Category: Students
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Eating the tompouce
There are some things that resist being done neatly. I am fond of sweet pastry-related offerings—to put it mildly. So, on my many trips to Groningen, when I saw something that looked (and largely behaved) like a vanilla slice, I had to give the tompouce a go. But unlike the vanilla slice eating of my…
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Against Nihilism, For Appetite: Why Teaching Still Matters
Cross-posted from my LinkedIn posts, where I mostly put stuff these days.. “In these troubled times” is a phrase we hear often, sometimes in a darkly humorous, sarcastic-not-sarcastic tone. At other times it feels like mere rhetorical habit. And yet it persists, because the underlying feeling it gestures towards persists too. The nihilism that Nietzsche…
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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…
Dave Webster 