March 2017 – howsheilaseesIT

#101 open stories – my story

101 open stories is a great idea organised by a fantastic global team of open educational researchers and educators to amass some open stories during this year’s open education week.

It got me thinking about my OER story or stories. Where to begin? I wish I had the time and the ability to weave a tale worthy of Scheherazade. One full of poetry, wishes, fantastic voyages and the odd djinn. One that would keep Vice Chancellors awake till just after the midnight hour (aka TEF/REF/NSS results publications). One that would entice them to fully embrace open education. However, if I want to get something done this week all I can do is share my experiences and some reflections my open journey so far.

My involvement in the open education world has been quite long and varied. It started during my time at Cetis. We were supporting open standards and open source, had been part of the whole learning object thang, so OERs and wider open educational practice were a natural addition to our remit. I was involved in our first OER briefing paper, was one of the first OLNet fellows back in 2009 when I went to Mexico to the OCWC conference to find out more about that community. I probably should do a time line of open stuff I’ve been involved in . . .

I think my open story is very much an evolving, personal one. Open practice has become an increasingly important part of my working life. I’ve never been “hard core” open, in the sense that it’s never taken up 100% of my time. Even back when I worked with Cetis I wasn’t involved directly in the support of the Jisc/HE OER programmes, I was of course influenced by them and did try to filter the open element to other Jisc programmes I was involved in at the time.

Sharing has always been at the heart of my professional practice. When we were made to blog at Cetis it actually opened a whole new level of professional interaction and personal reflection for me. At the time I didn’t really consider this as open practice, but now I really do. Openly sharing and reflecting has connected me to so many colleagues across the globe. That has been equally rewarding and enriching. It has lead to conversations and sharing of practice and ideas. This open story of mine probably hasn’t changed that much in the last two years.

I think that my experiences of open learning has been, to use a phrase I don’t really like, “game changing” for me. Back in 2011/12 in the heady days of MOOCs I probably signed up for a few too many of them but I really wanted to understand this aspect of open from a learners point of view. I still am a recovering Mooc-aholic. I still slip off the wagon now and again, but it’s not the same as the it was back in the old days . . .

My experience as an open learner really helped me to focus and reflect on my own approaches to learning, my own practice in terms of my approaches to learning design, to learner engagement, to peer support, to assessment. In fact all the things I do now as part of my job. It also introduced me to another set of fantastically diverse, open learners and educators. People like Penny who is one of the organisers of the 101 stories project.

Open-ness is now a habit for me. It’s part of my practice, but it has natural (and at time imposed ) peaks and troughs. Not everything can or should be open. I often find it a struggle to keep open on my agenda. I’m still working out my own praxis with open-ness. am doing this through the work of many open education researchers, people like Catherine Cronin whose work provokes and inspires me, and leads me to many others who are working in this field.

Open education isn’t a fairy tale, but it does confront some vary salient, moral and ethical issues around education. Including but not limited to: who can access education and publicly funded resources/data/research findings. What rights do staff have over materials they produce whilst working for institutions? Open-ness doesn’t automatically lead to a happy ending. It has many twists and turns, just like the stories of the Arabian Nights. It might be a bit like The Force in Star Wars, surrounding us and binding us. . . but that’s a story for another day.

Today as the UK takes a leap into the unknown and to closing of borders and creation of barriers, we need open stories more than ever. We need these stories to permeate, to keep open on the wider political agenda. To keep people talking about open, in the open.

I look forward to watching and learning from the #101 stories and hope that if you have read this you might think of sharing your own.

UPDATE AUGUST 2017

I have now received my open badge from the good folks at #101 open stories for this contribution.

Not so much the a case of the wrong trousers, more like a wardrobe malfunction my story for #oer17

igor-ovsyannykov-174012 — Nb this is not a picture of my wardrobe!

I’m really looking forward to hearing the keynote from, and meeting in person, Maha Bali at #OER17. As part of her preparation for the conference Maha has been using her blog to share ideas and to get contributions and stories from the wider community. I did something similar when I keynoted at OER15 and it was incredibly useful).

To try an encourage some more sharing of stories, Maha has written a lovely blog post called Fixing the shirt but spoiling the trousers. I love this idea:

“There is a part of my keynote where I plan to refer to an Egyptian expression, which, literally translated, means “when you tried to fix the shirt you spoiled the trousers” (must remember to say trousers not pants in the UK or they’ll think I mean underwear). It conjures up an image of comedy of errors or such, where trying to fix a problem creates new problems.”

Like many people I often think that parts of my working life are bit like a comedy of errors – sometimes all you can do is laugh at some of the absurd situations that arise. However in relation to open-ness I have to confess that recently I have had feelings more akin to a Shakespearean tragedy ( well maybe not quite that dramatic but you’ll get the idea from this post)

I commented on the post “somtimes feels like I have a wardrobe full for OER but nothing to wear”. I am want to qualify that a bit more.

I really try to be an open practitioner, I make an a concerted effort to share my work, reflections etc via my blog. It’s probably my main open outlet. In my institution we have an OER policy, great support and guidance for creating and sharing OER , a growing OER repository (mainly due to the perseverance and hard work of Marion Kelt in our library).

However recently despite having all this support I don’t seem to have been making any kind of meaningful contribution either through sharing of OERs or reflections ~~rants~~ about open practice. I do feel it’s kind of like opening your wardrobe, which is full of cloths but you still can’t find something/anything to wear. That can be (well, for me anyway ) a pretty demoralising experience.

However, to extent the wardrobe metaphor a bit further as OER17 draws closer, I am finding a couple of things that I’ve forgotten about and on trying them on have started to feel much better dressed.

A case in point is Virtually Connecting. I have been aware of this great open, extension to conferences, for a while now, but haven’t ever participated. Partly because I have been fortunate enough to have been at many conferences in person, and partly because I didn’t really think it was “for the likes of me”. It’s for “proper” researchers.

However on reading, and commenting on the excellent reflective post on the paradox of inclusion from Autumn Caines about the history and some recent evaluation of Virtual Connecting, I am changing my mind maybe it is for “the likes of me” after all. I am looking forward to participating in my first VC session during OER17.

I might not be able fully dressed in open everyday, but I am stating to feel better about my wardrobe options and choices and not worrying so much about wearing the wrong trousers.

I wish I'd said that . . . reflections from #digifest17

You know how it is, despite how much you plan for a debate/live speaking situation, there’s always something that pops in to your head on the train home that makes you think, “oh I wish I’d said that.” Since last week’s digifest I have had several of those moments.

As I wrote about last week, I took part in the “do analytics interventions always need to be mediated by humans” debate. I was defending that motion. I tried to explain my thoughts in this post. Richard Palmer from Tribal put up a strong case taking the other view. In the end, despite me claiming a Trump like spectacular, popular victory ( Many people said so), the final vote was pretty close. Due mainly to the word “always” and Richard’s pretty convincing argument that there are some alerts and “low level” interventions can be automated and so do not “always” need human intervention.

However, of course they do. The final intervention/ action from any alert, analytics intervention has to be mediated by a human. In the context of our debate that means a student actually doing something as a direct result of that intervention. I wish I’d said that. And if students just ignore the automated alerts/interventions – what then? Are we measuring and monitoring that? And what if all the power goes off? What about alerts then? What happens when a student challenges the alert system for allowing s/he to fail? Oh, I wish I had said that . . .

We do already alert students in a number of ways and we need to ensure we are having a dialogue with students so that we all understand what are the things that are actually motivating, and keep being motivating so that any student apps/alert systems we do produce don’t just suffer from the fitbit syndrome where obsession doesn’t actually lead to motivation but to disengagement.

The other thing – well it’s actually a word – that I wish I had said was “praxis”. Part of my argument was to (very quickly and I confess somewhat superficially as I didn’t have a huge amount of time to prepare for the debate) draw some comparisons with learning analytics and Freire’s seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I did want to get the notion of praxis into the debate but on the day it didn’t quite happen. However Mahi Bali picked this up over the weekend and commented on my blog.

“great title, Sheila, and bringing in Paulo Freire inside it is an additional bonus! I love where you’re going with this but would love it if you had the opportunity to take it further into more of Friere’s ideas with regards to praxis, consciousness-raising and empowerment of the oppressed. . . .What I think is interesting is the thinking of Paul Prinsloo on how to decolonize learning analytics such that learners possibly hold more power/control over their data and how it’s used. This could be a third path…

I couldn’t agree more. I think it really is time to discuss praxis in this context. Which brings me back to the core part of my argument last week. We need to have more debate and dialogue around learning analytics and the theoretical approaches we using to frame those dialogues.

I know this is a sweeping generalisation, please forgive me dear reader, but I do worry that emerging design models, partly driven by more fully online delivery, are defaulting to the now seemingly standard: read/watch, quiz, bit of “lite” discussion on the side of the page, badge/certificate and repeat. They are easy to measure, to “alert-ify”. But they are not always the best educational experience.

I missed LAK this year and only so a few tweets so I’m sure that there is a lot of work going on a much higher levels in the learning analytics community. However there is still the nagging feeling in the back of my brain that discussing bayesian regression modelling is still quite dominant. I know last year at LAK there was a concerted effort to work with the learning sciences community, to bring in more learning theory. But reflecting on last week, it seems to me that behaviourism is going to become (even more) embedded in our systems, in our KPIs, without us actually realising it or having the chance to have a an informed dialogue with our practising teachers and students. A post from Doug Clow from back in 2011, springs to mind, is the sinister sausage machine here?

Learning analytics, at least in digifest terms, seems to be the current “future now”. There were so many session with it as their main theme, it was hard to avoid it. On the one hand I think this is great to see. The debate, the dialogues I have been arguing for are being given a chance to begin. We just need to ensure that they are given enough critical space to continue. And to that end I guess I should get my “butt in to action” and maybe take a bit more time to write something a bit more informed about praxis. In the meantime here’s a short interview where Richard and I try to summarise our debate.

Time for Analytics of the Oppressed? – my starter for 10 for #digifest debate

Analytics of the Oppressed(1)

I have been asked to step into the breech so to speak for the learning analytics interventions should always be mediated by a human debate later this week at Digifest.

The structure for the debate is as follows:

The machine will argue they can use learning analytics to provide timely and effective interventions to students improving their chances of achieving better qualifications. Machines don’t forget or get sick; learning analytics is more accurate and not prejudiced; evidence for automated interventions.

The human will argue although machines can make predictions they will never be 100% accurate; only a person can factor personal circumstances; automated interventions could be demotivating; automated interventions are not ethical.

Fortunately for me I have been given the human side of the debate. Unfortunately for the organisers, Leanne Etheridge is no longer able to attend. Leanne, I will do my best.

Preparation for the debate has started already with this blog post from Richard Palme aka “the opposition”. In order for me to get my thoughts into some kind of order for Wednesday morning’s debate, I’m going to try and outline my reactions to the provocations outlined in the post by my learned colleague

Richard has outline three key areas where he believes there is increased potential for data driven system interventions.

First of all, humans have a long history of believing that when certain things have always been done in one way, they should stay that way, far beyond the point where they need to be. . . .If you look at Luddite rebellions, we thought that it should always be a human being who stretched wool over looms and now everyone agrees that’s an outdated concept. So, deciding that something needs to be done by a human because it always has been done by a human seems, at best, misguided.

2. Secondly, people object that the technology isn’t good enough. That may, possibly, be the case right now but it is unlikely to be the case in the future. . . Technologies will improve. Learning analytics will become more advanced. The data that we hold about our students will become more predictive, the predictions we make will be better and at some point institutions will decide where their cost benefit line is and whether everything does have to be human-mediated.

3. Thirdly, how good do we actually think people are? Certainly, human beings can empathise and pick up on non-verbal or even non-data-related signals from other people, but when was the last time a computer turned up to work hungover? Or stressed or worried about something – or just didn’t turn up at all?. . . . Will a computer ever be better than the perfect person? Maybe, maybe not. But, let’s face it, people aren’t perfect. . . .We worry about computers sending insensitively worded emails and inappropriate interventions but we all know human beings who are poor communicators, who are just as capable, if not more, of being insensitive.

Where to start? Well, despite us pesky humans almost falling at the first hurdle of not being able to be there in person – so unreliable! We can pick up challenge and a thread from where our colleagues have left off without the need for any additional programming. I don’t know what Leanne was going to say, but I really like the 2 quotes for the 2 slides she has selected. (I detect an air of confidence from only 2 slides!)

“ It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge” Albert Einstein

“Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or in the same way” George Evans.

Going back to Richard’s post I believe there is a truly pressing need to challenge this apparently sensible, logical narrative. The narrative that is being spun around data and analytics is becoming an ever complex web for us to break out of. But break out of it we must! To paraphrase Paulo Freire it is time for some critical analytics. It is time to seriously consider the analytics of the oppressed.

Point 1 – On humans “deciding that something needs to be done by a human because it always has been done by a human seems, at best, misguided.” I always worry when the Luddite card gets pulled into play. The negative connotations that it implies, negates the many, many skilled craftspeople who were actually fighting for their livelihoods, their craft. Audrey Watters explained this perfectly in her 2014 ALTC keynote Ed Tech Monsters.

“The Luddites sought to protect their livelihoods, and they demanded higher wages in the midst of economic upheaval,”

Sound familiar? It strikes me as uncannily similar to our current union campaigns for fair pay, to stamp out casualisation of academic staff contracts. But it’s ok because the overriding managerial narrative is that data can help us rationalise, to streamline our processes. It’s been a while since Friere wrote this, but again it rings true today.

Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system to the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new “Culture of Silence”

Point 2 – On technology not being good enough “Technologies will improve. Learning analytics will become more advanced. The data that we hold about our students will become more predictive, the predictions we make will be better and at some point institutions will decide where their cost benefit line is and whether everything does have to be human-mediated.”

Data about our students will be more predictive? Our predictions will be “better” – better at doing what? Better at showing us the things we want to see? Getting our student “customers” through their “student success journeys” without any difficult interrogations, without the right to fail? Or actually stopping someone actually starting/continuing their educational journey because their data isn’t the “right fit”?

The promise of increasing personalisation fits into an overwhelming narrative from ed tech companies that is permeating through governments, funding bodies, University leaders. Personalisation is the future of education. Personalised alerts are the natural progression to student success. But are they just another form of manipulation? Assuaging the seemingly endless collective need to measure, monitor, fitbit-itize the educational experience? The words of Fierre again ring true.

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders.

Point 3 Just how good are people anyway? We don’t turn up, we get ill and we are biased. Well all of those apply to most systems I’ve ever interacted with. Our own biases are intrinsically linked to the systems we develop, to the interpretations of data we chose to accept. As Fierre said

One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity

I cannot agree that the downside of machine interventions are “no worse that humans doing it badly”. Surely we need to be engaging critically to ensure that no human or machine is doing anything “badly”.

The “system” should not just be replicating current bad practice. Data should provide us with new ways to encourage a richer dialogue about education and knowledge. Learning analytics can’t just be a way to develop alerting and intervention systems that provide an illusion of understanding, that acquiesce to not particularly well thought out government driven monitoring processes such as the TEF.

In these days of alternative facts, distrust of expert knowledge, human intervention is more crucial than ever. Human intervention is not just an ethical issue, it’s a moral imperative. We need to care, our students need to care, our society needs to care. I”ll end now with the words of the Cassandra of EdTech, Audrey Watters

In order to automate education, must we see knowledge in a certain way, as certain: atomistic, programmable, deliverable, hierarchical, fixed, measurable, non-negotiable? In order to automate that knowledge, what happens to care?

Thinking about my own porosity, filter bubbles and twitter

I’m hoping that this post can help me make sense of a number of things that I have been thinking about this week and actually for most of this year. I’m not quite sure where to start, so I will just start at the beginning of this week and with the word “porosity”. What a lovely word, it’s even better when you say it out loud.

My blog, my twitter feed create a large part of my personal porosity. The porousness of my professional and private life are really important to me. It’s how I connect, make sense, network.

I had a meeting with a few like minded colleagues about The Porous University event taking place at UHI later this year.

The idea for this symposium arose out of a series of conversations and reflections on the nature of openness within Higher Education. It started with the observation that openness is increasingly seen as a technical question, whose solution lies in employing the low transaction costs associated with digital technologies with open licences to open up academic content to new groups of learners. . . . However, other questions also arise, what does it mean beyond releasing content? What is the role of open academics in dealing with problems “in the world”, how should staff and students become learners within community contexts, developing and negotiating curriculum based on those contexts? What would it mean for openness as a way to allow new voices into the academy, to acknowledge knowing and ways of knowing outside the academy, and where can and should our open spaces – both digital and physical – intersect? If we are to advocate allowing learners experience and organisations to inform the academy how open should academics be to the influence of private capital?

As a self proclaimed open educator this event is “right up my street” and it chimes with my personal research interest around the nature of a digital university. However that’s not what this post is about.

I’ve been blogging for quite a while now, 10 years in fact. Over the past decade my blogging has evolved from something I was told I had to do, to something that is now a habit. I often describe my blog as my professional memory. My blogging mantra has been If something significant (or even insignificant) happens – blog about it. Blogging has had a huge influence on my professional development, my professional reputation and has given me a voice (one that took a while to develop and is still evolving) and a platform. It’s always been something that has given me pleasure, and a reason to write. My blog is primarily for me, it’s not academically rigorous, and often a lot of rambling nonsense.

I try to post once a week, sometimes that doesn’t happen due to work/family commitments. However this year I have noticed that I am finding it harder to write blog posts. Partly this is due to the fact that quite a bit of the work I am involved in just now isn’t really that exciting or at a stage where I have something that I actually want to talk about and share, and an underlying sense that actually certain parts of my institution don’t really want to share anything with anyone. But more the bigger issue is that I am feeling more and more overwhelmed by what is going on in the world. Brexit, Trump fake news – all things I feel I need to rally against – but what to say about it apart from WTF?

I am in an incredibly privileged position of having a voice, a platform a role (all be it a very small one) in helping to ensure that education is kept open, is always a place for debate for the extension and sharing of knowledge. So I do share all the amazingly articulate posts that many people in my network produce. I do share news items that question “fake news”, call out hypocrisy and my channel of choice for that is most often Twitter.

My engagement on twitter has always been mainly in a professional context. I have never felt the need to put the “my tweets are my own” disclaimer on my profile, as I have never felt the need or had the requirement. I don’t work (yet) in a profession where there are statuary, professional body requirements around confidentiality and use of social media. Again, lucky me – long may that continue.

As anyone who follows me on twitter will know, the social part of social media isn’t lost on me. I’m probably better known for shoes and a penchant for a Twix every now and again as for anything meaningful that I may write in this blog. Anyone who follows me will also probably know my stance on Brexit, Scottish independence, the orange one in the Whitehouse.

One of the things I have always loved about twitter is the feeling of serendipity it provides. I’m just thinking about something and someone tweets a link to a great resource about that very thing; I’m having a busy day writing deadly dull internal reports and up pops some people dancing their PhD . . .

This morning I spotted this post from David Hopkins. I think David really touches on something here about the evolution of twitter and how it is being used. I am conflicted because I agree with much of what David is saying – particularly around adverts and the need for more user control.

I am also aware that a my use of twitter is changing. Partly that is around needing to say something and not be silent – even it that something is just a retweet about the madness of the wider world, a link to encourage others to sign a petition. Partly, it is again a feeling of being overwhelmed. Although I exist in a pretty “nice” middle class, liberal filter bubble, it is actually at times easier to dis-engage and get on with things.

Getting back to porosity, I worry that it is getting harder for me to find a way to articulate the world around me, that the leaky moments are becoming fewer and further between. I suspect I’m not alone. I’m not giving up and I’m not stopping doing anything but I am re-considering my own relationship with open-ness, and something that I will be talking about in a panel session at OER17 next month. Which will give me something for me write about over the next couple of weeks.

ALT 2017-2020 Strategy Launch

Never mind the UK Government’s UK government digital strategy, the most important strategy launch this week is the ALT 2017 – 2020 Strategy.

As Vice Chair of ALT I have been quite heavily involved in the development of the strategy. We have made a concerted effort to get input from our members through an extensive consultation process on their priorities . This has to form the basis of the work of the association. Our Chair, Professor Martin Weller summarised this approach perfectly:

“As Chair, I’ve found the manner in which the strategy has been developed as significant as the strategy itself. ALT champions open practice, and the development of the strategy was an opportunity to ‘walk the talk’. The webinars, face to face session, and online form were all examples of how we seek to gather input from all members. The strategy itself provides a clear direction for the Association and positions it as a key voice in educational technology both nationally and internationally.”

The strategy itself is based around three key aims:

Aim 1: Increase the impact of Learning Technology for public benefit
Aim 2: Provide stronger recognition of and representation for Learning Technology professionals on a national level
Aim 3: Lead the professionalisation of research and practice in Learning Technology

and highlights our values around our members, participation, our independence and our commitment to openness.

This year we also worked with Mr Visual Thinkery, Bryan Mathers, who joined one of our Trustee meetings and produced a fabulous set of images which we have been able to incorporate into the strategy. The images, like the strategy document, are available to re-use through a CC licence. All are available here.

You can read more of my thoughts on the strategy and its developments on the official strategy launch blog post. I am looking forward to continuing to work with and for the ALT membership in implementing the new strategy.