Exciting
Emma Penney, Jessica Pauszek, and Mark Nowak share out living projects with moderation by Sherry Lee Linkon… don’t miss it! Register for this Zoom event below
The Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice invite you to a virtual event
should paid academics do work unrecognised by their employer?
This is a guest post from Dr Anna Bull, Lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the University of York and co-director of research and campaign organisation The 1752 Group.
My comments on Twitter seemed to resonate with a lot of people. Other tweeters revealed that the same had happened to them and shared their experiences of giving ‘free’ labour to non-academic organisations.
Requests for expertise can take various forms, ranging from a chat on the phone, to giving presentations, to contributing to workshops to help devise interventions/programmes, to writing content.
Engaging with non-academic audiences has become more common as the ‘impact’ and ‘knowledge exchange’ agendas have gained prominence within HE; academics are supposed to build relationships with users of their research and share knowledge outside the academy. These “impact” and “public engagement” activities are hugely important and researchers whose work can be applied in these ways should be…
View original post 1,394 more words
Digital activism for authentic open access
Technological advances have an ever increasing impact on every aspect of the education system, from the provisioning of education to working conditions and administrative governance. Unfortunately, technology is too often dumped onto education institutions leaving behind a big ecological footprint but no educational improvement. However, there are also many examples where technology can contribute in a positive way.
One example is the development of technological infrastructure that can facilitate increasing access to and work with open educational resources (OER). OER are free and openly licensed educational materials. Online platforms and the use of algorithms to collect and analyse user data are the technological infrastructure that can enable teachers and students to access as well as collaboratively create and share digital OER more efficiently. But don’t be fooled – not everything that is labelled as an OER service is aligned with OER values such as equity, openness and education…
View original post 894 more words
X
This is part of a special collection celebrating the centenary of Paulo Freire’s birth.
When Paulo Freire’s book ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ was published in English in 1972 nobody could have envisaged the Covid-19 pandemic or contemplated how Freire’s ideas, including his critical perspectives on technology, marginalisation and empowerment, might resonate with educators and the state of education during the emergency responses of 2020 and on-going disturbances of 2021/22. When our book ‘Conceptualising the Digital University’ was published coming into 2019 neither could we.
In our exploration of the concept of the digital university we critiqued the dominant neoliberal practices to date, and offered more hopeful possibilities for the future, based on Freire’s ‘Education for Critical Consciousness’ .
This reflection applies our praxis, developed through writing our book, by viewing the pandemic, through a Freirian lens. While we can…
View original post 1,510 more words
Take yr time, worth a slow read
At the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, I found myself, perhaps like everyone else, endlessly speculating on the long-term impact of Covid-19. Struggling to reach even the most tentative conclusions as to how the post-Covid future would unfold, I felt a desperate need to talk about it with others, and, as a historian, felt I needed to connect with the practitioners of our discipline, who as scholars whose preoccupation was to look at patterns of change over time, would have a unique insight.
To that end, I initially contacted my university, assuming that the academic staff would share my preoccupation, and I could step into the faculty debate. However, whilst the response was encouraging, it became clear that the academic staff were largely preoccupied by fire-fighting, coping with both re-writing the entire teaching programme and dealing with the pandemic-induced collapse of the university business model. There…
View original post 1,041 more words
Labour in the academy
Small stories of pandemic fatigue
1
You’re in the middle of a work meeting and your child pops in, visible on your screen for all to see. There is just a moment to decide whether you will panic or remain calm, to wonder how the people on the other side will react. Will they be welcoming or impatient; will your child be demanding or understanding this time? Are you in the middle of making a complex point where you need to concentrate, or are you less central and can turn off your camera and hide your home life from view? Even if those you care for do not appear on your screen, they are part of the hidden work that you are doing now: juggling attention, judging need. As pandemic disruption extends, you are all tiring of the novelty of worlds…
View original post 1,327 more words
Digital learning PD Dr Ann Lawless 