PeterT – The halfbaked.education blog

About PeterT

Professor of Education focussed on issues to do with the purposes of education, the management of educational change, and enhancing education systems, informed by understandings of learning, pedagogy and the potentials of digital technology. Views expressed are my own.

From F2F to Online Courses – models of provision

PeterT15 Jun 2020Leave a comment

For over 20 years I worked at the Open University (UK) which is a world leader in online distance education. Over the last few years I have had the privilege of spending time at a number of predominantly face-to-face universities in Australia that were at various stages of developing their online provision, including over the last few months when most courses went online due to COVID19. I have been struck by the vast range of different approaches to online course provision I have seen, and thought it would be useful to try to categorise them. ...continue reading "From F2F to Online Courses – models of provision"

COVID-19 and the future of schooling 2

PeterT23 Mar 20202 Comments

Around the world governments are taking action to contain the spread of COVID-19, often in ways that are quite revealing about the purposes and practices of schooling, and the scope to which unchallengeable norms in education can actually be overthrown. ...continue reading "COVID-19 and the future of schooling"

Review of ‘Should robots replace teachers?’

PeterT11 Nov 201911 Nov 2019Leave a comment

This book by Neil Selwyn looks at the reality and rhetoric around AI in education. It feels like an easy read but it raises a number of complex critical issues and questions that anyone involved in education or developing AI based tools should engage with. ...continue reading "Review of ‘Should robots replace teachers?’"

Blog posts vs journal articles 6

PeterT2 Oct 201911 Nov 20196 Comments

As an academic who is focussed on having an impact on education policy and practice I struggle with whether to concentrate on publishing in journal articles or blog posts. Do both I hear you say, but that is also problematic. Here are the issues: ...continue reading "Blog posts vs journal articles"

Why traditional schools can never be effective 2

PeterT6 Sep 201920 Aug 20192 Comments

I have argued elsewhere that (human) learning is the process of becoming part of an enduring collection of people who are mutually engaged in a shared endeavour, they have shared purposes and shared ways of working. In this context, I argued that teaching should involve inducting young people into such communities. However, this clearly creates a problem for schools. ...continue reading "Why traditional schools can never be effective"

Radical change strategy

PeterT30 Aug 201914 Aug 2019Leave a comment

In previous posts I have talked about why school is a problem, how people learn and hence how we should teach, what should be learnt in school, and that we need to think more radically about the design of schooling. In this post I suggest a strategy for achieving this sort of 'disruptive innovation'. ...continue reading "Radical change strategy"

We need schome

PeterT23 Aug 201914 Aug 2019Leave a comment

In a series of earlier posts based on my OU inaugural lecture I outlined why school is a problem, how we should teach and what young people should learn. This implied far reaching changes to schooling as we know it today. However, I suspect that I didn't go far enough. In this post I suggest that we need to think even more radically about schooling (see Figure 1). ...continue reading "We need schome"

Moving to Australia 4

PeterT16 Aug 201914 Aug 20194 Comments

After nearly 24 years working at the Open University in the UK - most recently as Professor of Education (Futures) - I have decided to move to Australia (as Professor of Education (Innovation in schooling and educational technology) at the University of Newcastle (in NSW). Several people have asked me 'Why?'.

...continue reading "Moving to Australia"

What should be learnt?

PeterT9 Aug 201912 Aug 2019Leave a comment

During my inaugural I asked participants to rank how important they thought a number of different possible 'learning outcomes' would be in 2033. The results are shown in Figure 1 below. As you can see the highest ranked item was ...continue reading "What should be learnt?"

Brief review of Quantitative Ethnography (Shaffer 2017)

PeterT2 Aug 201912 Aug 2019Leave a comment

As nobody wanted to give me a review copy I went out and bought this book, and I’m glad I did. It is a good book – it is an important book – indeed I think every researcher (whether coming from a positivist or interpretivist standpoint) would benefit from reading it. ...continue reading "Brief review of Quantitative Ethnography (Shaffer 2017)"