Author: DavidWebster
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Schrödinger’s Snowflake.
Too scared to make a phone call, and hear opposing views, while simultaneously the greatest threat to civilisation and ‘Western/enlightenment’ values in living memory? Dr Nicola Rivers and Dr Dave Webster The idea of Schrodinger’s Cat has recently been adopted as a metaphor for numerous cultural phenomena or tropes. You may have seen it related to the…
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Stop Trying to Fix Students and Start Trying to Fix the University
Dr Nicola Rivers and Dr Dave Webster What do Universities do for students to help them secure a thriving future? They offer them mindfulness; sign them up to resilience programmes; advocate that they cultivate grit, and encourage them to promote themselves as personal brands, ready to do battle in the brutal arena of the precarious, broken gig…
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Vulnerability, Resilience and the Wild Seas of Auto-Ethnography: A Personal Reflection.
Making sense of personal experience is hard. When it isn’t hard, I fear self-serving simplifications, even when such narratives cast us in an unflattering light. Traumatic events in our lives operate below the surface, like the riptide that drags you away from the course you’re sure you are navigating. You can put a rudder at…
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Between Resilience & Vulnerability: Experiences of the Neoliberal Academy – Conference Announcement
We are pleased to announce that our Between Resilience & Vulnerability: Experiences of the Neoliberal Academy conference will take place on May 15th, at the University of Gloucestershire’s Park Campus Cheltenham. Click here for full details/poster There are more details over at the http://projectsoftheself.com/ blog, including the call for contributions.
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Putting Fun in its Place: Workshop at Social Media in Higher Education conference.
I will be at SocMedHE17, in Sheffield, next week, to deliver a workshop. I have previously, with Dr Nicola Rivers, written about our scepticism of ‘fun’ language in HE, but the session next week will be more specific. I will blog about the participants’ response – but you can get a sense, in the outline…
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The Denial of Death, Masculinity, and a well-lived life
This post might have ended up on my my Dispirited blog, but there is enough cross-over with recent preoccupations here about grit to persuade me to pop here initially… Teaching is a funny thing. Sessions on material you have done many times before, and where you are pretty sure what is going to unfold, can knock…
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How much a smile cost?
How much a dollar really cost? The question is detrimental, paralyzin’ my thoughts Kendrick Lamar: How Much a Dollar Cost? Walking into the campus this morning, I had a chance encounter with one of my favourite colleagues, and ended up talking about the busy, and quite challenging, day that I had in store. She observed…
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What is ‘motivation porn’, and why does Higher Education seem addicted to it?
Dr Nicola Rivers and Dr Dave Webster. In our recent work, looking at discourses of ‘resilience’ and ‘grit’ in Higher Education, we have made only passing reference to a phenomenon that seems to occupy much of the same narrative space, namely motivation porn. The term ‘motivation porn’ refers to a form of narrative that seeks to associate…
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Building Cohort Identity through Social Media – LTHEchat #96
Update: The Storify of this event is now available at https://storify.com/LTHEchat/lthechat-no-96-building-cohort-identity-through-so This coming Wednesday 15th November 8-9PM (GMT), I’m excited to be hosting a Twitter chat for LTHEchat (Learning and Teaching in Higher Education chat). The topic will be: Building Cohort Identity through Social Media. After the event, the chat will be captured via Storify – and I…
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Higher Education is not The Apprentice, and neither is the ‘Real World’.
Dr Nicola Rivers and Dr Dave Webster. Enabled by technology, we were discussing assessment feedback in Higher Education, while watching an episode of The Apprentice*. Although neither us of us are entrepreneurs, or teach business, or retail, courses, what initially struck us when watching the Apprentice was that it offered a certain jouissance of judging others. The…
