Tag Archives: femedtech

2024 End of Year Reflection⤴

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It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to share an end of year reflection in January, I always intend to do this in December, but it never happens, so January it is. I’ve been in two minds whether to write one this year though because 2024 did not go as expected.

View from the ward

At the beginning of the year I woke up one morning and couldn’t feel my hands properly. That was the start of the rapid onset of a bewildering and debilitating range of symptoms. After numerous scans, tests, and two hospital admissions, I was eventually diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease. It’s not curable, but it is treatable, with a lot of medication and mixed success.  I’ve been lucky to be more or less fit and healthy for most of my life, so to suddenly lose the ability to do so many things that I previously took for granted has been challenging to say the least.  I can no longer dance, sew, or wear my fancy shoes, writing is a challenge, walking is slooooow some days, and traveling any distance without assistance is difficult. Having to slow down has forced me to recenter and I’m still trying to figure out what life will be like from this point on, who I’ll be when I can no longer do so many of the things that make me who I am.  There’s very little data about how this condition is likely to progress, hopefully things will improve once we get the medication right, but who knows?  I’m just trying to take it as it comes. 

Despite all of the above, I’m still working with the OER Service at the University of Edinburgh. I’m immensely grateful to my colleagues for their support, and to my managers who have put adjustments in place to enable me to keep working from home. I really miss going over to the office in Edinburgh, but the four hour round trip is beyond me for the time being. I never thought I’d miss that Scotrail commute but here we are. 

OER24 Conference

MTU Cork

At the beginning of the year, before things took a turn for the worse, I went to the OER24 Conference in Cork with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto, to present a paper on Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education.  It was great to be there with Mayu and there was a lot of interest in her experience as a student working with the OER Service. The highlight of the conference for me was undoubtedly Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz’s inspiring keynote, The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at the crossroads, which explored their own lives and experiences as open educators and the possibilities generated by their profound and timely Higher Education for Good.  You can read my reflection on the the conference here OER24: Gathering Courage. Also! MTU has some really interesting architecture.

Their Finest Hour

Their Finest Hour project came to an end in June with the launch of the University of Oxford’s online archive of 25,000 new stories and artefacts from the Second World War, all of which have been shared under open licence.  I’m very proud that our Edinburgh collection day gathered and contributed 50 stories and many hundreds of photographs, thanks to the incredible work of project intern Eden Swimer.  You can read Eden’s thoughtful reflection on his internship here Reflections on ‘Their Finest Hour’.  I nominated Eden for an ISG Recognition Award in September and was delighted that he won the award for Student Staff Member of the Year. 

Learning Analytics

A fair chunk of my time last year was taken up with setting up and acting as business lead for a new learning analytics project. As part of the university’s VLE Excellence programme, the project aims to identify the learning analytics data available in Learn and other centrally supported learning technology applications, and enable staff and students to access and use it to support their teaching and learning.  It’s a long time since I’ve been involved in anything related to learning analytics so it’s been interesting to get my head back into this space again, particularly as the project is focused on empowering staff and students to access their own learning analytics data..  

EDE to DSDT

In October we had a small restructuring at work and my team moved from Educational Design and Engagement (EDE) into a new section, Digital Skills, Design and Training (DSDT). I’ve really enjoyed working in EDE over the last 5 years, and we’ll continue working closely with many of the services there, but I’m also excited about the opportunities the new section will bring.  I’m particularly looking forward to working with our Wikimedian in Residence again and exploring new open textbook projects with our Graphic Design Team.

AI and the Commons

I’ve been dipping my toes back into the murky waters of ethics, AI and the commons and have written a couple of blog posts on the ethics of AI in relation to OER and contested museum collections. 

All the other stuff…

Because my health has been so ropey, I’ve had to step back, hopefully temporarily, from most of the additional voluntary work I do, including assessing CMALT, sitting on award panels, contributing to City University of London’s MSc in Digital Literacies and Open Practice, and attending policy events.  I really miss the connections these activities used to bring so I’ve been trying to focus more on reconnecting through social media networks…. 

…which has been “interesting” given the hellscape of most social media platforms these days. I’ve barely used facebook for over a decade, though I still have an account there, primarily for finding last cats (long story). Twitter was always my main social media channel, I’ve had an account there since 2007, and it’s where I found my open education community. Seeing twitter degenerate into a fascist quagmire has made me so angry, however it was still a wrench to leave.  In March we mothballed the femedtech account, I stepped back from my own account later in the year, before finally deleting it. This was one of my last retweets. It seems fitting. 

I’ve been slowly migrating to Bluesky and Mastodon over the course of the year and it’s been great to start building new and old communities there. I like the different pace of the two platforms.  Bluesky feels like the place to keep up to date with news and events, while Mastodon provides space for slower, quieter, thoughtful conversations. 

This enforced slowing down, together with the changing social media landscape, has also prompted me to start blogging again. I hadn’t abandoned this blog completely but I’d definitely got out of the habit of writing here regularly. It’s been good to take the time to think and reflect again, and to try and express some of that reflection in words. At the end of the year I wrote a post about Slowing Down which really seemed to strike a chord with people. Across all these different spaces, it feels like little dormant shoots of community are reemerging. We need these human connections now more than ever. 

Beginnings and Endings

On a personal level September was a month of beginnings and endings. My daughter went off to university and it’s been great to see her stretch her wings and find her people. It’s also been illuminating to see the university’s systems from the student side.

In September we had to say goodbye to our beloved cat Josh.  He was magnificent, and he was my best boy, despite his habit of going round the neighbourhood scrounging for food and pretending to be a stray. He turned up twice on a local lost cats facebook group.  The shame.  I miss him terribly. 

Josh 2014 – 2024

I also had to say goodbye to our family home in Carriegreich on the Isle of Harris. This was my grandparents and then my father’s home and I spent a lot of time here during my childhood.  This is where I learned how to cast a line, set an (illegal) net and row a boat, collect the eggs and feed the sheep, tell a guillemot from a razorbill, pick up Russian klondykers on the ancient shortwave radio, and keep an eye out for the grey fishery protection vessels sliding out of the mist.  It’s where I spent hours wandering over the croft and the shore lost in other worlds. I very rarely remember dreams, but I still dream about this house and this shore.  We had hoped to visit the house one last time, but sadly that wasn’t possible because Josh was so unwell.  We said goodbye to Josh and to Carriegreich within the week.

Carriegreich

To try and make some sense of where I am now, I’ve been re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s Tehanu.  It’s always been one of my favourite Le Guin books, I love the writing and the pacing and the fact that it centres the experiences of an older woman finding her place and her power in a changing world through the different phases of her life. 

“Tenar sighed. There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.”

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing next, but I am sure there will always be something to be done. 

Slowing Down⤴

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I’ve been thinking a lot about slowness and refusal; in technology, in practice, in life more generally.  

Slowness and refusal was the focus of an Edinburgh Futures Institute Contested Computing event earlier this month on Imagining Feminist Technofutures, with Sharon Webb, Usha Raman, Mar Hicks, and Aisha Sobey. In a wide ranging discussion that questioned the dominance of techno-solutionism, the biases and inequalities that are encoded in technology, and the role of education in countering these historical structures of dominance, the panel touched on feminist refusal and the importance of “slowing down” development cycles in order to hold tech companies to account and give corrective measures and ways of refusal a chance to thrive. Slowing down can be seen as a form of progressive innovation, a way to offer resistance, and academia is a space where this can be brought to life.  

(I couldn’t help thinking about my own domain of open education where there has always been a tendency to privilege techno-solutionism as the height of innovation. Going right back to the early days of learning objects, there has been a tension between those who take a programmatic, content-centric view of open education, and those who focus more on the affordances of open practice.  Proselytising about the transformative potential of generative AI education is just the latest incarnation of this dichotomy.)

Recognising the value of refusal brought to mind a point Helen Beetham made in her ALT Winter Summit keynote last December, which I’m still thinking about, slowly.  

Helen called for universities to share their research and experience of AI openly, rather than building their own walled gardens, as this is just another source of inequity.  As educators we hold a key ethical space.  We have the ingenuity to build better relationships with this new technology, to create ecosystems of agency and care, and empower and support each other as colleagues.

Helen ended by calling for spaces of principled refusal within education. In the learning of any discipline there may need to be spaces of principled refusal, this is a privilege that education institutions can offer. 

During the Technofutures event, Sharon Webb asked “where is the feminist joy we can take from these things? How can we share our feminist practice and make community accessible?” 

This is a question that Frances Bell, Guilia Forsythe, Lou Mycroft, Anne-Marie Scott and I tried to address in the chapter we contributed to Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin’s generative book Higher Education for Good.  “HE4Good assemblages: FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education” explores the creation of the FemEdTech quilt assemblage through a “slow ontology of feminist praxis”. Quilting, and other forms of communal making, have always provided a space for women to share their skill, labour and practice on their own terms outwith the strictures of capitalist society and institutions that seek to exploit and appropriate their labour.  These are also a space that necessarily invite us to slow down.  Contributors to the FemEdTech quilt were

“compelled by the process to decelerate, helping them to curate, to stitch, to draw, to write, and to think. We acknowledge the pressures of the time: being creative in neoliberal times is itself a form of resistance.
…
Resistance requires radical rest (rest for health, rest for hope). The slow ontology of the assemblage required waves and pauses which allowed space to think. This may be the most crucial resistance of all in an industrialised HE which fills every potential pause with compliance activity. Feminists create, feminists resist, and feminists celebrate difference.”

This is how we can share our feminist joy; by decelerating, by sharing our feminist practices and making our communities accessible, through networks like FemEdTech.

Of course it’s difficult to disentangle the process of sharing practice and building community from the technology, and particularly the social media, that mediates so much of our lives. The exodus of users from X to Bluesky at the end of the year promoted some interesting conversations on Mastodon about the role of different social media platforms.  I particularly appreciated this conversation with Robin de Rosa and Kate Bowles about the ability of Mastodon to provide a space for “big thinking” and slowing down. 

I’ve been forced to embrace slowness on a more personal level this year as a result of serious ongoing health issues.  Its been a salutary reminder that although our practice is mediated by technology, it is still embodied and that ultimately it’s that embodiment that governs our ability to work, create, and contribute to our communities.  I’m still trying to figure out what all this means on both a personal and professional level; how to make slowing down and refusal a conscious progressive act, and to find the joy in embracing radical rest for health and hope.  Like the FemEdTech quilt and network, it’s a slow process of becoming.

OER23 Conference: Imagining hopeful futures⤴

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I’m a bit late with this OER23 reflection, it’s taken me a couple of weeks to catch up with myself and to let some of the ideas generated by the conference percolate.  

It was fabulous to see the OER Conference returning to Scotland for the fist time since we hosted it at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, and I was particularly pleased to see the conference visit the University of the Highlands and Islands in Inverness.  Inverness holds a rather special place in my heart as the site of many childhood holidays (it seemed like such a big city compared to Stornoway!) and as a stopping off point on annual journeys home to the Hebrides.  I had a slightly weird feeling of nostalgia and home-sickness while I was there, it was odd being in Inverness and not traveling on further north and west. Perhaps not coincidentally, sense of place and community were two themes that emerged throughout the conference. 

As one of the few universities in Scotland, along with Edinburgh, with a strategic commitment to open education, including an OER Policy and a Framework for the Development of Open Education Practices, UHI was a fitting venue for the conference. Keith Smyth and his UHI colleagues were the warmest of hosts and the airy Inverness campus was a beautiful location with plenty of space to breathe, think, and (re)connect. It was lovely seeing so many colleagues from around the world experiencing a Highland welcome for the first time. 

UHI Inverness, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell

One of the main themes of the conference was “Open Education in Scotland – celebrating 10 years of the Scottish Open Education Declaration” and Joe Wilson and I ran both a pre-conference workshop and the closing plenary panel to reflect on progress, or not, over the last ten years and to map a way forward.  I’ll be reflecting on these discussions in another post.

Rikke Toft Nørgård opened the conference with a fantastic and fantastical keynote on “Hyper-Hybrid Futures? Reimagining open education and educational resources Places // Persons // Planets” (slides, recording) that challenged us to imagine and manifest transformative speculative futures for education.  Her call for “open hopepunk futures in grimdark times” clearly resonated with participants. Rikke described hopepunk as a sincerely activist approach to fighting for a more hopeful future.  I particularly liked her vision for place-ful OERs; education that has a home, that belongs and dwells in placefulness, being some-where, not any-where. 

Anna-Wendy Stevenson also picked up on this idea of belonging and placefulness in her keynote “Setting the Tone: The democratisation of music eduction in the Highlands and Island and beyond” (recording). Anna-Wendy is the course leader of UHI’s award-winning BA in Applied Music, a blended learning course that enables students to study music in their own communities while providing opportunities for both virtual and place based residencies in the Outer Hebrides and beyond.  Having grown up in the Hebrides I appreciate the importance of having the opportunity to study at home, and the benefits this can bring to students and the community.  I left the islands to go to university and, like many graduates, never returned.  While eighteen-year-old me wouldn’t have passed up on the opportunity to move to “the mainland” in a month of Sundays (IYKYK), I would have jumped at the chance if there had been a possibility to go back home to continue studying archaeology at postgraduate level. It’s wonderful that students now have that opportunity. After Anna-Wendy’s keynote, it was lovely to hear her playing traditional Scottish music with some of her students who have benefited from this place-based approach to music education. 

It was great being able to attend the conference with a group of colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, several of whom were experiencing the conference for the first time. Fiona Buckland and Lizzy Garner-Foy from the Online Course Production Service gave a really inspiring presentation about the University’s investment in open education, which has resulted in 100 free short online courses and over 1000 open educational resources (OER) that have benefited almost 5 million learners over the last 10 years. It makes you proud 🙂

Tracey Madden told the story of the University’s digital badges pilot project and the challenges of developing a sustainable service that assures both quality and accessibility. Stuart Nicol and I shared the university’s experience of transforming the curriculum with OER and presented case studies from the fabulous GeoScience Outreach course and our indefatigable Wikimedian in Residence (slides). We shared a padlet of open resources, along with staff and student testimonies, which you can explore here: Open For Good – Transforming the curriculum with OER at the University of Edinburgh.

 

The Edinburgh team also had a really productive meeting with a delegation of colleagues from a wide range of institutions and organisations in the Netherlands to share our experiences of supporting open education policy and practice at institutional and national level in our respective countries. 

As with so many OER Conferences, hope and joy were prominent themes that were woven into the fabric of the event. Catherine Cronin gave us an update on the eagerly anticipated book Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, which she has been editing with Laura Czerniewicz. 

Prajakta Girme spoke about “Warm Spaces”; open multicultural space, or “pockets of community” for vulnerable communities and non-students within the university environment. Frances Bell and Lou Mycroft asked how we can use feminist posthuman storytelling to promote activism in FemEdTech and open education, challenging us to develop “productive approaches to exploring uncertain educational futures critically, retaining the pragmatic hope offered by Posthuman Feminism.”  Frances had brought one of the Femedtech quilts (it was lovely to see my Harris Tweed square at home in the Highlands) and she invited us to write speculative futures for the quilt assemblage.  You can read my micro-speculative future on femedtech.net here: Reconnecting with Joy.

Frances Bell and the Femedtech quilt, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell

I also had a really lovely conversation with Bryan Mathers of Visual Thinkery about our shared experience of reconnecting with our Gàidhlig / Gaeilge language and culture. His Patchwork Province zines had me laughing and nodding along in rueful recognition. 

I always leave the OER Conferences inspired and hope-full and this year it was lovely to end the conference by sharing a quiet, reflective train journey with Catherine, Joe and Louise Drumm, who captured this beautiful image as we traveled home through the Highlands.

 

 

Better late than never! 2022 end of year round up.⤴

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Is February too late (or early??) to write an end of year round up post? People often complain about January dragging but I swear it passed in the blink of an eye this year, and somehow we’re already half way through February. This is way, way, after the fact, but there are a few things I did at the end of last year that I don’t want to get lost in the churn. 

Although I didn’t manage to write an end of year review for this blog, I did write one for Open.Ed, the University of Edinburgh’s OER Service, which you can read it here if you’re interested: OER Service 2022 Roundup. 

EDEN NAP Webinar

In early December I was invited to take part in an EDEN NAP webinar on Institutional Approaches to Supporting Open Educational Resources, which explored the different ways that Universities are building open education capacity and acting as enablers of innovative open practice. I spoke about our experience of embedding strategic support for open education and OER at the University of Edinburgh. The other speakers were Professor Daniel Burgos, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), Dr Carina Ginty, Atlantic Technological University, and Fiona Schmidbauer, DHBW Karlsruhe. There was an impressive turnout of over 160 participants from all over Europe.  The webinar was recorded and I’ll link to it here once it’s online. 

ENCORE+ Webinar

I also took part in another webinar on OER and credentialing, run by the European Network for Catalysing Open Resources for Education (ENCORE+) Project. ENCORE+ is an ERASMUS+ Knowledge Alliance project, funded by the European Commission, which supports the uptake and innovation of open educational resources for education and business.  Earlier in the year I was interviewed by Dai Griffiths as part of a series of interviews exploring innovative approaches to credentialing learning in the European OER ecosystem, the opportunities that they offer, and the barriers to their application.  During the interview we discussed strategic support for OER at the University of Edinburgh, the role (or not) of OER repositories, and benefits for students creating open education resources and open knowledge as part of their accredited courses.  The webinar brought together several of the interviewees to discuss some of the themes that had emerged in the interviews in more depth.  You can read my interview here: ENCORE+ Interview.

Femedtech

At the beginning of December I took over from Maren Deepwell as administrator of the femedtech Twitter account.  Maren has managed the account and our guest curators for the last year and I’m hugely grateful for the simple and efficient process she handed over to me.  Clearly we need to question the ongoing viability of Twitter as a platform for femedtech given the (lack of) ethics of its current proprietor and the degradation of the platform itself. Femedtech has always been a loose collective with multiple channels and I know that some of our curators this year will be exploring how we can use those other channels, including femedtech.net, and potentially Mastodon, going forwards.  In the meantime, we’re going to continue curating the femedtech account and hashtag on Twitter, so if you’d like to put your name down for a curation slot you can volunteer here: Get involved with femedtech. 

I also did my own curation slot during December, the first time I’d curated for a couple of years. (You can read my reflection on my last curation slot here: Reflections on @Femedtech Curation.) I had planned to open a discussion about the ethics of remaining on twitter, and the logistics of moving to another platform such as Mastodon, but I got sidetracked by the ongoing debate about the ethics of AI art algorithms, their use of art works scraped from the commons, and the harmful stereotypes that appear to be inherent in the datasets and algorithm themselves. 

Critical Ignoring

I think the real highlight of my curation slot was coming across this paper by Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ralph Hertwig on Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens.  

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.

Critical ignoring is not a concept I’ve come across before but it’s something I’ve been consciously practising for the last couple of years.  If you spend any amount of time online it’s really hard not to get sucked into spirals of negativity, outrage and despair, especially when social media algorithms actively promote “controversial” content and push it into our feeds. Some people I know have sworn off social media altogether or take regular breaks to decompress.  I make frequent use of block and mute functions, and I also try to make a conscious decision as to whether it’s worth expending valuable emotional energy engaging with posts that will only anger or upset me.  I’ve also made more of an effort to separate my “work” and “non-work” time online.  It’s not always easy to know where the boundary lies but on days that I’m “not working” I log out of my main twitter account and ignore any e-mail sent to my work address.  This does mean that I sometimes miss personal messages sent through these channels, but I’m trying not to feel too guilty about that.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  The irony in all this is that I haven’t actually read beyond the first page of the Critical Ignoring paper…

UCU Industrial Action

I can’t finish this post without mentioning the latest round of UCU industrial action, which will see university staff striking for 18 days throughout February and March in protest at pay erosion and inequality, precarity, unsustainable workloads and pension theft. The first quarter of the year is always a really busy time for me because several open education events, including Open Education Week and preparation for the OER Conference fall in this period, so I find it really stressful not being able to work.  It’s going to be a long couple of months and the financial impact is going to be painful, but the alternative, just buckling down and doing our best in a system that is increasingly inequitable and exploitative is no longer sustainable. 

Photograph of statue of Donald Dewar surrounded by banners during Right to Strike rally. Buchanan Street, Glasgow.

Right to Strike rally, Glasgow, February, 2023. CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell

ALTC 2022 – Reconnecting⤴

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Earlier this month the annual ALT Conference returned as an in-person event for the first time since the pandemic.  Around 400 participants joined the hybrid conference at the University of Manchester, for both an in-person and online programme.  For many delegates it was their first in-person conference since the Before Times and I think it’s fair to say that everyone appreciated the opportunity to reconnect with friends and colleagues from across the sector. 

I had the pleasure of being one of the co-chairs of the conference, as to mark its in-person return, the event was was chaired collaboratively by the Trustees of ALT.  My term on the ALT Board came to an end at the AGM, so I’m proud to say that opening ALTC 2022 with a short reflection, alongside Natalie Lafferty and Puiyin Wong, was one of my last actions as an ALT Trustee. 

Natalie emphasised the need for learning technologists to become a collective voice that shapes the narrative and the future of learning and teaching.  Asking how we can consolidate the relationships we’ve developed with academics during the pandemic, Natalie urged us to be confident in our own role working at the intersection of academic and professional services.

Puiyin reflected on her own journey as a learning technologist over the last few years.  As a result of the pandemic, colleagues finally know who learning technologists are and what we do. We’re not just the people who fix Moodle, we understand pedagogy, we understand learning, we understand how to use technology in education, and how to make  learning engaging, accessible and fun.  Puiyin also urged us to welcome more TEL researchers into the community to share our knowledge and expertise.     

I touched on the ebook crisis and the increase in institutions establishing open textbook presses in response.  I hope that our libraries and open presses will draw on the OER expertise that already exists in the learning technology community to build on our knowledge of openness in education. I also emphasised the necessity of ethically informed approaches to how we implement and interact with learning technology and the importance of pedagogies of care, which are increasingly necessary during these uncertain times.  

Although openness wasn’t one of the specific themes of the conference, it remains one of ALT’s core values, and openness underpinned many of the sessions.  The Global OER Graduate Network presented an overview of their community values and research activities, and I also really appreciated Fereshte Goshtasbpour and Beck Pitt sharing their experience of re-purposing an existing open course for reuse in a different global context. Reuse and repurposing of existing OERs is something that we’re really interested in at Edinburgh, so it was useful to hear this case study. 

Ethics and care were two themes that also ran throughout the conference. Rob Farrow’s keynote presented a short overview of ethics in Western philosophy and highlighted the need for ethical frameworks for technology, such as the ALT Ethical Framework, and the space they offer for reflective collaborative thinking  Rob also picked up on the theme of ethics of care, which was explored by Chris Rowell in his talk on critical digital pedagogy.  Chris outlined six principles for critical digital pedagogy, all of which really spoke to me:

  1. Knowledge should be co-created between teachers and students.
  2. Digital education should challenge oppression.
  3. Digital education is a human process.
  4. Education and technology is inherently political.
  5. Knowledge should relate to and develop from the lived experience of teachers and students.
  6. Digital education is built on trust and belonging and should cultivate hope and optimism.

One beautiful manifestation of all these principles is the Femedtech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education, a craft activism project led by Frances Bell in collaboration with members of the FemEdTech network in 2019/2020.  You can read the story of the quilt on femedtech.net and also engage with the digital quilt at quilt.femedtech.net  The quilt was originally intended to be displayed at the OER20 conference, but as a result of the pandemic this is the first opportunity we have had to showcase the quilt in all its material glory

I spent most of the second day of the conference quilt sitting along with Frances Bell, Catherine Cronin and Sheila MacNeill. It was a really moving experience seeing people interacting with the quilt.  It was especially lovely to see people finding and reconnecting with squares they had created, pointing out this or that square – “That’s my daughter’s dress!” “That’s my mother’s earing!”  So many women, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, so many personal connections are sewn into the quilt. There was also an opportunity for people to contribute to the quilt by sewing on a button or a few stitches of embroidery and it was wonderful seeing people taking a quiet moment out of the busy conference schedule and becoming absorbed in the shared task of making. 

Sheila has already written a lovely reflection on the quilt here: Transcending the digital and physical at #altc22 – the #femedtechquilt. I particularly love this observation:

In quite a magical way, the presence of the quilt provided a way to bind many of us together by providing a safe, open, space to have long overdue catch ups, to share experiences and allow time for reflection and just “being”.

At the end of the day, those of us who had contributed to the quilt came together to suspend it over the balcony outside the main auditorium so it could be viewed by delegates.  It was an emotional (and slightly nerve wracking!) experience holding all that shared hope and creativity in our hands. 

We’re still living in desperately uncertain and insecure times, and our new normal is a world away from our old normal, however reconnecting with the learning technology community at ALTC 2022 gives me hope that if we can work together, to share our experiences and share the load, we can support and care for both our community and our learners.

The FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education⤴

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This short history of the FemEdTech Quilt formed part of a post on femedtech.net.

The FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education was a craft activism project led by Frances Bell in collaboration with members of the FemEdTech network in 2019/2020. FemEdTech is a reflexive, emergent network of people learning, practising and researching in educational technology, and committed to feminism and social justice. We are an informal organisation with no funding: our resources are our passion, kindness, knowledge, enthusiasm and volunteer time.

Ideas for a FemEdTech Quilt emerged following the 2019 OER Conference (OER19) and took further inspiration from the themes of OER20: The Care in Openness, particularly around care, criticality and sustainability. An open call was issued along with the OER20 Conference call for proposals, inviting all sewists and non-sewists, artists and dabblers, crafters, makers and writers, to contribute to the quilt by donating fabrics and found objects, creating quilt squares, and/or writing stories and reflections.

The project was originally intended to have three parts:

  • The preparation and assembly of a quilt linking themes of social justice and open education, making a contribution to activism in these areas.
  • The creation of a digital archive of the elements, components and finished quilt that becomes a shareable artefact and repository in its own right.
  • The completion of the quilt at a workshop at the OER20 conference, where it would be displayed in its material and digital forms.

There was an overwhelming response to the invitation to contribute to the quilt, with 67 six-inch and 17 twelve-inch squares being sent in from around the world, along with fabrics and other artefacts. As contributions arrived, the quilt grew in size from a single artefact to four linked quilts, each assembled by Frances Bell, Suzanne Hardy, and a group of volunteer quilters and sewers in Macclesfield, UK.

A corresponding digital quilt was created by Anne-Marie Scott at https://quilt.femedtech.net/. This enabled contributors to reflect on the process of creating their quilt squares and to tell the stories behind them. The digital quilt was also intended to allow those who were unable to attend the OER20 Conference in person to see and explore the quilt and its stories.

In the optimistic days of early 2020, when beautiful creative quilt squares were being sent in from all over the world, we could not have foreseen the advent of the global pandemic and the impact it would have. At the same time, we could not have imagined just how necessary the FemEdTech Quilt would become as a project of hope in those dark days as the threads of our shared labour wove the FemEdTech community together.

With the advent of the pandemic, the theme of OER20, The Care in Openness, could not have been more timely or prescient. ALT rapidly moved the conference online and lifted the registration fee, enabling over 1000 participants to come together from all over the globe. Although the pandemic initially deprived us of the opportunity to experience the physical artefact of the quilt, it became a powerful material manifestation of care, compassion and activism. Frances produced and presented a beautiful film about the making of quilt for OER20, which resulted in an upswell of collective emotion that, like the quilt itself, was “beautifully imperfect, imperfectly beautiful.” In the words of Su-Ming Khoo, the quilt became “somewhere to put our connection and our gratitude”.

The FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice continues to stand as a powerful symbol of the strength and solidarity that can be gained from shared labour, the sense of community and belonging that traditionally derives from women’s work, and the power of craft activism.

Transcending the digital and physical at #altc22 – the #femedtechquilt⤴

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It’s always tricky to try and summarize a conference experience in one post, so this post like so many other of my past conference posts is not going to try to do that. Instead I want to take a few minutes to share what was for me the most important part of #altc22 – the #femedtechquilt.

The #alt22 conference was my first “proper” f2f conference since lock down. I was simultaneously excited and a bit anxious about it. All the preparation, traveling and packing which seemed so mundane in the “before times” took much longer. However being back in person with some of my favourite people was well worth it.

What added to the #joy and sense of place and community was undoubtedly the first public outing and joining of the #femedtechquilt. You can find our more about the origins for the quilt here, it did seem to me (and others) that the more that 2 year wait to see it IRL brought even more resonance and power to the underlying principles of the quilt and its physical presence.

The quilt represents so many people, so many issues. Of course the quilt is a community created object, but its driving force has been Frances Bell, who has spent so much time planning, co-ordinating, stitching, quilting and writing about the quilt.

Frances situated the quilt outside the main lecture theatre used in the conference. It was at once a grounding and centering force. Arousing curiosity, attracting attention, allowing participation, creating conversations and ideas for the future. In quite a magical way, the presence of the quilt provided a way to bind many of us together by providing a safe, open, space to have long overdue catch ups, to share experiences and allow time for reflection and just “being”.

It was wonderful to see Frances explain the history of the quilt to those who didn’t know about it, to help those who had contributed to it find their square, and support and encourage people to make a contribution to squares to be added to the quilt. One priceless moment for me was when Marion Manton (who had organised a quilting circle to contribute squares to the quilt as well as supply lots of fabric for quilting) saw the quilt for the first time. A wave of unrequited joy washed over everyone nearby.

I felt hugely privileged to be able to help drape the completed quilt for delegates to see. I didn’t contribute to the quilt. I had planned to, but at that point in 2019 I had a creative crisis and wasn’t able to do anything remotely creative. However I have promoted and shared what I can about it. And now, I have also sewn a button onto a square!

On the final day of the conference I really missed the physical presence of the quilt. However, I know this first outing of the quilt won’t be its last. So I just wanted to thank everyone who contributed to the quilt, it really is a symbol of hope, of justice and the power of openness.

And of course congratulations to the ALT team, the Trustees, the conference committee and all the presenters and delegates for bringing #ALTC so successfully back to its physical space as well as supporting its digital spaces.

Photo 3 people beside part of the quilt on a table
Lorna Campbell, Frances Bell and Catherine Cronin with the quilt

Open Practice in Practice⤴

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Last week I had the pleasure of running a workshop on open practice with Catherine Cronin as part of City University of London’s online MSc in Digital Literacies and Open Practice, run by the fabulous Jane Secker.  Both Catherine and I have run guest webinars for this course for the last two years, so this year we decided collaborate and run a session together.  Catherine has had a huge influence on shaping my own open practice so it was really great to have an opportunity to work together.  We decided from the outset that we wanted to practice what we preach so we designed a session that would give participants plenty of opportunity to interact with us and with each other, and to choose the topics the workshop focused on. 

We began with a couple of definitions open practice, emphasising that there is no one hard and fast definition and that open practice is highly contextual and continually negotiated and we then asked participants to suggest what open practice meant to them by writing on a shared slide.  We went on to highlight some examples of open responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the UNESCO Call for Joint Action to support learning and knowledge sharing through open educational resources, Creative Commons Open COVID Pledge, Helen Beetham and ALT’s Open COVID Pledge for Education and the University of Edinburgh’s COVID-19 Critical Care MOOC. 

We then gave participants an opportunity to choose what they wanted us to focus on from a list of four topics: 

  1. OEP to Build Community – which included the examples of Femedtech and Equity Unbound.
  2. Open Pedagogy –  including All Aboard Digital Skills in HE, the National Forum Open Licensing Toolkit, Open Pedagogy Notebook, and University of Windsor Tool Parade. 
  3. Open Practice for Authentic Assessment – covering Wikimedia in Education and Open Assessment Practices.
  4. Open Practice and Policy – with examples of open policies for learning and teaching from the University of Edinburgh. 

For the last quarter of the workshop we divided participants into small groups and invited them to discuss

  • What OEP are you developing and learning most about right now?
  • What OEP would you like to develop further?

Before coming back together to feedback and share their discussions. 

Finally, to draw the workshop to a close, Catherine ended with a quote from Rebecca Solnit, which means a lot to both of us, and which was particularly significant for the day we ran the workshop, 3rd November, the day of the US elections.

Rebecca Solnit quote

Slides from the workshop are available under open licence for anyone to reuse and a recording of our session is also available:  Watch recording | View slides.

Sustaining an ethic of care⤴

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On Friday 13th of March I wrote a blog post called What Comes Next, which marked the end of the last round of UCU strikes and looked forward to my return to work the following week. Five days later, in response to the rapidly worsening coronavirus pandemic, my university advised all staff and students to leave campus and work from home, and the following week the whole UK went into lockdown. I think it’s fair to say that at that stage none of us could possibly have imagined what came next.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, it may be a cliché, but rarely has it been so true. In the fifteen weeks since lock down began, it’s been nothing short of inspiring to see the superhuman efforts of colleagues right across all sectors of education to ensure that teaching and learning could continue, while respecting the unique stresses and anxieties that we’ve all been facing in these Unprecedented Times.

Learning technologists have become the new superhero/ines, putting the technology in place to enable teaching continuity, upskilling academic colleagues to help them transition to online teaching, figuring out the practicalities of hybrid teaching, and working out the logistics of making it a reality at scale, all while dealing with the uncertainty that, for all the planning and modeling, we don’t really know what’s going to happen in September, and beyond that, what will happen in the longer term.

And all this effort has taken place against a back drop of hot takes from ed tech gurus, CEOs and journalists, who persist in comparing “traditional” on-campus face to face education to online learning, despite decades of evidence based research that direct comparisons between the two modes are unhelpful at best and specious at worst. Every day my twitter feed is full of educators and learning techs responding with tired outrage to articles claiming that online programmes require less staff, less skill, less effort, less funding, while providing an inferior learning experience and questionable outcomes.  

It’s as exhausting as it’s infuriating. Particularly when colleagues who were striking over precarity, inequality and workloads at the beginning of the year, returned from strike and immediately shouldered increased workloads without question or complaint. Meanwhile the pandemic has only exacerbated the inequalities that already exist in the system. Journal submissions from women scholars have fallen off a cliff, fixed term teaching contracts have been terminated, disproportionately affecting women, BAME colleagues and early career academics, and women are still carrying the invisible emotional burden of a system and a society under profound stress.

We’ve all had to adapt to the new normal and to do what we can to get by. But my concern is that the new normal still isn’t normal, and perhaps more importantly, it’s also not sustainable.  This level of physical, mental and emotional labour can’t be sustained in the long term without it taking a considerable toll.

As lockdown begins to lift, and we all start to breathe a tentative sigh of relief, my fear is that the delayed impact of that burden of labour will make itself felt just at the point when we have to step up a gear. Lifting of lockdown isn’t an opportunity to relax and get back to normal, it’s the start of a long uphill race with no visible finishing line in sight.

Academic colleagues, and the professional services staff who support them, face an astronomical task to prepare their courses for hybrid delivery, and to open the university to new and returning students in September. The online pivot, that all out sprint to ensure teaching continuity at the beginning of lockdown, has turned into a marathon and there are serious concerns whether we have the strength, stamina and resilience for it.

At the beginning of lockdown my own institution placed the emphasis squarely on communication, care and continuity, and by and large it has responded to the unique challenges of the pandemic with compassion and sensitivity. I sincerely hope that we don’t loose sight of that ethic of care as we move out of lockdown towards a new academic year that will be unlike anything we could ever have experienced or predicted, because that’s when we’re really going to need it the most.

Open Letter to Editors / Editorial Boards⤴

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(This post was originally shared on femedtech.net.)

The FemEdTech collective is calling on the Editors and Editorial Boards of scholarly journals to acknowledge and mitigate the disproportionate impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on women researchers and scholars. Multiple voices have highlighted the escalating impact of COVID-19 on women’s scholarly productivity, and hence the quality and representativeness of the research and scholarly work published during this global pandemic.

In order to support authors and reviewers, we are asking Journal Editors to consider these issues while reviewing submissions and commissioning editions during and after the COVID-19 crisis.  We therefore, call upon Editors to:

  1. State on their websites the special measures they will take to support women researchers and scholars during this time. For example, editors may delay calls for special issues.
  2. Promote gender balance by inviting potential authors to submit papers written by both female and male authors and prioritise papers written by women, particularly where they are single or lead authors.
  3. Ensure that revision and review timescales are flexible and take into consideration the additional schooling, caring and community responsibilities which fall disproportionately on women.

To evidence this call for action, we note that:

In the longer term, these factors are likely to have a significant impact on women’s career progression, and may increase their precarious work situation, as they take on more of the emotional labour of caring and pastoral support, labour that is rarely acknowledged or rewarded in the same way as research outputs and publications. We encourage Editors and Editorial Boards to help ameliorate the effects of the pandemic on women’s scholarly contributions and careers.

We acknowledge that these issues can also have a significant impact on the publication record and career progression of BAME colleagues, differently abled academics, and other minorities but data on this is more scarce. Staying Power, published by UCU in 2019 , reported on Dr Nicola Rollock’s research that interviewed 20 of the only 25 black female professors in the UK (that’s 0.1% of all professors).  A recently published book Data and Feminism, available open access as well as in print, is informed by intersectional feminist thought. The book goes beyond gender: to question who has power and who has not, and to support challenges to those differentials of power.

If nothing else, we ask Editors to read our letter and the articles linked to increase their awareness of these issues. Thank you for listening.

(Link to post about sharing this letter)