Feral Angels: wild

Tom Hirons runs the regular on-line Feral Angels Poetry Cafe. (https://tomhirons.com/events/feral-angels/feral-angels-poetry-cafe-february-26th-2023) This week the theme was: How does wildness exhibit itself in form and use of language - in how we put words on a page? That wildness we are pointing to, we are trying to bring that wildness into our poetry. What wildness? To find it, first ask, where can you be wild in your life?

Calibrating? Connecting? Consistently? (1)

On one level. that is what we do. All the time. We are planners, time and distance travellers. How much? Will it get us there? Every time? That is what we mean. But where is the "there" to which we want to get? And for whom do we want to get there? And who we? … Continue reading Calibrating? Connecting? Consistently? (1)

Get back on the horse

I have stumbled back over my place for writing and this is a surprise for me. I remember him! I last posted here two and a half years ago and retired from full-time paid academic work a few months later (August 2020), as the Covid lockdowns in the UK were being violated by Boris Johnson's … Continue reading Get back on the horse

Higher education: sunk at the end of history?

A reply to Justine Andrew. ‘The Strategic Imperative: Planning for a Post-Covid Future’. Wonkhe. Justine Andrew in Wonkhe (6 May 2020) sets out a strategic approach to the big questions facing higher education: sector, institutions and their governors. She, at KPMG, uses the structure: React, Resilience, Recovery, Renewal and New Reality. I want to suggest … Continue reading Higher education: sunk at the end of history?

Reflection in action: professional development study visits

How close to the moment can you get? "Be here now," urges 1960s psychologist Richard Alpert. A mythical Google aspires to a perfect concurrent rendering of this reality: in real-time, in software. How much rewinding can we do before anyone notices the pause for thought? Reflection in action often has the effect of: "Oops! Don't … Continue reading Reflection in action: professional development study visits

Beginning of term

Systems or people? We can model learning in order to develop ways for our machines to acquire, store, process and apply data: information gathered from the world around. Although I put it as a vague question of preference at the start of this essay, it has many ramifications. Are people not just quite complex systems? … Continue reading Beginning of term

One notebook warning

One notebook I write. Not as much or as well as I should. But I write. Two very broad forms interest me: poetry and philosophy of learning, knowledge, theory. What is true and good? Do these concepts mean anything? I believe they do. My job, and much of this writing, here, has to do with … Continue reading One notebook warning

A hidden curriculum

Published on: Jan 18, 2018 I examine two related concepts: hierarchised identity formation and the enclosure of desire as a hidden curriculum. A hidden curriculum is, I suggest the collection of assumptions, often about power (Brookfield 2017, chapter 2) that is communicated alongside and through the practice of overt curricula. A hidden curriculum is conveyed … Continue reading A hidden curriculum

Tinkering with algorithms

I read Franklin Foer's Facebook's War on Free Will the Guardian's "Long read" for Tuesday 19 September 2017. He recapped a familiar argument: you are Facebook's product. But when he hit "data science" I turned up my sensors. He says, "There’s a whole discipline, data science, to guide the writing and revision of algorithms". Then he … Continue reading Tinkering with algorithms