Penworks.Net

08/02/2021

Selective democratisation of the arts: who needs your book, song, painting? No one, that’s who

When Toni Morrison said ‘write the book you want to read,’ she didn’t mean everybody. (Fran Lebowitz). I recently saw this statement in a social media feed. Momentarily I thought someone had singled something pithy out of the current Lebowitz programme being screened on UK television. But on a quick Google search I realised this is a billion-shared meme. Which...

Categories Blog/Ideas/Words

10/12/2020

Smart Learning really is a thing

Catching up on current happenings in smart urban creative and learning initiatives using digital interactions to engage with place and the city I’m following up again on my continuing academic assertion that situated digitally mediated creativity, perhaps especially writing (aka writing the smart city, hyperlocal publishing, ambient literature, twitterature …) is a real opportunity for learning and engaging with place...

Categories Blog/Ideas/Learning & Teaching

30/11/2020

Repair, re-use, renew, adapt, survive

It is more than a year since I had to reinstall my operating system on my sturdy MacBook Pro (2015 8gb RAM 128gb SSD, OS X Yosemite 10.10.5). Everything still works great, and I celebrate my own sheer bloodymindedness plus *desperate need* to achieve this. Well done me. I was just about to leave for London, ready to teach the...

Categories Blog/Featured

09/10/2020

Teaching in Pandemic Times

People are talking a lot on social media about their lives, more than ever. Indiscretions are made, but the light gets in when things get broken. Today I saw some posts on a teaching group in FB about losing hope, about not being able to deal with the ebbing away of student motivation, snide comments about their practice, endless pressure...

Categories Blog/Learning & Teaching/Work

19/08/2020

Forty Days

I have forty days left. It is August 19th, 2020, and September has thirty days in it, so forty days. My ideal end day is September 30th. This allows ten working days to get printing done and deliver documents to the Doctoral school admin office. So, forty days. I can finally see the finishing line, off in the near distance,...

Categories Blog/PhD

14/04/2020

The topic of a doctorate

I’m jotting down a few reflections on how you choose a topic for your doctorate. I think for many of us it isn’t as simple as ‘something I’m really interested in’, or ‘what I’m good at’, or ‘what I’d like to specialise in’. Care must be taken in your choice, yet focusing on what you’re most interested in or have...

Categories Blog/PhD

28/03/2020

Teaching online from home

This post is about some of the issues you might encounter when teaching online from home, especially without much time to prepare for this transition. We are in unprecedented times, and us who teach (school, informal, non formal, tertiary) have had to move our practice online at very short notice. Many of us are inexperienced at doing any distance learning,...

Categories Audio/Blog/Featured/Learning & Teaching/Video

12/01/2020

Alexander Supertramp

A few days ago I watched a film called Into the Wild, the story of Christopher McCandless, and this film has made a very big impact on me which I hadn’t really expected at all. I was going through those lists that you do after Christmas when you’ve watched a lot of films, looking for some good action or adventure...

Categories Blog/Words

31/10/2019

Progress towards completing

This is a difficult stage, everyone says so. I’m deep into chapter five, where I outline in detailed terms how I went about analysis of data. In phenomenography this is a crucial aspect of the reliability of the findings. We don’t pursue ideas about replicability, because it’s impossible to replicate individual experience. What we do is to build communicability of...

Categories PhD

19/09/2019

Blog, for all our sakes

This post is about how important it is to blog. Perhaps people think it isn’t important to blog, that it’s trivial, it doesn’t matter, it’s duplicating other work, it’s pointless. So I feel it’s useful to list a few reasons why blogging is vital as part of debate and information online. Of course blogs play different roles for different areas...

Categories Blog