Hugh

What a perfect vignette to describe the damage that’s been done to higher education by people who are obsessed with “skills” and “job-readiness” but above all with compliance.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/25/a-new-room-for-a-doomed-loom-and-the-battle-to-save-australias-slowly-dying-crafts

A new room for a doomed loom – and the battle to save Australia’s slowly dying crafts

When a university’s rare weaving device was destined for the skip, a collective of artists, teachers and students united to rescue it. They bemoan how course changes are replacing deep skills with competency checklists

The Guardian
May 24 at 9:41pmWeb
Show threadHughMay 24
RMIT has a “Blockchain Lab” which mostly serves as a crèche for the Right Libertarians in the IPA, yet this university that was originally a working men’s college didn’t have the wit to weave (allusion intended) their rare Jacquard Loom into subjects from fine arts, computer science, and engineering. If they had any imagination they could have become the hottest place to study all of those.Instead they decommissioned the loom and destroyed their whole textiles major.
Show threadGunzel WashingtonMay 24
@hugh Jacquard looms were the first practical computational devices! It is pure Philistinism driving these decisions.
Also lmao at “the space formerly inhabited by the Jacquard loom has been taken up by a military-funded textile project and requires a security clearance to enter”
Show threadBetsyMay 25
@hugh what?!?! How could they get rid of that? Don't they know how many weavers around the country would give a limb to get a chance to use it?
Show threadNeil JenkinsMay 25
@hugh I witnessed the same with a university I worked at 20 years ago where all the letterpress equipment was ‘decommissioned’. The physical, practical nature of typesetting was a wonderfully simple way to introduce many of the concepts of typography.
Show threadRowland MosbergenMay 25

@hugh I have supervised 200 uni students over the last 4 years as part of my internship program.

Only about 25% were job ready at the start of the internship :(

Hopefully a higher percentage of them were job ready after the internship...

I agree with the compliance and maybe that is not making them job ready...

Show threadAndy Linton  ✅May 25

@hugh I remember being taken as a youth 60 years ago to see a Jacquard loom weaving beautiful damask linen in the small town I grew up in Co Armagh. The trade was on it's last legs as all sorts of fabric production was being moved to Asia. The control mechanisms were something I really liked.

Fast forward 15 years and I found myself working with punch cards programming my first computers. I love that this loom closes that loop. So good to see it survive.