Category: Students
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Dead University Theory?
This is a short LinkedIn post that I’ll post here as a reminder to expand! You’ve heard of ‘dead internet theory’?* Which seems to get more persuasive every day. The idea that the internet is now largely driven by bots and algorithms interacting with each other, and as the automations and AI take up more…
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Social Media (Zombies) and ethics in Higher Education
At the University of East London today – for the Learning and Teaching Symposium: Connected Students event. While my poster might not match the abstract exactly – I’ll share what I promised, and then what I actually delivered. In our zeal to leverage the social tendencies our students, to harness the irresistibility of apps and…
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Tightrope Walkers: Social Media, Equity, and Educational Practice
I am finally getting round to popping up the link to this. In June, I was delighted to be able to give the keynote lecture at The University of Sheffield’s TELFest event. Click the image to watch a recording of the talk. The description of what I tired to cover is below. Social Media…
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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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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…
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What is academic challenge? Vulnerability, resilience, grit, stretch, toughness and the student experience.
Next month, Ros O’Leary and I will be attending ICERI2017, the 10th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation. The title of our contribution is What is academic challenge? Vulnerability, resilience, grit, stretch, toughness and conceptualising the student experience. This will draw on our Model for Academic Challenge, that we have began to develop here, as well on the concerns…
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Teaching In Higher Ed podcast on Resilience in Education.
Recently, Dr Rivers and I were interviewed by Bonni Stachowiak, from Teaching in Higher Ed, for their podcast series. Ours was number 173 in the series, and there is a wealth of really exciting content to enjoy amongst them. We talked about our work on resilience, notions of grit, student welfare and mental health, and a…
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Why we should be wary of thinking students just want to have fun
Dr Nicola Rivers and Dr Dave Webster. This post is borne out of hearing some in the HE sector talk about the puzzle of student engagement. This is a serious and worthwhile endeavour. Amidst the plethora of good ideas, and a lot of them relate to forms of active learning, however, we have heard the notion that…
Dave Webster 