Ivory Towers and Captains of Industry: A Clash of Clichés

John Traxler, Professor of Digital Learning - University of Wolverhampton
 
I was invited to write this piece by Ninder Johal. I am a university professor, and he is a university governor, and we are keen to build some mutual understanding. He comes from worlds of enterprise and entrepreneurialism and I from worlds of scholarship and enquiry.
We each have faulty understandings and inappropriate expectations of each other’s worlds, sometimes characterised by cliches, sometimes hiding behind inaccurate assumptions that that we thought could be ‘taken for-granted’ or ‘not-worth- mentioning’ 1.
So, me, I am a Professor of Digital Learning, but also uniquely a UNESCO Chair and a Commonwealth Chair, the former in ‘innovative informal digital learning in disadvantaged and development contexts’, and the latter in ‘innovations in higher education’.
To be more concrete and specific, I am interested in helping people and communities find, understand, share and evaluate what it is that they ...