It has been a week of organising base groups and applications for admission with credit for prior learning, sorting out the VLE and wiki, watching posts and comments start coming in to Activity 1. There is something exciting about the first full teaching week of the semester, but also something a little unhealthy about the seeming compression of time and intensity of activity. Everyone is so busy that it becomes infectious. Not that we aren’t really busy. We are. But, there is something almost compulsive about the need to be busy, and to be seen to be busy, at this time of year. I do not know if it it just run away neo-liberal, managerialism turning up the heat on the sector, wanting us to compete like cats in a bag: a fear induced by a climate of employment precarity: do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. Or is there something else to be factored in? Something about preserving values of community, respect for learners and learning, and our own scholarship, in spite of the pressures that keeps us going.
rWorld2 