Blog – Page 2 – Penworks.Net

18/05/2019

Let’s talk about phones

I’ve just upgraded my phone, so thoughts about phones have been in my mind, on a personal level as well as the research. I’ve had a fair few phones over the years but this article isn’t about my historic ownership of phones so I won’t go into the awesome BT fold up phones of the mid nineties (though they were...

Blog

06/05/2019

Radical Candor, Radical Constructivism

In a professional environment it’s difficult to speak out and say what you really think. Often you might wait until bursting point and then everything comes out under the cloud of a bad temper ‘emotional outburst’. You get a reputation for having tantrums, and anything you’ve said gets very likely dismissed without a second thought. I speak from personal experience,...

Blog/Ideas/Learning & Teaching

09/03/2019

Meme Me

Ideas for the Internet culture wars. These came about as a result of seeing what people said in tweets or Facebook posts, and are cut up snippets.

Blog/Ideas/Images/Social Media

01/02/2019

Right Click, Refresh

I once had an acquaintance who had a saying: “right click, refresh”. This was around 2003 or 2004, maybe even earlier. It was before flat screen monitors were common, when they were still expensive, back when we all used to have big white PC towers, hand built by friends and full of pirate software and hooky operating systems. It was...

Blog

01/01/2019

How to navigate your digital life

“How to navigate your digital life, or, how to avoid death by a thousand digital cuts.” Recent events have made me consider deeply how digital life affects each of us and how we navigate these unknown terrains, attempt to manage our interactions, needs and expectations, and how others in our networks manage their own lives that intertwine with ours. How...

Blog/Featured/Social Media

30/12/2018

The Twittersphere Highway

I’ve seen friends having issues with Twitter conversations recently, experience the horror of public shaming, the ritual of punishment by RT. The addiction of argument, justification, righteous ire point scoring. It’s an interesting phenomena, what Twitter ‘has become’. But what does that even mean? Twitter is many things to many people. It’s a conduit of information, knowledge and professional connection....

Blog/Social Media

23/12/2018

A pedagogical landscape of information

I wrote a paper a while back which in part discussed Google Lens. Google Lens will soon become standard Android camera technology, permitting the smart retrieval of knowledge content associated with stuff we view through our smartphone camera. This is a huge innovation, only currently being conceptualised for commercial purposes. But placing that functionality in a generic open access knowledge...

Blog/Featured/PhD

22/11/2018

Depressed teachers, neoliberal commodification and coffee

I attended a lively symposium yesterday with speakers from various universities and nationalities: Ireland, Sweden, Cyprus, Malta, Canada, UK. The title was “Rethinking Teaching” and essentially was about educational philosophy, theory and practice. The usual suspects featured: commodification, standardisation, KPIs, uniformity, absence of pluralism, neoliberal top down marketisation, efficiency, and more unusually and deeply, the being of teaching. We met...

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24/05/2018

The Gibson SJ200 has left the building

I’m kind of sad to report I sold the Gibson SJ200. I thought it would be a lifetime purchase but in all honesty I never really bonded with this guitar. Beautiful, rich toned and lovely to play. And yet. It had a cold dark heart at its centre and never felt creative or inspiring. I’m not sure why but guitars...

Blog/Featured/Images

01/09/2015

Moving to Malta

I moved to Malta. This is overall an incredible thing and either really stupid or utterly brilliant. I do love the Rock and all it has: history, ancient culture, sun, unpretentious good life, relaxedness. Downsides, yes there a re a few. Traffic is very bad at rush hour, buses can be very full, and it’s a lazy lifestyle so I...

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