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Organisational Change and the Power of Collegiality

Rugby_scrum.jpg

There’s been something of a theme running through the last half dozen or so posts here. I guess it’s a function of the time in the new academic year … beginnings and the raising of issues that are challenging us all. I was at another faculty meeting last week where e-learning was discussed. You could feel spines stiffen a bit as the topic went round the table. The conversation went something like this: ‘People won’t (make an effort/change their way of doing things/appear to be even slightly interested in innovation or … add your own phrase here) unless they are made to.’ Now the ‘people’ being referred to are academics. I’m moved to ask what happened to the spirit of intellectual inquiry and the desire to develop one’s scholarly practice? Well that’s another matter, but for now there’s a management imperative that has to be addressed by individuals in the faculty collective, and fast.

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Clayton’s Won’t Do!

OK, the rehearsal you’re having when you’re not having a rehearsal … more than a week away from the last rehearsals and I’m getting twitchy. Damn this bug! It gets in your system, you have to keep working away at it. So, yesterday trying to keep in the groove by reading the script, imaging the

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Digital natives and the class blogging blues

Book and Computer

It’s been quite a week and a bit getting a new class of students signed up and into blogging on a group project. I’ve written before on the apparent e-learning challenges to students, and on some of the roadblocks I’ve encountered with their digiphobia. This time round, very few found the process of signing up with edublogs … the platform I’d chosen for the class blog … to be a trial. It seemed that following the instructions and getting themselves signed in with user names was just too complicated to bother persisting. Keep the approach simple, but no simpler (thanks Einstein).

However, I’m wondering after the past 10 days whether, rather than the unfamiliar navigation in a new environment being the stumbling block, that it’s not the actual process of reading online that is the real problem.

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