I also went to see the Odyssey twice, once with Maren and once “the way Nolan intended” in IMAX. It’s been interesting to see the online discussion about it. I must admit, I hadn’t appreciated hitherto how many experts in ancient Greece walked amongst us. I also can’t recall a film where so many people have opinions. My insightful view is, I quite enjoyed it as a piece of cinema. I will note that many who criticise Nolan’s version seem to have a rather noble vision of Odysseus as hero (one suspects they haven’t read it). Like many people, my first introduction to the book was via the TE Lawrence translation (a man no stranger to his own ego). You don’t go into the book with any high-minded ideals when the translator in his introduction says Homer has “thin and accidental characterisation. He thumb-nailed well; and afterwards lost heart… that cold-blooded egotist Odysseus, and the priggish son… It is sorrowful to believe that these were really Homer’ s heroes and exemplars.” As he concedes (although one suspects through gritted teeth) “the tale was the thing.” Approach the film in the same manner I would say. The tale is the thing. Mind you, I also enjoyed Evil Dead Burn which I saw this month as well.

Writing

My second horror novel, The H-Index, is scheduled to come out on the 1st September. I blogged the cover reveal, and pre-orders at Amazon and other platforms are available. I think the writing has really improved since the last novel, so if you enjoy the idea of a group of academics on a writing retreat is remote Wales being tormented by an ancient big demon, then this book is for you. It’s possible to read it as a parable for the academic system of metrics, but I couldn’t possibly say.

I also finished the first complete draft of my third book this week, a bio-tech horror set in Aberporth. More on that later…

Books

Jenny Radcliffe’s account of her career as a social engineer in People Hacker, was a fun read, but also a useful reminder amidst all the tech focus that people are both strength and weakness of any organisation. An updated version of Soccernomics does the sorts of things with data that you want, it asks interesting questions and then sets out to answer them methodically, including why the financial fair play rules reinforce existing power structures, why black managers are so under-represented compared to black players and why women’s soccer should receive reparations. Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men seeks to undertake some reparations of its own by providing a thorough (and thoroughly readable) account of a wide range of female artists through history.

Other books I’ve read this month can be found on my Goodreads page.

Vinyl

Baby Rose returns with her smokey vocals and cinematic production on Yearnalism, an album rich with, well, yearning. My favourite new album this month os from indie-folk stalwart Kevin Morby. On his 8th album, Little Wide Open, he teams up with The National’s Aaron Dressner for a more expansive, Americana sound, for an album of the year contender. With partner Katie Crutchfield already releasing the brilliant Snocaps album & them having their first child, it’s a busy year on the Waxahatchee ranch.

Here is the cover:

The back cover blurb reads:

Publish or perish just got real.

An isolated writing retreat on the Welsh coast brings together five academics, in single-minded pursuit of career progression. Each of them has their own reasons for why they came to Pembrokeshire, and as they begin their work together tensions between them rise. Not all is as it seems however and when a storm hits and forces them to shelter together against the elements, they begin to fear that there is more to contend with than their personal demons. The picturesque coastal setting turns into a sinister stage in a fight for survival pitching their intellectual prowess against a natural horror.

The H-Index is academic horror at its blackest and funniest — proof that no amount of citations will save you from what’s coming.

The demon in this book is a bog witch from Welsh folklore, the Hen Wrach, and the cover really captures that slimy, dripping menace. More to come later on with links for all those pre-orders you want to put in.

I try to do this periodically on my Gmail account also. But what I hadn’t done was a real back catalog clear out. I had around 90,000 emails which Gmail placed in the Updates folder, and a similar number in the Forums and Promotions categories. I’ve used Gmail as my main account since about 2008. I generally try to delete stuff as it comes in, but even so it accumulates. At one point in the early Twitter days I had my setting to be notified when someone liked or retweeted my posts. So I had emails from 2010 informing me “David Kernohan retweeted your post”. I mean, that’s nice to know (thanks David!), but I probably don’t need to keep it.

As this article highlights, the environmental impact of all this pointless storage is pretty significant. I try to always opt out of further emails when I’m buying something, but inevitably you still end up on quite a few. And then there are those I deliberately signed up for, thinking “I’m going to read all of these”. I have been going through the process of assiduously unsubscribing from all of these as they come through. I’ve kept a few newsletters that I do actually read, but even then I try to burn after reading.

The unsubscribing process falls into three groups I’ve found:

Straightforward – you click unsubscribe, it knows who you are, you select unsubscribe. Job done;

Unnecessary steps – you have to enter your email address, or select a reason, or they send you another email saying you have successfully unsubscribed. More annoyingly you end up only unsubscribing from one of twenty different categories of emails they send you;

Pain in the butt – a few academic lists I have ended up on have asked me to log into an account I didn’t know I had, or email someone to get taken off a list that I didn’t ask to be on in the first place.

One good practice I came across was via BookBub – I get regular emails with deals for ebooks in them. In one of these it highlighted at the top that I hadn’t interacted with this type of email in a while and to click a button if I wanted to keep receiving them. This proactive checking in is a good idea to reduce our load I think.

Mind you, I have a newsletter, and it doesn’t do this. And you should definitely sign up for it.

(Image – Unsubscribe graffiti)

A month that almost resembled the old days of working. I gave a keynote (online), had an external examiner meeting (the end of my tenure for the fabulous Warwick IATL courses) and went to a conference. I need a month off now.

I may blog this in more detail later, but this month made me reflect that when I first left the OU I was quite focused on creating distance between my old identity of ed tech and open ed, because I wanted to carve a new path. But after a couple, of years (during which time I have remained connected if not deeply involved), I feel that I can combine both the new and old identities. It’s not a case of one or the other. And I still have some thoughts on education.

Writing

I usually cover books I have read and vinyl I’ve bought in this monthly round up, and now I’m adding a new category of writing, which will cover my progress on fiction writing. See? I’m combining those identities already.

This month I finished the final round of copy-editing on my new book – The h-index (I’ll blog more about the book later). I also sent the brief to the cover designer, Roderick, who did the cover for The Recluse Rules. I hope to have a cover to reveal later in July.

After several rounds of copy-editing I am very happy with this book. The writing is a clear improvement on the last one, and the characters really lead the way. I had the experience this time of not being sure where things would go, but letting the characters themselves lead me.

Books

John Kampfer’s Braver New Worlds attempts something very noble – to try and offer realistic hope. He examines some of the main political, social, and economic problems that democracies are dealing with, such as immigration, health care, education and technology, and for each find one country that is at least attempting to deliver a practical, long-term solution, instead of simplistic, populist responses. These are not without issues themselves, and I don’t always agree with him, but they are at least reasonable, robust solutions based on careful policy and not the “old man shouting at clouds” based approach we have now. Mind you, I also found it a bit depressing because for each of them I tried to imagine them being implemented in the UK, and the right-wing press would stir people up into a frenzy each time.

Katherine Rundell’s hugely readable biography of John Donne managed to be both entertaining and thoughtful. She gets the balance right in not judging Donne by today’s standards, but also highlighting his flaws, as well as his gifts. I also learnt that Renaissance flattery and sucking up was on a level that Gianni Infantino would aspire to. This is how you do biography.

And Graeme Thompsons book on Talk Talk is how you do music writing. His book covers the last three Talk Talk albums and the solo Mark Hollis one. He details the gruelling, extraordinary process of creating the beautiful, influential album The Spirit of Eden. He doesn’t glorify Mark Hollis, but also gives due reverence to the music itself. It made me go back and listen to each album again, with new ears.

Vinyl

Which neatly segues into my music listening this month. As well as revisiting the post-rock, minimalist world of Talk Talk, this month I purchased the new record from 00s indie rock favourites Death Cab For Cutie. This group personified the American wave of that indie movement in the noughties (covered in depth in the book Such Great Heights), and their album Transatlanticism was one of my favourites. I didn’t think I’d get to see them live but last year they toured that album, as well as the hughly influential rock/dance cross over Give Up (by the Postal Service). Without become a tribute band to themselves, the new album mines the best parts of what made them so great to start with. The sound of an artist being comfortable with their legacy,

The most unusual record I bought this month, and probably this year, is Frankie Archer’s The Dance of Death. Archer has a classic northern English folk voice, and this album covers folk songs, but it is very far from a traditional folk album, with each given an electronic, dance treatment. She describes it as “a collection of nu-ancient trad bangers”, which I didn’t know I wanted, but it turns out I very much did.

My album of the month is Aldous Harding’s Train of the Island. It sounds deceptively simple, and is quirky, distinctive and memorable. I’m still finding new elements to it.

By the way, if you’re interested I’ve started doing a short “What I’ve Been Listening To This Week” video over on my music Instagram account.

The theme of the conference was “Looking Back and Looking Forwards”. The conference started with an engaging keynote form my colleague Eileen Scanlon looking back over her career in open education, and citizen science. There was also a 20 years of OpenLearn panel and 30 years of JIME retrospective.

This chimed with something I’ve been pondering for a while. The rise of AI has caused some existential musings in the open ed community – is AI the new OER, or the very antithesis of this? This has combined with the Hewlett Foundation undergoing a strategic review which looks to be moving away from open ed as a focus. I notice too that ALT has launched a new strategy, and openness is no longer one of the core values.

In short, it seems that open education has rather fallen out of favour. I’ve no doubt we’ll see a few “the death of OER” type posts over the coming months, but I don’t feel despondent about it. In his opening talk, Rob Farrow made reference to my 2014 book The Battle for Open, and commented that the battle is never won, and the current mission is to redefine our ambition. What is the problem that open now solves? I’ll come on to that but first a couple of thoughts on what might be termed the OER Phase of Open Ed.

If we take the launch of MIT’s Open Courseware in 2001 as the start, then that is a 25 year run. Of course we can argue about start dates, and this represents only one aspect of open education (the type embodied by the Open University has a longer history). But this represents a convenient framing.

The first thing to say is – 25 years is a bloody long run in a lot of educational movements. Lots of other things have come and gone in that time. Nothing lasts forever.

Secondly it has had significant, practical impact in that time. It has often felt like OER is always “just about to happen”, where “happen” means enter worldwide dominance as the mainstream way of teaching. While it’s nice to have grand goals, the failure to realise this can sometimes make you forget all the incredible work that has been done – in terms of open textbooks, open pedagogy, OER sites like OpenLearn, OER for social justice, and so on. Nearly all Silicon Valley movements in education which get all the headlines don’t come anywhere near that level of actual impact.

The movement (that is a contentious term, but let’s go with it for convenient shorthand), has evolved a lot over that time, with a shift in focus away from purely content to more practice based considerations. And that broad umbrella has been both a benefit and a drawback as it allows for a broad range of interests and research but can also lead to a dilution of vision.

I think now is a time to re-evaluate and consider what were the key aspects of openness that we valued in education, and how they are best represented now. It’s not my place to say what that vision is, but I think it will be around the centring of the role of people, creativity and ethics in education which is facilitated by transparency, openness and trust.

So, I would say that as Open faces the end of one phase it is not a time for mourning but for stating how it can stand for (and against) things we value (or despise).

There is a strong GO-GN presence there as you’d expect so I’m looking forward to catching up with all of those people. I’ve been back to the OU a few times since I departed, and it combines a bit of a nostalgia hit along with “I’m glad I don’t have to do that commute” relief.

A lot of times when you leave something you’ve overseen it can go to pieces or at least go in directions you don’t necessarily agree with. The exact opposite has happened with GO-GN. Now that Rob and Beck are the co-leads it has flourished, with funding for OER hubs and their own seminar earlier this year.

It’s great to see the OER conference returning to Milton Keynes, a sort of homecoming. I don’t think I’ve missed on since 2014, so it holds a special place for me, and has always been the conference that generated the sorts of papers and conversations that made you think. When I co-chaired it in Cardiff in 2015 that was the first time I met Maren, who ten years later would become my wife. OER – come for the intelligent research, stay for the marital bliss.

The first question to ask in terms of sustainability of practice, is sustainability of what? The things each of us might want to protect and grow might be very different. The second is to consider how you can approach that issue. You can rely on institutional or Governmental guidelines. But these are limited I feel. To take the obvious example of dealing with AI, this study of AI policies across UK higher ed institutions found that there was no shared approach and despite claims to put students first, most policies were about compliance and monitoring. The author, Sam Illingworth comments that:

“Universities are supposed to develop critical thinkers. If an institution’s own AI policy cannot model critical thinking about AI, if it resorts to compliance while claiming to educate, then the policy contradicts the mission.“

This suggests that if you really care about a subject, or approach, or principle, then you can’t rely on institutional policies to do all the work for you. We’re going to have to make the practices we care about sustainable.

Anyway, here is a screen recording of the talk in my delightful monotone:

Step 1: Curating the Lyrics

As good a lyricist as McAloon is, you still don’t want everything. I needed to curate the lyrics from the ten albums. I used Claude (claude.ai) to analyse each song’s lyrics and strip out repetition and filler. I then identified lyrics to keep, either as stand-alone or as couplets. I used the extensive collection of lyrics at A2ZLyrics for this.

Step 2: Setting Up the Google Sheet

I needed to create a database of the lyrics so decided to use a simple Google Sheet, with four columns:

There was a lot of copying and pasting here, and this was the most time-consuming part. But also fun as I got to appreciate that often the best lyrics are tucked away in “lesser” songs. I then added a fifth column:

The Random column contains a =RAND() formula in every row. This recalculates every time the sheet is accessed, giving each row a new random number which allows the selection to be random rather than sequential.

Step 3: Creating a Bluesky Account

I wasted a bit of time messing about with Threads, but the multiple account maintenance and complex OAuth in Meta was too messy. I opted for Bluesky because it had simple authentication, and the site isn’t full of nazis.

I created a dedicated account at bsky.app and under Settings → Privacy and Security → App Passwords I created an App Password specifically for Make.com.

Step 4: Building the Automation in Make.com

I used Make.com (free tier) to automate the daily posting. I hadn’t used it before and after some initial errors (all mine) it was very effective and simple. Make uses “scenarios” and within these you create modules. I used four modules chained together:

Module 1 — Schedule

Triggers the scenario once per day at a set time. This isn’t really a separate module but attached to the Google sheets one.

Module 2 — Google Sheets: Search Rows

• Spreadsheet: my lyrics sheet
• Filter: Posted column is empty (unposted rows only)
• Sort by: Random column, Ascending
• Limit: 1

This fetches one random unposted lyric each time it runs.

Module 3 — Bluesky: Create Post

It has a built-in BlueSky module so once it was connected and authenticated to my account I just had to select the Create A Post function. It prompts for a text field, drawing on the Google Sheets variables. I selected:

"{{Lyric}}"

— {{Song}}

This formats each post cleanly with attribution.

Module 4 — Google Sheets: Update a Row

• Row Number: taken from the Google Sheets module output
• Posted: Y
• Date Posted: {{now}}

This marks the row as used so it never repeats.

Once it was toggled to active I selected Post Once – Daily and set the time. And there it is, all brave and shiny in the world.

I then asked Claude to create a web page that would choose a random lyric from the spreadsheet. I wasn’t worried about repetition here, as the user can keep smashing the “Give me a lyric” button as often as they like. I cheated here and just let Claude do all the HTML. I know, I know. I then hosted it at my Reclaim site.

This is a common mistake (particularly of people going through a midlife crisis on Facebook), that lyrics which seem meaningful in context are trite, or even embarrassing when presented in plain text. Take a simple, obvious line such as “I miss you” – with the right singer, or chord change, or manic repetition, it can be very powerful in a song, but doesn’t mean much in isolation. But McAloon is a lyricist who often comes to his songs lyrics first, and many of them work perfectly as single lines or couplets of text.

I had the idea on the treadmill therefore to create a bot that would post a daily McAloon lyric to Bluesky. I haven’t created a bot before. I’ve set out how I did it in the end in a separate post. It was sort of assisted building with the aid of Claude. Anyway, it now works! I have to say I’m quite surprised that it does actually function as intended and seeing a random lyric every day prompts thought and a smile. I also created (well, vibe-coded really) a web page where you get as many lyrics as you want.

I’m sure the world doesn’t need another bot, but on the other hand Bluesky seems generally full of understandable fear, doom and outrage. Adding a little daily nugget of beauty into that isn’t a bad thing. If you’re on Bluesky, give the bot a follow!

Maren and I visited Canada for a two week trip this month. We completed (very slowly) the Vancouver Half Marathon, and then spent some time on Vancouver Island. I loved the big country feel of Vancouver Island. You will believe a Sasquatch (or at least a bear) could be in the forest. While we were there we met up with a lot of old ed-tech friends, including Rajiv Jhangiani, Anne-Marie Scott, Tom Farrelly, Brian Lamb, Marryann Kempthorne, Clint Lalonde, Amanda Coolidge, Scott Leslie and Valerie Irvine. It was like getting the old gang back together. That is pretty much my social interactions for a year used up.

What this made clear though was something we used to comment on a lot back in the halcyon social media/blogging days, that you made genuine connections. We didn’t even talk about ed tech much, it was just good to meet up with friends. I’m not so sure it’s easy to make those kind of connections amongst all the AI slop and nazi-soup that constitutes much of social media now. We got lucky with our timing.

Books

I resisted saying “the golden age of social media” in my previous paragraph because I recently read Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. She doesn’t set out to trash the Renaissance, but rather illustrates that it is a myth, a narrative that is used by people for different reasons. Depending on your view, the actual renaissance has different messages and occurred over different times. One very powerful argument she makes is regarding Florence, where she highlights how the self-reinforcing nature of its claim to be the centre of the renaissance has helped strengthen that claim. In WW2, both the Germans and Allies treated it with deference, compared with other sites which held equally important art works, for example. This a good example of how establishing a solid narrative about yourself (institution, profession, country, interest) makes it become true. I think there is potentially a lesson here for higher education. The more they don’t bend to every little political bully and establish their solid principles, then the more people view them as the holders of those truths. Even if it isn’t always true. But they too often accept every new priority and direction flung at them.

A fun read was qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division. In this different beings have the power to mess with our memories. The author has some fun with this (for instance an ancient deity who makes humanity forget how to ride bikes). The Antimemetics Division controls this but there is one existential threat that as soon as a person learns of it, they seek to destroy themselves or others. Knowing about it means that you can’t defeat it. This is fun in and of itself, but maybe it was just timing, but I read it when I had spent an hour or two doomscrolling. I was experiencing the loss of reality that the book captures. What was real anymore. Did this celebrity really give someone on set CPR and save their life? Is that a real video of a car slipping into a canal? Did that politician really say that? It’s not that you can’t determine the truth of any one of these (no, no, yes, in the case of these examples), but rather one’s whole relationship with truth becomes worn down. We need the Antimemetics Division now.

Vinyl

Welsh artist Art School Girlfriend (Polly Louise Mackey) released her third, and best album so far, Lean In, which I’ve been playing a lot. She mixes shoegaze and electronica to produce a kind of ethereal dance music. Speaking of third albums by solo female artists who go under monikers, Snail Mail (Lindsey Jordan) released Ricochet. It’s had some middling reviews, but I’m a big fan. The pure vocals over 90s indie rock sounds like it could soundtrack a cool film you still talk about years later. It also sounds like an America you can still believe in.

Raye’s second album, This Music May Contain Hope, successfully combines RnB, pop, musical theatre and jazz. There’s two things I particularly admire it beyond the (excellent) music:
1) it’s a proper vinyl album, designed for the format structurally and aesthetically, with 4 distinct sides and theatre like programme. Raye respects the vinyl!
2) When an artist gets the kind of success she had with her last album, it can sometimes ruin them. They either shy away from it or try to repeat it and end up second guessing themselves. Raye has embraced it with both hands to do the things she’s always wanted to.

My album of the last month or two though is Snocaps, self titled debut (one-off?). They’re sort of a supergroup combining Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) & her sister Alison along MJ Lenderman (solo artist, and member of Wednesday), with Brad Cook on drums. It’s indie rock just how you like it. If The Plains was Crutchfield exploring the country side of her sound this is her leaning into the indie side. This is a “does exactly what it says on the tin” album, and brilliantly so.