Heart Soul Machine

The Vibe August in Adelaide is always a month of contradictions – sun and rain, cold and those first glimpses of spring.

So it's Thursday and I haven't posted to the blog since Sunday, and I don't think I have another post in me.

I went to a public lecture this week on AI and creativity Future Minds: Creativity and Ethics in the Age of AI hosted by Dr Rebecca Marrone and Dr Maria Vieira.

Getting a new work laptop is always a mixed experience.

Back in 2017 I wrote a post called Beyond the LMS that sketched out an idea I called the Distributed Learning System.

A while back, I watched the movie Monkey Man and documentary The Mission back-to-back, I found myself connecting them through an unexpected visual thread.

One of the things that has changed over time is how I approach writing for the blog.

Last year we travelled to Japan, and one of the things that had always quietly worried me about travelling in Asia was the language barrier.

In such a contested space as education, there are bound to be arguments that arise.

Ed Zitron has been on a tear over the last year.

Twenty-five years of working professionally in and around technology gives you a particular vantage point.

Social media and media in general promote the idea that they create dialogue around big issues.

This is another post in my series on shared solutions – things I've done to solve problems, the approaches taken, and what actually worked.

The Network Should Be Ours After reading an interview with danah boyd on parasocial networks, it got me thinking about a distinction I keep coming back to: the difference between the service and the product: The service is the value proposition, why people

I've been using EchoFeed to crosspost from my blog to Mastodon for a while now.

So it's day ten of Blaugust, and this is probably the longest writing streak I've ever managed.

I absolutely hate this phrase.

There's a desire we all share as humans – the desire for answers.

The Problem with Bubbles When I worked at CSU, educational designers were school and faculty based but centrally managed.

My barber recently moved premises, set up on his own, and I found something genuinely compelling about that.

Most democratic parties are built around an underlying ideology that drives not just their appeal, but the principles guiding their decisions.

Culture is a container word.

The Labor Party are now the conservatives.

I came across this toot from Tantek yesterday (August 1st).

The Vibe July has felt fairly momentous.

The Vibe June has been pretty up and down – but I am ending the month on a bit of a high, having accepted a new role at the university in the Learning Futures team as the Capability Development Manager.

The Vibe So it's been a bit of an up-and-down month.

I've always loved the signal-versus-noise framework from information theory.

Over the past year, much of the conversation in higher education has centred on what we do about AI.

The news this week is full of stories about universities going offline after Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning management system, was taken down by a cyberattack, shutting down LMS access for staff and students at institutions around the…

The Vibe The good vibes are probably due to my health.

At work, I've started to be involved in developing a process for program design.

If you've got dark-mode enabled on your system or browser ,you might be seeing the website differently than normal.

The Vibe March in Adelaide is what the locals call Mad March — all the festivals descend at once.

I've been spending this week exploring program design at universities and what current practices look like, and importantly, what people are thinking about at this point in time.

I've been slowly working away at developing a portfolio, and I was starting to get a bit lost.

The Vibe While January was a bit of a mulligan, February has been good.

The Vibe We saw in the New Year with friends, which was really nice.

Trying to sum up the year feels like a challenge.

The Vibe OK – let's round out the year.

The Vibe The first couple of weeks of November we were in a post-Japan haze.

The Vibe I am running behind on my monthly post, having just got September out the door a week into November.

Feel free to read the post below - which was my rough script for the presentation.

Catching up on the blog after a bit of time off and time away (which I’ll share in the upcoming October update, which will certainly come out before the end of November!).

In drafting my August 2025 post, I had been mulling over another point, but that post had become quite lengthy.

The Vibe August seems to be my month of introspection.

The Vibe In fact it’s the wettest July in 27 years, so more than the whole time we’ve lived here.

It started for me with this video of Philomena Cunk and Brian Cox: Now regardless of Paul’s understanding of quantum theory, this clip planted the idea of mirrors in my head.

The Vibe It’s been a pretty wild month, particularly on the weather front.

Present commercial “social media” platforms have increasingly gone past their ‘social’ origins.