Ons voorkeure, ons fiemies.

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.

‘S gan fágthaí a’m ach cnáimhín

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.

Croke Park…

… 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.

Sunshine…

… 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.

Interfacing ICT4E Research, Policy and Practice

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…

Bhuel de thug mé cos ar an siúlóid mhór…

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…

There was…

… 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.

Sometimes…

… 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.

Paris CDG? Yeah, right…

DLD 09 were not convinced. The problem about playing fast and loose with location is that when you really are stuck in an airport  transit lounge and you want to do some shared activity on line, they are hard to convince that this time you are not messing about!

The upshot was that we had to run another ‘realworld’ session yesterday to close out the current course. And it was actually very impressive to see how far they had come in a few months.  A couple did absolutely fantastic pecha-kucha  on their projects; others went for more traditional presentation and one even laid-on a bespoke YouTube slot.

Funny how quickly these endings come around.  Another course hears off into the wild blue yonder and I go back to the deskwork…

There are compensations. A British Council Conference invite has come around for mid-June. Talks in Potsdam and Vienna are both lined up for the autumn and now a very interesting opening slot for a Dublin workshop on digital literacy and 21 century higher education has come along.

A morning of light rain…

…has made much of the riveside seating along Kankerjevo nabrezje a bit too damp for comfort. But I’ve found a dry seat under a huge umbrella at Corso and am sitting here, contentedly, sipping a very decent cafe latte and watching the Sunday afternoon crowd pass by. Ljubljana has its rewards for the weary academic traveller.

Later I might take the path up to the castle. It’s steep and winds upwards through a stunning forest setting. But right now here is good enough. Which in itself says a lot about the last and next few weeks.

Looking across the Three Bridges towardsthe castle

International datelines and other nuisances to the more productive knowledge economy

Funny thing technology…. recently we decided to try something a bit different within  the work being done by the current Digital Learning Design group. It wasn’t anything other than a spin on the theme of framed /assisted DL but it produced interesting discussions and a lot of learning. 

We had fun with the ideas of ‘Monday’ and ‘5pm’. This resulted in exploring how notions like these don’t have all that much currency up here on t’internet. Our ‘Monday’ ran from 06:15 Auckland time to  23:35 Dublin local time in Dublin when we decided it was  probably time to shut the shop .  The 36 hour day has arrived!

And despite the cynical nature of some of the tasks involved, levels of participation in the activities were high.  I think we all learnt a few things – about technology, the politics of place, learning design and indeed the learning process when it’s at a remove. Of course there was room also for more reflection. But it came at a price. We totally thrashed the two-hour nature of our weekly session, for instance: despite some half-hearted initial efforts aiming to keep the work within the usual time frame.  Then there were mad dashes up the M50 when offices were closed for the evening, there were teams that needed to be pep talked, cats that needed feeding, and schools systems that belong in the third world.  All stuff it’s hard to factor into the mix when you ask some simple question around how a (normal) weekly, m-level teaching and learning slot be dragged into the contemporary moment.

Perhaps the key part of the system-side learning in all of this was that time frames don’t frame – they just broadly shape. And GoogleGroups seems to have stood up reasonably well to our sea trial… However, DLD Note4 is still out there: and, I  advised, better sooner rather than later.

Memory and meaning don’t always match well when you’re on global time.

The politics of forgetting

Increasingly I seem to find myself living in a world where nothing much counts unless it happened this semester or at best last.  Or it has something to do with management. We inhabit a now that seems to overlay everything else and overwrite all our pasts and which excoriates everything that doesn’t neatly fit the rubric of the new order.

Take the recent visit to our school by one of the university luminaries. Leaving aside the lack of grace displayed in corralling us for the event without even a nod towards an explanation as to what it was all about, what followed was an exercise in the ”narrative of victory” that left me wondering whether anything other than metrics holds purchase in the heads of these people.

Excessively managerialism comes to mind as does cynically underplaying both the tensions of trying to work meaningfully in an exclusionary context and the debilitating effects of actually saying what you think in the face of transactional leadership on an almost manic scale. 

Then this morning, in my inbox:

The proposal for a revised Grade Approvals Process for full implementation in the Semester 2 grading session has now been Approved. Information on the revised Grade Approvals Process, including frequently asked questions, is available on the staff section of the Assessment website. S2 judgements may now be entered in Gradebook. All who deliver modules should ensure compliance. Structure and component information for modules reflects what was submitted and verified prior to the start of this academic year and the assessment strategies are no longer subject to change. 

I truly don’t know whether to laugh or cry.   

Kiteflyer’s Hill.

When you go to the TED site – like so many do at this time of the year to catch up on the latest and wildest stuff – it’s almost impossible not to then start wandering around revisiting TEDs that lit a fire or caught the eye previously. Or to pick up on something you missed last time. Like this one. Given that I am a lifelong, paid up member of The Fairground Attraction appreciation solidarity, you’d have to wonder how I missed it for so long.  But there it is. So here’s to life’s Kiteflyers and those who climb that hill.

The irony….

… wasn’t lost on those present – including the speaker.

Dr Stuart Griffin of Kings College London gave a fascinating talk on Peacekeeping and Stabilisation at the first of a new series of strategic studies seminars at NUI Maynooth. The venue was the Upper Loftus Room.

While he explored changing doctrinal issues around the military contribution to PSOs and the finer points of hot stabilisation / warfighting within Chapter 7 UN type interventions, below us in the Lower Loftus Room, the college gospel choir was in both fine voice and extended practice.
There was a touch of the surreal about it all; pictures of weary peacekeepers doing what they can in places like Rwanda, Cambodia and Somalia, set against the soaring strains of ‘Oh Happy Day’. 

But hey, what can you do except smile… both in their own ways are about acceptance and ability,  they just need the right environment…

Petabytology…

… is perhaps what the new dogma should be called.

I’ve just reread this piece by Chris Anderson is the hope that I misread it the first time. I don’t think I did. Among other things it suggests:

“Google’s founding philosophy is that we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.”

and

“Petabytes [of data being crawled by algorithms] allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.”

The piece is titled The End of Theory; The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. My fear is that the claim may actually be right.  And this is not fear rising out of any deep and meaningful relationship with old-school scientific method – I’d consider myself an interpretivist, I suppose, if pushed to declare a broad allegiance. But to see feral, untrammelled positivism taking things by the throat like this is unnerving, to put it mildly. Is this really all we can now look forward to if we turn to research to unpack the conditions of our times and lives? 

It’s all too reminiscent of the story told about Mortimore and the research he and his colleagues did in London in the 1970s. It was one of those Big Science pieces where stats and figures played lynchpin roles in the findings. Wearing anoraks in classrooms was – we were told with deadly earnest – clearly and demonstrably causal when it came to misbehaviour. (And sod the lack of safe coat storage and faulty heating in run-down buildings.)

If it is, then as a signed-up, paid up advocate of these digital times I think I want my money back…

Troppo prevedibile.

I read recently that English is a morphologically poor language. Perhaps so.  But in every other sense it deals well with endings.  In fact it could be argued that English is to the languages of the world what Venice is to its cities; a splendidly improbably confection of styles and intentions that somehow works. Despite age and weathering and all the despoilations of the modern urban turn. And a myriad other reasons. But essentially English facilitates wonderfully what Venice is all about; the conflictions of endings. The romantics of the 19th century knew it for what it was and more recently in a wonderfully ironic way so do the citizens of the city. 

Venice has been on my mind a lot lately. Partly because of my recent visit and partly because I’m re-reading – in snatches of time stolen from other things – Invisible Cities.  As a piece of writing it continues to draw me back and draw me in. Not many books do so. 

So while leaving Venice is perhaps always a statement on hope of return, it was also an ending of sorts this time.  Been there, written the postcards, bought the t-shirt. I’ve even taken morning coffee by a window onto San Marco; like a million others.  And then there’s the mask…

And what a mask!  

With seven days of vaporetto journeys behind me, some wonderful memories and a greatly increased understanding of the ontological challenges of generating a worthwhile repository tucked away in the belfield brain, I rolled out of Plazza Roma  on route to Marco Polo International.  Leaving Isidora  and Share.TEC to others.

So perhaps there is some small satisfaction in crediting things, and moving on.

There are worse ways…

… to spend a Sunday morning than sitting with a coffee by a window overlooking a quiet Dublin street, revisiting moments from the year gone by while outside the world goes about its January business.

 Particularly when you know that this is something which will be increasingly difficult to find time for over the weeks and months ahead.

What endures…

The traditional packaging of best wishes

… can still surprise in a good way.  The hall table these Christmas Packages rest on is an old, foot-pedalled, sewing machine; a tangible link with the past in the Belfield home. And the packages in the picture? Another link.

Home-made Christmas Pudding – each one a special request; cherries, no cherries, extra of this or less of that…  All ready for Christmas.  This year, as last year and the one before.

Out here on the rocky edge of Europe things endure as well as change.

The Teaching Grid, Warwick.

I had the pleasure of keynoting the Warwick Teaching Spaces of the Future event earlier in the week. There’s often a bit of anxiety around hitting the right tone for something like this but for once I was pretty clear what I wanted to say and what colleagues in the early stages of a really exciting development in technologising the learning space might benefit from thinking about. Mainly, I suppose, because I feel we are often coming at this from such a long way behind at Belfield; despite the fantastic work recently being done by IT Services and AVC in particular.  Still, it was good to get the opportunity to hear what people like Gary Saunders,  Tony Wilson and Cath Lambert have to say about the field.

Some of the ground we covered as the day progressed is by now pretty much well-rehearsed – the millennial challenge to higher education, the problematic of education as identity development, the political economy of the contemporary university, the Wesch concerns. But as always when a roomful of interested people has the chance to engage on a subject that is a bit disruptive of tried & trusted practice there were moments of genuine wonder and insight.

One aspect of the day that really stood out for me was the quality of theorising on HE space and its pedagogical uses. Cath Lambert offered a challenging (and very Warwick!) view of the redrawing of learning and teaching relationships being done at their Reinvention Centre within a CETL project shared by Warwick and Oxford Brooks. Later, Andrea Raiker and Nicola Reilly offered interesting counterpoints and extensions to this, grounded in the work they’re doing on creative learning spaces and ‘collaboratories’ (collaborative student inquiry spaces) at their respective universities. Each gave us lots to think about concerning how underdeveloped this aspect of the new teaching world can seem.

Another was the quality and direction of discourse around learning design. This included commentary on the physical and fiscal dimensions of designing creative spaces explored by Mark Dudek – including some really intriguing observations on the Plowden era and its progressive education settings – and the often overlooked centrality of the architectural brief and managing that relationship with facility design professionals. It also encompassed the importance of pedagogical design to the learning act & experience – much of this put in play by Gary Saunders. And all of which helped me shape and sharpen further my own interests in this area. It was good to see questions of critical stance, imaginative criticism and emerging social. imaginaries in higher education being discussed and debated by people who understand and care about such matters.  Indeed, such concerns for the meaningful rather than unthinking technologisation of the teaching space really touched a nerve among the participants and led to the most interesting conversations of the day.

Tony Wilson’s insights into the BSF experience were also valuable; as were his rather puckish observations on courage and working with those leading change.

And of course in one of those uniquely HE ironies, I had to go to a conference in a different country to meet for the first time a colleague who works in the building next to my own. What he had to say over coffee (and during Jonothan Neelands excellent workshoping of a learning space) about teaching and learning spaces and the politics of innovative action around pedagogy in higher education could, on its own, have made the trip worthwhile. Notwithstanding the more Bursar-friendly alternative of a moot in some coffee shop at Belfield. But sometimes you just need to be somewhere else.

Il tempo che resta…

It’s that kind of Saturday morning. Obligations met; a decent cup of coffee to the good; sunlight over a garden too wet to tend, and the startings of another ending in the air – it’s truly autumnal up an down our road. Another academic year shakes itself out and takes form.

There’s still email to catch up on after my trip to Leuven and Brussels.  And I am doing a cursory scan-through when one in particular catches my eye - a Geary Institute listserve about an upcoming talk by Mike Wilson (of the NCAD/DIT GradCAM) in the ongoing Humanities Institute of Ireland series. It’s titled: Knowledge production: the university, public culture and the possibility of dissent.

It’s the dissent bit that I like. So, a ’Click for more..’ or two later and I’m hooked. Mike is clearly attracted by the work of Giorgio Agamben – particularly around the question of atheology and what Agamben puts forwards as the irreconcilable differences between modernity and eschatology. As a way of adding virtue to the time that is left between time and its ending, these have a certain appeal. But perhaps that’s because a part of me is still out there, walking those cobbled streets and navigating those low-land moments when it’s easy to imagine some other version of the self, and be for a while at least a part of streetscapes and cafe lives that would otherwise be beyond us.  At  a stretch, to know for what he is that passing stranger on a gabled laneway, moving perhaps between harbour and guild house. Or, more likely, between harbour and some cloister inn.

Not my usual Saturday morning fare. But then, dissent takes many forms…