Sunday Posts

Online Learning is poor experience! How much was I reminded of my past life, when I was an young e-mail evangelist and was forced to comparative charts of fax and email, when I was confronted with that statement. There was an element of surreal in the setting too: I was talking to a Senior Manager in a large corporation based in Philippines who do most of their work remotely anyway. But the tone was sincere - it was not an attempt to end the conversation as the coffee had even arrived - and this was a point being made, as I guessed, from the person's own life experience.  This is a difficult debate to engage into. Because it is difficult to argue against experience: If you had a bad meal in a restaurant and I had a good meal there, I can't convince you that the restaurant is good. I can only convince you that your experience was not typical, as much as you can convince me that neither was mine. There was a lot going on in online learning, and every tom and his friends hav...

If I summarise what I wish to do going forward, it will be this: I want to work in New Education and stop working in Old Education.  This stands on a fundamental assumption that education is at a point of disjuncture, when the old ways of doing things must change. This idea, being proclaimed by educational thinkers, economic historians and technologists alike, bears out in my personal experience. My experiences in private and public education in UK and elsewhere tell me that we have built an elaborate and extensive system of education aimed at doing nothing: All the 'quality' talk that the Western countries take great pride of is actually a triumph of emptiness, as Mats Alvesson calls it. Bill Readings, in his book on Universities, did point out to the pointlessness of quality talk - that quality by itself means nothing - and this has now become an all-pervasive disease, quality assurance becoming the excuse for status quo. The problem with this is that we are just fo...

Employability is the mantra of the day, because we sure have a jobs problem. Governments are making universities, in fact education system as a whole, the scapegoat for millions of unemployed that they have to deal with. The conclusion is straightforward: There must be an education problem if so many people can't find jobs even after getting educated. And, hence, increasingly, public policy is making employability the centre-piece of the higher education agenda. I shall argue that this oversimplifies the problem and diverts our attention. I am not suggesting that the education model does not need looking at: Indeed, we need to revisit what the universities do in the context of the modern world. But, employability is not a problem created by the universities and colleges, it is a structural issue and everyone knows this. To start with, there are not enough jobs available. It is very good to say that there are vacancies for Rocket Scientists and Brain Surgeons while there is une...