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As an antidote to the tech gurus pontificating about how they’ve been warning/predicting X for years, I thought I’d consider the things I have been wrong about over the course of my career. The list of all the things I have been wrong about is quite extensive, so I’m limiting it to ed tech here, which still leaves a substantial amount. It’s a more interesting perspective in many ways, why did I think some things would or wouldn’t take off, or they developed in a manner I didn’t predict? Boasting about your failures is not always conducive to developing a successful career, but now I’m of a certain age, it’s a privilege I can indulge. There has been a move in some areas to recognise the value of failure, with Fail Fairs where people talk openly and in a relaxed manner about things that went wrong. This is a bit different from reflecting on which of your views or opinions turned out to be a bit amiss/wildly off the mark/total garbage.

So, I thought I’d do a few posts on things I can now see, that on reflection, I was a freaking idiot about.

We’ll start gently with QR codes. Released in 1994 by the Denso Corporation, QR codes allowed tracking and production in certain industries. The specification for QR coding was made openly available, which meant it was adopted elsewhere, but it remained a fairly specialised tool. As smart phones began to proliferate in the late 2000s, it obtained a wider societal spread.

It was at this time that I used to mock the idea that QR codes were a cool thing to do and would become a useful means of sharing information. Why? Because they were clunky to use, you needed specialist software and they didn’t really have penetration. Now, of course, they are everywhere – even my local pub, not exactly a Portland microbrewery techno-hipster joint, has QR codes for ordering food and drinks. You stick them at the end of presentations for further info instead of people jotting down URLs. They have become ubiquitous in exactly the way I thought they wouldn’t.

Why is that? The key breakthrough was the integration into the camera in smartphones. This in itself relies on almost total uptake of smart phones, and data connectivity. But you could predict those aspects coming to pass, even back in 2008. But it is the easy integration into the existing technology of the camera that elevated them to a tool that the general population will use.

There are a couple of good lessons here. Firstly, it was the open specification that allowed them to spread so widely, you don’t have to pay to create one. Openness wins in this case (you’d think I would have realised this back in the open heyday). Secondly, there is an incremental change in adoption when a technology requires specific knowledge and tools and when it is simply there. We’re probably witnessing this step change with AI as it becomes increasingly incorporated into existing tools. Thirdly, hand in your ed tech badge Weller, you’re done. I wasn’t alone though – I got the featured image from this 2014 page.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I left the Open University this month. I had a lovely leaving party with colleagues (funded by ourselves I hasten to add). Maren and I marked the end of that era with a holiday in Sardinia. Since I’ve returned I’ve blogged some thoughts about the OU, and am now busy setting other activities in motion. I have joined the board of Trustees for the National Extension College and have my first board meeting next week.

It’s largely been a period of establishing a new working environment. I handed back my university Macbook and bought myself a nice shiny iMac. I’ve been setting up new calendars, unsubscribing from 1 million email lists, and trying to shift over accounts linked to my OU email to my Gmail one (surprisingly more difficult than you would think). Is there a ‘digital removals’ service who you can get to do all of this for you, much like moving house services? The next phase will be to establish new routines and processes, but we’ll see how that goes for next month’s roundup.

I have kept up the reading momentum this month, despite my arduous schedule of sitting by the beach in Sardinia. I boggled my way through the first instalment in the 3 Body Problem, before watching the TV series. I don’t read a lot of sci-fi but this seemed in the grand tradition of the high concept stuff I used to read from the golden age. The TV adaptation makes some legitimate changes to make it work as a series (including introducing more humour), but I was struck anew by how you can read something and it seems entirely plausible, but it can appear faintly ridiculous when transferred to the screen. This happens a lot in horror, but I also had to stifle a laugh at the whole dehydration process in 3 Body. In other books, Steven Peck poses the question, what would hell be like if it was an actual realisation of Borges’ Library of Babel? The answer is, pretty damn horrific in its monotony. Philip Ball’s thoughtful analysis of How Life Works prompted some ruminations on AI that I may blog later (I’m annoying myself in how much everything seems to provoke some considerations of AI, so maybe not). I’ve blogged some thoughts on re-reading Stephen King’s Misery and what that tells us about cruelty and the power of narrative.

As a leaving present from the OU, my colleagues got me some Record Store vouchers (how did they know I liked vinyl??). I used these to purchase some upbeat, funky summer sounds, including Aaron Frazer’s Into the Blue, and Say She She’s Silver. If you prefer something peaceful, a discovery I made this month was jazz/folk/experimental artist Caoilfhionn Rose (pronounced Keelin to save you making an idiot of yourself in record shops like I did). Here is a session of her latest album, Constellation:

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I’ve been re-reading Stephen King’s Misery recently. For those of you who don’t know the story, it features a writer, Paul Sheldon, who after a car accident finds himself in the isolated house of his “number 1 fan” Annie Wilkes. Wilkes is psychotic, and becomes enraged when she reads the latest of his Misery historical romance books, in which he has killed off the main character. She tortures him and forces him to write a new Misery novel, just for her.

It is foremost a great horror novel, but it also acts as an obvious allegory for the relationship between writer and their audience and their own work. From a grander perspective it is also about the power of narrative – both positive and the darker, more deranged consequences of telling powerful stories. Voltaire’s maxim that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” is the essence of this.

What Misery brings into horrible focus is that people will commit any cruelty to maintain a narrative they have come to see as essential to themselves. Annie Wilkes is furious when she reads the manuscript of his new book, not a historical fiction but a modern piece of literature about car thieves. This is not the world she wants, she wants the cosy, entirely fictional world of Misery. And she feels not only entitled but righteous in any acts of pain she inflicts to regain this narrative.

We see this in the Brexit and Tory British Empire fantasy. The past was, of course, never the Camelot they portray, but any cruelty is justifiable for its maintenance. When they cheer the death of drowned migrants in the Channel and urge the lifeboats not to rescue them, then you know there is no horror they won’t sanctify for their narrative. With the far right gaining power in France and Trump looking like he may be heading for victory in the US, new levels of terror will be required to shore up an increasingly obviously cracked narrative. We are all set to be held captive by the Annie Wilkes of power. It won’t be pretty I fear.

(Misery is a great book, but not unproblematic itself I should add, but for the purpose of this post it is the exploration of narrative and subsequent cruelty that is the focus).

Now that I have finally, finally left the Open University (I know, it’s been like the end of Lord of the Rings, with about 20 times you think “This is the endpoint, right?”), I thought I’d say some nice things about it as an institution. Beyond a couple of people and a handful of dogs, the Open University has been the great love of my life. Now, don’t misunderstand me – it has its fair share (maybe even more than most) of obstructive bureaucracy, frustrating processes and toxic staff, which I’ve experienced more than I would wish, so this is not a piece of blind propaganda. But I want to celebrate the best of it, having spent the bulk of my adult life working there.

Firstly, its very existence is a wonder. Like Wikipedia, you feel that it shouldn’t really exist or function as well as it does. It is inconceivable to me that if we didn’t already have it, any modern Government would have the vision and desire to push it through to creation. You can imagine the backlash the right wing press would create at the idea, the headlines of Mickey Mouse university, the indignation at a non-campus based approach to higher education. The arguments about how it would serve industry, who would fund it, why should people be allowed to study this way. Or worse, they would establish it in partnership with a commercial offering, the Microsoft Open University, which would quickly be directed away from any non-vocational subjects. It would, in short, be a clusterfuck. They’d probably invest billions and then it would become mired in competing directions from different stakeholders, like an educational HS2, unloved and waiting for somebody to take it over.

Instead it is a national treasure. The innovation of open entry (ie you do not need A levels or other qualifications to enter higher education) remains, I think, the most impactful interpretation of the many different forms of open education. For all of the “levelling up” and “social mobility” agendas we have had over the past couple of decades, there is no single policy that has such a direct and demonstrable impact as open entry combined with flexible study. While other institutions have moved into the mature students space, it remains the dominant “Second Chance University”.

This social justice mission also means that many of the people I have worked with over the years are from diverse backgrounds. Many colleagues have themselves come into higher ed through the OU, or from industry. I don’t know the data, but my guess would be that the OU has a higher proportion of first-in-family to attend university as staff members than most HEIs. This makes working there pretty collegial and pleasurable on the whole – a lot of that inherent hierarchy and snobbery you still encounter in much of higher ed is absent (well, mostly anyway).

Various funding policies and performance metrics have not always treated the OU well, and it is still a constant battle to remind policy makers that not all of higher education resembles their own Russell Group experience. Politicians, the media and society in general need to act responsibly with regards to the OU, and recognise it for the treasure that it remains. Because I fear that if they were careless it could disappear with a callous shrug, and we’d never get it back. Only then would we appreciate the full value it offers.

My identity has long been allied with the OU, I am, in my own head at least, “Martin from the OU”. I used to feel anxiety and anguish about its troubles, the same way you do about a close family member going through a tough time. I have Emeritus status now, so I remain allied to it to an extent, but I am on the outside, so I feel that connection less. This is necessary as I establish a new identity, but I’d still fight a duel with textbooks at sunrise to protect its honour. As Joan Didion puts it “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from” and the OU is as good a place as any.

Now that I’m coming to the end of a a substantial phase of my career, which while not exactly earth-shaking, has been successful on the terms I would wish it to be, I thought it would be instructive to reflect on the role of luck in this. This is not an exercise in false modesty, where I’m hoping you’ll respond “no it’s because you’re amazing Martin” (let’s agree that I’m amazing), but in any success however moderate, there is an element of chance. “Luck” is probably the wrong term, it’s more something like “a beneficial confluence of personality, time and context”, but “luck” is a convenient shorthand. I think there is a general tendency to dismiss the role of different aspects of luck because people don’t want to downplay their own agency and hard work. I get that, but if we look at that broader interpretation of a combination of your own traits and the context then it doesn’t reduce it all to some happenstance that you were powerless to resist. So I thought I would consider the different forms of good fortune that have cropped up.

Luck of birth – firstly that any individual one of us exists is a miracle of statistical freakery, but let’s not dwell on that. More systemically being born a white man in Northern Europe, while not in a privileged connected family, means I haven’t had to contend to with society actively working against me. It’s difficult to quantify this form the inside perspective however, but it has to be acknowledged

Luck of timing – With regards to technology Douglas Adams suggested that:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

This is probably the area of greatest fortune I had. I came into employment in higher ed just as the web was breaking, I was young enough to be excited by it, and there was no real established expertise in this field. If I had been 10 years older I may have dismissed it, or if I had entered the field 10 years later then it would have been a more established practice. But in the early days a little knowledge can take you a long way and from that you gain momentum.

Luck of employment – I didn’t set out to work for the OU. I needed a job, and would have taken anything as my casual employment at the University of Teesside was coming to an end. It transpired that the OU was a perfect fit for me – I’m a better writer than speaker, so crafting written course materials suited me, and the social mission of the OU was something I could identify with. As a distance ed university they were also the ideal place to be as online learning took off, related to the previous point.

Luck of social value – I think higher ed was a natural fit for me, but there is also an element of good fortune in that my chosen sector is something that means a lot to people. There are other very valuable jobs in society that we don’t attach such emotional and social value to – remember during the pandemic when everyone suddenly appreciated the real value that the waste disposal teams do for us all the time? Yet we don’t see this as readily. But whether it’s creating courses that bring people into higher education, or Masters courses that allow them to develop their interests, or supervise researchers through their PhD, it is a privilege to be involved in a sector that has such an impact on people’s lives. Footballers often justify their enormous salaries by pointing to their hard work and talent – which is true, but they don’t work harder or have more talent than, say, an Olympic judo athlete. But they are lucky in that our society rewards footballers more highly. While you don’t quite get those financial rewards in higher ed, you do get to be in a profession that can change people’s lives for the better. That’s lucky.

Luck of funding – I was fortunate to grow up when you didn’t have to pay for university tuition fees. As a first generation to university, I’m not sure I would have gone if it had meant taking on a debt. I also dropped out of my first year, only to start again the following summer on a different degree. If I had been generating debt during this time I’m not sure I would have been free to explore this phase. Similarly when it came to doing a Masters, I was on an EU funded scheme at Kingston Uni, which not only paid the tuition fees but allowed us to sign on at the same time. Then after a period of unemployment during the recession I got a job at Teesside as a research assistant on an EU funded project, which allowed me to register as a PhD student. This account will probably make Daily Mail readers combust, but it’s how you facilitate “levelling up”. I simply wouldn’t have done those studies if I’d had to fund the fees.

Luck of exploration – I mentioned that I was allowed to drop out and then restart undergrad study, as I explored what it was that I wanted to do. But also at the OU I was lucky enough to explore many different, often futile avenues. I did an experiment with the first online tutor group, I played around with blogs, I developed an online profile. I didn’t have to state deliverables for these or complete monthly reports. I was allowed to explore and often those explorations led to more meaningful outcomes. But often they didn’t. My sense is that degree of freedom is less readily available in higher ed now.

With each of these elements, they are “lucky” in that they meshed with my interests and personality – they wouldn’t necessarily be fortunate for someone else, who would have a different set. Partly I think composing such a list is useful vaccine against becoming one of those older people who criticise younger people for not doing things the way they did. Timing and context play a big factor in whatever you do. Anyway, speaking of vaccination here is everyone’s second favourite Mancunian anti-vaxxer giving us a belter of a tune.

(I’ve been going through some old photos – I’m the little blond one in the above, where it appears that I grew up in the 1930s)

I’ve been having a “Month of Lasts” as my OU clock ticks down: Last Open Programme meeting, last JIME meeting, last Applaud Steering committee, last research theme meeting. Shedding all those roles and activities one accumulates like burrs on a poodle running through a field of burdock feels liberating. I’m not quite sure what will replace the interaction, structure and activity that meetings provide though. We do of course like to portray the meeting as the irritating guest at our work wedding, but across a working week they provide social interaction, focus for activity, and structure for the day. Even if I say so myself, I’m pretty good at chairing meetings and they’re usually productive and dare I say it, quite fun. Replacing the architecture they provide will be the challenge post-OU, but I have plans afoot.

As one set of obligations fades however a new set has arisen in the form of negotiating the various care support structures around two elderly parents. The social services, elderly care, private providers and NHS systems sometimes take some cajoling to communicate with each other, but my experience so far has been of unfailingly helpful, supportive and caring staff. But a weekly 9 hour commute to Bedford and back in one day is not as much fun as you might think.

In terms of reading this month, those long drives have allowed audiobooks to be consumed, especially now I have learned to tolerate a 1.4 reading speed. This allowed me to get through some chonky boys, including Dan Simmons The Terror (that North West passage fever was a real buzz for Victorians). If I felt a bit anxious about the open vistas of life before me, then reading Werner Herzog’s memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All reminded me that intellectual curiosity can take you on all sorts of adventures (I don’t think I’ll be hauling boats through jungles or planning to murder Klaus Kinski though). Screenwriter John Yorke provides a compelling account of storytelling, dismissing many of the secret how to guides and instead focusing on why we tell stories. And when it comes to telling stories, when I was in Cork, Catherine Cronin gave me a present of a book called This is Happiness by Niall Williams, which tells the historical life in a fictional Irish village. It’s beautifully, lyrically written, like a seasoned narrator sitting you by the fire and enjoying their own storytelling prowess and that you are lending an ear. In its attention to the everyday nuances of small village life it is also quite profound.

On the vinyl front this month saw releases from two women at different phases of their musical careers but both carving their distinct niches. Beth Gibbons of Portishead released a solo album Lives Outgrown. The artwork and song titles such as “Tell Me Who You Are Today” speak to the rather schizophrenic nature of the album – sometimes it’s like a singalong at a Woodstock camp fire, then there are drum and bass elements or discordant jazz rhythms. It’s a proper album in the sense that it takes quite a lot of unpacking. Pop phenomenon Billie Eilish released her 3rd full album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. We are lucky to be living in a golden age of massive selling pop queens, and while it’s not a competition, for my money Eilish is the most interesting of them (although I have a lot of time for Taylor, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo). But my favourite purchase of the month was an old one – the acoustic version of Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen. I came across it on Spotify a few years ago but didn’t realise until recently it had been a Record Store Day release a while back. I found a reasonably priced (although ouch on that postage) copy in the US on Discogs. While the Thomas Dolby production of the original is sympathetic and gave us a classic album, you can really appreciate the quality of the songwriting in these stripped back versions. When I was a teenager I had a notion to write a novel, each chapter beginning with a lyric from this album. Let’s be clear, that would have been absolutely awful, but it’s an indication of how such music can affect sensitive young men, and I was sensitive, dammit! Anyway, enjoy what Pitchfork calls “some of the most beautiful, enduring British pop music ever made”

As I mentioned in my last post, it’s my months of lasts, so you may want to mute the blog for a few weeks. This week I chaired my last meeting as co-editor of JIME. The editorial board pulled together some nice data of my time at the helm:

I became co-editor with Ann Jones, in 2013. In that time the journal has published 197 papers with 604 papers being submitted in that time. As well as editing general issues, I have been the editor of 8 Special Collections, and I’ve encouraged guest editors to curate another 9 Special Collections over the last decade.

I think the most significant thing I achieved while co-editor was the shift from hosting a version of OJS ourselves, to working with Ubiquity Press. We never had enough OJS demand to allocate technical support at a reasonable amount of time, and so we didn’t really stay on top of updates and changes sufficiently. By effectively this to Ubiquity, while covering the APCs from an internal fund, it smoothed things over and meant we spent less time as a board dealing with process and technical issues. Ubiquity have been excellent to work with, they really believe in open access. This model pre-empted the Diamond Open Access model, which has now become a desired approach.

Actually, I’ll amend that – the most significant thing I, and the board realised during this time, was to keep going. Running an open access journal on the edges of people’s time with a small budget is not always the most rewarding thing to do. I always wanted to do more with it, to innovate more, to publish more, to use it as a vehicle for change more. But sometimes doing the work is the real victory, and we’ve published a lot of interesting articles, supported a lot of early career researchers and global south researchers.

I was pleased that the excellent special collection edited by Katy Jordan and Mark Carrigan on Social Media came out as I was departing. And it also looks as though JIME will be part of the agreement with Jisc which means authors from institutions signed up to this will have their APCs paid by the institution. This puts the journal on a good footing for continued publication, and with Rob Farrow coming on board to join Katy Jordan as co-editor, it’s in excellent hands.

This is going to be a month of ‘Lasts” for me, so I beg your forbearance for the extended farewells. Last week I chaired the last Board of Studies meeting for the Open Programme. This was a role I took on five years ago. The Board of Studies is the tri-annual meeting where we bring together issues relating to a particular qualification area. The Open Programme covered the Open Degree, the combined STEM degree and Open Masters.

I’ve blogged previously about these, and in particular the power of allowing students choice and flexibility in their pathway. A point I’ve made often, but as Jack White would say, it bears repeating, is that this flexibility (over 250 different modules can be combined for the Open Degree) is a function of asynchronous study. It allows students, even if they are studying at full time intensity, to combine modules of their choice without fear of timetable clashes. There may be some overlap in assessment dates and occasional events but there is sufficient flexibility built into most timetables to alleviate these. This is a benefit so often overlooked when institutions adopt online learning and replicate the lecture model, with all of its inbuilt logistical headaches.

More importantly though the Open qualifications treat the student with respect I think. They are shapeable to their needs, interests, and context. Of course, named degrees are important, and the dominant mode across the sector, but they are not the only possibility. Many of our open students speak passionately about how this flexibility gave them what they wanted and needed.

A small whinge – I think the OU itself rather hides this jewel away and doesn’t promote it anywhere near enough. When I tell people about it they often respond along the lines of “that sounds great, I wish I’d known about that when I did my degree”. At the OU and across the sector we need to be encouraging more of this type of study, in a complex, messy world the narrow confines of specialist degrees won’t be sufficient by themselves to wrangle the society we live in to a meaningful, caring one (although specialism will be an important part of the mix).

The photo is the fantastic bespoke artwork the lovely Open team commissioned through conversations with Bryan Mathers.

I’ve blogged about the Twitter Diaspora, arguing that Twitter was a default place for many in higher education. Alan suggests that the Town Hall was something of a myth, and while there’s probably some truth in that, I would content that, during the 2010s, if you were in higher ed, and active in social media, then you had a Twitter account. You would likely have other platforms also, and maybe some you preferred over Twitter, but Twitter could act as a default engagement platform. That assumption no longer holds true.

In a very timely special issue of JIME on social media, Apostolos Koutropoulos and 8 co-authors consider this fragmentation of educational discourse (again, I would argue they wouldn’t be doing this if Twitter hadn’t been the default engagement network). They conclude that:

As some of the established social media like the social network formerly known as Twitter ‘go down’ and others like Mastodon or Bluesky ‘rise’ we must finally realize that these or indeed any social media platforms will always continue to ebb and flow – they are out of our control. They never were the third spaces that some believed they were, or wanted them to be.

I do agree with Alan when he says “Accept the distributed, disaggregated ness of it all”. I don’t think there is a “next Twitter”, ie one platform where you can pretty safely assume people will connect.

Which brings me on to the PEE – Personal Engagement Environment (I may have to work on that acronym). Some of you may recall that around the late 2000s we got excited by the idea of Personal Learning Environments, the idea being that individuals stitched together their favourite tools to create their own learning environment. This morphed into a Personal Learning Network, which moved the focus away from the tools and more to the people and resources in your own network. Back then we used to create radial diagrams comprised of logos of the various tools we used. Scott Leslie did a really nice analysis of these diagrams, noting that there were 6 broad categories: tool, use, resource, flow, people, or hybrid oriented (with tool focused being the most common). Here was mine in 2011 (aww, bless, look at all those defunct services):

While a lot of this was because we were excited about all that Web 2.0 stuff, it was also a useful way to map the tools you used regularly. Dave White developed a useful mapping activity around digital residents and visitors which did a similar thing.

While I’m all up for more radial diagrams, this is more of a way to think about post-Twitter life. Each of us develops a personal engagement environment, the different elements of which will be emphasised for different purposes and audiences. It’s a return how we operated pre-Twitter dominance I guess. You may have a main platform (eg blog), a work focused one eg LinkedIn, a personal one eg Instagram, a general one eg Threads, a course focused one eg podcasts, etc. For any one engagement activity you may post to all, one or some of these. Consider the example of wanting to share a new article you have had published – you may blog about it, and post a link on LinkedIn and on Threads. If you wanted to boost someone a post from someone else, that may just be LinkedIn. For conference engagement you may focus more Mastodon, etc. You may decide that you don’t need or want a lot of engagement, and just stick to one platform such as a blog.

As Koutropoulos and co state “Times are complex, supercomplex”, and depending on the type of engagement you want or need, then your PEE (no, definitely need a better acronym) will be complex as well. I think we have to accept that, and embrace it. Get those diagrams going!

I was looking forward to April, I had booked study leave and had a number of small, fun projects I wanted to get started. Well, it transpired that April had other plans. For no particular reason I had a mental health wobble in the first week, and was just getting over that when an elderly parent emergency arose, which necessitated several trips and stays in Bedfordshire. This included missing the much anticipated hockey playoff weekend in Nottingham with my daughter, and abandoning a holiday in West Wales. Add in an emergency dental appointment, and yes, April can do one. I looked back at my google doc for plans for this month and it is a wasteland of unchecked lists. The saying that if you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans, comes to mind.

Because I’ve been doing lots of driving and hanging around in hotel rooms, I have gotten through a lot of books this month, although I’ve also been struggling to find ones that really engage me. One book that definitely did was Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. They set out how a feminist perspective on data science is necessary to combat dangerous misuse, stating “Underlying data feminism is a belief in and commitment to co-liberation: the idea that oppressive systems of power harm all of us, that they undermine the quality and validity of our work, and that they hinder us from creating true and lasting social impact with data science.” They set out 7 principles of data feminism, and I would argue that all institutions would be well served by approaching any large scale use of data, AI, analytics with those principles in mind. The book is available as open access also.

Speaking of feminism, I also read an intriguing book with a great title, House of Psychotic Women by Kier-la Janisse, in which she uses analysis of exploitation and horror films as a route for autobiography. Navigating her complex, and sometimes traumatic childhood in particular, it’s a thoughtful (if sometimes difficult) interweaving of personal history, feminist theory and film critique.

And, speaking of data, I also read an ice hockey analytics book, which prompted me to develop my own NHL playoffs predictor model. This has given me the following playoff bracket prediction, so let’s see how well my model does against that reality thing:

In my previous post I mentioned the book The Revenge of Analog, and an event mentioned in this book is the success of Record Store Day. Although I couldn’t participate on the actual day I managed to pick up a couple of releases later, including the 3-LP box set of Wilco’s The Whole Love. I also enjoyed Kacey Musgraves’ exploration of contentment in Deeper Well, and decidedly less content, we saw the return of the Phosphorescent with Revelator. At one point this month I nodded in agreement with his sentiment “I don’t even like what I like any more”. But, I got to spend some days in West Wales with the view above, so can’t really complain.

(Photo by Natalie Cardona on Unsplash)

Like Maren, I read David Sax’s The Revenge of Analog last month, and some points in it chimed with some other thoughts I’d been having around AI. The book makes the case around how analogue industries and formats have revived despite their apparent inevitable demise in face of digital alternatives. It is sometimes too keen to reinforce its won hypothesis and ignores counter points (the education chapter had me wincing in places for over-simplification), but overall it marks an interesting reaction to technology. It can be viewed in some respects as an argument against technological determinism, that despite all of these predictions of doom, people tend to behave in unexpected ways and new models come through.

This is not just persistence of the old format, but how that format or practice is changed through the basis of a digital prevalence. For example, the sale of vinyl records has grown steadily over the past 20 years but that doesn’t mean the people who purchase them don’t also have Spotify accounts, and use this to discover new music, or that artists don’t use digital means to connect with audiences and distribute music.

He also makes the point that analogue is often more profitable than digital, whether it be sales or advertising, it is a case of “digital pennies versus print pounds”. And this gets to the feeling I had about AI following on from the inevitable discussions at conferences about its impact. The areas where analogue has proven resistant and popular is where people have come to value the process over the product. Tabletop gaming is a good example – many of the games could be played as well, if not better, online but it is the process of sitting around a table with friends, interacting over the game that is valuable. And while audiophiles make a claim about the sound quality of vinyl, I think it is really the process of purchasing, owning, handling and listening to music in a physical format that is the essence cherished by those of us with unwieldy vinyl collections.

Which brings us on to AI. The use of AI tools is generally fine when the process itself doesn’t matter. Producing monthly reports that no-one will read? Sure, use AI. Making an image for a presentation to a few people? DaVinci your heart out. However, if you are writing a paper, or an essay where the act of writing increases your own understanding then AI is at best a prompt. If you want to create art for a research project that reflects your values and identity then the act of doing so (as we know with our work with Bryan Mathers, who always emphasises that it is the conversation that is important) is in itself valuable. Plus you are demonstrating that it matters to you by employing someone or utilising your own time.

What this perspective reveals is how much of the higher education experience we have made seem like it doesn’t matter. Writing research papers is merely a means to increase an h-index, or get promotion, so you may as well get AI to do it. We have stressed grading to such an extent that writing essays for students is mainly only about getting the grades, so why shouldn’t they use ChatGPT? The focus on performance metrics has created a sector filled with garbage process that we have to undertake because that is how to win but that are essentially meaningless in themselves. They are begging to be AI’d to death.

Ted Gioia has an interesting newsletter post about MacGuffins. The point of a MacGuffin in film is to give the onscreen character some reason to pursue their quest, the Holy Grail being the archetype. But actually he notes, the MacGuffin is in itself irrelevant, it could be anything. When it becomes a physical object it becomes meaningless “The quest was previously about transforming your life. Now it gets turned into a physical object—and a vague one, with all the key details missing.” This could be a description of much of higher ed.

There is something in the value we place upon certain analogue based experiences and higher education’s response to AI I think. It should be a wake-up call to reinstate the value of the process itself and to consider the importance we place upon garbage processes. It’s worth asking “does this process matter?” if the answer is no, then expect it to fall foul of AI. If the answer is yes, then we need to demonstrate and reinforce that, because it is difficult to tell now which of the processes actually add value to the individual undertaking them, and which are just meat for the metric grinder.

Some of you may have seen this article in HEPI in which the author makes an argument against the possible establishment of a city centre base for the Open University. I will say up front, I have no insider knowledge here, and as I’m leaving, no skin in the game, these are more just thoughts based on being a long time OU and distance/online learning advocate.

The article makes a strange case, partly aligning their opposition to the move on the basis of CO2 emissions, which I’m not in a position to judge (but equally they offer no evidence for). Their argument is basically, if we all wish hard enough, academics will want to come to the existing Walton Hall campus. Yeah, that ship has sailed. Saying we could make it more attractive by innovating and that will attract new staff is going the wrong way I’d suggest – being able to work remotely and live, say, in beautiful West Wales while still being a full, active member of staff would be more of a draw for new staff I’d suggest.

The possible city centre provision (and from what I understand nothing has been decided yet, but options are being considered, which seems sensible), would not necessarily be for existing OU students. We might think of it as a separate offering, let’s call it F2F-OU (to be clear, that’s what I’m calling it, not a proposed brand name), that shares some resources with traditional OU, such as content, expertise, accrediting powers, etc. In this model students would either enrol with F2F-OU or Trad-OU (maybe there would be different fees? I don’t know). This does not contradict the existing OU offering or its open, distance, four nations remit.

There are some areas for concern here, the OU has not been great at large scale strategic moves (see USOU), and finances are tight across the sector. It’s an understatement to say this is not the ideal time to be thinking about opening a new F2F university. But I’m not in the meetings so don’t know what finance models are being proposed, I’d hope some independent oversight would be given to these. There are also legitimate concerns about lab facilities, particularly in STEM, and these would need to be resolved to maintain a decent research status. It might also be a huge distraction when we cannot accommodate it.

The bit I do find interesting though is more sector-wide. I occasionally give talks, during and after the pandemic, to HEIs who are now in the position of having to shift some provision online, become more flexible and find hybrid models that work economically and pedagogically. It would seem logical (but again, no inside knowledge here) that the F2F-OU offering would make use of existing OU content and supplement this with some F2F provision. Getting this hybrid blend right, so students have some of the benefits of F2F and the flexibility of high quality distance learning materials would be an attractive offer, not just to students, but as a model to the sector more widely. As F2F universities are embracing elements of an OU model, perhaps it makes sense for the OU to embrace elements of the F2F one. Whether the city centre move goes ahead or not, I think cracking that model would be the innovative and exciting piece here, whether for OU students or in collaboration with partner institutions. I don’t really care one way or the other about the move itself, but academically, if it is a catalyst for developing sustainable hybrid education models, then that is interesting (to me anyway).

These types of proposals can induce a good deal of anxiety, particularly around core values and mission and I’ve seen plenty of people projecting fears on to the proposal which are not part of what is being suggested. Maybe that’s inevitable when the proposed solution is still in relatively early stages. I had the sense of doom with the 2018 OU crisis, but I don’t feel it with this proposal (with the large caveat that this is only if the finances work out), since it doesn’t undermine the traditional OU offering and potentially offers a new model that is suitable for the type of robust higher education I have talked about elsewhere.

But hey, I’ll be on a beach sipping cocktails by 2030, so what do I know?

It’s been a busy presentation month. I gave a metaphors talk for Rikke Toft Nørgård’s Digital Pedagogy and Learning special interest group. I like these more informal presentations, and we had a fun chat about Nordic metaphors afterwards. I hosted a session for the European Digital Education Hub, on learning environments. Preparing for this prompted me to think more about AI enhanced learning environments, so it was one of those presentations that help move along your own thinking. Dominic Orr joined me and gave an excellent overview of the work they do at Atingi. I’ve blogged about the OER24 experience, so won’t say more here except to say it warmed this cynical old man’s heart.

On the book front, I’ve been a bit immersed in horror and Stephen King this month. King was an author I read a lot as teen, the classic era of his writing. But then I put those childish things behind me and read “proper” literature. Returning to his writing some 40 years later I am chastened by that snobbish attitude, and also really able to appreciate his craft in creating characters you like spending time with. If he were less of a genre writer he would probably be feted more as serious literature (not that it bothers him I suspect). I enjoyed Nige Tassel’s odyssey to track down all of the artists who had appeared on the NME’s C86 tape. It’s a warm, humane book about what happens after brief brushes with fame. Many of the people he spoke to still play music in some form (and a surprising number seem to be into cycling), and it is that sense of creating music for its own sake that comes through (and also that the NME was pretty shitty to a lot of them having created this genre themselves).

It’s been a good vinyl purchasing month with the release of new albums from several artists whose previous albums had been firm favourites. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s new release, The Past is Still Alive was a more subdued affair than the “nature punk” of Last Days on Earth. On it Alynda Segarra’s chronicles their chaotic youth of being a teenage punk runaway, jumping trains and dumpster diving. As with the last album the sound is deceptively upbeat whether they are singing about ICE brutality, transphobia or fentanyl abuse. But that’s kind of the point, they find humanity in the tales of the dispossessed, in the tradition of Steinbeck. Brittany Howard’s new release, What Now, has a LOT going on. It’s a massive sound, with funk, soul, complex jazz rhythms & orchestration. Every track is a good album in itself. My favourite of the month is Waxahatchee’s Tiger’s Blood. I quite iked Waxahatchee’s last album, Saint Cloud, but her collaboration with Jess Williamson, as Plains was incredible. This album continues in that vein of country with the benefit of hindsight. If it was a person they would live in a trailer, drive a battered pick up, swear like “a dry county welder”, and be the smartest person you know.

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I mentioned my visit to Cork to pull off One Last Job at OER24, which I am now safely and legally returned from. There I gave a fun presentation with Maren on podcasting and internet radio, and one on the afterlife of my 25 Years of Ed Tech book. The conference was excellent, with thought-provoking, engaging and warm keynotes from Rajiv Jhangiani and the double act of Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin.

We had a compact, full GO-GN workshop the day prior to the conference. I like seeing new generations of GO-GN scholars coming through, there were few of the attendees who had been before and it felt like a new wave of scholars now benefitting from the network.

The OER conference has long been my favourite one to attend, with its combination of quirkiness, critical perspectives and generous people. This was the first one to be hosted since Maren departed ALT, and much kudos goes to CEO Kerry Pinny and events manager Katie Johnson for making it such a success. It is always difficult when taking over from someone who has been at an organisation for a long time. Often the temptation is to make your mark and just change everything. Kerry and the team maintained the ethos and warmth of the OER conference, but also tweaked things and made it their own. It was an exemplar of how to move onwards sensitively, and yes, maintain that meticulous informality (I’m going to make that term a thing).

A couple of small things that I thought worked well (and it’s often the small things that make a conference). The format was generally three- 15 minute talks and then a 15 minute question period in one session. This meant the sessions all moved very quickly, there was never any sense of “I’m trapped in a never ending session that I zoned out from ages ago” which sometimes happens. The timekeeping was something Tom Farrelly had apparently drilled into the session chairs, and the use of the Tomato of Doom timekeeping apparatus kept everyone on schedule. This also meant you could reliably switch between rooms and attend different talks. The conference programme software was a bit confusing at first glance, but it really came into its own when sessions were live and you could see what was happening and upcoming.

There was also an ego-indulgence at the end, as this was possibly my last OER conference (certainly my last as GO-GN director), and Rajiv said embarrassingly nice things about me and everyone generously allowed me to babble on a bit. If you enjoy seeing reserved British men squirm, then this video is for you (watch the amazing Gastas first though).

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