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Tag: Digital

CSET 2025

Photo of a phone with a thinking emoji on screen
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

CSET 2025, Critical Studies of Education and Technology, is a global research project, organised by Neil Selwyn, Professor of Education at Monash University, Australia, to bring together academics and educators with an interest in digital technology to discuss the issues we are facing in small groups, to feed back to the central project and to build local communities. I was pleased to find that Durham University had picked up the initiative in the North East and a number of representatives from Sunderland were able to attend the event. Rather than recapping the discussions at the event itself, I’ve instead decided to give my individual written response to each of the four research questions below, but informed by those conversations.

1. What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround EdTech in our locality? What questions do we need to ask, and what approaches will help us research these questions?

I think it’s increasingly difficult to separate ‘EdTech’ from ‘technology’ in general, and my first thoughts about the impact of technology on the ‘issues, concerns, tensions and problems’ on people in the North East of England, and Sunderland in particular, one of the country’s most deprived cities, is how social media has, over the past 10-15 years, destroyed the idea of a common truth.

This is a concern which should be at the heart of universities as places of learning, but instead I feel that our time and efforts are increasing spent at the whim of whatever tech craze is current, struggling to stay ahead with little criticality. Just in my time as a learning technologist, the hype bubbles I’ve seen come and go include virtual reality, the blockchain, MOOCs, machine learning, the metaverse (VR again), and now generative AI (sparkling machine learning). Big Tech has sold every one of these innovations as the next big thing, driving us to adopt virtual and augmented reality head gear, or convert our modules to fully self-directed, online courses, only for the benefits to be rather niche. Meanwhile, the Canvas.net modules I helped develop have been quietly abandoned and then deleted, and the Meta Quest sits atop our lockers gathering dust.

I will grant that generative AI feels a little different, as the pressure there feels more like something which is coming from the bottom up – from student’s use and misuse of them, to which we have to respond to uphold the integrity of our degrees and awards. AI literacy is something that we really need to get on top of.

2. What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and education in our locality?

There is a lack of ownership when it comes to technology. The big, central VLE is a university-owned and controlled space, with students as consumers of content, and when we provide spaces which try to flip the pedagogy and make them student-owned, like an ePortfolio, I find that use is limited. Instead, students develop their own personal learning environments on platforms like WhatsApp and WeChat. It was perhaps ever thus, going back to my own university student experience the Facebook groups which used to pop up for each module were invaluable sources for information and sharing things that perhaps our teachers and the institution wouldn’t want us sharing, old exam papers for example. But these informal spaces can be problematic too, from inequalities of access, to bullying and harassment which is hidden away.

There is also an increasing problem of rentier capitalism, as technology has shifted from a model of buy once and own the software, to recurring subscriptions where you lose your access and data if you can’t pay. Many of these services are also tiered, with better off students able to pay higher subscriptions for more or better features, which exacerbates poverty and contributes to wealth inequality, the everything bagel that is behind pretty much every social and political problem of our age.

3. What does the political economy of EdTech look like in our region? What do local EdTech markets look like? How are global Big Tech corporations manifest in local education systems? What does EdTech policy look like, and which actors are driving policymaking? What do we find if we ‘follow the money’?

Follow the money, and you’re going to end up in the USA. Maybe Australia. Australia has quite a nice little pocket industry of learning technology, e.g. Studiosity, but whichever side of the world you end up in, EdTech is dominated by their own tech giants like Blackboard, Instructure, and Turnitin. This means that we are often working around design and teaching conventions from a US market that don’t work in the UK. At Sunderland, our Canvas modules use a repurposed ‘syllabus’ page for our module template, despite the concept of a syllabus not being a thing in UK HE. Secure and private data storage is always an issue, and I don’t have a lot of faith in the integrity of the various ad-hoc data sharing agreements between the US and the UK / EU which have cropped up since GDPR and EU privacy legislation came into effect.

The UK has traditionally had quite a strong open source contingent, the Moodle and Mahara collaboration, but I feel like that’s fallen away a little in the past few years. The problem with open source solutions is that the software may be ‘free’, but they aren’t free to run, and HEIs using this approach need to have a team of learning technologists and developers to look after them, something which I fear can be seen as a cost saving in a move to hosted solutions with SLAs. But the more consolidated the sector becomes the less power we have to drive change in the direction we want. I am glad that we still have organisations like Jisc and ALT that can advocate for us, are indeed formed of us, and can negotiate and innovate from a more powerful position. More of that in my answer to the next question.

Vendor lock-in is another issue with the big EdTech companies. There is EU regulation on data sharing and ownership, but propriety features and functionality render this next to useless in my experience. When I ditched Spotify and started buying music again, I was able to export a huge spreadsheet of my library, which is lovely, but I can’t do anything with it! I feel like EdTech is even worse. When Sunderland migrated from Pearson LearningStudio (don’t ask…) to Canvas, we had to start again from a blank canvas, if you’ll pardon the pun. I’ve also attempted migrating my ePortfolio from PebblePad to Mahara using the Leap2a standard which technically worked, but with very poor results.

4. What grounds for hope are there? Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment? What local push-back and resistance against egregious forms of EdTech is evident? What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures?

I worry that I’m becoming increasingly grouchy about technology as I get older, and my youthful optimism in general has been taking a battering since 2016. Yes, very specifically 2016. But there are reasons to be hopeful! There are events like this which bring like-minded people together to share our experience and, if nothing else, afford us the opportunity to really pin down the issues we are dealing with.

Then there are the industry bodies and communities like Jisc, ALT, Advance HE, and even our wee North East Learning Environments group that has sprung back to life like an elephant-shaped phoenix, that are leading a collective response to emerging challenges and finding innovative solutions. A good recent case being Turnitin who, having captured pretty much the entire UK HE sector with their originality checking tool, tried to do the same thing again with their AI detector by offering it for free on a limited time basis to everyone, only for a collective response to emerge from the community to say ‘no’, we want the ability to turn this off and make decisions that are best for us as individual institutions. A feature which was then added.

Modern EdTech, for all its problems, has also created huge opportunities to expand education to people for whom a tertiary education would have been unobtainable even a generation ago. I am myself an Open University graduate who was unable to follow the conventional post-18 university route for a number of reasons. Many of the tools and systems also bring big quality of life improvements to all of us, genuinely making our work as educators easier. Last week, for example, I received an automated email from Canvas alerting me to a number of broken links in the module I’m currently teaching which I was then able to easily find and fix.

Finally, there are still great tools and solutions being created by smaller teams and often shared as open source or under a creative commons license. A great example from our region in this space is Numbas, Newcastle University’s bespoke solution to online maths testing.

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ALT NE User Group: November 2023

My turn to do the hosting honours today, for the first time since before we had that pesky pandemic. My carefully planned agenda went completely out the window during the first item, but everything still managed to run pretty smoothly, and splurging the boss’s cash on the catering after getting the venue for free was a result, as the food was roundly praised.

We began with institutional updates from attendees. I thought as it was the first meeting of the year a quick round of updates would be good to have. I asked for one slide or five minutes each, got something like 17 slides from one bod, and this half hour item ran to well over an hour. But it was good, and I learned that we are all dealing with the problem of digital skills of staff and trying to make improvements there, and what the Blackboard and Anthology merger has done for AI in Blackboard. Staff now have access to an AI Design Assistant which will create entire course outlines and structures which serves as a great starting point. Middlesbrough College are trialing Microsoft’s Copilot tool in Bing, and have made it available to all staff and students, and Newcastle have seen a big increase in digital exams which are now at 40%.

After the roundup, I had one of my team do a demo of the Clevertouch boards we rolled out last year, then a learning design / content development showcase which provided an opportunity to share examples of best practice. In the afternoon we had a discussion on the role of ALT and where we sit within it, and a tour of Sunderland’s new anatomy suite. We have a new Anatomage table with a number of additional models, including some fine detail scans which have digitised certain features down to 0.1mm.

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Teaching, Learning and Assessment in a Digital World

100 years of learning theories showing the learner as the active agent
The learner must be the active agent in the learning process

This was Bob Harrison’s inaugural lecture as a Visiting Professor at the University of Wolverhampton. Bob has been in education for over 50 years, and I have known his name in Ed Tech circles for a long time.

His talk was on the dangers of over-emphasising the power of technology as a solution to the problem of online and distance education, and the need to continually relearn the lessons that successful learning, no matter whatever physical distances may be involved, needs to be driven by the learner as the active agent in the learning process, supported by well-designed content delivered by caring and competent teachers. And if I’ve mangled Bob’s thesis in this summary, you can read it more eloquently in his own words in this article, Why there is nothing remote about online learning, published last year. And for an example of how you can’t magically improve online learning just by throwing money and technology at the issue, Wired’s article on the ‘LA iPad debacle’ is a good read.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bob’s lecture, and his dismantling of technological solutionism, neoliberalism in education, and his barely checked scorn for the Department for Education and their fixation on remote teaching.

The screenshot which I grabbed to illustrate this post shows a continuation of the theme of learners as the active agents of learning in the most influential learning theories spanning the past century.

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Digital Equality Awareness and Impact on Practice

Seven Elements of Digital Literacy
The seven elements of digital literacies, according to Jisc

Maybe it’s the humanities background biasing me here, but all the best training I attend always seems to be deeply interdisciplinary by nature. Sure, the core of this session was about digital equality and things like the different between digital literacy and digital competence, but it really grabbed me when we got into discussion on the nature of poverty, and why and how gender and racial biases get baked into artificial intelligence algorithms.

The ‘Seven Elements of Digital Literacy’ diagram above is taken from Jisc’s Developing Digital Literacies guide, and breaks down digital literacy into media literacy, communications and collaboration, career and identity management, ICT literacy, learning skills, digital scholarship, and information literacy.

Another great resource from this session I am absolutely going to steal for my own work (by which of course I mean appropriate cite), is the Good Things Foundation, Digital Nation UK 2020 infographic which provides research findings in a striking visual format full of data points showing the digital divide.

Finally, some relevant recommended reading. From the session itself, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez which I read last year and highly recommend, even if trans and non-binary people are seemingly non-existence, never mind just invisible. And one I threw into the conversation, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, by Mar Hicks.

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Resuscitation Quality Improvement System


Demonstration of the RQI System

I had a meeting this morning with our paramedic programme team about how to integrate various distinct systems they have into a new digital Practice Assessment Document to replace the multiple binders full of paper which trainee paramedics have to assemble at the moment. I have some thoughts on this which I’m sure I’ll write about in future as this comes together, but for today I just wanted to share the Resuscitation Quality Improvement system I saw, which is another one of those quite fabulous, albeit niche, technologies we have scattered around the university.

RQI is a mannequin made by Laerdal Medical that is used for training people to perform CPR, but this one has over 40 sensors inside it hooked up to a computer that gives you realtime feedback on things like how regular and deep your chest compressions are. It’s great! Watch the attached video to see it in action.

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The Life and Death of Mozilla Backpack

Unsplash BadgesPhoto by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

I received an email yesterday informing me that Mozilla Backpack will be shutting down, which has been known for some time, with ownership of the Backpack moving to Badgr. There was also an attachment in the email which it said was all of my old badges, along with instructions on how to create a new account in Badgr. There were a number of problems with this. First, not all of the badges I’ve earned over the years were in that zip file, only, I think, ones which were attached to one particular email address. There were also no instructions at all about what to do with this file. In the end I was able to work out how to import these into Badgr, but for around half of them this process failed.

Like all DRM schemes, which is essentially what underlines the validity of digital badges, the whole system is unintuitive and very user unfriendly. One of the claims about digital badges has always been that you would be able to have all of your badges in one place, which was meant to be the Backpack, but this has never been my experience and I have badges scattered all over the place. The only online location where they are all collected together in any form is on this blog, tagged Badge. I want to like digital badges, I always thought they were a good idea, but however well intentioned, it’s always felt like kind of a mess, and it’s not getting any better.

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Advance HE Teaching and Learning Conference 2019

advance_he_conference

Attended, and more importantly, presented at the Advance HE Teaching and Learning Conference held this year at Northumbria University. Day 3 of the conference was themed around STEM and the keynote was given by Debbie McVitty, editor of Wonkhe, who talked about the impact the TEF has had on the sector and how to really measure teaching excellence.

A highlight of the day for me was the post-lunch Ignite Sessions which saw 8 presenters speaking for 5 minutes about their work or project. “Pride and Prejudice and technology (that enhances learning)” from Katie Stripe of Imperial College London will stay with me for her unique approach, as will the brave soul who used audience response in an Ignite presentation by asking people to stand or remain sitting in response to questions. Also from Imperial, Drs Tiffany Chiu and Freddie Page presented on their work around what an ideal student looks like which attempts to address the disconnect between how students see themselves and what they want out of their HE experience, and what staff want from, and want to get out of students. And Dr Helen Kaye from The Open University discussed how they are supporting final year psychology students to complete an empirical research project which possess unique challenges for distance learning students.

I also came away with ideas and additions to my reading list. For my own teaching on our PG Cert I’ve been inspired by the University of Strathclyde’s Dr Patrick Thomson to include a session around peer instruction, expanding on what we’ve done around peer assessment. I also want to expand what we have traditionally taught around rubrics and online marking, to include a discussion about the value and role of marking and the different ways it can be done. To my reading list I’ve added Alone Together by Sherry Turkle and Taking Up Space by Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi.

By far the most important thing to happen today however, was that I presented for the first time with my colleague Dr Katrin Jaedicke on the work we have done to convert her statistics for biomedical sciences students course into a full fledged massive online open course (MOOC). It was mostly Katrin’s talk, as it is of course the content that is key, but I was there to contribute to any discussion around the technological and pedagogical considerations in the conversion of the course from a flat web page into a MOOC. I also ran a live quiz at the end of the session, giving people a taste of the MOOC. Katrin had initially wanted to give people a handout of one of the self assessment quizzes, but I suggested doing it live using Poll Everywhere and awarding participants with a digital badge, just like the MOOC students receive, and I’m pleased to be able to say that it all went very well.

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Web Accessibility for Leaders

GDS Posters - Link in Post

This was a really good webinar from Jisc and Government Digital Service (GDS) on the new accessibility regulations which are coming into force and which apply to all publicly funded bodies, building on our obligations from the 2010 Equality Act by adding a new, higher, standard for compliance with new levels of monitoring and enforcement. What this is going to mean for learning technologists is that we are likely to have to an increased burden on ensuring that learning systems and their content is compliant with the legislation. At Sunderland, I can see us being tasked with writing the accessibility statement, or statements, for the VLE and our other systems, as the University is far too complex for a universal statement covering all of our websites and apps.

Accessibility statements are the key new requirement, and are quite prescriptive about what they need to contain. They should detail how accessible the system is, what problems there are with it that you have identified, what end users can do to mitigate those or access the content in a different way, and most importantly the statement has to include a plan about what we are going to do to improve the current situation, however good, or bad, that may be.

There is of course some concern about additional workload requirements for us, but I’m fully behind this. It’s all excellent stuff and should drive an improvement on the quality of our learning materials across the board, something which will benefit all students. Jisc are putting together statement templates which HEI’s will be able to use, and GDS, who will be the monitoring body for the legislation, have a huge range of support materials on their site, including some excellent posters.

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Winging It

country_profiles

I’m having one of those periodic feelings that I’ve been neglecting the blog a little, so some updates on what I’ve been up to:

Ramifications of the department restructure in July continue, as the programme leader for our Academic Practice PG Cert – and my informal mentor – decided to leave the institution in December for new pastures. That has meant that I’ve been thrown out of the frying pan a little. I’m no longer the informal module leader on the digital technology module, learning the ropes, it is all mine. Officially. Now. Whether I know what I’m doing or not. I’m slowly coming to realise jus how much of academia is people winging it as best the can. So far it’s going well. Half the taught sessions were done last year, and the first assignment submission is due shortly. I’ve also continued to provide a number of bespoke sessions here and there, including digital skills for Sociology students and WordPress for postgrad researchers.

On the other side of my job I’m working on formalising exactly what work we can do for academics in terms of developing their content which will comprise of a new set of Service Standards for Learning Materials Development, a low-key project management system for organising the team’s workload similar to what we used to have when we had access to Jira, and a dashboard for reporting what we’ve done. That’s something we definitely need more of, we do a lot of good work that doesn’t get shouted about enough. I’m also pushing for hardware and software updates. We’re still on Storyline 2 which is getting on a bit, and an upgrade to 3 should be fairly straightforward to get through, and I would like to run a pilot of Adapt or Evolve.

I’ve been working with our Medical School again to source and integrate a series of anatomy and physiology eLearning content units developed by an external company into a number of our Canvas modules. I made an interactive world map in ThingLink to showcase country health profiles written by students for an assessment on a sociology module which will build up over the next few years (above). I was down at our London Campus again in October to help with the selection and recruitment of a new VLE support officer there who then visited us in December for a few days training with myself and the team here. Finally, getting outside of strictly work, I’ve reached the denouement of my social media alienation. On the 31st of December, to go into the new year fresh, I deleted Twitter and Facebook from all of my devices, consigning my accounts to the same dark cupboard where LinkedIn and Google+ lurk, still in existence but wilfully ignored.

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To Do: Take Over the World

Some very interesting and productive conversations this afternoon about my future. Last year, as part of the PG Cert AP, I taught on some sessions of the technology module, EDPM08, for experience. This year, responsibility for teaching of this module will come under full responsibility of the CELT, my team, so I’m going to be doing a lot more with it – teaching all of the sessions and acting as the de facto module leader. I won’t officially be the module leader as I don’t have experience of this, and there is a certain amount of paperwork and process which I’m not familiar with. So for this year the official module leader will be the programme leader, but they will be teaching me everything I need to know so that I can take over full responsibility next year. Exciting!

I also had a discussion about what I’m going to do next for my own professional development. Since confirmation that I passed the PG Cert AP a few weeks ago I actually stopped being a student for the first time in a decade. It’s a tad disconcerting. (Shh! Don’t tell the NUS, I still have 18 months left on my card!) The next logical step for me, in my mind, is Senior Fellow of the HEA, and based on the conversation I’m now happy and confident that I would be able to get this.

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