One last job…
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
1w ago
Next week I head to Cork for OER24. While I may get invited to conferences once I leave the OU, this could well be my last one, and will definitely be my final one as GO-GN director and OU employee. That’s right, before I head off into the sunset, I’m going to do One Last Job, what could go wrong? In the manor of all One Last Jobs, a crack team has been assembled to pull it off. We have the GO-GN squad, running a workshop the day before the conference for a small team of explosive experts OER Researchers. As I’ve probably mentioned before, working on the GO-GN project for the past 11 years has ..read more
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Don’t look back in anger (or anything else)
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
2w ago
Because I was too busy indulging in self-pity in my last post I forgot to blog about Udacity being acquired by Accenture to build a platform to take advantage of AI, blah, blah. Audrey Watters taking a rare foray back into ed tech to say “I told you so” reminded me to blog something. Audrey says it better, but that’s never stopped me before… There are lots of takeaways from this tale. Here are some that occur to me: Self-Reflection is the real unicorn. Investors like to talk about unicorn companies, but it seems the real unicorn (as in, it doesn’t exist) is any sense of self-reflection or humi ..read more
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Welcome to the Wonkalarity
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
3w ago
If you live in the UK you will probably have seen the story last week about the Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience in Glasgow. It promised a rich immersive experience, but turned out to be a disappointing, depressing warehouse with some bad props. We get one of these stories every year usually about a Santa’s grotto which is, well, less than might be expected. These stories often go viral, the mismatch between promise and reality is ripe for memes. This one I think offers an interesting prompt for considering issues around AI. For a start the advertising of the experience used AI generated image ..read more
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February 24 roundup
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
1M ago
(photo shows Irwin DeVries, Audrey Watters, Brian Lamb and Rajiv Jhangiani in 2015) As February comes to an end, I feel I am entering the wind down phase of my Open University career, with departure scheduled for June. The replacement for my role on the Open Programme is being recruited, we’re planning for my last GO-GN workshop at OER24, and I’m handing over editorship of JIME. It leaves one in a slight liminal space mentally and work wise – I’m busy doing handover, and continuing workload, but I’m not required for planning things that will take place after I leave. It’s not so much that I ha ..read more
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Ed tech indie horror
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
1M ago
I’ve been reading some interesting takes on horror recently: the meta-fiction of Native American author Stephen Graham-Jones; the influential feminist analysis of horror exploitation movies Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Clover; a personal account of the importance of horror in Kris Rose’s Final Girl: How Horror Movies Made Me a Better Feminist; and The Black Guy Dies First, Robin Means Coleman’s analysis of black representation in horror. And it got me thinking about analogies to ed tech. I know, as usual. First of all, the horror take… It has to be acknowledged up front that horror is oft ..read more
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Dangers of tech metaphors in nature
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
1M ago
In Metaphors of Ed Tech I suggested that we should approach metaphors drawn from nature with caution, writing: “it is worth emphasising that metaphors drawn from nature are probably the most prevalent, and the most dangerous, of metaphors. Making appeals to what is deemed ‘natural’ and applying it to any form of human endeavour has led to justifications for social Darwinism, misogyny and repression, with the implication that certain states are naturally occurring and therefore inevitable.” But the opposite is also true – we need to be wary of technological metaphors applied to nature. I came ..read more
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January round up
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
2M ago
Despite being 27 weeks into the year it is still only January apparently. I gave a keynote at an informative event organised by the Open University in Wales (pictured with my colleague John Butcher), to celebrate the launch of their Access Insight Project, looking at the experience of Access and Foundation students across Wales. It’s an excellent report, with HE and FE providers across Wales all collaborating effectively (not always the case in higher/further ed). I was asked to give a ‘provocative’ talk before lunch to get people chatting. Provocative can often be a synonym for ‘obnoxious’ bu ..read more
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Congestion of the brain or creative constraint?
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
2M ago
I recently read an account of the infamous Victorian murder of three-year-old Saville Ken, investigated by Jack Whicher. At one point Detective Whicher is widely pilloried for his conclusion (later prove to be correct), and he resigns from the police, with “congestion of the brain” cited as the reason. The Victorians were big on congestion (at least three people die of congestion of the bowels in the book), with its hunts of ethers and natural flows. Congestion of the brain could mean literal blood clotting, and a cause of strokes, or dementia, to a more symbolic, metaphorical congestion. It w ..read more
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The range of the Open Degree
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
3M ago
I finally got around to reading David Epstein’s Range last year. It’s one of those popular books that makes a very powerful case, although you suspect some reporting of the academic findings may be over-simplified or contrary evidence maybe overlooked. But even so, it is a valuable validation of the multidisciplinary approach to education. As the Director of the Open Programme at the OU, which has a multidisciplinary open degree where students can combine over 250 modules into their own pathway, a combined stem degree focused on science pathways and a postgraduate Open Masters, this is of cour ..read more
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December round up
The Ed Techie Blog
by mweller
3M ago
I had an unexpected bounty of speaking invites for December, presenting about educational technology as an interdisciplinary topic for the Open Programme, an internal workshop on social media for researchers with my colleague Arosha Bandara and the keynote for the Social Media in Higher Education conference. These last two talks were interesting in that they made me reflect on how much has changed in the social media landscape over the past few years. Arosha and I gave a similar talk back in 2019, and this was a more cautious, nuanced one post pandemic and post-Musk Twitter. The talks prompted ..read more
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