This will be a series of blog posts that I am writing to assist me in the work of developing my course in Learning Design. I’m trying to stay abreast of current research and writing in the field of learning design, instructional design and other, related fields. This will help inform my own practice, but…
Category: Academia
Some reflections on Banal Nationalism by Michael Billig (1995)
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. Springer. Introduction societies that maintain armies – belief that some things are more valuable than life itself. What is valued – changes in times. Sometimes, these causes, after time has passed, seem trivial. This reflects a shifting balance of priorities. Great causes today – different. So is the scale of…
The life cycle of social movements (part 3)
I think there are three major differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements. The mix of the physical real and the virtual real, and the ability to make use of affordances in different spaces. Early studies of the internet (in the first instance) and social media (in the decades following) often focused on who was…
What does social justice in learning design look like?
Learning through Covid-19: Social Justice and the digital divide | 15 July What does social justice in learning design look like? Introduction I’ve had a bit of a history with social justice education – it’s often mentioned in the same discussions as civics and citizenship education, human rights education and a few other areas in…
The life cycle of social movements (part two)
The new However, it would be my argument that newer social movements do not have the same risks or costs associated with participation. Indeed that much is generally a given in terms of social movement organising theory (see Earls etc). Certainly, the use of mobile technology and social media has meant that organising – and…
All assessment, all the time (part two)
In the previous post about this topic, I discussed the challenges of assessing online discussion posts as a proxy for learning and also a proxy for physical real conversations. In this blog, I wanted to advance a few ideas about how this might be changed – and what that change might look like in terms…
The life cycle of social movements (part one)
The old Social movements – especially when broadly defined, which is generally how I choose to define them – are hardly new phenomena. I imagine they have been around as long as people have gathered in groups and organised to achieve specific goals. Of course, not all social movements are successful, widespread or share the…
All assessment, all the time (part one)
I’ve had the privilege of speaking with a few well respected academic about learning design and education more generally over the course of the last couple of weeks as we work towards putting together a grant proposal. Quite naturally, our discussions about the grant have wandered off into interesting areas relating to education and especially…
The erasure of history
(Since I wrote this post, I have seen a number of academics and historians make this point more clearly and more succinctly than I have below. I suggest you reads their posts – especially Melitta Hogarth’s work on the AARE blog. I’m retaining my posting here merely as a reflection of my own thoughts, as…
Some reflections on Universal Design for Learning by Meyer, Rose and Gordon (2014).
I’ve been aware of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for a long time – my colleague Greg Alchin has taught me a lot about it over the course of our acquaintance, and I’ve been to a few sessions on it over time, but up until the last couple of years, I haven’t really had the…