November 2017 – howsheilaseesIT

Why don’t I code?

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

I’ve just read a blog post by Tony Hirst called Programming Privilege . It’s a short post but the opening lines really caught my attention.

I saw a quote today somewhere that I didn’t save an don’t properly recall along the lines of most people don’t know what it’s like to be in the privileged position of a programmer who is able to code your own custom apps.

Slightly earlier, I’d idly wondered about the rhetoric of “everyone must learn to programme”, and how many people I know found it useful in their work to “do some programming” yesterday, or last week or over the last month.

I also wonder about how many of the folk preaching “everyone should learn to programme”:

a) actually know how to write code (and if they don’t, do they intend to learn? When?);
b) ever use code to do anything (i.e. why should folk learn to code? What’s it useful for?)

Whatever…

Going back to the privilege thing, what I think folk don’t realise is how little you need to do to get things done, if you know what to do – or look for.

Now over the years, I have had the privilege of working with some fantastic colleagues who as well as having many other talents, are programmers. Reflecting on it now, the majority of them embody the notion of self directed learners. They were/ are all motivated to do things, to experiment, to push the boundaries. Significantly for me, they were (are) all generous enough to listen to me and my half baked ideas of what could possibly be done if they could just tweak/write the code.

Despite what some people may think, I am not a “techie” in the programming sense. I understand what can be done, the logic of some “stuff”, and I will have a go a low level “stuff” but I am not a programmer. What I have been able to do over the years is to develop the knowledge, understanding, vocabulary to able to have meaningful conversations with people who can programme and work with them to meet both the technical and user needs of systems/standards etc.

Over the years, I have tried to do bits of coding/ programming. I can sort of understand HTML, enough to edit a page, spot rogue code. At one point I was almost proficient in understanding XML mark up in standards documents. I’ve had a play with scripts that Tony and others like Martin Hawskey have created, particularly around data visualization and I have really enjoyed those experiences.

Still, there is a part of me that doesn’t actually completely agree with the “everyone needs to code” mantra. On reflection that’s probably because of the privileges I’ve been afforded such as working with generous people who have shared their knowledge with me so I understood what they were doing even if I didn’t actually do it myself. There was/is just never seems enough time to get to grips with things properly and, hey why should I when people I work with can do it faster and better than me . .

I’m also still a bit scared of code and programming. Irrational I know – but I might just actually break the internet 🙂

However, Tony’s post has really made me think. My irrational fear stems back to my early educational experiences. When I was at school and personal computers were coming of age it was made very clear that programming wasn’t for the likes of me – a girl, not great at maths, not really interested in computers.

Those biased assumptions still lurk in the recesses of my psyche. That’s why another bigger part of me does really support and believe in the need for continued support for getting young girls in particular into coding early. It’s really important to know how things work, how as Tony says, easy it is to get things done and not just let others do it for you. Of increasing importance now is being able to articulate what you think systems should do for you, to challenge how “stuff” (aka data) is stored, collected, used/abused. Knowing about programming provides another way to have informed discussions about many, many other things.

So maybe I should make the time to learn to code a bit more and not abuse my privilege of letting others do everything for me.

At one with the kids (and the teachers): Education Leaders Summit, 24th November

Last Friday I was delighted to be one of the presenters at the Education Leaders Summit held at the Scottish Parliament. This event was aimed at school Headteachers across Scotland to help share practice, ideas and challenges of implementing the National Digital Learning and Teaching Strategy.

There were a great range of speakers including Professor Judy Robertson, University of Edinburgh, Ian Fordham, Director of Education, Microsoft UK and me. For me though,the most exciting speakers were not the keynotes (though they were good) but the teachers and the pupils whose work they shared.

GLOW, the Scottish Schools intranet, really seems to be coming into its own now and there was a huge amount of enthusiasm shared in particular for One Note and Sway. The collaborative, accessible and personal aspects of both were demonstrated to great effect. It was lovely to see pupils and teachers talking so enthusiastically and honestly about the “stuff” this, and an internet connection can provide. There was also a powerful reminder of the struggles we still have to work on around the digital divide.

Paul Flemming is Headteacher at Kinneil Primary School in Bo-ness. His school is in one of the most deprived areas of the country. I can’t even try to describe the challenges Paul and his team face. But it was inspiring to hear how they are using Facebook to successfully connect with some very hard to reach parents, how a few google cardboard virtual reality sets took the school to Africa, to the moon, how a group of pupils won a national Enid Blyton story competition.

These and other stories over the day were really heartening in that they should the power of digital technologies to make a difference in education. But that’s not to say there aren’t still huge challenges. In my (very interactive) presentation I asked what they main challenges delegates faced in using technology in the classroom – IT, wifi, infrastructure, staff confidence, council rules, doing “other stuff”, lack of skills and knowledge of what’s out there, accessibility, levels of motivation – were just a few of the responses.

I kept shutting who owns all the services/data monster out of my head too. Maybe because it was a Friday and maybe because it was just so nice to see so many positive stories being shared. And, also to see hope in an emerging generation that they are digitally savvy enough to start asking the right questions that – as long as we don’t give it all away before then.

And once again I found mentimeter a great tool for getting audience interaction – I think one or two schools might be using it this week! You can see the results of the questions I asked here and my slides are below.

Raising or removing the bar from Sheila MacNeill

Some thoughts on being open and the ongoing struggle with open praxis

(random picture from my open photo collection)

I am writing this post in response to this, really thoughtful critique on open practice from my former colleague and good friend David Sherlock (aka Paddy the Rabbit).

In the post David articulates his personal struggles with being told to “be more open” and about writing openly. At the crux of the post is this question

how does an open person use technology in an open way? . . . I think there is a struggle in the current technological landscape to be open and that large corporations purposely turn open in to self-promotion. In technology and education I don’t think that something ‘being there’ is the same as “being open”. How can people interact with my stuff, how can they expand, remix. It isn’t solely about the right license.

Now this really made me stop and think. As one of the people who encourage not only David, but everyone, to “be more open”, I see technology as a crucial part of my own personal open network/ecosystem/infrastructure. That’s not to say I don’t share David’s concerns about intentions of big corporations, fake news, data manipulation, bots. I really do.

However I believe that those of us working in education do have a bit of an obligation to use/subvert technologies and be open or at least keep an informed and evolving discourse alive and active across many channels. Blogging and social media are a way of doing that.

Perhaps I am deluding myself, but I have to believe that the medium is not the message. There are really significant messages with the medium. But of course finding them is a challenge. The needs of “the market” are mostly at odds with the recognised right for all to universal, fair and open education, as highlighted in UNESCOs 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development . But we have to try. As commercial pressures force changes into the terms and conditions of many services, we are all potentially held hostage to the dominant “fat digital controllers”.

Not long after reading David’s post, I came across this post from a wonderful open educator, Maha Bali. If it wasn’t for technology, I probably would not have found her work so immediately. But more importantly I wouldn’t have been able to connect directly with her and be able to call her a colleague and friend.

Maha’s work constantly takes me out of my comfortable, global North enclave and reminds me of the wider meanings of inclusiveness, hospitality, open-ness and equity. and the “unbearable whiteness of the digital.” In this open document she quotes Lugones and Spellman:

We [the minorities] and you [the dominant] do not talk the same language. When we talk to you we use your language: the language of your experience and of your theories. We try to use it to communicate our world of experience. But since your language and your theories are inadequate in expressing our experiences, we only succeed in communicating our experience of exclusion. We cannot talk to you in our language because you do not understand it

Now this made me think of David’s post. Ironic, on so many levels as David is a white male – but he really is one of the good guys. It got me thinking is what David expressing actually his feelings of exclusion around open practice? Is he actually seeing a dominance of open voices that he equates to established personalities and personas that he can’t engage with/that won’t engage with him beyond superficial self promotion?

I don’t know, but it does make me think about the difficulty of working at the praxis of open education. It is a habit, you can’t do it all the time, as Catherine Cronin says it is continually negotiated.

So how do we ensure that open practice doesn’t seem out of reach, too hard, for researchers like David to engage with? I would point people to the work of the non dominant voices like Maha, and so many others. Use them as inspiration and example of how to circumvent the tech giants, the formal means of academic publishing.

Personally I have always found working in an open way equally scary and rewarding. I keep doing it at my own pace, in my own way but with the support and encouragement of a wider (mainly open) community. Sometimes it is superficial but more often than not, open practice (in all its variations) leads me to many things that enhance ‘the day job’. The externality that my open praxis provides me with often gives me the support, inspiration and criticality I need to continue my work in more closed areas.

David is probably more open than he realises but it is really important that these struggles are discussed further. I would love to hear what you think?

The long and short of it

(Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash)

So Twitter have finally gone and done it. They have rolled out the 280 character limit to everyone, despite the fact that what users actually wanted was an edit button.

Like most of my peers I use twitter a lot for professional purposes, although I do have my internal struggles about it.

I have always been impressed by how eloquent other people, even me at times (and I know there are exceptions, hello Mr President) can be in 140 characters.

But now, 280 characters. I really hope that the habit, and self regulation Twitter claims to have seen does in fact pan out. Apparently in their testing only 5% of tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and 2% were over 190 characters.

Twitter works (ed) for me because of its brevity. I was as skeptical as anyone at first about the point of message “only” consisting of 140 characters, but I think it made me be more concise and a better note taker/writer which is no a bad thing. Yes I got frustrated at times not having an extra 2 or 3 characters, but that just made me have to really consider and edit what I was trying to say.

JK Rowling sums it up nicely

Twitter’s destroyed its USP. The whole point, for me, was how inventive people could be within that concise framework. #Twitter280characters

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) 8 November 2017

I wonder in in a couple of months/ a year if I will feel more comfortable with the new limit? I guess I just have to wait and see. Maybe one long tweet is better than 2 or 3 short ones . . . I really don’t know. What do you think?

On being a Chair and the value of reflection #altc

At our annual conference in September I become the Chair of ALT. I have served my time as a Trustee and last year was Vice Chair to our now President, Martin Weller. Being the Chair of any organisation is a quite a “big deal” but it hasn’t actually seemed that real to me until last week when I attended our annual joint Operational Committees meeting and I saw this badge.

Last year much of the Trustees work was involved in developing ALT’s new strategy. Something of which we are all, quite rightly proud of. This year we really start to put that strategy into action.

As the strategy points highlights, ALT really is a community, our members really are at the heart of what we do and collectively we “are greater than the sum of our parts“.

The work that all the members involved in our committees and special interest groups are testament to this. ALT has a very small full time staff complement and we rely on the dedication and participation of all our members but in particular those who become committee members. This continues to allow the organisation to provide an increasingly vital, independent voice for the education sector.

A part the day was dedicated to the first of a new consultation exercise we are undertaking around new pathways to CMALT, our accredited membership scheme. Now a well established route, it is timely for a review to see how the scheme can be expanded to recognise different levels of engagement from early career learning technologists to more established senior level academics/managers.

Although CMALT is increasingly recognised as professional development achievement it doesn’t have the traction of say Fellowship of the HEA which is increasingly becoming a target at University levels for staff development. During part of the discussion there were questions raised about the value of CMALT, in particular for more senior staff, as compared to other forms of professional recognition.

That is a challenge, but one as a community we need to overcome and that is down to our community finding new ways of expressing and sharing the value proposition of CMALT. As more of the first wave of learning technologists are filling more senior positions in colleges and Universities, we need to leverage that by getting CMALT moved from a “nice to have” to “need to have”. We also need to extend our reach outside the formal education sector and it was great to see members yesterday from non HE/FE organisations sharing their views on how we can do exactly that.

Having done completed my CMALT almost a year ago now, I can thoroughly recommend taking that time to reflect on your own work and professional development. However I also recognise that I put getting HEA Fellowship ahead of CMALT as it was an institutional driver and something I had to get.

I am very excited at seeing how this consultation exercise evolves and how the extended scheme will be implemented. If you have any views that you want to share then keep an eye on that ALT website for more information over the coming weeks. In the meantime, feel free to share any ideas in the comments – or by contacting me directly.

As Chair, I have an increased responsibility to represent the views of the ALT community. It is an absolute privilege and honour for me to do this. Like ALT, open-ness is at the heart of what I do, so please do get in touch: my email/twitter/ blog is open to all thoughts about ALT.