“To be an open educator today is to embrace contradictions. Online activity is increasingly being fragmented and integrated. Open culture takes giant steps while forces of control tighten their grip. The future has never been brighter nor so perilous. Can we inhabit irresolvable dilemmas and still manage to act?”
- Brian Lamb’s Keynote, Open Education Conference, 2007.
Irresolvable dilemmas is about right. This is what I experience most about being a librarian circa 2007, and what I discuss with SLAIS students – a mix of discomfort about the hegemony of technologies, and a technocratic zeal for them at the same time. Brian Lamb is a kind of intellectual swing at UBC (think Broadway swing, or Figaro as factotum), a technocrat in both the positive and pejorative senses of the term, and now a vermin virtuoso. You gotta read this post.
Related links from The VV:
1. Links from the Keynote – http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Its_All_Coming_Apart
2. abject learning Blog – http://blogs.ubc.ca/brian/
Yvonne Chan
lse721
So you know that dirty rat too? Lucky you, lucky you—he was simply amazing at the Open Ed conference, and UBC is lucky to have such a thinker who works through this stuff in the most complex and intriguing ways possible.
More than that, I found a blog of a another UBCer that both Scott and Brian mentioned at the conference, consider me subscribed.
Hi Jim,
Nice to put a name (well, a given name, Jim) to your post on Brian Lamb. I’ve dug around, and found out a bit about you (validating my retrieval abilities). You guys that do the information technology specialist/discoordination thang are hipsters in a way that I want to emulate ::sigh::
If I weren’t such a librarian. ::smirk::
This is you, no?
http://jimgroom.net/home/about/
Hey Dean,
You have uncovered the ugly truth. That is, indeed, me, at least the cleaner side of me. However, I think bavatuesdays does a much better job of representing the awful mess I truly am.
I wonder if in the retrieval process you came across my classic b-movies from the 1960s. In another life I was a British independent filmmaker, and I was pretty good. I love it how Google gives me new identities, I learn so much about myself with a simple search. I should add all of that to my resume site.
As for the hispter approach to EdTech, I can’t speak for Brian but I tend to think of myself more as a downright fraud, and if I were to be sold for anything more I would be upset.
See you on the other side,
Jim