Author: DavidWebster
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Adventures in Flatland: Learning first..
I can’t seem to get used to it. No matter how many times I sit on the train North from Amsterdam, towards Groningen, the flatness of the landscape shocks me. The undulating Cotswolds are hardly mountainous, but by contrast seem an epic landscape. My first ever trip here, oddly enough, was about climbing something, but…
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The curious case of social media
I’m really looking forward, next week to giving an opening keynote at an event our Postgraduate Research students have put on. Later in the day, @nikirivers and I will be exploring our ideas around resilience, and there’ll be a range of topics, from Anarchy to horror films (I’ll be hiding my eyes during the latter).…
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Student Grandmothers, mitigating circumstances, and process
Yesterday seemed to draw the issue of ‘student-shaming’, and the murky world of staff attitudes to student’s requests for extended deadlines, into the open. The spur for this was a piece in the USA-based Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled To My Student, on the Death of Her Grandmother(s). The piece, written as a character, uses the…
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De-weaponising Academic Challenge. Let’s lionise Vulnerability, and Leave ‘grit’ to the Self-help Gurus.
Ros O’Leary & David Webster In another post, we will reflect on the pedagogical responses that Higher Education practitioners might make to an atmosphere where ‘challenge’ is suddenly (partly due to a shift in the National Student Survey questions) a hot topic. There is a discourse, which we are seeing more of, related to the…
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Is Socratic Dialogue really good praxis?
In contrast to recent collaborative posts, this one is all my fault. The only mercy is its brevity. I am not the first to suspect that the valourising of Socrates, not in terms of founding Western philosophy*, and all that, but in terms of character, and approach, was a little problematic. There’s a blog post,…
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Festival of Learning 2017: Reflections
I have recently had the privilege of organising (along with a team of people who actually made it happen) The University of Gloucestershire’s inaugural Festival of Learning. You can see more of the event, and get a real sense of the conversations, via the Storified Tweets at : https://tinyurl.com/GlosLearn17. There will be lots of video content…
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Open for Business?
Today, I have been lucky enough to be attending the EduTech Symposium of our Business and Computing School. I was part of the initial panel, then helped colleagues in the Adobe Connect session. The opening session was fascinating, and largely consisted of a Q&A with staff. It is a large academic School, with some very…
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Critiquing Discourses of Resilience in Education
Sat at the Association of National Teaching Fellows one-day event in sunny Birmingham, I found myself engaging in passive-aggressive tweeting about bloody ‘resilience’. On my return, I complained about my disquiet with the way the term, and what it has come to stand for, have become pervasive in some parts of education. With great relief,…
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Memes? Srsly? Can memes carry wisdom: neo-Haiku, cute kittens & social media.
Originally posted on Dispirited: At the CESNUR (Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni) 2015 conference, I presented a very brief, conversational, paper about memes. It was rather speculative, but may interest/amuse readers of this blog. I am working with a friend on adding a more scholarly tone -but till then… — This talk is a cry…
Dave Webster 