New basis for pinned tweet

Plan A today is to drop #EUnionist tag and balance out my scope a bit. Still very concerned about Brexit etc but it is getting out of hand. I may be wasting time for my tech / learning followers but not so worried about that. the robots have decided on what to send me, I think. Seem to be missing some topics so hope to change this. Also my conclusion ( see Fleet Street in Europe and Cyberspace ) about Brexit is that a major reason for current problems is the media bias on Jeremy Corbyn. This gets me into exchanges very interesting but takes a lot of time.  So I may go back in time to check things, though relates to present and maybe future events.

There is another Unbundled HE MOOC from Futurelearn coming up in September. This is another reason to change the emphasis of tweets. My take from a previous OU MOOC is that the technology available is more of a factor than academics sometimes realise. So hope to tweet around it. Also gossip about OU policy. Why did the new investment come from Australian jobs site? What are UK unis thinking about?

Some coherence as social media relevant to Brexit situation. Most UK newspapers solid with No Deal / do or die . Guardian very LibDem, rarely report Corbyn, mistake in my opinion. BBC take Brexit as a national project so knocking Brussels most of the time. Some broadcast media available from outside UK, but online is a major option for good sense. Flooded out by advertising but still worth trying. More on this in the Fleet Street blog.

Hashtags and real space

Background for tweets and messages this week.

We Don't Know Show on Wednesday. Also sitting in for Story Teller on Drama Hour ahead of Wild Show on Thursday.

Catching up on the theatre / drama / fiction around the Exeter fringe. Most of my fiction was about radio but now coming back to reality. There can be a tech future very different to FM Radio. This will be part of Six O'Clock Somewhere , maybe in time for another occasion.

Fiction though needed to cope with reality of things that did not quite happen. I hope to use a clip from Happy Sundays with Camilla Joyce and Jeff Sleeman. Earlier I failed to record anything at the MakeTank event. It was decided the studio would be better sound but then nobody was available at the time. But there was a bit of response to the idea of a walk from the Phoenix with outside broadcast equipment. Could be just a phone, any sound recording device. Will return to this as a historical reconstruction / fiction.

Meanwhile tags are working well but hard to explain. I found that they show up if put in the title on YouTube. But interview with Celia Delaney still not much noticed. Not sure how to promote. Matthew guest on Wild Show last week. Will try #WnD to see what can be done.

Hang Massive next major Phonic benefit. They have a lot of views on YouTube. How to translate to ticket sales? I think the dates are such that Like Minds is before this. So maybe get some ideas.

Help welcome on Instagram. Storyteller seems to like it more than Twitter. Not sure why but will try to find out.

Exeter makes sense to me as a space now. Several things do not work out but it can be returned to. Sequences can be edited for future shows / podcast / video playlist . I have scripts / docs based on Lancaster campus and Kendal but there could be Exeter centre versions. More later.

Guardian reporting on universities and online.

See recent post on "readG" blog about Guardian take on unis. They write about whether the debt is worth it bot leave out MOOC and online degrees. It is possible to mix employment and part time  / online study. That post made a guess the Guardian would have to think about news and paper if reporting all that is happening with EdTech.

Story so far, Guardian has mainly ignored the MOOC. Peter Scott wrote in 2013 that he tried not to write about them. Mostly he sticks to this. By the way, what happened with Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge? Not much published recently as far as I can tell.

I would like to go back to blog posts and tweets around FutureLearn and Peter Horrocks, once VC for the Open University. Nov 2017 Horrocks lecture at Durham on the Role of Distance Learning  - his own title mentions "Fortress University"- see here for PDF .

Jan 2018 Peter Wilby interviewed Peter Horrocks for the Guardian, based on this lecture and conversations with people at the OU. Horrocks backed the investment in FutureLearn MOOC platform and closed regional support centres. There was objection to his emphasis on digital in future plans and doubts about how FutureLearn might be viable.

May 2019 , as reported by Class Central , Seek invested in Coursera and Futurelearn. I have been surprised how little this has been reported. It puts some value on FutureLearn and suggests there is a viable future. Over the next six months or so I would like to go back to the discussions around the Peter Horrocks lecture and see what has changed. Based on Twitter I think maybe not much.

Of course the EdTech valuations can go down as well as up. 2U has had some problems. See Motley Fool.  But there is now a lot happening with online learning. More than the Guardian is reporting, just my take.

So the blog will be in time travel back and forth a few years.