Wonderful notice on a seminar room door in college this evening: ‘The Risk & Uncertainty Reading Group may have to be cancelled tonight due to unforseen circumstances. Contact [Name] for further info.’
I don’t know if it’s a wind-up but it made me chuckle…
As I waited for the train to Belfast earlier today, this scene caught my eye. It was in the seating area at Connolly Station but it could be almost anywhere in these global times. Haven’t we come a distance…
Scene from a New Ireland
Nonoperating temperature: -4° to 113° F (-20° to 45° C).
Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing.
Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m).
But no webcam.
Still, looks interesting.
So it looks like it’s going to happen: the Minister has announced – in that now inimitable style of his unencumbered by much in the way of though beyond the moment - that the National University of Ireland is to be dissolved.
Its ‘outlived’ its usefulness. The press release goes to great pains to emphasise the ‘ limited’ and ’small number of administrative and academic functions’ the NUI currently carries out. And suggests that the bright, shiny new ‘qualifications and quality assurance agency’ will do a grand job anyway. And ther’s the IUA too – sound men, can be depended on to do right by the knowledge economy and all that. Now they really will be ‘the representative body for the seven Irish universities’ that they always wanted to be. Modern. Progress, forward-facing going forward, don’t you know. Besides there’s that massive 3 million that can maybe be saved by killing off NUI ; good PR in these desperate times. And a few of the lads have their eyes on that Merrion Square site too…
The matter of the NUI senators is waved away. The Minister ‘will address this issue by working closely with his colleague, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, in the context of wider plans for Seanad reform’. Grand; should be gone by Tuesday so.
I wonder would it have been a different (wrecking )ball game altogether if the univeresity constituency generally didn’t have this rather bothersome habit of returning people like Shane Ross and David Norris?
I’ve spent some time recently wondering about the nature of things digital. Is a weblog a document? A YouTube video? A FaceBook page? Are any of these in any traditional sense either fixed or truthful? And why might this matter? These questions I find troubling; they are the kind that niggle when you teach & research a line over a period of time but come inexorably to accept that there are large areas of strategic gap and omission in your project. Basically, too much time spent looking and not enough seeing.
Of course it is a truism to say that information technology has radically changed the world. The past thirty years or so has seen the reconstruction of all major global economies around notions of knowledge and data passaging. Digital documents – in their myriad forms – fill the airwaves. They are germane to almost every emerging practice around contemporary economy and society. Most especially, they run native to the possibilities of communication networks; they travel on demand and instantaneously, and invite easy transposition, translation, repurposing. We gather, process, and exploit information on an unprecedented scale and at an unprecedented pace. Aided by the ubiquitous and increasingly powerful transmission capacities of the internet, the architectures of what it is to know and act are endlessly shaped and reshaped – both physically and, arguably, cognitively. And to succeed in this frenetic world we must be at ease with its technologies and its value systems which are interwoven in essentialising ways.
With the digital turn of the past decade, notions of what constitutes the act of ‘documenting’ and the product of such acts has truly gone liquid to a startling extent. Nothing remains untouched in a storm of change and new practice. Foucault terms this the state-creating function of the economy and it seems to me to be almost wholly ascendant even in these post-Tiger days: market values are extended to every social action and embedded in every institution. And so there is, I suppose, no reason why the act of personal documentation and (re)presentation should escape similarly reinvention and repurposing.
And here, in this Best Of All Possible Worlds, even schools suffer from variations on this digital fever. From an early age we expect young people to learn to process larger and ever-more complex data sets. Our students are expected to gain and hone the literacies, skill-sets and understandings that will allow them to be ’successful’. As workers we are incessantly told we must be more entrepreneurial, more innovative, more flexible and adaptive, more team and task savvy, more opportunity focussed, more resilient, and above all more driven, more competitive.
Technology also proliferates in all the defining spaces of our lives; the home and the social. And while I love my technology, I am still perverse enough to let these things niggle. A whole global generation now goes out to play on the web – mostly in the rich, global north but also increasingly in many parts of the south. Our usages range – like those of our younger digital compatriots – from the unremarkable to the unrecognisable but centre mainly around the participatory cultures of social media and building what are – despite the assumptions that can too easily be made about this – unique spaces / worlds, often personalised to the extent that a particular public genre of social media will allow. We Facebook, WordPress, YouTube, IM ourselves into existence(s). And in doing so, we present ourselves in terms those many others outside our shiny, digitalised contexts can find troubling and even ‘untrue’.
I think often I really should find time to write something about all this digital fever… a sort of Uncle John’s guide to it all. Perhaps here on my blog. 
But then, inevitably, another set of those unmet obligations derail all good intentions. Lakelife kicks in. The academic groves need tending. Another load of pedagogical wood needs chopping. And it’s back to the mortgaged hours.
Cambridge was celebrating. So it was interesting to be one in the crowd when The Senate House and Old Schools, Kings and Kings Chapel were transformed by the son et lumière brilliantly assembled by Ros Ashton for the 800th Anniversary Finale.
It’s funny how an idea can sometimes catch your attention, move in, have a bit of an evaluative mooch around, then settle down and make itself at home. Welcome or not.
I’ve never though of myself as anything other than indecisive and over-caution but I’ve beginning to realise this may not be wholly the case. And that while hitting that ’send’ button may have been instrumental in dropping me into some of the worst situations I’ve found myself in from time to time, it has also been most certainly behind many of the very best. My hesitations have, however, been over signing up for conferences outside my comfort zone* & that I can’t really afford* to attend — not strategic job hops. ( Never got that one sorted at all.)
All of which brings me to a point where I sit here this evening wondering about things that normally don’t bother me – though not, alas, with any guarantee of success. Like whether we should worry that notions of what constitutes the act of documenting the self /the product of such acts have ‘gone liquid’ to such a startling extent with the digital turn of the past decade. These last two days have been given over to trying to articulate the ways that digital documentation can both construct and hollow-out the self. And the implications of this for truth and public (re)presentation; like this blog. It’s truly head-melting stuff.
There’s possibly even a paper in it… because it seems to me that it’s not so much a JFDI thing: more a there’s another bridge – I wonder if… one. (Followed usually by a loud, dorsal-searing whooofff! )
Might be difficult to place for publication though…
[ * Both terms used, of course, with real linguistic appreciation.. ]
… become noon, become evening.
I’ve spent the day lost in the slow rhythm of correcting or more accurately grading college work. Truthfully: it’s the part of this job I least enjoy. But it has its compensations.
Like finding a piece that is beautifully crafted – unbound by the moment, less about context than content; with a depth that surprises both philosophically and stylistically.
Only one in more than two hundred, perhaps. A product of situation rather than its prisoner. But a gift. Like a snowy, January morning with a dog to walk.
… to go making fun of the whole snow at Christmas /rustic setting /mid-18th century ye olde village scene. Snowed in with nothing but the fire, the family and the internet to amuse me.
Sometimes life’s good.
Another solstice wassailed. Christmas just a few hours away. Another turning year. And it’s been a memorable one.
Ewan McIntosh did a lovely rundown on his year a Christmas or two ago and I remember thinking at the time; nice idea, must do something like that sometime… But then I never seem to have blogged enough either in terms of quality or quantity ! There are so many gaps and lost moments in the Belfield blog that sometimes I wonder why I bother at all. Then I think about the critical impact of just inquiring, as I do when I try to write an entry, and in that most Irish of all traditions: I can’t go on, I’ll go on…
Despite the presence (as they say) of more absences in the Belfield chronology than there are ideas in a DES IT policy framework, three places stand out, when I actually get around to looking back over the year, and two events:
Venice. And I think I’ll carry the better moments of that trip with me for a long time. So many threads came together. Hope and even expectation where previously there had been little or nothing. Though in the way of these things coming togethers also signify endings. Ciò nonostante: Grazie mille di cuore a La Serenissima e la mia ragazza…
Ljubljana. Again. And again a bagful of memories to help shore up the quotidian nature of what passes as a day job. Corso and three casual conversations with strangers over the length of a morning sitting drinking good coffee and watching the river and the rest of it pass me by. Heartening in a surprising way. Those conversations started me out on the track of (rediscovering) Giroux and pushing along what I started ages ago on Sabatier - to the point that I would actually seek him out for a conversation at another memorable event in another beautiful city.
And most recently, Göteborg. Not just for the reception what I had to say received there – though that really was a good moment! – but more especially for the discussions with participants and other keynotes in the days before and after the conference. There’s a lot to be said for a good meal and an intense head-to-head with half a dozen well-wired academics, thinking librarians and open access advocates.
The first event that lingers happened early in the year. And it would be comical – or at least mordantly funny – if it wasn’t so disheartening at the time. One of those questionable decisions that I can make put me in front of a fellowship board. It was supposed to be to do with developing innovative pedagogies in higher education. And so there I was, chasing a sliver of possibility but knowing in my heart I was wasting my time. The full insight hit in force as I sat there fielded another inane question from another inane member of the board – I can’t remember whether it was the singularly unqualified ‘lead’ on academic policy or the director of Teaching & Development who has no experience of either. But I knew then that this was a closed and bolted door. Wherever things were going, they was going without me and nothing I could say or do would change that. My regrets around that moment are twofold; first, that I actually engaged at all with what had from teh start all the makings of another exercise in cronyism, and second that I didn’t just up and leave the room, there and then. At least there would have been some moral courage involved in doing that.
The second event was the standing ovation I got for my contribution to the Göteborg conference. And the topic? Innovative pedagogies in higher education. Sweet that. And restorative.
But now, perhaps it’s time to move on.
Long boring story of angst, climate concern, missing the last post for overseas etc, etc.
But to cut to the chase, the Belfield household decided to do the charity donation thing this year instead of posting Christmas cards. So I was looking around for something seasonably twee, digital and appropriate to send instead – you know the story – snowflakes, rustic setting /mid-18th century ye olde village scene, carol singers, smiling dogs, howling children etc.
But then I found this….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqwmSlTU0sU&feature=channel
Hope all you who drop by here from time to time have a great Christmas… and all the best for 2010.
And ye better watch out…!
UCD and TCD together with Irish Aid have recently been running a seminar series on development issues as part of an on-going project to put a unique, new, cross-institutional masters-level initiative on the ground in Ireland. It has led to some some very interesting talks both here at Belfield and also in Trinity. Well… until now at any rate!
Friday was my turn to take the floor. It’s probably reasonable to say that while I think it went off well enough, my penguins didn’t fly and one of my elephants (problems we prefer to ignore) came as a bit of an unknown for a lot of those at the seminar. The moral of the first part is simple; always make sure Quicktime is installed on a presentation PC in a place you’ve not spoken in previously before trying to play your comical-but-pointed Quicktime video. The second was a bit more worrying. I brough up Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid criticism of the political processes and rational underpinning norther governments’ involvement in overseas development and aid. But surprisingly a fair number in the room hadn’t yet come across her particular brand of smooth, loaded rhetoric.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise. The programme that Paul Walsh, Padraig Camody et al. are putting together is very much in the Amartya Sen / Jeffery Sachs tradition; reasoned and hopeful. The question of needing to engage the more sensational counter-currents is however a thought for a necessary future year 1 inclusion. After all, if the course graduates aren’t aware of all of the type of ideologically charged, anti-aid stuff that’s out there, it’s hard to see them not being phased by it when they hit it in the fieldwork stages.
The superpipes part of the talk was more like home ground; technology and its affordances for education in a developing world setting, the sometimes ambivalent IT / Telco sector practices, the telecommunications superpipes now hitting developing countries’ shores around the world – as well as the ownership of these and the continuing paucity of provision for the African situation. We also looked briefly at the ITU role in all of this and the part played by ‘maverick’ initiatives such as OLPC, and the increasingly valuable role of ‘northern’ universities in supporting and promoting development and meaningful collaboration with southern counterparts.
But as always the best part of the talk was the conversation that followed. Many of the seminar participants may not have heard of ‘the best looking voice’ on the anti-aid side but their passion and intelligence was obvious in our discussion.
As an academic and humanistic initiative, this programme deserves to succeed. I hope it gets a kinder reception across the university more broadly that it has in my own school.
It is not yet December, but the sky darkens earlier every evening and there are other signs of wintering times ahead. The past few months have been frenetic. It’s been an academic hand-to-mouth existence with talks and papers passably ready no more that a day or so – if even that – in advance of whenever it was the event took place.
The HII at Belfield, Potsdam, Vienna, Brussels. The Curragh, Malahide, Brookfield, DIT Cathal Brugha. And Liverpool.
I’ve hawked my wears with an enthusiasm that can be put down to hope more than belief but, in the main, found an encouraging amount of interest in what was being rehearsed. And so the planned wintering: another well-intentioned turn to the page. Which – even in the shadow of the necessary recompile and reset of ideas, memory of earnest talks in cafes and on hotel corridors, the exchange of business cards and hearts, digital indiscretion, and the compact folding in on itself of more than one professional hope; ons fiemies - looms like some trompe-l’oeil future. Or as a restorative and regaling turn, perhaps, which makes complete the journey from July to here and signals – finally – the calculus required in cutting loose from Venetian days and the abandonment of rigorous, longitudinal project in favour of the more venal, gainful and available.
All of which results in my working on a new grammar. One of inventiveness, the sustained, responsibility, probity in the face of disappointment. Questions - as Attridge might say – of indebtedness to the other, of trust and betrayal, and of confession and truth to the self. So yes, there’s performance in it all and instantiation. The ineluctable address of intention towards what might otherwise be idle longing, makes for this possibility. However faint and far away and however awry the actualization that may result.
And of course it may be the travel pass needed to clear this karoo for once and for all. To drum under different skies. Or it may be an end of dreaming.
There you are in early-June, ploughing through another badly-written, badly conceived dissertation which lacks originality, vigour and anything like criticality. And you have this idea; Couldn’t a module on critical analysis and writing out of policy texts go a long way towards giving this crew the understandings and skill-set they need to seriously raise their game?
So you beaver away for a couple of months drafting a course, finding resources, working on novel assessment arrangements. Getting it through the Vogonesque bureaucracy. The works. Basically, innovating. Because innovation is not just about doing more. It’s about doing things differently; in a interesting, motivating and more effective way.
But that’s the thing about innovating in and around a university programme. Sometimes the buggers don’t want to be ‘innovated’… it gets in the way of a quiet and well-ordered life. Better the good old instrumental stuff, the long booklist and a take-home test!
One candidate registered.
I’ve always consoled myself with the though that over the years I’ve become a half-decent, forward-facing thinker where new courses are concerned. (Unlike the younger self and the more Norman & Stoppard’s Philip Henslowe modality he lived through; when your feet are in the fire you will promise anything… ) Now I’m not so sure.
Ah well, best just put it down to ignoring too much outside of my own compositional practice and an overweening concern for aesthetic modernity…
Besides there’s always a conference to look forward to.
… is without a doubt an impressive place and for many it still has a resonance that goes beyond the sporting alone. I come from a background where both histories of the ground were freely intermingled and easily switched between. So part of me has always been a bit cynical about the ‘modernisation’ that put a towering great sports stadium where the old Hogan and Cusack stands used to be. Not least I suppose because my late father – after 50 years of unbroken attendance at Hurling All Irelands – found to his dismay that he could no longer find the wherewithal to continue being a season ticket holder in this bright, new corporate world. [His local club rallied around and ensured he was never short of a ticket through the remainder of his life - but that's another story.]
However, for reasons that are more trouble to relate than they’re probably worth, I am sitting here on a rather overcast morning in the conference area of the ‘new’ Hogan stand. Below me – or rather below and level with and above me – the U2 stage totally dominates the playing arena. The conference area itself is comfortable and a little understated. Corporate boxes double as working spaces and meeting rooms and there’s a bit of a 21st century buzz to it all that draws you in. Naturally, the eye is drawn constantly to the pitch – or rather where it should be!- and the surrounding banks of seating that just seem to rise skyward against all odds and expectations.
The old guy had an expression which today – in this place and space – seems particularly apt; Changing days always suits someone. Usually someone else. But give things a chance and they can surprise you. Perhaps he had a point after all.
… from a counterindicative sky. That would be July, near Dublin.
It’s the time of year I get to do a bit of reading. Nothing work related. Just a few bits and pieces to fuel the spirit and offer some sort of regeneration.
Just noticed that Ewan McIntosh is also reading one of the small pile I’ve assembled – though I think he’s finding it more impressive that I did. Mind you, there have been moments lately when what the Zanders say about being out of the boat reverberates to the core of everything I try to hang on to in this life. Still, it’s all a bit over enthusiastic about needed only to step-away and re-vision to see the absolutely perfect way forward buried in the problematic. Which may be why Sennett’s The Craftsman remains for me the touchstone for these times. I reread it over the past few days in part to help frame an answer to some personal impasses about where next & why for the year ahead. And what struck me once again is the power of the claims he makes for freedom from means-ends relationships and the hope – and price – of dignity.
The Zanders would seem never to have had to deal with the type of idiocy that results in placing people with no true understanding of either teaching or learning in control of academic development in a university setting. Sennett at least offers the possibility of a meaningful personal way forward when faced with dishonest practice and square-lake cronyism.
It can be hard to please people sometimes. The morning sessions of the recent GeSCI Workshop were busy and informative. But over lunch there was a discernible sense of frustration among the participants that there were not enough opportunities to converse and debate. So on a hunch, I decided to take a more dialogical approach to my own session than originally requested and planned. I worked out rather well…
We opened with a brief introduction to the panel and a short scene setting exercise that involved elephants in corners – those things we all know but don’t always feel comfortable acknowledging. In this case; the extraordinary disconnect between policy making and research of any kind, and the particular challenge we all face in education with the emergence of ubiquitous computing and web 2.0 modalities of learning. We explored briefly the nature and intent of the major players in the ICT4E arena and the various forces driving various agendas forward. This scene-setting generated a considerable amount of discussion in the workshop.
We then approached the task of structuring a discussion in a simple and direct way. A question was displayed on screen, one or two of the panel offered an initial response and then the conversation moved to the floor. Of the five questions we had hoped to address we covered four.
Things that work…
Initially, a number of very different and very geographically diverse projects were identified that fitted this description in terms of ICT usage in education. However, serious issues around continuity and sustainability were raised where many such project interventions are concerned. It became clear from the discussion that it was very difficult indeed to point to examples of sustained ICT4E where research, policy and good practice were successfully combined. The idea of ‘brokerage’ was advocated as a useful means of connecting leading edge practice and policy making.
What ‘education innovation’ looks like…
This was an interesting discussion and at the end of it we were still not totally sure we could agree what it looked like. But we were pretty much in agreement about the usefulness of keeping on looking for it! Different conceptual understandings of innovation were discussed; industrial models versus educative models, the linkage between innovation and ICT at both general and field-specific level, and the policy implications of buying-into one model as opposed to another. Several speakers emphasises the moral and values aspects of education – and the challenge of retaining these in a world where economic ideals were more often emphasises.
Policy making as practice….
We discussed two issues under this heading: the value and utility of networks and lessons form policy work North and South. The discussion was lively and productive. We agreed that policy was a complex and layered process, all too often misunderstood or only partially understood by those encountering the process for the first or at least first significant time. We got some way into the task of identifying who the policy makers are and how and why they operate as they do. We also made some gains in terms of placing teachers and other field practitioners at the rightful heart of the process. And we unpicked some of the more general problems and benefits of operating in and through networks for change.
Networks and partnerships…
A spin off from this last discussion saw further exploration by the workshop of the contributions and opportunities to participate that might usefully exist with a research network or partnership in ICT4E. The primacy of really understanding the practice context and the context right to the school level of the proposed intervention – with all its myriad challenges and opportunities – was emphasised. The various ways that governments and NGOs can contribute to framing and supporting policy for intervention and subsequent action were explored. And finally the role of the academy was emphasised – in terms of providing policy research expertise, focussed assistance where requested and in honest and constructive policy evaluation that focuses on lessons-learnt rather than target gain.
We closed the session on a slightly mischievous note by discussing the need to be able to know the difference between ‘the good guys’ and ‘the bad guys’ in policy and research terms. There were no clear outcomes from this particular area of the forum other than the conversation – both light hearted and more serious – it engendered subsequently over coffee and in the following sessions.
All in all an enjoyable and I think useful event. Though it falls somewhat under a pall of gloom when set alongside the recent news from Irish Aid…
This evening, about when our new School building was being officially inaugurated (in a meaningful and significant manner) by a covey of carefully chosen dignitaries, deputy registrars and other University placemen, I took my dog for his evening walk. It seemed to represent a better use of time. And as I stood in the parklands to the south of Castletown and watched him chasing swallows, I couldn’t help a fleeting thought and a rueful smile. What a pair…
… a considerable amount of activity around the Roebuck Buildings yesterday. Portfolios and assignments overflowing the desks in the main office, placement files being dropped off and/or collected, new regulations for grading and marking being explained to successive groups by those most concerned in that aspect of the School’s work, tri-corn mangement cabals all over the place – with faces looking suitably serious and concerned.
In short; busywork. On a major scale.
I was glad to be able to close my door and simply focus first on the assignment materials that have come in from the DLD programme and then on one of the new courses I am planning for next semester. Things like the sequestration of the university role, reading power , the deep nature of US neo-conservative policy, and failures of political & moral courage could wait for another time.
There are days when I regret not having left here long ago.
… there is light on the water of this digital world and the sun pours down on something to be wondered at.
“Now, as I sift through the pages of the anthology, I experience a strange thrill, something akin to a homecoming. Constantly uprooted, I have lived my life accepting the idea of home to be nothing more than notional, a clutch of haphazard memories. But here, between the covers of this book, I realize, my character has found shelter, and I an uplifting peace, amidst an eclectic sisterhood of writers.”
When I read this I know the voice instantly. And I can see the flowing, cursive script that once carried stories and poems to my classroom - that led me as a young teacher into a world of dancers and dancing and walled castles and younger hearts so lost in the poetry of themselves that they could see nothing and nobody else.
But this is far more. This is the work of a writer. Perhaps one still seeking that final something – that contemplative certainty of voice and place in the world. A restless, cosmopolitan soul, now touched by the whitefire of life and the otherwhere. But a writer to the core.
