Strangely compelling

I'm not sure what this collection of pictures has to do with Shibboleth, but I suspect it might be something.

Take a tour of European cities and their misplaced manhole covers. It's much more interesting than it sounds, I promise.

Living in the future

Watching some 'classic' DS9 the other day something frightening occured to us. Being passed around, poked and studied, these devices are all over the space station.

They're iPads.

The same thing happens when we're travelling around London. Some tube stations have projectors which play video adverts on the walls opposite the platforms.

We're living in the future.

A Power to Persuade | The Weekly Standard

A Power to Persuade The Weekly Standard:

When Anthony Patch, one of Fitzgerald’s failed heroes, learns that “desire
cheats you,” he refers to a phenomenon we now recognize as the power of glamour:
“It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds
some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do
the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part,
but the glitter that made you want it is gone—.” We may demand the sparkling
surface, like a cellophane coating, yet what we are able to grasp will be of
little consequence. Glamour wields the power to capture its viewers’ attention
as if by a spell that fascinates and arrests. .  .  . Transfixed, one gazes at a
world of possibility that is foreclosed, inaccessible, yet endlessly
alluring.

Glamour, of course, can gild not only inconsequential objects but deeply
consequential ones, including political leaders, policies, and ideas. Here,
although she never discusses such subjects, Brown’s analysis offers a useful
warning: “Glamour did not emerge from human warmth, morals, and the messy
emotions that define the everyday,” she writes of Hollywood glamour photography.
“Rather, in their place was the coolly aloof and beautifully coiffed
personality, hovering over the multiple indignities of life on the ground.”
Glamour not only makes things look better than they really are. It also tends to
edit out human complexity—including, in the political realm, the complexity of
disagreements, of clashing values, of diverse wants, of technological, economic,
and moral tradeoffs.

Powerful stuff.

Time, gentlemen

This one has been bouncing around my head for a while now. Not sure why it chose this morning to fall out, but there you go.

Work-life balance, DINKs, flexi-time, paternity leave, contract work, visiting tutor...

Is full-time employment unworkable?

I'm no social historian, but I'm not so naïve as to believe that we had a perfect world where men went out to work and women stayed at home looking after the 2.4 children. That never happened. The only reason we think it happened was because society was run by the privileged few people for which that happened. Anyway...

More and more women are choosing to be in the workplace, resulting in wonderful things like maternity leave and flexible working hours. The concept of work-life balance has arisen out of this. I'm quite happy working part-time. If I worked full-time, I'm not sure I'd have enough time for all the other stuff I have to do, like ironing and baking oaty bun things and sawing bits of wood.

So, what will happen to the concept of full-time employment? I'm not so sure it's much cop any more.

Del Preston, the world's most advanced practitioner

"It's an old trick I picked up from an eLearning conference when I was tweeting with my phone... S'probably why kids can't be taught by conventional methods..."

Don't know why, but the image came to me...

Return trip

I have been approached by one of the Head of one of the Departments I work for and asked to consider joining a team of pretty high-ranking college bods on a trip to China. We're trying to set up links with a college outside Beijing who want to teach some of our Business courses.

I'm not sure how I feel about going back to China, particularly in a work capacity. It'll be weird, but good, I think. I just don't know.

Cahoots

Been talking shop with a Secondary teacher of my acquaintance and esteem. As far as I can make out, FE and Secondary teaching is very similar on paper when it comes to hours and time. The only real difference I can see is the amount of work a secondary teacher has to mark each week, and the class sizes, which makes more marking and more work. I'm guessing it would be impossible to fit all of this into PPA time, which, I'm told, is 10% of contact time, roughly 2¹⁄_bit hours. Even after an insane first couple of years teaching a subject and getting all the materials made and courses planned, it would still take more than this to do a good job.

My other point of curiosity was about status, arising out of my current stagnation. I see him as a real teacher, as he was trained before he started, works incredibly hard and genuinely aims to disturb his students to the point where they can learn (his Nazi party-piece is the stuff of legend). He, on the other hand, sees me as the real teacher, as I deal with skills and people who feel the need for these skills in the real world.

Perhaps we're both individually thinking that we're still not quite good enough for the responsibilities we've taken on. From where we're standing, the other one looks like an expert, and the trouble with experts is they make everything look easy.