Tag: Naomi Barnes

Bookmarked The education minister’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea* (aare.edu.au)

When will governments learn their lesson? Worksheets won’t fix workload crisis.

Alison Bedford and Naomi Barnes respond to the proposal to produce centralised planning resources as a means alleviating pressure. They discuss problems with past projects, such as Curriculum to Classroom (C2C) reforms, whether it be limits to the resources, copyright requirements, and safe options. The issue they suggest is not planning, but workload.

The clear and obvious solution to relieving pressure on teachers is an ongoing investment in additional staff: learning support experts, sports and arts co-curricular supervisors, and professional pastoral staff.  Recognising teachers’ professional expertise as educators and giving them the time to do their core business well is the real answer to the teaching crisis, not handing out another worksheet.

Jo Lambert raises similar concerns responding to pressures around recruiting when there are still structural issues at play:

We have a teacher workforce issue without a doubt. We need more teachers urgently. But some of us are nervous about recruiting new teachers at the same time as we are sorting out their workplace conditions.

Gill Light also shares a teacher’s perspective on how to fix the teacher shortage, including career structure, raise the profile, change the model, and letting teachers’ teach.

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Not sure about Excel, but pretty confident I could do it with Google Sheets using QUERY formula. Are the datasets public on the web?
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Naomi, I recently read Clinton Walker’s Stranded, unpacking the Australian music scene between 1972 – 1992. I kind of knew/guessed it was wild, but not sure I really appreciated how wild it was and all so very male. Can only imagine UK was even more so.
Liked If only politicians focused on the school issues that matter. This election is a chance to get them to do that (The Conversation)

At a symposium in June 2020, Keith Heggart and Steven Kolber asked teachers, principals, politicians, journalists, education researchers, parents, public intellectuals and community members to discuss democratic issues faced by Australian schools. The two authors have compiled a soon-to-be-published edited collection based on the symposium. They summarise key issues as:

  • teachers’ rapidly increasing workload
  • lack of trust in teachers and their professional judgment
  • lack of scrutiny of the expensive adoption of new technology
  • the quality of research used for so-called evidence-based policy.

Suggested approaches for tackling these issues include:

  • more effective and personalised professional learning for teachers
  • more parental and community involvement in schools
  • more targeted support for early-career teachers by linking them to professional networks and teaching communities
  • a revitalisation of teacher unions, including a return to grassroots work with members, but also through expanding connections with the broader education community, including parents, professional associations and think tanks.

Underpinning all of these issues was a central theme: teachers must have the flexibility, trust and quality of research essential for education that serves local needs.

Listened Why Alan Tudge is now on the history warpath from EduResearch Matters

This points to education tactically being used to further the Federal Government’s re-election campaign, rather than a strategic move to save the soul of the nation. Tactics are localised responses to circumstances, whereas strategies are more stabilised and long term. So in other words, the federal cabinet ministers are finding issues to associate with the word “optimism” and putting it in front of as many voters as possible. For education, the History Wars have a history of going viral, even before the internet. And if you look at Tudge’s comments on Friday, the History curriculum is nestled in with the other two big viral topics – literacy and numeracy test scores.

Reading Naomi Barnes’ discussion of Alan Tudge’s challenge to the history curriculum had me going back and listening to The Fauves Celebrate the Failure.
Bookmarked Thread by @DrNomyn on Thread Reader App (threadreaderapp.com)

Thread by @DrNomyn: I’m thrilled that @bedforda1 and my edited collection is finally finding its way around the world. This has been a long road, a labour of love of pop culture, and nerding out about theory….…

Naomi Barnes unpacks each of the chapters of a new book Unlocking Social Theory with Popular Culture:Remixing Theoretical Influencers:

This book demonstrates how pop culture examples can be used to demystify complex social theory. It provides tangible, metaphorical examples that shows how it is possible to “do philosophy” rather than subscribe to a theorist by showing that each theorist intersects and overlaps with others.

Liked Adults made the media mess (aare.edu.au)

Social media platform Facebook pulled the plug on Australian news last week after a tussle between the government and the digital giant. What does that mean for Australian educators and students? What are the ways we can combat misinformation and disinformation? And how far along are we in the struggle to teach media literacy (answers from a professor and a PhD student)? How important is it for students to create their own content? PLUS read an excerpt from Kid Reporter, a handbook for young investigators (and their teachers) by Saffron Howden and Dhana Quinn; and Peter Greste’s review of the book.

Bookmarked What does ‘back to basics’ really mean? What ‘reforms’ are being signalled this time? (AARE)

What does Premier Berejiklian mean when she dubs the NSW curriculum review as “back to basics” reform?

Naomi Barnes reflects on the many iterations of ‘back to basics’ education and highlights the way in which this empty signifier means more than just reading, writing and arithmetic.
Bookmarked Are you an academic labouring for social media impact? Here’s a must-read (aare.edu.au)

I am writing this essay to complicate the idea of academic use of social media by considering it in terms of digital labour. I do not wish to discourage academics from using social media. If academics stopped using it, I wouldn’t have anything to research. Please don’t! However, if use of social media is considered part of academic impact, then the labour involved must be given greater attention.

Naomi Barnes explores the labour associated with the use of social media by academics. A part of this is the work associated with translating academic research for different contexts, the cruel optimism of edu-influencer asspiration and the impact of the pressure to make an ‘impact’.
Bookmarked 7 Ps of Platform Education (criticaltheoryoftech.com)

Social media research is not pop-cultural. It is a mechanism for understanding the very real performativity in platform education.

Naomi Barnes explores the effect of the platform economy on education. She breaks this investigation down into seven considerations: platforms, publics, profiles, produces/prosumers, professional expectations, policy and performativity. In closing, she highlights three points to be taken from all this: platform education is here and there is no pragmatically viable way to avoid it, social media policy makers should be aware of the ebbs and flows of social media platforms and factor that into workload and human resourcing, and policy makers must be aware of the effect of their presence on social media. This touches on the work of Ben Williamson and his book Big Data in Education.
Bookmarked Doing my research work is like walking a city. How would you walk this city? by Dr. Naomi Barnes (EduResearch Matters)

If you were to walk to the top of the tallest tower and look down on the network of roads and people, it might look planned, straight, considered. Plenty of people have taken that path and many know where to go. You can tell by the structures. But when you get down to ground level, the steps people are taking are not all in unison. They wander, stop, turn around, bump into things.

Naomi Barnes reflects on walking around cities, irruptions and the way in which we shape our research and our research then shapes us. This was an interesting read in light of Ian Guest’s reflections on flânography and his description of riches.
Replied to Logic and rhetoric: the problem with digital literacy by Naomi Barnes (Critical Theory of Technology)

Below are 5 approaches to digital literacy that language researchers in digital rhetoric have identified.

  • The error model
  • The apprenticeship model
  • The dialogic model
  • Situated learning model
  • The gift economy model
This is an intriguing post Naomi.

I have thought about digital pedagogies before, but only ever as a part of a wider discussion of pedagogy. I had never really thought about the intracies.

The five models have me reflecting upon what models I have used in the past and within what context. It then has me considering what models work best in my current context, working with teachers.
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Surely about the myth of Musk. Was just strange how it all came about, but maybe I am a cynic 🤷‍♂️
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I think that ‘ownership’ is problematic. I remember it coming up in reference to domain of one’s own. In part that is what interests me about the IndieWeb ethos and POSSE.

📓 Creating an Archive of a Set of Tweets

I really the way Naomi Barnes shares her readings and responses via Twitter. This is something that I have done in the past. For example, check my quotes associated with danah boyd’s book It’s Complicated. Beyond replying to the first tweet to create a connected stream of responses, I used a hashtag (#ItsComplicated in the case of boyd’s book) to organise the responses. This is a method often encouraged by authors / publishers more and more. See for example the use of #intentionthebook to collect responses associated with Amy Burvall and Dan Ryder’s book Intention.

Barnes has taken this a different way and developed a hashtag to collect all her readings (#NBNotes), but rather than tagging each subsequent post, this is just saved for the initial Tweet.

I really like Barnes’ intent to share. I just wonder if there is a means of owning these notes. Ideally, taking a POSSE approach, she might live blog and post this to Twitter. I vaguely remember Chris Aldrich sharing something about this recently, but the reference escapes me. This is also limited with her blog being located at WP.com. I therefore wondered about the option of pasting the content of the tweets into a blog as an archive.

Clearly, you can embed Tweets, often by adding the URL. However, there are more and more people deleting their Tweets and if you embed something that is deleted, this content is then lost. (Not sure where this leaves Storify etc.) Another approach is to use Martin Hawksey’s TAGS to create an archive and then use this data to paste into a post. I have documented the steps with gifs here. If each of the tweets included the unique hashtag, the archive could be created using this, however as it is not, the easiest way of capturing the tweets would be to search for ‘@DrNomyn’.

The problem then is that the archive includes all tweets. Although I could query this, it is easy enough to use the Filter option in the Data menu of Sheets to focus only on tweets from @DrNomyn (Column B) and to organise Tweets in chronological order (Column E). The quickest way to get these Tweets into a post is to highlight the cells in question and copy them.

Then just paste this text into the post. I would then add blockquotes, but this maybe a personal preference. I guess there are other things that could be done, such as adding blockquotes via the sheets and even removing links to the actual Tweets (if desired), but I think that this offers a start.

_I just realised that TAGS only captures 140 characters, not the extended length. I guess this solution may not work_ I realised that I needed to downloaded a new copy of TAGS. Here then is a copy of the tweets:

The current challenge to 2nd wave feminism is what to critique.
Which understanding of androcentrism?
Which interpretations of gender justice?
Which modes of feminist theorising should be incorporated into the current political imaginary?
Fraser urges feminist to ‘break that unholy alliance’ between feminism and marketisation and forge new ones between ’emancipation’ and ‘social protection’
The personal became political.
Boundaries of contestation became more than just the socio-economic
What happened in homes and was attached to bodies were thrust into the public sphere in order to politicise
The first issue the New Left focused on was the Vietnam War and the role capitalism was taking in supporting neo-colonialism to support the West.

Soon attention was turned to other core features of capitalism that had become ‘naturalised’
Materialism, consumerism, social control, sexual repression, sexism, heteronormativity were all normalised under capitalism.

Social activists began to organise to break through these normative political routines
Fraser argues that feminism can no longer ignore economic inequality if it wants to be taken seriously as a politically transformative force. Revive Act1 (redistribution) with the cultural insights of Act2 (recognition)
Act2 – the feminist imagination turned from redistribution of power/economy to recognition of difference – identity/cultural politics dominated
Feminism [and I’m going to add on the shoulders of the Civil/Indigenous Rights, LGBTIQ, and independence movements to which it should be eternally thankful] began questioning the exclusions of social democracy
Attention turned to the politics of recognition.
Unable to transformatively address the androcentrism of capitalism, feminists began targeting the harms capitalism caused in an effort to transform culture
Feminism must also integrate transnationalism into its agenda.
How might feminism foster equal participation transnationally across entrenched power asymmetries and divergent world views?
Feminism MUST be intersectional if it wants to address the inequalities of capitalism
The history of 2nd wave feminism:

Western Europe and North America saw unprecedented prosperity after WW2.

Keynesian economics showed how to incorporate the unions and built welfare states

Mass consumption had apparently tamed social conflict
But the ‘success’ of Keynesian economics ignored the exclusion from the labour market of women and people of colour.

The ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ was shattered by the New Left – the radical youth who took to the streets
Fraser suggests that instead of synergy between redistributive and recognitive agendas, 2nd wave feminism developed a binary where people had to choose which side they thought worked best
Act3 – still unfolding but we are seeing the reinvigoration of feminist and other emancipatory forces to demand that the runaway markets be subjected to democratic control
Second wave feminism came out of the New Left after WW2.

Act1 – Began life as an insurrectionary force that challenged male domination in state organised capitalist societies
Neoconservative forces have (for a time) defused 2nd wave feminism’s radical currents but we are beginning to see it’s reanimation [Fraser predicted it in 2014, I reckon we can say it’s here in late 2017]
Fraser argues that, despite good intentions, the emphasis on identity dovetailed too neatly with neoliberal desires to make people forget about egalitarianism and redistribution of capital
At present 2nd wave feminism is deepening its signature insights
– critiquing capitalism’s androcentrism
– analysis of male domination
– gender -sensitive revisions of democracy and justice
By the 1980s the political project of feminism had died down due to decades of Conservative governments. The fall of the Communist bloc also didn’t help ‘socialist’ movements
The book traces the changing focus of the history of second wave feminism over the 20th/21st centuries. Providing essays situated in each of the three ‘Acts’. I’m live tweeting Fraser’s overview of the history and spirit of the wave