Skip to content

MEANDERING DRAFT AND THE DEAD BIRD BLEEDING ON THE KEYBOARD

MEANDERING DRAFT AND THE DEAD BIRD BLEEDING ON THE KEYBOARD

We five are sitting on the last day of Hybrid Pedagogy Lab PEI during the unconference afternoon session. I am but the scribe of this swirl of ideas voiced in the hope of making sense of the pain we encounter in our varied personal and professional lives. On tap: why don’t people in general understand the value and flow of educational journies.

Blog posts can become conversations. If people respond. Lawrie Phipps had some comments on his blog recently and it shocked him —”Who actually comments on blogs anymore?” he asks. We are sitting at #DigPed PEI discussing annotation and which methods. Scott Robison nods and expresses with his face what we all feel — education is messed right up.

Robin DeRosa is trying to sort out and is concerned about things because she wants to know where the bigger picture work gets done. During a conference, she wants the thought leaders to gather from a variety of industries to gather and get the tough work done.

Lawrie Phipps worries about differentiating between the work self claimed thought leaders and what is actually being done. He takes issue with the noise and sound-bite thought lead-ness of some thought leaders in his beloved UK. These shady figures appear on the keynote circuit and they create an initial buzz, but then fizzle. It reflects poorly on the HigherEd landscape.

How do you differentiate the noise? We need people who want diverse models to structure and design programs. With all of the “awesome” people we have in our lives, how do we get people like Martin Weller to talk to others who want to enact change in higher ed?

There are personal and systemic changents that we share with those around us. How do we shape a more critical systemic group?

#DigPedSystems is what we might need? But Lawrie doesn’t believe that the focus should be on the PED — it should be focused more on the soft skills and “embodiment” as Amy Collier references in her Digital Design work.

We can come to conferences like #DigPed and no matter how oppressed you are can change your individual pedagogies, but systemically you will eventually hit a wall. Our enemies and how we counter them are un-nameable perhaps. Money doesn’t matter. We need to focus on low input high impact projects that affect change and create a need to be fulfilled.

OER may be a way for us to break through some of the barriers. As schools become run more like businesses, the human elements and public service are disappearing. People cannot see the public needs because of the privatization of #HigherEd. Public narratives are fledgling because of education not serving the common good. This lack/abuse of basic literacies have lead to UK being literally torn apart.

We need to find a way to talk to the public about the true possibilities of education.

Published inALLftwUncategorized

Comments are closed.

css.php