Its not what I had planned

What might I have learned if i had listened to students (or their music) instead of to managerial directives in higher education?

The living end has caught up with me, and its not pretty.
I've been buried in the sand
I've come down with no place to land
I (don't) need you to understand
It's not what I had planned....

Suicidal education
It got sold to our generation
Wake up to the manipulation
Wake up to the situation
...
(ref Aussie grunge band, The living end circa 2006)

So Ive downloaded the ringtone for my mobile phone, it might help me stay grounded in reality.

Pink Floyd's 'Teacher leave them kids alone' seems to have been taken literally. Beaming content from one venue to four others is a fiscal driven curriculum rather than an educational philosophically driven one. Let us not delude ourselves.

In working with new technologies these can be integrated for better or for worse. Measuring worse is of course difficult. As is measuring better no doubt. Both requires one first of all to think better or worse for whom. The second part of the question can then be considered, what is the measure of better? And is doing as much as possible with as little as possible a valid measure? Is efficiency valid when it is also accompanied by accidental learning that could include:
Your lecturer does not want to 'see' you.
Class time is engaging only if one considers engagement in the same way one might watch a film.
Enculturation into university studies means a lack of presence...

If your an educator with doubts you might like to take up the ringtone option as a way of at least reminding yourself that there was, and is, another way. Ghandi's approach of civil disobedience at least keeps me saner in the insane places of academic practice. Meantime i am directed(!!!) to teach to a formuleic template, x mins of ppt no less, followed by x mins of expert videos...followed by x mins of breakout time. Heavens.

I'm writing this on a table made from the floor of a chapel where Mary McKillop once walked, so i figure in hope and faith, that given things changed once they can change again. And being a devotee of actor-network theory, i know things can always be otherwise... enrolling a saint's help amongst one's allies will surely help in the restoration...