Posted by george on 1st November 2009
I am going to be leading a workshop on “Investigating teaching in your discipline” next Wednesday. The outline is attached to this page (below).
Discipline is an interesting word, which we often use without reflecting on the complex valency of meanings that it bears. I have been reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in preparation for the workshop.
Foucault sees discipline as largely a coercive function, with emphasis on that part of its semantic field that is about correction. And, while the corrective function has largely been polished up (or at least rolled in glitter) and sanitised by the academy for use as a synonym for “field of study”, much of the structure of domination and normalisation still lies below the surface of our academic disciplines.
Discipline… is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets… And it may be taken over… by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals)… (Foucault, 1977: 215)
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. (A. Sheridan, Tran.). London: Allen Lane, Penguin.
workshop1summarydisciplines
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Posted by george on 15th October 2009
Wi-Fi Direct will connect at existing Wi-Fi speeds– up to 250 mbps. Wi-Fi Direct devices will also be able to broadcast their availability and seek out other Wi-Fi Direct devices.
Some of you might have heard me witter on about widely distributed databases (e.g. bit torrent) and mesh networks (e.g. OLPC). I made a few comments here: http://my-world.typepad.com/rworld/2007/10/more-on-the-mes.html
This post suggests that developments facilitating such a network are continuing. Yes, it may be a long way off but eventually there will be no telcos as we know them: no ISPs. We need to be thinking past the centralised data centres to the far edge: you and me and our various devices. Security will be a big problem: identity, access, spam and fraud. Curation will be a problem. But, if we don’t get washed away in a big glacial melt down (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-coming-of-a-new-climate), one day there will be one big network.
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Posted by george on 15th October 2009
European survey data on how young people are using social media.
Either they use it or they don’t. Not much middle ground. 25% use the Internet more than 20 hours a week; 30% less than 5 hours. Well, it is more complex than that, of course, but even stronger bimodality is showm with IM. Not sure about the typology of users, but the implications for teaching are challenging. Who do you teach to? Should teachers and institutions adopt one modality? Or, the other? Aim for the middle and hit no-one?
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Posted by george on 26th August 2009
Further to the last post, Sustaining Communities, the tension in higher education is between: open educational dialogue and institutional pragmatics.
Open educational dialogue is concerned with networks or communities for information sharing, which take a user-centred approach to learning and design for learning on all scales. These networks make use of user-generated content for learning resources, including novel audio & video resources. Assessment, feedback and feed forward is conceived dialogically for learning. Among the benefits of open educational dialogue should be improved student induction and retention in situated learning communities. Among the technical enabling practices by which open educational dialogue might be supported, projects are working on systems mapping, business analysis (BA) and work flows. Information aggregation practice and content syndication (RSS) are being implemented using increasingly open web services and service oriented architectures (SOA). While institutions are traditionally seen as being located in physical space, mobility and location-based services are increasingly re-articulating the relationships between people, space and institutions: domestic, commercial, cultural, civic, language, faith, education, state and their various concrete reflections in houses, offices, systems, stores, transport ways, networks, authorities, maps, corridors and campuses.
Innovation themes supporting open education dialogue appear to be:
- Portals and personal portals (programmes, eportfolios and PLEs) to CPD aligned with
- Flexible frameworks for accreditation, underpinned by
- Multimedia epistemologies, the semantic web and a peer-to-peer participatory culture in disciplines
Sustaining participation as principal, agent, volunteer, affiliate, staff for:
- natural and built environments
- food, water, energy
- economies
- polities and communities
Managing participatory identity
- learning (peripheral participation)
- authentication
- trust (accreditation)
- access (privileges)
- openness
The innovative potential of these themes depends on and is set against an enabling apparatus of social institutions – institutional pragmatics. These are the means by which order is brought to, or structures educational practice along rational lines. Institutional pragmatics may be resolved to nine categories:
- Learning teaching and assessment
- Research and development
- Business and community engagement
- Learning resources
- eAdmin
- Institutional ICT services
- Physical estates and learning spaces
- Mobile, location aware and pervasive computing
- Green ICT
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Posted by george on 25th August 2009
…according to:
Franda, Marcus (2001), Governing the Internet: the emergence of an international regime. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO, USA p 206
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Posted by george on 24th August 2009
I used to be concerned in this direction when making a transition from working in industrial training and development education to working in educational development roles in higher education.
All categorisations of this sort serve to channel people and institutions into differently funded and privileged regimes. There are no essentials of this sort. Conceptual categories are constructed. These constructions do have agentive force in networks of inference or meaning (epistemologies, actor networks, discourses). They may be useful tools of development. They may also be part of a colonial apparatus of social control.
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Posted by george on 21st August 2009
Or, at least that is one possible reading of this following example from HESA’s Guidelines for the use of the DLHE Longitudinal Survey Dataset.
To illustrate how this is done:Black, mixed and other ethnic group graduates accounted for 21.9% of the selected Sample A.
From the initial census it is known that these graduates represent just 4.9% of all graduates
To ensure that these graduates feature in the analysis in their correct proportion, the ‘black’, ‘mixed ethnic group’ and ‘other ethnicity’ graduates in the sample would be given a weight of 4.9/21.9.
You mean weight the results by 5/20 because most of the respondents were black! What is the correct proportion? This is a small example of how marginalised groups appear to have to work five times as hard just to be level.
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Posted by george on 17th August 2009
In many respects, OER and the Creative Commons licenses help propel US centered ideas of copyright and intellectual property, indirectly inserting such ideas on the back of moral concepts such as sharing, freedom and openness, as though sharing, freedom and openness didn’t exist before, and that the only way to protect such notions is with legal instruments that recognise copyrights in the first place!
This is a partial response that needs more thinking through. I admire Leigh taking this once more around the loop and I find his argument almost compelling. But, the extrapolation across the whole creative commons (CC) is problematic as is the denial that any part of any leopard might change its spots: CC is a big progressive step and there is a lot that is progressive in OER, too. I am not sure that the limited uptake of CC India means that CC is a bad idea everywhere. Nor is OER, even if the Capetown Declaration is flawed, as Stephen Downes has argued [ref to come]. With real struggles to be faced like the Digital Britain initiative, which is overtly colonialist and reactionary, suspecting and projecting covert neocolonialism throughout the broad OER and CC movements renders the struggle unwinnable, alienates allies and is, as Leigh implicitly acknowledges probably irrelevant in many places anyway.
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Posted by george on 16th August 2009
In the field of educational technology a creepy treehouse is an institutionally controlled technology/tool that emulates or mimics pre-existing technologies or tools that may already be in use by the learners, or by learners’ peer groups. Though such systems may be seen as innovative or problem-solving to the institution, they may repulse some users who see them as infringement on the sanctity of their peer groups, or as having the potential for institutional violations of their privacy, liberty, ownership, or creativity. Some users may simply object to the influence of the institution.
Just want to post this as much as a reminder to myself as to any other people on the Brookes (or any other) PCTHE: as we branch out to using more social technologies than the VLE, there are risks as well as rewards
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Posted by george on 15th August 2009
There are three main ways we can characterise most peoples online internet and mobile activity and presence. Let me state up front that these distinctions are purposely blunt, but do act as effective and critical distinctions, especially when talking to people about how and why they can manage their online identities.
Josie Fraser characterises these as: personal, professional and organisational. The article is a very useful intro to some of the problems around personal identity management.
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