Now where was I?

October was pretty much a lost month for me, between working on the new casa la bava and preparing for my third child, I’ve been out of the loop.  I had to put 110 Days to Xmas on ice (resurrection coming soon), and basically fell off the blogosphere for the last two or three weeks.  I read very little, and posted even less.  I enjoyed focusing on something different for a while, and my home projects are by no means finished.

But when I resurfaced this Monday I wanted a way to find out what was happening, and while I could have let things slide and moved on with some confidence that important discussions would be ongoing or re-surface, when I went to my RSS reader the 200+ posts in the OLDaily were unbelievably helpful in bringing the last month into perspective quickly and rather comprehensively. Downes’ insanely impressive commitment to regular posting about his readings provided me with an amazing resource to fill in some gaps. So, thank you Stephen, and here are some of the gems I culled from the OLDaily just recently:

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What you begin to see in this list is how I read the OLDaily, I’m actually interested in the politics behind the growing crisis in education right now, and how this is in many ways directly relates to questions of copyright, corporate interests, and a general impulse towards framing the current economic crisis as a way to increasingly privatize the educational industry, and by extension increasingly dis-empower those working within it. Also, the parallel between the Health industry and the education industry that are paralleled by Downes here makes me wish I would have kept up with the OLDaily in preparation for the Uncanny Learning presentation I did with Tom Woodward and Brian Lamb—-“The Three Year Solution” and “College more expensive than ever” would have gone a long way towards making my examples from the future that much more concrete. And I can’t help but agree that there is a crisis brewing, and often times it’s being used to both demoralize and disinvest the educational workforce.

On a related note, Marc Bousquet had this post about how real the omnipresent “fiscal” crisis is at universities. He also highlights a series of protests and occupations happening in the UC system as well as in Europe (Vienna, Austria in  particular) further reinforcing the crisis that you hear so little about through conventional channels.