Penworks.Net

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...

Blog

12/11/2018

Challenges of methodological procedure

This article serves as an exercise in how to consolidate argument for methodological process in a context of developmental phenomenography. It is a work in progress, being edited currently. It’s based on 13k words of draft ‘thinking’, most of which will not be included in the thesis final version. That might, if it’s lucky, form some basis for papers that...

PhD

25/05/2018

Smart Learning & Open Access

I was pleased to take part in a webinar for the Smart Learning Institute at Normal University in Beijing, China. Due to time difference I suggested I do a video-cast and they were happy to oblige with that, so I created a presentation of slides with audio for them to use. The video is shared above. The presentation was part...

Learning & Teaching/PhD/Work

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

11/01/2018

The impermanent landscape of now

The problem is that what I see today is not what will be here tomorrow. Like watching a river, the water flowing by, it is not only the content of digital streams that is perpetually in beta (Garnett & Ecclesfield, 2011, p. 9), but the whole landscape and territory itself. The infrastructure, platform functionality and nuanced realities of all the different...

PhD

17/06/2017

Connectivism, semantic web and sentiment data for smarter learning

Some key quotes and papers on why thinking about a Connectivist inspired pedagogy for smart learning leads to thinking about the knowledge web. How we may need to transform the way we manage and organise this vast resource from a technological perspective as well as more conventional educational perspectives. The need to think in more inventive ways about knowledge in...

PhD