Emily Durham Bradshaw

The Practice of Receiving    I am actually a huge proponent of sharing, and I believe deeply in the words I have heard from OER researcher, David Wiley: "Knowledge worth knowing is worth sharing."  In a recent article by Stephen Downes (2022), he writes about the "Seven Habits of Highly Connected People."  One of these is to "Share."  He advises readers not to pull back from sharing because they might be worried about someone else benefitting from their hard work.  "The way to function in a connected world is to share without thinking about what you will get in return. It is to share without worrying about so-called “free-riders” or people taking advantage of your work."  Your good work in sharing will come back around to benefit you, according to Downes.  But I am just a little bit hesitant.   Many of my higher education colleagues come from ethnic and cultural groups that have been marginalized.  "Erasure" is a real thing.  T...

In her article, "The University Cannot Love You," Brenna Clark Gray discusses the care-work of faculty members in mentoring and providing pastoral care for students, especially during the emergency shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.  She makes a strong point that "care does not have to be burdensome, but it becomes so within systems that refuse to make space for it."  In other words, if a university's demands on its faculty members are not realistic given the amount of time and energy faculty spend in care-work, then the care becomes a burden. While Gray acknowledges the fact that this burdensome care falls more squarely on the shoulders of female faculty and that the pandemic highlighted the role women played universally as shock absorbers for care-work, the university DOES provide a great deal of student care.  The question is, should the "help" the university is providing be redesigned or redistributed to better serve faculty and...

My work with the NGO, Community Development Network (CDN), has me on weekly zoom calls with partners in W. Africa.  Without fail, one of my African colleagues’ voices will go into robot slow-motion mode or glitch out, strobe-voice fashion. At that point, their square picture frame, which was not showing their face in order to reduce processing load, disappears from the screen. Someone says, “I think they’ve lost their connection.”  Lost connection. This is the connection that the world is just beginning to experience–the connection of being able to problem-solve with people from all over the globe and have valuable conversations in real-time.  Connection to shared content. Connection to shared learning.  This connection, which articles like “Systematic Changes in Higher Education” (Siemens and Matheos, 2022) praise as the future of education, is as tenuous as the zoom call connection.   Siemens and Matheos describe shifts in future education based on the af...