I don’t know how I found out about this event, but it was very good! It was a talk by Louise Drumm (Edinburgh Napier), facilitated by John Brindle (Lancaster), examining some of the issues that arise in the intersection between digital technology and educational research. Among the points discussed were how the former is a fast moving, external, source of pressure and change, swimming in venture capital cash, while the latter is often slow, ponderous, and impoverished. Louise talked about agency, and how we, as learning technologists and educators, are expected to be users, often knowledgeable and enthusiastic ones, of technologies and practices regardless of how we may feel about them personally.
Louise created a Miro board for the session in which she had created a timeline of digital technology innovations and events which have emerged throughout her career, grouped into different phases. She opened the board up to the group for us to collaboratively edit, move, change, and add new items, which was chaos, but good, creative chaos! Which was a theme of her talk and of her research practice. Creativity that is, not chaos. Just to be clear.
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.
Another good webinar, two in a row, crikey, this one more for the ideas and thoughts it stimulated. So, ALT’s annual survey results came out in February, findings here, and this webinar was a follow-up discussion on a new area of focus for ALT, equality.
The webinar explored the differences in answers between survey responders who identified as male or female*, and asked questions about why there are those differences. For example, on the question of ‘What are the enablers / drivers for learning technology?’, there were significant differences in ‘Dedicated time’, which was ranked less important for women, and ‘Recognition for career development’, which women scored much higher than men. Maren and Martin then went on to discuss representation in ALTs governance and leadership (good, fairly balanced), and other areas including honorary lifetime member awards (very poor – 6 male, 2 female).
Slide 23, which I’ve cheekily screenshoted and annotated (above), is interesting. The number of women with ‘Senior’ in their job titles is quite a bit higher than men, but not so with titles that contain ‘Head’ and ‘Director’. Is this where our glass ceiling is then?
I asked a question in the chat, has there been any research into the gender balance of learning technology teams, and if they are imbalanced (my suspicion and experience), does that have an impact on the nature of the materials we develop and the services we provide? The answer was ‘not that anyone was aware of’. Very interesting… as I continue to inch closer to doing my own PhD and seek ideas…
Martin Hawksey’s blog post about this topic and a link to the slides can be found here, and are worth reading.
* No mention of the ‘Other’ category, which is highly problematic. I get why that is the case – relatively small survey size (c.200 responses per year) – but that doesn’t mean you can literally ‘other’ the ‘Other’. It’s not okay, and there needs to be an acknowledgement of this and justifications explicitly provided. There must be inclusion of people with diverse gender identities, even, and especially, when research splits people along binary lines. This feels rambly, a topic to be explored in a much longer post I think.
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.
The results of ALT’s 2017 Annual Survey have now been released. Unsurprisingly interest in VLEs, content management systems, and eAssessment remains extremely high. I like looking at the changes more. Assistive tech, web conferencing, and collaborative tools all growing areas.
Interest in social networking on the wane. Interesting. Will social networks one day be regarded as some strange phenomenon that gripped people for a couple of decades? I’m seeing more and more disengagement on, well, social media mostly. But is that because I’m writing and reading about that kind of thing lately? Oh the paradox!
ALT has published the report and data from their second annual survey which can be dowloaded here. Interesting reading as they now have comparative data from last year’s survey so you can see the trends and changes.
No signs of the monolithic VLE going anywhere just yet, and interest in the field of data and learning analytics is continuing to grow. I was a little surprised to see open badges so far down the list, but as a colleague in another department said to me a few days ago, employers don’t know what they are or how to value them, and as a consequence students just aren’t interested.
Jisc are looking for input from interested parties to ‘inform the future of technology in education and research’. It’s in three parts, one pertaining to research, one to FE and one to HE. Full details are on their website here. Deadline for feedback is 2nd of February.
I say, it’s been a little quiet on here over the past few months, hasn’t it? It has been a frightfully busy time for me! At work the start of the new academic year brought with it the usual amount of chaos and mayhem, and outside of work I have been moving home while desperately trying to do something, anything, with my dissertation! I’ve just popped in some posts about things I’ve done recently, but there has been plenty more I could have written about.
Clearning was, alas, a bit of a bust in the end. The core team were just so good, and so efficient that they left me with very little to do, and so I ended up just spending the afternoon doing general enquiry chats. Still, it was a nice break and I’m good to go next year.
I did some good work for the newly rebranded School of Law using Storyline to record some introductory videos to smarten up some of their programme spaces, and got access to a professional recording studio to record voiceover for the Anti-Bribery Act training module I have been building, a project which is now back in the hands of our Legal and Governance department for approval. They initialled asked for this to be ready for October. 2014. It’s still ongoing.
In early September we, as a team, were able to elbow our way into a number of faculty and department conferences to provide a crash course on changes to SunSpace, i.e. the new template and the Turnitin LTI, which was extremely successful. In one session we probably hit more people than all of the Technology Bytes sessions we ran last year. Those aren’t happening again this year; instead of planned sessions we are holding generic drop-in surgeries with colleagues in Academic Development in the hope that those will be better attended. Other teaching I have delivered has included some sessions to front-line Library staff on new things in SunSpace and, just a couple of weeks ago, some sessions to students on creating posters in PowerPoint to display their research proposals at a showcase event taking place in early December.
Also at the start of the new year the University went live with a new electronic attendance monitoring system that required all students to be issued with a new ID card, a mammoth operation for which I volunteered a few shifts.
At the beginning of October we had a conference call with colleagues at Texas Christian University, something we have to do because we are the only university in the UK trying to use LearningStudio as a VLE, only to discover that they are now well along the road in migrating to a new VLE and ending their relationship with Pearson. I probably shouldn’t say any more on this topic, but I can slip in a cheeky link to this article and let you read between the lines about what it means…
End of October was appraisal season and as well as my own I was invited to sit in and contribute to the team’s appraisals as per last year. Any moment now I will start on my middle-managers training course, which was supposed to happen this year, but it has been completely re-written and is now a fully accredited PG Cert which works out really well for me. Also approved in principle is my doing the PG Cert in Education next year.
Finally, last week I attended a consultation event from our VC where she discussed the plans and the direction of travel she wants to set for the next five years and her thoughts on the recently published Green Paper. One of her big themes or ideas was on cultivating an ongoing relationship with students after graduation to keep their skills current.
Our second series of Technology Bytes has just completed. This time, with the benefit of more time to plan and a longer semester, we ran twelve sessions from February to July at roughly fortnightly intervals. The programme of sessions were as follows:
Student Engagement in SunSpace
Engaging Distance Learning Students
Collaborative Learning Material Development and Deployment
Online Assignment Submission, Marking and Feedback
Using Self-Reflection to Improve Student Engagement and Outcomes
Increase Student Collaboration Using Discussion Tools
Improve Feedback for Students by Using Audio and Video
Use Video to Enrich Your Learning Materials
Smart Use of SMART Boards in Your Lectures
Death by PowerPoint? How to Keep Your Students Awake in Lectures
Teaching and Learning on the Move
Preparing Your SunSpace Sites for 2015/16
The big difference from last time round was a change in focus from ‘the tool’ to some problem we could help resolve. This worked better and is more apparent for some than others. I found writing succinct titles with this goal in mind difficult, but it was better achieved in the accompanying descriptions and in our advertisements. Another change was the explicit focus on one thing only per session, though again I tried to theme this around pedagogy or some problem we could help with rather than a specific system.
In spite of these changes attendance remained poorer than I would like and around half way through I modified our advertisements to make people aware that they could also use these sessions to ask us about any related matters. A barrier we face, and one that is difficult to resolve, is that our academics are quite tightly time constrained through the use of a workload planning system that doesn’t allow a lot of free time to attend extraneous activities. Nevertheless there were particularly popular sessions – ‘Death by PowerPoint’ had to be run twice. (One of the sessions I taught, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with it!) Finally, on the back of Technology Bytes, we delivered a number of sessions down at London Campus which were very well received.
Feedback has been very positive overall and outweighs, I think, the relatively poor attendance. As I keep having to remind the team, even sessions that run with only one person can have a huge impact as they propagate what they have learned to their students and colleagues. Informally, I have had many people tell me that the team is now more visible and they are more aware of the work we do thanks in part to these sessions. For all of these reasons I would very much like to keep them going next year, though with changes. One idea I am working on with Academic Development is joint drop-in surgeries, not just the two of us but also including other services such as the Library.
For the University Library’s SMT meeting this morning I was asked to deliver a short 30 minute talk about the work and accomplishments of the team over the past year, and to look forward to what is coming for us next year. Notes and thoughts which I started putting together yesterday morning morphed into the presentation below which was very well received. Indeed, I ended up talking for around an hour thanks to a really good Q&A session. Many people at the meeting have asked to either disseminate this presentation to their colleagues or for me to attend other meetings to deliver this again. That’s a very satisfying feeling, a job well done. Following this reception I have gone on to publish the presentation on our website and on a ‘Show and Tell’ module on SunSpace that we use for this kind of thing.
