Why start with an image of the Illuminati? Well I’ve just now found my invitation to join the blog – Durham’s email server had decided to quarantine the invitation and it quarantines so much stuff I’d missed the notice that it had quarantined it.
I _did_ notice a message that an email about a podcast I do with my friend Mike had been quarantined. Just as I was about to just delete it I saw the word “Pedagodzilla” leap out at me (the name of the podcast). Going to the list of quarantined emails, nestled between one inviting me to have a paper published in a predatory journal and another inviting me to join the Illuminati, was the one from Northumbria University inviting me to join the RE:PLAY blog. Apparently whoever designed Durham’s spam filter believes Northumbria’s IT services is as spurious as an ancient Bavarian secret society.
As an aside the email about the podcast was to congratulate us on being voted into the top 35 education podcasts on Feedspot. Here’s the link to the feed https://podcast.feedspot.com/teaching_and_learning_podcasts/ Spoiler alert. We’re not on there. Neat way to get people to look at the site though – and actually there are a lot of good ones on there. We did get a badge though – woo-hoo.
But actually the failure of the starting on the blog does raise the whole issue around communication. With the proliferation of platforms, and the volume of sheer crap being passed across them, it’s almost impossible to communicate reliably. The spam filters could be a lot more intelligent, but we still need them, otherwise we’d be inundated, even the quarantine notifications end up spamming our in-boxes. And is that message in an email or on Teams? Why do I have to switch from a Durham account to a Northumbria account before I see any alerts? More broadly, is that communication I half remember on a channel, in a chat or in a meeting chat? It’s like the people who design these things never intended them to be used by actual people in a team.
So throughout I’m going to have to remember Hanlon’s razor which is normally: “”Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Or in this case – it’s not really a conspiracy to prevent communication, it’s an inadequacy of the tech to enable it. Or just that designing communication with a guaranteed high signal to noise ratio is very very hard.
Unless the Illuminati really are behind everything. Maybe I should have accepted that invitation.