Today I had the pleasure of attending the first RIDL:HE conference at Northumbria University, chaired by Nic Whitton and Alex Mosley, with an online Discord presence facilitated by Malcom Murray from Durham. Rather than my usual boring recap of sessions I attended and what I learned, when revising my notes this time I find that there are some themes which did not emerge, but which I identified as spanning across different sessions and discussions throughout the day. So let’s try looking at it from that lens:
Playfulness: The Research in Digital Learning conference opened by articulating a mission, to make conferences fun and relevant again by injecting playfulness (or mischief, as identified in one of the pillars) and criticality. This in response to a feeling that academic conferences have become too focused on selling services or solutions to problems. “If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll do more of it”, as someone said. I was also very pleased when they said that, in accordance with the principle of ‘integrity’, the catering for the conference was entirely vegetarian / vegan, as this has the biggest environmental impact on hosting a conference.
The only way I get to attend conferences of this nature is by submitting something, which makes my boss happy (and is good for me) so I was there to talk about the work we’ve done on a pilot of Studiosity’s Gen AI powered version of Writing Feedback+ on our Sunderland Online version of Canvas. Presenters were briefed to make their sessions fun, interactive, and engaging, so during my talk I press-ganged everyone into joining my new venture, Sonyaosity, to give them a taste of providing feedback on a sample piece of academic writing. The idea was to demonstrate how difficult and time-consuming this can be, and then to compare and contrast this with how quickly Studiosity’s AI can do the same job. It did work, but not as well I would have liked. I used a piece of my own writing on ethical grounds, but Malcom said to me after I shouldn’t have told people this in advance, as it may have made them reluctant to criticise me as much as I wanted them to.
Polycrisis: I was fortunate that due to a shuffle of the schedule I was able to attend two sessions ran by the team behind the University of Banford: Lawrie Phipps, Peter Bryant, and Donna Lanclos. Banford is a hyperreal institution designed to explore the issues facing higher education in an exaggerated, playful manner. See, for example, The Department Most Likely to be Shut Down in Austerity, in the Faculty of Old Things. In the first session we were tasked to imagine ourselves as academics at Banford, being pulled in different directions as the institution pivots around teaching online / in person, or being against / pro AI, at the whims of the senior leadership team.
This introduced us to the concept of the ‘polycrisis’, the constant state of crisis afflicting HE, and the never-ending technological hype cycle which those of us in learning technology are especially burdened with: ‘Meta decides to hype VR again, so teaching has to utilise VR headsets now’; ‘Large language models get good and are rebranded as AI, so now everything needs to have an AI chatbot’, etc. Another aspect of polycrisis came from a session on ‘Becoming a Digital Scholar’ by Dr Jane Secker, who reflected on the whiplash of Covid, pivoting from making all teaching online at the height of the pandemic, to the decrees from government that all teaching had to go back to in person over concerns about students fees. This particularly affected disabled student who, during the pandemic, finally got the teaching and support they had been asking for for decades, only to have it whipped away again.
In the second Banford session the team deconstructed the exercise to explore some of the concepts. This started with an exercise asking us about we feel about the end of learning design – ‘sad’, ‘anarchy’, ‘dystopia’ – before talking about the role of learning designers and how we are particularly exposed as the “first responders” to whatever new thing or policy lands on our heads. There was a good discussion on how austerity and neoliberalism robs us of our time to be able to reflect and understand. After all, there is no time to question what we’re doing if we constantly have to be responding to the latest crisis.
Open Educational Practice: Finally, I was introduced to the term ‘Open Educational Practice’ by Dr Secker, a collective term which encompasses and expands on OER (Open Educational Resource) to include open access publishing, and technologies and pedagogies which encourage collaborative and flexible approaches to teaching and learning. Joining the themes together, I think a good argument could be made for the adoption of OEP in response to some of the crisis which are afflicting HE, such as austerity, marketisation, and the growth of authoritarianism.
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