Mark Smithers

Learning and Educational Technology in Higher Education

future

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 [...]

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Reforming the university: evolution or revolution? – A Response

As a ‘disenfranchised insider’ I really enjoyed reading Tony Bates’blog post ‘Reforming the university: evolution or revolution?’. In it Dr Bates discusses change in universities from a stakeholder point of view and considers Faculty, Students, Government and the Economy. He concludes by saying: My view is that universities do need to change quite radically, and [...]

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Selling Solar Panels to Oil Sheiks

In a reflective mood on my Friday evening commute home I tweeted that: Being an advocate of #elearning and #edtech in universities is a bit like trying to sell solar panels to oil sheiksless than a minute ago via SeesmicMark Smithersmarksmithers

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Spoken Like a True Non-Academic

I had an interesting experience last month, I was asked to participate in focus groups to help a university IT services department develop its IT strategy for the next 5 years. The brief was to help generate ideas for what might be required to inform a five year strategy but we were also asked to [...]

A Draft Educational Technology Landscape Map

I’ve been working on educational technology strategy and implementation for what feels like as long as I can remember but one thing I have always intended to do was to develop a visualisation of educational technologies in the form of a ‘map’. There are a number of such maps around already. Some of these are [...]

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The Size of Universities in Australia and the UK

For a long time I have been interested in organisational innovation. At the the moment that is focussed on the way that higher education and universities specifically can adopt and mainstream innovations in eductaional technicology and changing pedgagogy related to the adoption of new technologies. One barrier to innovation adoption may be related to the [...]

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Brainstorming EdTech

I’m in the process of developing a roadmap for the future of educational technology at my institution so that we can plan for the next 3, 5 and 10 year periods. As you might expect this is reasonably challenging but it is also quite an enjoyable activity. I would expect the next ten years to be an exceptionally interesting time to be working in IT in higher education.

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Academic Reputation in the Future

I have been reading Professor Martin Weller’s very interesting recent blog posts about academic reputation and online engagement. He raises interesting questions about the nature of scholarly activity, the factors that have traditionally lead to recognition and promotion and whether or not these are changing in an increasingly socially networked world.

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