Mark Smithers

Learning and Educational Technology in Higher Education

Early Thoughts on MITx

MIT today announced MITx which appears to be an open learning initiative. They describe it as “an online interactive learning platform” that will offer a portfolio of MIT courses. organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication allow for the individual assessment [...]

, , , , ,

Playing the Game, Publishing or Perishing in Higher Education

I recently read an article by David Colquhoun in the Guardian titled Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science. It’s well worth reading but what struck me was how we have got to the ridiculous situation that we are currently in and the part that senior academic managers have played in directing us there. [...]

,

Teaching lecturing online: is this the definition of irony?

This morning I was unfortunate enough to attend a vendor presentation for a series of online academic staff development modules. Basically a series of SCORM packages (so HTML pages, images and Flash content with a little xml thrown in). I won’t mention the vendor’s name for fairly obvious reasons.

,

Dropping out and dropping in – Steve Jobs and higher education

People that know me know that I didn’t always agree with Steve Jobs but I have no doubt of his creative skill and vision and his impact on modern life. I also think he had a huge impact on education and not always in the ways you might expect. I’ve been watching the Stanford University [...]

, , ,

Blogging and trust in Universities

It seems to me, as an interested observer of the higher education landscape over more years than I care to think about, that we are reaching the point where it can be argued that the private sector is behaving increasingly in ways that universities should behave and some universities are increasingly behaving in ways that [...]

Prof: ‘Engage Students Through Their Laptops’ — Campus Technology

  I was interested to see this new lecture enhancement technology being bought to market. Prof: ‘Engage Students Through Their Laptops’ — Campus Technology. I particularly liked this quote: “The key is to engage students through their laptops or cellphones, so they don’t drift off onto social networking sites” Of course maybe they actually prefer collaborating [...]

, ,

The ideal university

In the wake of AC Grayling’s setting up of the New College of the Humanities the Guardian newspaper has asked for submissions from readers for their vision of the ideal university in under 250 words. Of course I cant’ resist having a go so here is the entry that I’m about to submit to the [...]

The Cloud as a disruptor of educational technologies

The number of higher education institutions (HEIs) moving their student email (and, in many cases, staff email) to a cloud solution continues to grow. Every other day there is a new report one one HEI or other adopting either Google or Microsoft. Intrinsically I am not against this although I do find it interesting how [...]

, , , , ,

No Studying Between 12 and 2

The other day I happened to be on the campus of an old and prestigious university (that shall remain nameless other than to say it was not my own university) when I thought I’d treat myself to a coffee in the main campus coffee bar/ restaurant. Nothing unusual so far but having made my way [...]

, , , ,

More dead edtech please

Last night Twitter pointed me in the direction of a new Seth Godin post entitled “Bring me stuff that’s dead, please” in which he bemoans the the way ‘drive by technoratti‘ are obsessed with whatever the latest technology is. He makes the point that: “Only when an innovation is dead can the real work begin.” [...]

Previous Posts