities of a USQ graduate to include mention of digital literacy. I remember the discussion clearly because there was a proposal that digital literacy be replaced by technological literacy, against which I spoke on the basis of technological literacy having a...
Peter Sefton has posted an impassioned plea to Stop saying ‘Protect our IP’ in educational contexts? In essence I think I agree with all, certainly most, of what he wrote but I might press a few points further and saw a few things that provoked comment. After a brief discussion of the idea of IP, he hones in on copyright...
I’ve written on this topic previously (Chance encounters, May 2005) but I’ve been building up to another shot for some time and events today finally brought me to tipping point. This morning one of the members of our University committee that deals with our LMS passed on a copy of an EDUCAUSE report (Diaz, 2009). The committee chair later circulated...
Peter Sefton at PT’s Outing asks himself and anybody who is listening “Why do I keep going on about HTML export from word processors?” He begins like this: I spend a lot of time on this site going on about HTML, particularly XHTML export from word processors using styles. Why? Surely in 2005, when the mainstream use of the web...
READ MORE Why does PT keep going on about HTML export from word processors?
It’s Sunday night and I’m just now trying to pull together some thoughts about some things that I started reading on Friday night but have had to let wait because I had more pressing work and social engagements. Now I’m wondering how to make any sense of what is a very mixed bag of posts I marked as I came...