Penworks.Net

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

27/04/2019

Refining Analysis

This post is in a series of posts about simplifying and clarifying the analysis system. As I’ve moved forward, more clarity comes to light. How to actually define units of meaning (eg Reed, 2006, Marton & Pong, 2005) for the intended outcome spaces (remember, there are five, a main one, and four subsidiaries, if you like) is the major challenge....

Featured/PhD

12/03/2019

Doctoral Thinking

I’ve been working on the analysis system now for some time. That means I *still* haven’t yet fully clarified how I will analyse the transcripts and then how I will in some way interrelate the other data sets, that is, the other data that aren’t transcripts. I’m well on the way but have a distinct feeling I must streamline, make...

PhD

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...

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