The Renegade New Literacy Critic!

Here I am at the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education summit in London, live blogging in blatant defiance of my own earlier critiques of this kind of intrusive practice! This event is being blogged officially by several people, so I'm using this space to record my unofficial views...

The conference is about agility in HE, symbolised like this (honestly - whose idea was that?):



...and Ewart Woodridge the host is being very agile in dealing with the continuing absence of keynote speaker Martin Bean, who is still stuck in a car somewhere. He has encouraged the audience of 260 to explore the blogging environment for themselves. (I've got some things to say in a future post about the confused role for blogging in the context of an event like this)

Now Martin Bean has arrived and given his usual dynamic (and funny) speech. His overall theme is that HE institutions will have to meet the needs of informal, critical, mobile and engaged learners who have the resoources of the world's experts, mentors, and free content providers, to select from. (See Patrick McAndrew's live blog of the speech - which he posted while I was busy making notes - most of which are the same as what he has written- so now I don't see any point in posting mine).

Now I'm in a breakout group discussing the relationship between research rigour and impact. Blogging it here. (..actually finding live blogging quite difficult - my instinct is to stop and think before I publish something - but my role is to produce a record of what is being said - and sometimes I just don't understand what someone has just said - and I find myself writing in disjointed phrases like this - and losing my concentration as I go back to correct typos etc...)


(here they are discussing the leadership implications of the rigour vs impact challenge while I work out how to upload images from from my new mobile phone...)

..now it's lunch