#RawThoughts

Short posts to capture interesting information or my initial thoughts or impressions of something.

Weekly round-up

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A picture of various draft word processed documents

Just a couple of items from he last week or so that I thought were of interest: Digital transformation in higher education. An interesting and easy to digest summary of some issues in the digital trends for higher education. Perhaps as you’d expect, this is very techno-centric rather than concerned with, for example, teaching and … Read more

The gatherings of a ‘smart’ university

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Ben Williamson has written a great post here on the concept and realities of a smart, quantified and data driven university. The post outlines the increasingly overt positioning of universities as conduits for data collection, analysis and exploitation. The datafication of universities as the ‘smart university’ or ‘intelligent campus’ provides a clear pathway for the … Read more

Ethnographic study of experiences online

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I came across this quote in Veletsianos Open practices and identity: Evidence from researchers and educators’ social media participation which strikes me as a useful approach to auto-ethnographic research of (online) experiences in different contexts: This study was influenced by cyberethnography (Ward, 1999) and virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000). However, unlike these analytical approaches, and akin to Watulak (2011), instead of doing ethnography (Green … Read more

Goals for technology in education

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This looks like a really interesting conference in Aarhus University from where this tweet on goals for technology in education caught my eye.   Three ambitious goals for how to further expand the productive use of technology in education. #educationdisrupted pic.twitter.com/a1vIEEN3Br — Nicki Brøchner (@Brochner) November 21, 2018 While there’s much to agree with here, there … Read more

Block chain – a candle in the wind?

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An interesting post from Donald Clark on Blockchain in learning and education here. I’ve still to see a single implementation in learning that is worth the candle. In truth education and training does not want to be decentralised and democratised or disintermediated, as almost everyone in the field works in an institutions that will protect themselves … Read more

Artificial intelligence and the disintermediation of Learning & Development

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This is a really interesting post on artificial intelligence and disintermediation of Learning & Development. Are the current professional qualification frameworks developing practitioners with the future-relevant capabilities? Implementing a capability framework is an opportunity to engage and support managers with the development of their people – some thoughts from a conversation I had with an … Read more

On theory

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A sociogram of my Facebook network

"The idea that one can trace the causal connections of any events without employing a theory, or that such a theory will emerge automatically from the accumulation of a sufficient amount of facts, is sheer illusion." — Friedrich Hayek — Hayek_Quotes (@HayekQuotes1) August 10, 2018 Worth repeating, especially in relation to ideas that ‘big data’ … Read more