Public, Free, Open
Free as in liberalNot free as in no cost[1] FreeAs part of a presentation about Open Educational Resources (OER) in July 2012, I asserted that it made more sense to think of the term 'free', often used...
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Narrative, Sequence, Consecution and Hypertext
In an engaging review of the translation of Mikhail Shiskin's novel, Maidenhair, by Marian Schwartz, James Meek (2012) asserts that most writers seek to provide readers with (at least) a double sense...
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Futures of Learning and Digital Agencies
The Learning EnvironmentFor universities in the UK in their current situation, despite their different characters, there appear to be five topic areas which are particularly important for possible...
View ArticleOn Distinctiveness
According to Barber, Donnelly and Rizvi (2013), "Distinctiveness matters". As universities complete for students and funding, they will need to make an offer that marks them out from the crowd. In...
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'A Librarian': Deweyan Pragmatist, Peircean Pragmaticist or Unbounded Fantasist?
In reviewing a raft of re-issued novels and a book of selections of prose and drama by B. S. Johnson, Colin Burrow explains that through the unstructured form of The Unfortunates Johnson was...
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Narrative, Performative, Learning Environment
One major insight for the design of narrative environments is the recognition that, in following Martin Buber, the world ceaselessly offers opportunities to move from instrumental, narcissistic I-it...
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The ego-logical and the eco-logical
If, as Will Adams (2007) implies, humans are relational beings separated by their egos, which he suggests means that people relate pathologically, what might this mean for learning? How might learning...
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The Re-Uses of Literacy
From Literacy to AgenciesAllan ParsonsMay 20131. Literacy: agency, democracy and hierarchyA major element of standard, base or alphabetico-phonetic literacy, as the ability to read, write, interpret,...
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Blended Learning
Let's be contentious...If the library (at its best) stands for openness, sharing, freedom and independence in the processes and practices of learning, and thereby tends to democracy, and the classroom...
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British culture; actants
Rachelle Hope Saltzman's A Lark for the Sake of Their Country: the 1926 General Strike Volunteers in Folklore and Memory is a study of the activities and attitudes of the hundreds of thousands of...
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Intersubjective asymmetry
Peter Beaumont (2013, 15 September) brings to attention the credo of one of novelist Victor Pelevin's more cynical creations, the Russian adman from the novel "Homo Zapiens": "First you try to...
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Postmodern: un-conditionally?
There is something strange about Lyotard's use of the term 'performativity' in The Postmodern Condition. One way of trying to state this summarily is to say that he seems to conflate the notion of...
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Ill-fitting notes on Destruktion and deconstruction, in the context of...
1. Destruktion and DeconstructionIt is not possible to use the word 'deconstruction', which itself is a value or stands for a certain set of values in terms of academic inquiry, without evoking a chain...
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The Barnett hypotheses #1
Four epochs of understanding learning can be identified, Professor Ronald Barnett (2011) suggests: a metaphysical view; an empirical view; an experiential view; and a learning-amid-contestation view....
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The Barnett hypotheses #2
The knowledge function of the university is being undermined to such an extent that it has been proposed that we are witnessing ‘the end of knowledge’ in higher education (Barnett, 2000). This thesis...
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The Barnett hypotheses #3
In "The coming of the ecological university", Ronald Barnett (2011) sketches three imaginaries, or dominant background understandings, of the university, as a prelude to discussing four possibilities...
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The Barnett hypotheses #4
The hypothesis, or rather hypotheses, in "Knowing and becoming in the higher education curriculum" (Barnett, 2009) is, or rather are, more difficult to set out than the previous three because there...
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Performance, Performative and Performativity in Higher Education. From...
At an engaging first session of the HEAT Reading Group on 13 November 2013, organised by Matt Charles and Steven Cranfield, the topic of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s use of the term ‘performativity’ in “The...
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Take your time, but be quick about it…
“Take your time but be quick about it because you do not know what awaits you.” (Derrida, 2001: 56)We seem to have reached a chiasm, knot or simply an entanglement with the terms performance,...
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