What is a Conference Venue For?

My Day 1 #ALTC24 conference shoes, Black DM brogues embroidered with skulls, union jacks, and lightning bolts, against the backdrop of a striking hotel carpet.

Last year and earlier this year i wrote two different blog posts reflecting on aspects of conferences I would be attending, each of which I was also on the program committee for. The most recent one was about OER24 in Cork, Ireland, and was a rumination on my relationship with the city, and how my experiences there made me excited for people who had never been in Cork to experience it for the first time, In the first post, done for ALTC23 in Warwick, I was writing about what I thought conferences were for, and what my own personal journey through academic and academic-adjacent conferences meant for my own practices. I presumed to give a bit of advice at the end.

“I think it takes multiple opportunities to engage before it’s possible to get to the point where you can move away from broadcasting and focus on engaging with, experiencing, building your network of people as the content of any given conference…

…If you are a first-timer at ALT-C, when you are there, I hope you think about what could be different the next time you attend. I hope that you return, to be able to experience your own arc of development around conferences, connecting, and the balance between broadcast and engagement.”

Conferences require multiple modes of engagement from participants.

I think what is not often considered enough are the ways that the spaces conferences are set in can shape, facilitate, and hinder those modes of engagement.

This year, unlike any other year, ALTC was at a hotel. Specifically, an airport hotel in Manchester. Previous venues have been university locations, with the various kinds of conference activities spread across classrooms, lecture halls, atriums, and interstitial spaces such as mezzanines and lounges. This year we had a pretty standard hotel conference set up. I’ve been at conferences (especially large ones like the American Library Association and the American Anthropological Association) set in large hotels or conference centers, and I know that sometimes the logistics or size of the conference requires these corporate spaces as settings.

Doing meetings in conference hotels means that the connections and technology are set up for conferences as a default. It means that you are guaranteed rooms for the delivery of your sessions, with plenty of chairs for attendees. It means you know at least one room will be perfectly set up for large plenary sessions as well as (if necessary) a conference dinner.

But the contrast with past ALT conferences that had been at university campuses prompted me to think about what the University settings brought to the meetings that a corporate setup did not.

An opportunity for the university to act, alongside the organization, to host the meeting. In the past I have seen university presidents kick off the opening keynotes. I’ve seen special venues used to great effect to showcase the physical plant of the University. Specially set up classrooms for active learning, or maker spaces, or renovated (or very old and still amazing) library spaces can all contribute to the content of the conference, in their own way, by grounding the conference experience with local details.
An opportunity for local staff to showcase their work to their colleagues coming to the meetings. I’ve seen local staff acting as helpers and moderators and facilitators at the meeting so that attendees were surrounded by people who knew where things were and why, and who were happy to tell you the history of it all (good and bad!). It was also an opportunity for them to share their institutional practices with off-campus colleagues in a concrete way, not just in the delivery of their presentations in sessions.
An opportunity for the local community, not just the university, to be a part of the conference experience. This is more “local color,” and also cafes, pubs, museums, restaurants, and parks can all serve as third spaces to conference session rooms and lecture halls, places for people to connect and also rest and recover before they have to connect some more. Having access to more than just meeting rooms and conference center/hotel venues also accommodates the need for places that allow for varied modes of engagement, not just broadcasting of ideas via presentations.
In the case of ALTC23 and OER24, it was a chance for local teams to invite their academic colleagues to witness the conference, its content, and the network of people who constitute the conference community. It’s an opportunity to make visible the professional identity of people who are often not visible enough in their own institutions.

I get it, I do, there are financial reasons to locate events in places that are corporate and containable. I also think that the loss of the kinds of things I describe above might not make the conference experience as rich, or as likely to encourage people to come again the following year.

So if you are organizing a conference event, I would say it’s worth considering carefully: what is a conference venue for? I would recommend tying the answer to that question to what you think conferences themselves are for. Conferences require not just spaces to fill, but meaningful places that are configured for people to be human in a variety of ways with each other. They are for people. Just like Universities should be.

What I did before the summer started

Image of the book cover, with a blurb from Martin Weller, calling the book an “impressive collection” and an “invaluable contribution.”

I am the co-editor of a book, a book myself and my co-editors are very proud of, called How to Use Digital Learning with Confidence and Creativity. In it we have brought together colleagues from the US, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Egypt, and Australia to write short, accessible chapters on Technology, Theory, and Praxis in digital learning. Our authors worked hard and we are so proud of their work (and of our work in bringing it all together).

We had a book launch in late June, it’s now out in the world, and as of this writing (in mid July 2024) there’s a coupon code (SUIL35) that will get you 35% off the price.

This is my first ever time editing a volume, I never could have done this alone, and am so grateful for the expertise, energy, and friendship of Dr. Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Dr. Tom Farrelly. We used spreadsheets and weekly meetings and many deadlines to get this done. And I am so grateful for our authors’ collective care and enthusiasm in writing (and rewriting) their chapters.

Right now you can also read the introduction for free. Here’s the abstract.

“How to Use Digital Learning is an accessible and practical introduction to key
topics and practices in the field of digital learning. The book is written primar-
ily for early career academics and other staff working in higher education who
are now expected to know not just about digital learning tools and platforms
but also about a range of increasingly challenging ethical, pedagogical, ideo-
logical, and strategic issues arising at the intersection of digital technology and
teaching and learning practice. The deep engagement of the book’s contribu-
tors with the field ensures that the book, while both practical and accessible,
does not gloss over any of the complexities or controversies of contemporary
digital learning. The structure of the book allows it to be read cover to cover
or used to get quickly up-to-speed with particular key topics. The editors hope
you come away from reading each chapter feeling not only more grounded
in the topic, but also feeling more confident and better-prepared to seek out
additional resources and insights independently”

I think it’s fair to say that no one asked us to pull this book together, and yet It is my hope that this book helps people with any number of things they need to think about in around digital learning. I want this to be a first stop for anyone confused about basics, and wanting to know more. I want this to be experienced as a group of experts who care about people teaching, and who want them to be supported, not bombarded with endless “guidance.”

I’m writing this blogpost in the middle of a very hot and troubling summer to remind myself as much as anyone that we did this work and it is worthwhile. It can be hard to remember, when I am between batches of work and everything feels chaotic outside of work, that I work with people who do and think good things that try to help people, inside and outside of academia.

Image of the book cover, this time with a coupon code SUIL35, good for 35% off the cover price until July 31 2024

ALT-C Radio with Donna Lanclos and Peter Bryant (thanks to Dom Pates)

There’s no Pink Floyd on the playlist but I did visit Battersea after the conference.

Well it’s been a while but I finally can post this conversation that I got to have with my buddy Peter about music and other things (I especially talk about my dad here, as I often seem to do when talking about music I love) at ALT-C in September 2023. Thanks to Dom Pates for giving us the platform and starting things off with me while we waited for Peter to grab lunch! (proper sound kicks in after about a minute)

“The Future” is Bullshit–Gasta talk, EDEN 2023

I was fortunate to get to spend 2 weeks in Ireland in June. I was fortunate to get to give the final Gasta talk of the EDEN 2023 conference, and I am finally getting to share it in blogpost form here. Many thanks to the TEL team at Munster Technological University for the work we got to do together before EDEN, and to Tom Farrelly for being an excellent (as usual) Gasta-master.

The theme of the conference was “Digital Education for Better Futures” and as you can see I was coming at that theme somewhat contrariwise. Gasta (Irish for “lightning talk) is an extemporaneous event for me, so this blogpost is me making prose of my notes and slides, likely not an exact representation of the talk live. If you want to know what that was like, I’ve linked to the recording at the end of this post.

“The Future” is Bullshit

Let’s start with some basic folkloristic definitions. Folklorists (at least, the ones I was trained by) divide narrative folklore into three broad genres;

Folktales: fiction, told as fiction
Legend: fiction, told as true
Myth: told to communicate sacred truths

Each of these genres are defined with the notion of truth embedded in them. Within each of these genres is also embedded a sense of the roles of tellers and audiences. These genres are not simply one-way narrative experiences, but require a back and forth between teller and told. Suspension of disbelief, on the part of the audience, is key in particular to the definition of legends.

In the US we have the sub-genre of legends called a “tall tale”—outrageous narratives, sometimes called “yarns”or even more clearly, “lies”—it is a settler colonial North American spin on narrative conventions surely influenced by all of the Irish people who participated in the European occupation of these lands. There is more than “a bit of the Blarney” involved in tall tales (note I made this point primarily because I was delivering this talk in Dublin, Ireland…)

Tall tales, in the telling and the listening, are fun, suspension of disbelief by the audience as the tale is being told is part of the fun. When you participate in Tall Tales, either as a teller or as a listener you are operating within the frame of play. You know about the frame of play, children point to it explicitly on playgrounds when asking each other “are you playing??” or shouting at each other “time out!” (to suspend the frame of play when trying to pause the game, to argue about rules, or because they are hurt…) or declaring “I’m not playing!” to make sure they are not within the frame while their peers play tag, or make believe.

The key to the frame of play is consent. The key to participating in a fun way with tall tales and other legends (remember, fiction told as true) is consent: “I agree to hear you tell me lies.”

What is that participation worth? What can the frame of play bring us, as people? Joy, laughter, connection.

Consent. Let’s sit with the idea that futures should be things that we consent to, that we mutually create, not that are handed to us by people trying to sell us things.

I am using as my working definition of bullshit that offered by philosopher Harry Frankfurt: “Persuasive without regard for the truth (2005)”

Related to that is David Graeber’s definition of bullshit jobs: collections of tasks that are done without regard for what matters (that is my paraphrase of Graeber 2018).

These definitions underlie much of my reactions to Large Language Models (LLM) tools such as Chat GPT (Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, and Shmitchell 2021; Bergstrom and West 2021). These tools are bullshit generators, producing content without regard for either truth or worth.

LLM tools are not minds, they cannot “know” a lie, and are not capable of engaging in the human relationships required for constructing and recognizing the frame of play.

If we believe the hype of the people trying to sell us these tools, we are told there are a lot of things we should be worried about.

For example:

Students will cheat
Robots will take our jobs
We need to give venture capitalists money to build “EthIcaL AI”

These are bullshit fears.Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

What do we really need to be concerned with?

We need to fight in education to be able to focus on processes, not products.
We need to recognize the reason that people have or don’t have jobs has nothing to do with robots and everything to do with capitalism
We need to realize that the bullshit future that Venture Capitalists are peddling justifies the harm they are doing in the present (Perrigo 2023)

If people are already using LLM tools for work they have to do, we might consider that as evidence that they are surrounded by tasks without merit and this is how they are coping. So, we are looking at a tool that seems perfect to meet the bullshit demands of bullshit jobs we’re being told is our future by the people peddling the bullshit.

If some people think these tools are good for helping them deal with (for example) professional development and social justice work, that might be evidence that those people think that non-bullshit things (professional development, social justice work) are bullshit.

We should pay attention when people mistake worthwhile and necessary service work for bullshit.

Who decides what matters? The “bullshit generators will help us take care of bullshit tasks” formulation doesn’t entirely work. We can observe people using LLM tools in part to give us evidence of what they think does not matter (and we can learn from that, or at least think about the implications of that).

What does it mean that we can find evidence that some people think that all of the following are bullshit tasks, suitable for being completed by a bullshit generator?

Outlining essays
Planning lessons
Making art
Filling out bureaucratic forms
Completing DEI statements
Writing letters of recommendation

Wait, what? Maybe it’s not that these tasks don’t matter at all. Maybe it’s that the value of these is not visible to everyone. And that a case needs to be made for these tasks.

Some of these tasks are “service work”(who has to do that? Who gets to not do that and call it “bullshit?”) Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Venture capitalists and tech bro billionaires (especially those who call LLM tools “AI”) spin Heinleinian fever dream visions of a future to sell their products. That vision has no regard for what is happening in the present.

That future has no regard for the worth of the present, the agency of people to create their own futures, or any regard for the people in the present who are not the wealthy white men trying to dictate the future. Their actions now are happening outside of any frame of consent

https://mastodon.social/@effinbirds/109922699517920743

The rhetorical churn around LLM and the future is bad bullshit.

Let’s think about who we want to bring along into the future. Not just who we are being told will be there (AI? Robots? White billionaires?) but who is in the present, and how the communities that surround us in the present need to see themselves as having a future, and be seen as deserving of a future by those with the power to facilitate it.

Even better, we need to make sure that people have the power to make their own futures, not just be handed one by people with more money than sense (Gilliard 2023; Feisler 2022; Forlano 2021)

I want to take back bullshit, keep the good fun stuff of sitting around and “telling lies” to our friends.

And I want to remind us that with consent, and the lodestones of what is true, and what matters, we can do better than the bullshit future that venture capitalists want to sell us.

(if you want to see me give this talk in 5 minutes the link is below)

EDEN 2023 Annual Conference – Gasta Talks hosted by Tom Farrelly – Day 2

Digifest 2023

Bloomsbury daffodils the day before I flew home from London

I attended Digifest 2023, in Birmingham UK, and once again spent most of my time in the exhibit hall. In years past (I’ve been attending Digifest since the first one, in 2014 when it was called the “Jisc Digital Festival”), it was because I was exhausted from presenting (either a workshop, a plenary address, or a research paper). But this year it was because I arrived the day before the event and was straight into work mode with jetlag. And, as always, while I enjoy some of the presentations, the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and make new ones is my priority. When I go to the same event over several years (as I did at anthropology meetings, and then in library contexts, and now in edtech ones), the time I can spend talking to people is the most precious part. And what I have missed the most, over the last few years.

I want to capture just a couple of themes that I took away from the event this year.

In the main hall on Day 2, there was a graduate panel–recent graduates working at Jisc in rotations across the organization discussed their experiences and their expectations about working with the organization. Each graduate expressed surprise at all of the different roles in Jisc, and also all of the various roles in universities beyond just lecturers. The invisibility of the work should be concerning. If we are going to be in a situation (as we are now) where students are told that their fees are paying for what they get at university, they should know about how all of the sausage is made. Transparency is key to getting student awareness of the work that goes into their experiences. And the work that might not be directly about students, but nonetheless is still part and parcel of the university. Jisc provides and maintains crucial infrastructure (Janet, eduroam, content licensing). Why is that a secret? Is it that students “don’t need to know?” Or, something else? Are they worried that when something goes wrong, Jisc might get blamed instead of the university? Couldn’t that be an incentive to improve on the work being done, rather than hide altogether?

Conversations in the exhibit hall were never about the tech, but were about the human work of education. The human work isn’t quantifiable, doesn’t show up in rubrics or strategic plans or work plans or whatever, and Isn’t accounted for in teaching hours, or meeting minutes. For example:

Assessment–that’s what ChatGPT made many of us think about again. All the things that many of us have been saying about assessment since before the pandemic (needs to be more authentic and flexible) and then during the pandemic (needs to be more authentic and flexible) and now that the moral panic over “AI” is happening (NEEDS TO BE MORE AUTHENTIC AND FLEXIBLE)…If we seem repetitive perhaps it’s because there still hasn’t been a widespread and resource-rich attempt to actually tackle assessment in ways that are not proctoring or standardization.

Labor–once again there were strikes during Digifest, and still not enough discussion about labor issues in education and the impact that labor conditions (underpaid, precarious, pension-poor) has on the sector as a whole: research quality, student experience, teaching practices. The theme this year was “Innovation” and what can innovation possibly look like on the backs of people who barely have time and resources to keep their heads above water? (see our 2019 article Trust Innovation and Risk…it’s still relevant!) Back to the theme of not being listened to I guess. And to the previous point–rethinking assessment takes time and labor that is currently not being funded.

So I have questions about how the work that has been addressing things like assessment and labor get buried and ignored, in favor of talking about shiny tools and tech. And I think it’s notable that recent students were unaware of both the labor that goes into Jisc’s work AND the shiny tools and tech that they are responsible for maintaining/connecting with their labor and funding.

In terms of plenary content, Jisc did good work here: The opening keynote, Inma Martinez,talked about both the shiny tech (machine learning, natural language processing, and AI research) AND about the human responsibilities we have around the development of tech (ethics, transparency, deliberate decision-making independent of the venture capitalists who are trying to sell us this tech). On the second day, Professor Sue Black OBE delivered her own personal narrative, where tech was present but not the most important part of her powerful story. The keynote panel for International Women’s Day highlighted the need to talk about who is working with technology in education just as much as (perhaps more than) the work itself.

But I was left wondering what the impact of these human-centric presentations was, when I witnessed in the Q and A that so many of the questions that were read aloud were about “how do we get people to use this tech?” Insert heavy sigh here. I don’t understand the utility of encouraging people to use tech that was 1) unethically designed 2) not designed for educators or students or vulnerable people of any kind or 3) actually very good at anything but bullshit.

As ever, the human content and concerns were present at Digifest, but were not the message of the event (Innovation!). The noise around ChatGPT in particular sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room, and makes me wonder what things people might have talked and learned about during sessions and keynotes had their attention not been captured by the AI hype.

Education is a process full of other processes. When we are sold products by people who make claims, we should reorient ourselves to processes. Education isn’t the degree at the end. Writing isn’t the essay at the end. Learning isn’t the test at the end. We need more places and spaces to focus on processes not products. I’d like to see Digifest and other events spending more time discussing and illuminating processes,and the people navigating them.

Meet me by the Fountain

South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, California, December 2013. By Nandaro – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30566531

My family moved to Southern California (Inland Empire, represent) in 1982. The Frank Zappa tune “Valley Girl” (featuring his daughter Moon Unit) came out in 1982. “Valley Girl” the movie came out in 1983. I was in high school from 1984 until 1988.

The San Bernardino-Riverside-Redlands-Highland area of California is notoriously hot in the summer (June through October…). When we were living there it had such polluted air that you could not see across the valley except in the height of our winter, when the December-March rains would wash the air and reveal the snow-capped mountains around us (my high school was named after one of those peaks). Deep breaths (while swimming, while running, while being outside at all) were rewarded with knife-like sensations in my lungs.

My birthday is in August, and I would usually celebrate my birthday by getting to spend the money my grandparents gave me at a special mall. My mother would drive me and one or two friends to South Coast Plaza, and we’d spend the day shopping and in the food court. During the school year, if I wanted to hang out with my friends, the best place was the local malls: Central City Mall, the Inland Center, and in a pinch, the Redlands Mall (which wasn’t nearly as big as the other two). My mom would drop me off, and I’d have to meet her back where she dropped me off at a specific time. I would meet my friends at an agreed upon landmark, sometimes the Orange Julius, sometimes Sam Goody’s, sometimes the Wet Seal (where my best friend worked).

Why didn’t we meet at a park? Well, the local government was working on not supporting parks, because they thought that public spaces encouraged homelessness and crime (they are apparently doing better around that now). Also did I mention it got really hot? And the air pollution?

I have just finished reading (and enjoying) a book called Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, by Alexandra Lange. It’s a history of the mall, as an architectural phenomenon, but more importantly, as a social one. Lange traces the history of malls from the moment in the 1950s when (mostly white) people were moving to suburbs, away from city centers, and were ripe for a new (climate controlled, also privately owned) shopping location and experience. These “temples of commerce” were of course far more than places for people to buy things. They were designed to get people to linger (and also buy more things) and so became places for social interactions, not just transactional commerce.

It will not surprise anyone to read that malls were also shot through with all of the inequalities of our society; certain people were welcome there, others were not. The experiences of Black people in privately owned shopping malls was distinctly different (in a bad way) from those of white shoppers. The implications of private spaces providing “public square” experiences, but only for some, reflected the lack of concern for the need for people who were not white middle class people with a lot of disposable income to also have places to gather safely and comfortably (and yes, to shop).

So, I recommend the book. It’s a fantastic discussion of malls, and also about what happens when people’s need to meet up and be together in spaces that are not their homes are met primarily by the private sector.

I am most personally familiar with the California phenomenon, as I lived that, but those of you who were also American teens in the 80s might remember the Mall as a place not just in pop culture but in your own life where you could meet with friends, hang out without your parents around (ideally), and maybe spend a few dollars if you had them. The latter point is part of what made teens less welcome than adults in the Mall. We might have been there to shop, but rarely to buy. Mostly we were there to see and be seen, flirt when we could, and generally try out being a person in the world.

Lange also documents the hollowing out of Malls, the fall of big department stores with the rise of Big Box and discount stores, and, e-commerce. Malls fought back by building in Experiences, and that might have been a long-term solution except in March 2020 the pandemic emergency came and sent everyone home. At least, home from the Mall.

I am writing this in November of 2022 and those of us who have been using Twitter as a kind of public space might recognize the processes that Lange describes happening in and across Malls. How they promised (and actually provided) access to goods, services, and an environment for meeting up more readily than some publicly held spaces. How, once more than just white middle class adults claimed space at the mall, increased surveillance, rules about who could congregate, and how (age limits, insistence on parental supervision, curfews) swiftly followed. Malls, as privately held spaces, were fragile locations for the public sphere.

Privately held social media spaces have provided a space for the development of multiple public spheres, places and networks that are present not because of the priorities of the private company, but because of the people who constitute those networks. The genuine and justified upset that people in #DisabilityTwitter, and #BlackTwitter (among others) are experiencing while facing the gutting of Twitter by its new owner was in part made possible by the vacuum of publicly-held options that gave the same reach, the same possibility for connection and communication, that Twitter has provided (at a price! We were always the product being sold..).

“Be less online” isn’t the answer for people for whom online experiences are truly transformative, without which they would not have the community to support them, without which some would not have their current livelihoods. The internet as a whole is still not a public utility, which is also part of the problem–how can we build publicly held spaces on a private infrastructure? We can try (and I think we did within Twitter) but we see how precarious it is (many had seen the precarity a long way off…).

It’s been interesting to see journalists and disaster communication specialists talk about the speed with which Twitter allowed them to find information and do their job. Twitter providing that kind of space also happened concurrently with the decimation of local news networks, and a lack of robust and consistent government spending on disaster preparedness (choosing instead to be reactive once a disaster is underway). Twitter was important, and became ever more so, because public infrastructure has been neglected for a very very long time.

I started this particular story of me in the 1980s. In California. I think the success of Twitter is in part a story of the rise of government austerity, and what the private sector did to take advantage of that situation. And I am reminded that the governor of California when I was in elementary school was Ronald Reagan. And that while I was in high school, Reagan was President.

We had malls instead of parks. We had tuition instead of free university, We had low property taxes instead of funding for education and other public services. We had increasing numbers of homeless people instead of mental health care and affordable housing. We had “welfare reform” instead of universal basic income.

And eventually, we had Twitter. For a while anyway.

Reading the Educause 2022 Horizon Report (Teaching and Learning)

Teaching and Learning report or Urology article, you decide.

I am lucky this year in that I get to work with the Munster Technological University’s TEL team. Last term we had a series of Shut Up and Write sessions, so that we could collectively protect time for writing and also support each other in the kinds of things we were trying to write (blogposts, articles, conference presentations, etc). This term, realizing that some of our struggle with writing is that we don’t always have enough time to read things that inspire us to write, we are doing Shut Up and Read sessions. I wanted to take some time here to describe how we’re doing it in terms of tech, and also highlight some of the themes that emerged from our conversation.

Because we are a team working from a variety of physical places (various places in Ireland, as well as with me usually in North Carolina) we needed asynchronous ways of sharing and commenting on the thing we are reading, to give us starting points for our synchronous discussion on Zoom. Team member Roisin Garvey set up a private Zotero group for us, and when using the desktop application (and setting up the synch option), we can collectively annotate and highlight what we are reading. I’ve been really pleased with how the annotation worked out, we were well underway in our conversation before we got to meet in our video call. There are several color choices for highlighting and notes, so each person can choose a distinct color, and the comments and highlights also indicate who left the comment/highlight. The only drawback that we’ve seen so far is that we can’t directly respond within a comment (like you can in Google Docs), but we dealt with that by locating our comments that were responses close to the original comment. If there’s a thing we want to read that isn’t in pdf form, we will likely have to find another option, but at this early point in our reading group experiment, Zotero seems to be a good solution. It also helps that it’s open source, with free user accounts. We are also going to use the private Zotero group to collect suggestions on what to read next, and some team members have suggested that they can use it to share things they come across that might be relevant to other team members’ work, whether we discuss them collectively or not.

This past week we read together the Educause Horizon Report (Teaching and Learning) for 2022.

We were struck first of all by how optimistically framed the narrative about technology in education was. The report authors started with this statement: “As this year’s teaching and Learning Horizon panelists gathered to reflect on current trends and the future of higher education, many of their discussions and nominations suggest that change may be here to stay and that there will be no return to “normal” for many institutions.”

In contrast “Back to normal” is definitely the message that we, the discussants, are constantly encountering. University leaders in Ireland, the UK, and the US are pushing this narrative, along with the “back to campus” impetus, and many are actively discouraging online options. This “snap-back” state of affairs wasn’t inevitable, but was something that many people were concerned would come to pass. It does not feel as though the sector as a whole shares the Educause report’s techno-optimism.

The attention the Educause report paid to microcredentials was also striking to us. One team member had been on the job market recently, and she put her concerns like this “No one reading my resume wanted to see microcredentials, they wanted to know if I had a Master’s degree.” We wondered who was pushing the microcredentials narrative, who is this perceived to benefit? The discussion was framed as being concerned for students, but that framing was belied by referring to the desires of companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (the latter two in particular not known for their excellent treatment of their workers) for particular kinds of skills training for their workers.

Is the discussion of microcredentials just a reskinning of the employability narrative? To what extent is the attention being paid to microcredentials another way of trying to get universities to do the kind of skills training that people used to get to do once they were already in jobs? Is concern for microcredentials another way of pixilating undergraduate degrees into vocational training? Much of our skepticism was not in the absolute utility of skills training, or even some kind of official recognition for that, but rather for the idea that such credentials could or should usefully and entirely replace the idea of 2, 3, or 4 year degrees. Billionaires with microcredentials are going to be fine. The rest of us? Not so much.

It’s also odd to see the discussion of microcredentials in a so-called Horizon report. Discussions of microcredentials are at least as old as the conversation about badges, starting in the 2010s. This is an old conversation, not a new trend.

In discussion we also agreed that it was nice to see how much money the Educause report writers assumed would be spent on more staffing and resources for the everyone-agrees-necessary hybridity in teaching and learning, going forward. The section on hybrid models of education (again, not a new trend, but one that gained new attention in the pandemic) seems terribly optimistic about institutions being willing to hire and retain people, and give them what they need for successful blended delivery of teaching and learning. This, too, is counter to our experiences in the sector, where there are increased expectations from many tech teams, but little in the way of more money or resource for people to meet those expectations.

The (ubiquitous in sector reports, alas) AI/machine learning section was suffused with the “we are gathering so much data on students in the systems we make them use so we should figure out how to use that data” narrative, which again is not new. We did discuss as a group ways that students being given ownership of their data might be truly transformative, but collectively remained skeptical that the data was or could be used for student benefit. More likely the data would be used, as much of it is now, to benefit the institution, in allowing it to try to make arguments to accrediting bodies and funding agencies about what they are doing (or claiming to do) for students. I would point here to the important work of the Data Doubles team in breaking down the justification for such wholesale data capture from students, and their cogent arguments against collecting data because “we might figure out a way to use it.” Even if AI could give the same kind of advising support to students as a well trained human advisor (it can’t), there’s very little coherent justification for gathering and hanging onto as many data points as the LMS, library, and advising systems can collect.

I want to highlight is how desperately timid the politics of this report are. There are references to political contexts throughout, especially in the sense that political contexts are not friendly to education right now, and have decreased and continue to threaten funding. There are no explicit references to which political forces are primarily responsible for those threats, ie the Republican party in the US, and the Tories in the UK. Educause is a US-based organization, and it being deliberately vague about where the threats to public education are coming from is disingenuous at best.

One bright, and useful area in the report are the vignettes about the different types of institutions. This section is written from a variety of perspectives and situates the findings from the report into a range of specific, though not exhaustive, contexts. This section, written by individual authors who also contributed to the “modified” delphi process that informed the content of the first sections, reveals how much better writing about teaching and learning and technology is when there are specific contexts, rather than generalizations.

As a reader and a practitioner I don’t want publications to generalize for me, but to give me information I can evaluate and decide whether it’s useful because I know where it’s coming from, who wrote it, and why. These three questions are hard to answer for the Educause teaching and learning report as a whole. Who is it for? Education technologists? CIOs? Faculty? Why is it being written? To sell tech? “Thought-leadership?” It’s called a Horizon report but isn’t doing much in the way of horizon scanning, it’s very occupied in what is happening now and what has been happening for a while.

This post wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive deep dive into the report, but a way for me to mark the kind of conversations we had around it, and also to document our process for facilitating the conversation across time zones and locations. I am sure it’s clear we didn’t always agree with the content of the report, but reading something like this was a great way for us to start conversations about local conditions at MTU, and ways we want to try to get to contribute to and shape the narratives around technology, teaching, and learning going forward.

#GrowDX event at MTU–this time online

View to a grove of trees, all leafy and green, surrounding a small circle of very short standing stones. This is my back yard, in North Carolina. — I could not be in Cork for this event, so here is a view of part of my back yard. Note the standing stones (very small ones) at the bottom.

I attended (online) the latest Munster Technological University digital transformation (Dx) event a week or so ago. You can catch up with this recording of it. The idea was to facilitate a conversation about the regional impact of digital connection, in the context of education and non-profit organizations. Speakers Keith Smyth and Frank Rennie, from the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Scotland, joined Grainne O’Keefe, CEO of the Ludgate Digital Hub in Skibbereen, Co. Cork, on a discussion panel moderated by Gearoid O Suillebhain and Tom Farrelly, both of MTU.

These events at MTU (I was physically present in Cork for the previous one, along with my colleague Lawrie Phipps, to talk about digital transformation in HE contexts) are designed to provoke thought and provide information about what is happening with digital places and tools, and also what we would like to happen with digital places and tools in the larger context of our professional and educational and personal practices. I see these conversations as a way to step around the futurecasting that continues to dominate much of the discourse (“What will education look like post-pandemic??” as if we are out of the pandemic, and as if we have a good handle on what it looks like now, let alone in the future…). Grounding discussions in the practices of people now, and recognizing the continuity with what has happened in the past, feels like a more constructive way of going about trying to create a future, rather than have one handed to us.

The GrowDx conversation centered on the relationship between communities and the educational and other institutions embedded within those communities. UHI is scattered across a wide physical area, much of it remote and isolated from major population centers, and has historically had to figure out ways to connect students and staff at a distance, well before pandemic concerns made that a priority for everyone involved. Keith Smyth talked about the “co-located and dislocated campus,” referring to the ways that physical distance and digital proximity combine to produce a multiplicity of ways to participate. The new MTU is similarly scattered across a wide area (“from Ballyferriter to Youghal” as Tom Farrelly pointed out), and has as one of its primary remits a responsibility to conserve, develop, and curate connections at a distance. Digital places and platforms provide crucial ways for those connections to happen.

Grainne O’ Keefe pointed out early in her discussion of the development of the Ludgate Digital Hub, now a model for the rest of Ireland for how to provide a place for rural communities to connect with educational and professional services and networks beyond their immediate physical environment, that none of those connections are possible without investing in digital infrastructure. The first step was getting strong broadband installed down to Skibbereen, in West Cork. The idea is to give people a chance to study and work where they want to live, rather than having to leave their communities for opportunities. Leaving Ireland has a long and devastating history for Irish people; colonization and the post-colonial experience has long made it necessary for them to go elsewhere to make a living (or simply, to live). Creating places, with the help of digital affordances, that make it possible not just to stay but to stay and thrive, feels to me like a radical act.

Both Ludgate and UHI share the model of “hubs” as a way of bringing digital to people, and also bringing people to each other, in the same physical location as well as connected to each other digitally. Students can attend classes without having to leave their immediate area, but also can connect with other local people doing the same thing, via these hubs. People working in Skibbereen don’t have to rely on their household set up to do their work online, or to study for their degrees, and also do not have to do any of it in isolation if it does not suit them. Grainne O’Keefe also made the point that spaces without programming, without intentional planning around what will happen in those spaces, will fail. Connecting people to possibilities and each other takes more than “a physical location, filled with tech.” She described Ludgate as a “community informed social asset” and I think that description also fits the new MTU.

I always wish for more time for discussion in events like these, and attending online meant I did not have access to the chats over tea and coffee when some of these discussions take place. Those of us in the chat did manage to ask some questions about what places like UHI and Ludgate can offer, in helping us think about possibilities.

My primary question after the discussion was about how to protect those possibilities, especially in countries like the US and the UK, where there are fewer resources being offered to us in the educational sector. Ireland has the advantage of being in the EU, and also of a government that sees the value in investing in the public sector.

What is the role of institutions in keeping “doors open” for people who could benefit from multiple modes of engagement (I feel like this is all of us)? Flexibility like that requires more resources, including people who need to be paid to do the work of setting up the spaces, the tech, and social and educational programming. More resources requires more money.

There’s something here about the importance of carrying forward the good things that being online brings us while also keeping up with the good things that physically embodied experiences can yield. What these hubs do is expand and support the choices that people can make around how and where they want and need to work and study. The hub model provides more open doors to people, rather than presenting with a “do it all online, or do it all on campus/in the office” binary.

Digital Transformation in HE: A Munster Technological University TEL event

co-written by Lawrie Phipps

*View across the river Lee to the abandoned St Kevin’s Asylum, Sunday’s Well, Cork City. Photo by Lawrie Phipps*

Note: Additional commentary about this event can be found at Lawrie’s site.

Last week the TEL team at Munster Technological University hosted an event that they called “Digital Transformation and Digital Practice,” at MTU’s location in Cork city. Lawrie Phipps and I both got to be there in person, in the physical room, the first such room I’ve been in since around this date in 2020.

I keep saying the year is 2020, when I try to remember the date aloud.

This was a hybrid event, and we had more people in the Zoom room than we did in our seminar room. The idea, when Gearoid O Suilleabhain and Tom Farrelly were planning things, was that we have a facilitated conversation about what has been happening around education in digital places because of the pandemic, what were the things that MTU had already been doing before the emergency, and what we hoped would happen next. We wanted for the people in the rooms to ask us questions and also to talk amongst themselves, so there were MTU TEL team members in the Zoom room to facilitate that conversation, and we had a coffee/tea break after our initial panel discussion to allow time for reflection and follow ups. We were grateful for all of the people who showed up in each mode, it was an excellent crowd.

What I hoped to come out of the discussion was not any facile sense that we were “moving on” from the pandemic, but rather an opportunity to recognize and sit with the facts that 1) this pandemic (thanks to our governments and capitalism) isn’t going anywhere and 2) people have needed us to pay attention to what digital tools and places can bring to education and other public services for a very long time. In addition, it was a chance for us to talk publicly about the research that Gearoid, Tom, and I have done at MTU around academic teaching practices in 2020-21, and for Lawrie and I to draw connections between that work and the research he and I have been doing on student and staff emergency remote teaching (and learning) practices.

There is an edited recording of the event on YouTube, and I’m placing it in this post for you to have a look/listen if you like.

Link to YouTube video of DX in HE

I want here to draw out the central themes we tried to address in the time we had,

Teaching staff at MTU were already well-supported in exploring and developing digital practices in their work, and told us that while they didn’t feel like they really knew what they were doing all the time, they also felt it was OK to try whatever was necessary because they already knew who to talk to and go to for help. Sometimes the people staff said they worked with were the TEL and EDSU teams at MTU, sometimes they were colleagues who they already knew were confident and capable with a range of digital tools and places. The important part was not necessarily being confident with digital per se, but being confident that someone (or more than one someones) would help and support them doing what needs to be done.

Supporting teaching staff means that you are also supporting students. Staff who are not worried about their contracts, compensation, and precarity can spend their energy on their work, on teaching, on connecting with their students, on recognizing when their students are struggling and getting help in figuring out how to make things better for students. The staff experience is the student experience.

The most precarious students, those who are from marginalized populations due to race, gender, and economic circumstances, tend to look for help from staff members who they recognize and trust as being “like them” (or at least, not the cis white men for whom the power structures of institutions like universities are traditionally aligned). That often means that the most vulnerable staff members, staff who are Black, staff who are women, staff who represent “non traditional” populations in academia, are being asked to do more work on behalf of students. When we interviewed white men senior academics in the UK about their students in the pandemic emergency, we heard “I haven’t seen/heard much from them, they are probably OK.” When we interviewed early career white women we heard, “I haven’t seen many students, I hope they are OK.” And we also heard from an early career Asian woman “I keep hearing from students, my inbox is full of one-on-one conversations, it never stops.”

Digital Transformation is not about technology. The technology that is deployed at a university is a necessary first step to potentially transforming practice, but it’s only one thing, and might not actually be transformative if all you are doing is “digitizing” (s/o to Jim Nottingham for helping make that distinction clear to me–it’s a distinction I hear from library workers, too, pointing out that there’s nothing inherently transformative about digitization). Transformation also cannot simply be “digital by default”–not everything needs to be done digitally, and thought and care need to be put into where digital affordances can help, and where they can actually do harm (as is the case for surveillance, predictive analytics, and relying on the chance-y promises of AI as a substitute for human labor and care). Gearoid, in the conversation, offered MTU’s idea of “digital by design”–thoughtful attention to where their work as a teaching and research institution aligns with what digital tools, places, and platforms make possible. It’s an approach that doesn’t just value the things they know they need to do with digital, but provides sandbox-y opportunities for staff and students alike to make connections between technology and their practices, to come up with emergent possibilities that no one expected. When any organisation starts on a process of digital transformation, they need the technology in place, but they need to make sure that the people are both resourced and supported, and only when we have alignment between the transformation we want, and people being supported and resourced do we see a culture change, a genuine transformation. This should always be an iterative process that centers people, not tech.

That last point chimed nicely with the message offered by Audrey Watters in her Digifest 22 keynote this week. In the Q&A she advocated and hoped simultaneously for a future that was about people, not “the algorithm.” In her talk she said directly: “Hope is not in technology. Hope is in our humanity.”

In our discussion at MTU, we also tried to center people, their lives, and their needs, in a context when that can be alarmingly challenging. And the work is far from complete.

Something about Networks and Connections

Butterfly amaryllis from my mother’s garden

I grew up on Air Force Bases in the continental US and moved around fairly frequently (though not as frequently as some!) in my childhood. My parents had met in their small Louisiana town, and started dating when they were in college at LSU. I get to thank a hurricane–I think it was Betsy– for them spending a weekend on the phone together that made them realize they wanted to spend their lives together. Once they had left their small town for Baton Rouge, they began building relationships that are still strong, friendships with my mom’s roommates (a woman who was sent from Cuba by her relatives, a Cajun woman after whom I am named) and their boyfriends (now husbands)–they remained close with those people, after leaving Louisiana, and we see them when we can, they are present in my mom’s life and mine.

They moved to Arizona for Daddy’s first posting and had me, and their social network grew to include the friends they made in Tucson, as well as their family and friends back in Louisiana. That core group of friends knew me before I was born, and even though we knew we would not be in Tucson forever, those friends stayed a part of my parents’ (and my) life even after we were sent to Minot, ND, and then to Vandenberg AFB CA. We sent letters, traveled to see them for Thanksgiving or Easter. My parents had local connections, too, made friends (and kept many) where they found themselves, but also kept the connections they had made before.

When things were hard where they were, if they were lonely, their local network was not the only one they had to draw upon.

Local circumstances were not their entire circumstances , they were only a part, and the larger entirety of their lives, their scattered network of friends, made it easier to deal when tough times happened in other parts of their lives.

When I moved from school to school, it was hard, but also gave me practice in connecting with new people. My mother helped me in this because she knew I was a person who craved other people; she sought out kids for me to meet when we moved somewhere new, made sure I had chances to find at least one friend in a new place.

When we left for a new base, I was sad to leave friends behind but because of my parents’ habits of keeping connections, I never really felt that they were gone forever. We got Xmas letters, sometimes we would get to visit them, we were in touch and real to each other (even before the internet, which did eventually make that kind of thing easier).

When I was in high school I had a small group of very close friends but they were not all in the same place all the time at school. I had swim team friends and speech and debate friends and in-class-with-me-friends and they were not all part of the same network. So when (inevitably) there were fallings-out or misunderstandings or breakups in one group I still had the other groups. It was never terrible all the time.

I realize that my circumstances were lucky, but also think that my parents were very deliberate in building that capacity in me, in modeling for me a way to have a kind of resilience (I know, I know) in my own personal life, so that when there were struggles in one place it wasn’t everywhere and didn’t make my entire life hard. I had refuges, other places and people I could turn to for relief and respite and support.

I almost made the mistake of shrinking my entire undergraduate university experience down to one group, the anthropology department. I knew I wanted to major in that from the beginning, and threw myself into everything anthropology my first year. My friends, (including romantic partners) were in the department. My social life was in the department and when it was going well it was great.

When it did not go well I had nowhere else to go.

Almost on a whim, I decided my second year to live in an International dorm on campus, one where every room had one American student and one exchange student from a different country. I roomed with a Korean woman, my suite-mate from LA had a roommate from Japan. In addition to Japanese and Korean students there were Italian and British and French and Australian students.

I had a fantastic year. And when I had a hard time with my studies, or with relationships (yeah, still with anthropology students), I had this part of my life that was my dorm hall, and the friends I made there (and who I still have).

Living in that dorm meant that I decided to study abroad. I went to Ireland for the following year and it changed my trajectory through anthropology, because up until that point I was studying archaeology, and I realized in Ireland that if I went to grad school I wanted to study living people.

So when I did apply to graduate school it was to study folklore and anthropology and also as a newly married person (because living apart from my boyfriend for the year helped me to figure out that it would be nice to have him in my life all the time). And I arrived in grad school ready to be a grad student but also not entirely dependent on graduate school to be my entire life.

The friends I made, the network I built in graduate school was almost entirely independent of my studies. I hung out with archaeologists (they are much better at being constructively social than socio-cultural anthropologists…) and so when I had a hard time in any given seminar, or conflicts with professors, I had somewhere else to go, other connections to draw upon. And, not just there in the town where I was in grad school, but the connections I had built and my parents had built were still there, and I had multiple places and sets of people to ask for support when I needed it. I had a partner (also an academic, so not completely out of the world I was in) and was an entire person independent of my graduate studies.

This helped me survive graduate school. I would not have, if my entire world had been my studies.

When we moved to Charlotte, with our two young kids, we moved to be a part of the department of anthropology here, and that helped us have a local network right away. But we were also moving to the state where my partner grew up, and so we had a personal network, too. We had brothers and sisters and in-laws and cousins to be with, our life was not reduced just to the university, we had other options. With kids in school we made friends with some of the parents of their friends, and that was good and also sometimes complicated, so it was (again) good that when that was hard we had other networks to rely on.

I am repeating myself. I am working through to see a pattern.

When I started working in libraries I did not leave my anthropology network behind, it was still right there with me. When I was working in libraries I also built connections with ed tech and instructional design people, because it made sense and also because I made friends. When I had to stop working in libraries, those co-existing networks helped me not to despair, or think that there was nothing else I could do.

I was more than my job. I was (and am) part of more than one network. I am so lucky, I have so many kinds of people in my life.

I worry about my students who seem to only have university-based networks, or who are isolated from their non-university networks in some way. I am more confident for my students who already show up with strong connections to a supportive community, with connections independent of the university. I worry about colleagues who are deeply embedded in one organization, or attached to one conference, who don’t have a different place to go when things go wrong. Things always go wrong, at some point.

When I hear people in a variety of contexts talking about “building community” for students or colleagues (or, customers), I worry about that, too. Is the motivation an additive one? “Let’s give them more people to connect with and rely on?” Or is it intended to be a kind of capture? I think in situations where money is concerned (conferences. tuition) it can too often be the latter.

I wonder if one of the differences, in professional networks, is if we are people or products? Maybe that was the difference in grad school, too. I connected with and kept people in my networks who were people to me, and who treated me as more than what my degree or career would or could be.

When I returned to the anthropology department of my graduate program after the death of my child, the people who saw me as a person hugged me and asked me how I was. The people for whom I was a (failed) product did not see or speak to me at all, even as I passed them in the hallway.

I have witnessed a lot of extractive networking. I’ve probably done my fair share, too. Extractive practices do not build the kind of networks that endure and support. I have long been wary of organizations or events that claim to “build community.” All we can do is make space, and do things we think might be useful (for ourselves, for each other). Whether a community emerges from any given organization or event or series of events isn’t up to us.

I am looking at 2022, when I get to start working as a Professor of Practice for a new MA on Climate Science Leadership at Virginia Tech, thanks to a grade school friend who is still in my life. I get to work with Munster Technological University thanks to connections that have come to me via edtech circles but also my insistence on keeping connected to people in Ireland. My daughter is getting married this year and my best friend, who I have known since I was 13 years old, will attend the wedding along with my mom who taught me over and over again the importance of keeping good people in your life, even across long distances and gaps in time.

I remain here with questions, at the end of this ramble. How are we people to each other, in our (ideally) various networks, offline and online alike? How are we treated as (how do we treat others as) products? What does that difference mean for our experience of our networks?