Mt Gravatt reflection
Very early yesterday we drove to Mt Gravatt (pdf), on the south side of Brisbane, and walked up and down and up and down and up and down for two and a half hours, burning off some of our holiday excesses. My brother-in-law Steve (pictured) is preparing to walk the challenging Kokoda Track in PNG next year, so was carrying all the right gear and 20 kg of dry dog food to make it a real exercise challenge. The smell of the bush and the sound of the birds made for a pleasant and peaceful experience.
Nestled on the flank of Mt Gravatt is the lovely campus of Griffith University. In 1987 I arrived in Brisbane from Canada with a mission to pursue a postgraduate degree studying social implications of computing. At the time, several books had appeared which forecast many of the changes we have since experienced due to technological affordances (although that term wasn't used then). For example, with the advent of debit cards and ATMs, few of us plan our weekly spending after a trip to the bank to get cash. In Sleepers Wake, Barry Jones (who I didn't know at the time) wrote about the changing face of industry in a knowledge economy. I was attracted to Griffith because it was a young, unorthodox institution up on a hill like my alma mater SFU. Before emigrating from Vancouver, I had obtained information about a programme about science and society that seemed to be appropriate for my study.
Only three days after arriving in the country, I took a bus up to the campus and met with Professor Tomlinson, with whom I had made an appointment by email (remember, the Internet did exist in 1987, but not the Web). We had an amicable meeting, but I was very disappointed to find that there was not a faculty member with the necessary ICT knowledge to provide adequate mentoring. Moreover, he had little advice about where to turn. I left Griffith completely disillusioned, having travelled halfway around the world with great expectations.
Later that year I enrolled in a Masters degree by coursework at University of NSW in Sydney. But I dropped it after only one semester as I found the faculty so engrossed in their own unrelated topics of research and completely dismissive of the needs of students. It took me almost two decades to cast aside my cynicism about Australian academia, a process that is not yet complete. The irony is that I went to The University of Sydney last year thinking that I was going to study organisational learning, but instead ended up studying exactly the sort of epistemological and theoretical approaches that relate technology to learning and learning to life. In other words, I ended up completing exactly the sort of study I might have done twenty years ago, but with greater insight, experience, purpose and maturity. In 1987 I did not understand the nature of self-directed postgraduate study.
So my timely return to Mt Gravatt yesterday brought all this back in sharp relief and like Steve's ardure up the slopes, reminds me about the challenging work I still have in front me.
Nestled on the flank of Mt Gravatt is the lovely campus of Griffith University. In 1987 I arrived in Brisbane from Canada with a mission to pursue a postgraduate degree studying social implications of computing. At the time, several books had appeared which forecast many of the changes we have since experienced due to technological affordances (although that term wasn't used then). For example, with the advent of debit cards and ATMs, few of us plan our weekly spending after a trip to the bank to get cash. In Sleepers Wake, Barry Jones (who I didn't know at the time) wrote about the changing face of industry in a knowledge economy. I was attracted to Griffith because it was a young, unorthodox institution up on a hill like my alma mater SFU. Before emigrating from Vancouver, I had obtained information about a programme about science and society that seemed to be appropriate for my study.
Only three days after arriving in the country, I took a bus up to the campus and met with Professor Tomlinson, with whom I had made an appointment by email (remember, the Internet did exist in 1987, but not the Web). We had an amicable meeting, but I was very disappointed to find that there was not a faculty member with the necessary ICT knowledge to provide adequate mentoring. Moreover, he had little advice about where to turn. I left Griffith completely disillusioned, having travelled halfway around the world with great expectations.
Later that year I enrolled in a Masters degree by coursework at University of NSW in Sydney. But I dropped it after only one semester as I found the faculty so engrossed in their own unrelated topics of research and completely dismissive of the needs of students. It took me almost two decades to cast aside my cynicism about Australian academia, a process that is not yet complete. The irony is that I went to The University of Sydney last year thinking that I was going to study organisational learning, but instead ended up studying exactly the sort of epistemological and theoretical approaches that relate technology to learning and learning to life. In other words, I ended up completing exactly the sort of study I might have done twenty years ago, but with greater insight, experience, purpose and maturity. In 1987 I did not understand the nature of self-directed postgraduate study.
So my timely return to Mt Gravatt yesterday brought all this back in sharp relief and like Steve's ardure up the slopes, reminds me about the challenging work I still have in front me.
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