I am working on ideas in order to make, and that’s the key word here, a contribution (7 x 7 inches) to The Femedtech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education. Read all about what this is and more here. Read it, share it, get involved. This is important.
I have never made anything for a quilt. I can hardly sew a button back on so that it stays on. I tried to learn how to knit, but although the women in my family are super craft capable as a whole, I am NOT. So despite my keen interest in the project and the warm invitation, support and encouragement I have had along the way (THANK YOU to you, you know who you are) I am feeling thoroughly intimidated.
I have made and shared some drawings of early ideas:
And now I am thinking about how I can actually make something. Something that would capture how much I care about the cause that this project is all about.
Quilts are very special. I don’t know much about the history, but I am lucky enough to own some. And they are very precious to me. They make my daily life a warmer, safer, more caring place. And that I value very much. For naps, for early mornings, for sleeping in winter, for bad days, for dark days. The quilts I own have been in my family for nearly forty years and recently one of them had to have emergency repairs. I brought it to my mother and hoped that she could help. It was late autumn and felt reminiscent of taking teddy bears that had lost eyes or ears or even a leg to be cared for and put back together… only to magically reappear under the Christmas tree – whole again. It always disturbed me that in Star Trek even Captain Picard never had a proper duvet or quilt for sleeping under. Only strangely metallic fabric blankets that seemed at least to me never really comforting. A proper quilt is a source of great strength and comfort and not something I’d like to be without in the future.
And a future without care would be very bleak indeed, and not just in Open Education.
I can’t wait to see this quilt come into being come April. And carry all of our hopes for change and resistance with it from OER20. I am deeply grateful to all those who make it happen and most of all thanks to Frances Bell.
This post is re-posted from the #ALTC Blog. You can find the original post here.
Dear Members
Since we updated you in October, work on the next strategy for ALT has continued apace. We are now in the final weeks of the consultation process and here are the key points for you to be aware of.
Make your voice heard
If you haven’t already done so, we invite you to complete this year’s Annual Survey https://go.alt.ac.uk/ALTSurvey2019. We will use the results of this survey to inform the work of ALT for the coming strategy period, what we prioritise and how we put our shared values into practice. We strongly encourage you to complete the survey in your own right, even if you work for a member organisation. Representatives of member organisations are welcome to complete the survey once on an individual basis and also on behalf of their organisation. While this Annual Survey is primarily aimed at ALT Members it is open to anyone to complete.
Review what we have achieved
We have now published ALT’s Impact Report 2017-20. Access the full report as a PDF or Google doc and visit the report homepage. Introducing the report, Sheila MacNeill, Chair of ALT, said:
“As you will see, the Association has grown in size and influence, serving our Members in all parts of the UK. Close my heart is our commitment to being an open organisation which reaches from our governance and leadership to marketing and communications. Our commitment to openness reflects the need for greater criticality and transparency when it comes to using technology for learning, teaching and assessment. Our Membership includes practitioners, researchers and policy makers from all sectors and together with my fellow Trustees I want to thank everyone involved for helping take ALT from strength to strength.”
Sketchnotes created by Bryan Mathers.
Highlights from the strategy consultation
Since the start of the consultation period in June, we have heard from Members via the Strategy Suggestion Box (which continues to be open for contributions until 12 January 2020), in early September the formal consultation with Members and the wider community was launched at the ALT Assembly meeting at the Annual Conference and the Annual General Meeting. Since then, the monthly meetings of the ALT Assembly have continued the consultation process, and staff as well as the Board of Trustees had productive strategy days in November. In December, at this year’s Online Winter Conference, Members took part in a strategy discussion around the Ethics in Learning Technology, facilitated by ALT’s chief executive Maren Deepwell and Professor John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton. The questions we discussed included:
Why do professional bodies have ethical codes or frameworks? What are the benefits?
What are typical examples illustrating the breadth of formality, detail and principles?
What is so specific about learning, technology and learning technology?
Is it just about research ethics?
Members strongly supported establishing a broad ethical framework for Learning Technology professionals and suggested ideas of how this could be put into practice. You can view a recording of the webinar.
The shape of things to come
Thanks to the many contributions we have received, it seems clear that ALT’s current aims and values continue to be in line with Members needs. In recognition of this we are looking to refine and strengthen our vision to reflect the challenges ahead and the changing context we work in. Whilst the strategic objectives will only be finalised once we have analysed the results of the survey, we want to share a taste of what is to come with this update to ALT’s definition of Learning Technology:
How we define Learning Technology
We define Learning Technology as the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that are used to support learning, teaching and assessment. We recognise the wider context of Learning Technology policy, theory and history as fundamental to its ethical, equitable and fair use.
For now, thank you to everyone who has already provided input, participated in the consultation events and sent us suggestions.
We encourage you to take part in the final phase of the consultation until 12 January 2020 and make your voice heard! The new strategy will launch in February 2020.
Authors: Sheila MacNeill (Chair) and Maren Deepwell (Chief Executive)
Deep in the edtech sprawl, where daylight only rarely penetrates and you can hear the constant hum of servers being cooled, there is writing on the wall:
Is digital better? Is a computer better? Is AI better?
Passers-by hurry past these words, but they still read them. In those words they hear the deep thumping beat of the march of the machines. That sound is never absent from the edtech sprawl, forever thriving to mechanise, industrialise, to cut costs and increase profits. ‘Better’ may look glossy, sexy, new… but usually it is shorthand for something more, for devaluing labour for example. Deep in those dark and dank streets, there is a constant race to keep up, to remain relevant, to be employable. There is a competition to answer those questions about what is better, who is better. A machine or a human being.
Fortunately, we are making a map (with small moving footprints on it like the magical map in Harry Potter, only that the footprints on this map glow briefly in different neon colours… it is the Neon Flaneuse we are following after all) that will lead us to think about things in a different way, beyond the ‘digital dichotomy’. Beyond, to a more helpful and interesting part of the sprawl, where we can sit on a bench and watch the world go by. A bench which is still wrapped in the grey fog of the metropolis, but where the daylight sometimes penetrates. The bench has a plaque which reads: In Memory of Lilac and Flag.
There are two things I want to think about:
Creative professional practice, the way artists and designers work, which often blends different modalities of working, analogue and digital. Their approach provides a different starting point for thinking about the relationship between humans and machines or humans and data, more integrative than adversarial.
Also, experiencing art in person, rather than looking at a (digital) representation of or reading about it, may point in the same direction. May help our thinking take a step away from which is ‘better’, take a step back from the human versus machine narrative and get us to a more interesting place… .
Let’s think about art first. Many artworks are now catalogued online, and I can even take a virtual stroll through a museum or exhibition. The experience of reading about and looking at digital representations isn’t the same as experiencing a painting or a sculpture in person. Even if I wore a VR headset, and the recording or scan was extremely high resolution, it would be different to my first hand experience. It may be amazing, but it’s not the same as being there. It’s hard to articulate those different experiences I find because usually the language we use to talk about experiencing things through machines or the way in which machines function humanises technology. We use phrases like ‘the camera sees’ or the ‘the computer thinks’ or ‘the robot cares’ and that confuses the issue. So articulating the difference between what a human being does and what a machine does is tricky unless you are expert enough to use technical terms. Yet encountering art, a sculpture or a painting for example, is different for a human than it is for a machine. Obviously. There are many variables between an object, a person and a situation, that combine to create the experience. All of which contribute to the meaning that particular work of art may hold for the individual. Nothing holds meaning for a machine. Some elements of that meaning may be shared, like feeling small when encountering a large installation. Others may be so specific that they are singular. Some art or architecture is so spectacular that it is easier to engage with it because we know we should – we should look for meaning. But it can be hard to find, and taking a selfie, having a record, has become the predominant mode of engagement.
I like to imagine that with the Neon Flaneuse any museum I went to would suddenly be quiet, that people would magically melt away. All those labels and descriptions would also disappear and we would just follow our feet and stop and pause whenever something really captured our imagination. I went to art school for six years and yet never developed an interest in reading about art in museums. I still hardly ever read the labels. I know that I can remember enough about it to look it up in a book or on the internet later. But when I’m there in person, I want to really pay attention, to notice what I get from the experience.
Many people don’t feel that they really understand art. So they read the information provided in order to do so. It helps make sense, explains why something is important or what others feel was special about it. But if the museum was devoid of such clues, if there were no markers to tell you which one to pick, what would you go by? How would you know which one to like? Which one to take a picture of?
For me, personally, encountering art is all about the moment. There are artists whose aesthetic, ideas, style or mastery I admire. There are types of art of which I like the medium. There is art that I like because of its role in history. But for that I can buy a postcard or read a book. I don’t need to necessarily go to see Marcel Duchamp’s urinal or Rachel Whiteread’s house.
Instead, I want to focus on what I feel drawn to. A tortoise would be a good museum companion, making her way slowly and steadily through the levels. She could potter on whilst I stood still. People usually find that annoying. After all, there is always more to see, guides to follow.
A few years ago I spent the morning at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and the visit had two real highlights. Walking up to the museum I saw a big neon sign spelling out the words: everything is going to be alright. It really meant something to me that morning. It was just the message that I needed to see light up in bright lights. It made me smile despite being wet and cold.
I went to see the Ed Ruscha exhibition they had on and some specific artworks I’d never seen before in real life. It was interesting but also what I had expected. No surprises, even though I learnt a lot. But in the last room of the exhibition I came across a painting that made me stop in my tracks. I sat down in front of it for so long that the school kids with their sketch pads were jostling me as they made their drawings and the security guard gave me funny looks. But that day this particular painting made me feel that sitting and staring at it, really drinking it in, was just what I wanted to do. It inspired me. It made me think and feel things I hadn’t felt before. Looking at it now on the Tate website I don’t connect with it in the same way. I still ‘like’ it and I get echoes of how I felt that day in Edinburgh but it’s different. The moment has passed, it’s become part of my story.
Coming back to those words on the wall, to the adversarial “which one is better” narrative… I don’t think it’s helpful to think in terms of which one is better. How we perceive the world isn’t better or worse than what we can measure or capture with tools and machines. Technology is useful. It enables me to learn all about that painting I saw in Edinburgh, to show it to you, to reference it and so forth. There is no competition as to what is better. Each type of experience, different ways to relate to and interact with the world have a different purpose and meaning. Both have value.
Creative professional practice has a long history of making use of technology. Digital technology has expanded the toolbox significantly but physical objects and other forms of knowledge are no less important. It seems perfectly logical to combine using original archive materials with digital sources to create physical models which can then be used to create a digital version and so forth. All have their place in the creative process.
There’s an interesting documentary series on the art of design that gives insight into this beautifully, but I’d guess talking to most creative professionals or visiting an art school or studio will highlight the same. The point is that we use whatever is the most useful without creating a hierarchy of what’s better. There is a joy in creative practice which I feel is absent in much of the work in educational technology.
So instead of asking which is better, a print maker or a printing machine, a teacher or a teaching machine, we ask different questions. We don’t set up a dichotomy which focuses on measurable indicators rather than purpose and meaning. We move beyond the digital dichotomy and we keep walking and go to the museum. Pick something and spend some time sitting with it. You won’t need to take a selfie. You will remember.
At the museum
Soundtrack for this post: Our Day Will Come by Amy Winehouse
Andy Warhol wrote a book called THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) published in 1975 and as you might expect, it’s a bit of a strange read. It’s definitely not a book that takes you in a straight line from A to B. It’s more of a peek into a very singular imagination. One which you can easily get lost in. On the contents page of the book at the very top is the phrase “You Can’t Argue with Your Scrapbook” (I like that EVERY word is capitalised even in the contents section – it gives you an immediate sense of the importance of the ramblings that are to follow… ) and this is very much what this post is going to be like. A walk through of some pages of my scrapbook, sorry, My Scrapbook, about how we experience spaces, particularly urban spaces and to think about an embodied perspective as well as a technologically mediated one. I’m thinking about why how we perceive and interact with our environment matters and how it can become an act of resistance. Curiosity v capitalist conformity if you like.
It was this tweet that brought these ideas back to the forefront of my mind:
Do any of you still allow yourself to get “lost” driving in a city (either your own or one that’s new to you)? Or, do any of you explore a city w/o using some mapping tool?
The thread of all the answers makes for interesting reading. Although the idea of getting lost by car feels like an America’s concept to me. I am not sure most of the places I drive to are big enough to get lost in on purpose or with fun to be had (unless you count British one way systems). But the tweet struck a real chord with me because I feel that in this age of search and GPS getting lost is underrated. Whenever I see a tourist navigating Oxford or London with their phone held at eye level, staring with concentration at the street-view of where they are, reading the notifications that pop up about buildings and sights as they pass, I wish they would put the phone away and look around instead. I wish they would follow their feet and experience the place for themselves and discover makes them curious. Not to follow a predetermined route or learn only about what others or an algorithm deem important.
There are three concepts/metaphors related to getting lost and walking in the city that I am interested in: the slow walk or ‘ flanerie’ through the city that Benjamin and Baudelaire wrote about, the ‘derive’, that drifting through urban space that Guy Debord first wrote of and that was an important part of the Situationist International movement and the embodied practice of exploring a place with all our senses engaged to create a phenomenological perspective which is often associated with studying landscapes in Anthropology and Archaeology.
As an aside, as I mentioned in the introduction to this series, I really need to find some more diverse references for these ideas and concepts. The current list is only a starting point – I did create the Neon Flaneuse not a Flaneur intentionally. Suggestions and links via Twitter to @neonFlaneuse would be gratefully received.
Anyway, let’s get back to The Scrapbook and why these three concepts can be useful to think with now, in our context:
Phenomenological studies of prehistoric landscapes may not immediately spring to mind as an obvious reference point… but how we create meaning through our experience of a particular place and what mediates that experience is highly relevant to our relationship to technology. It helps articulate the contested, shifting nature of places and encourages us to consider the limitations of what we can capture about a place or an object (in images or words or other data). Placing primary focus on human experience, our individual points of view, presents an interesting challenge to data driven narratives.
The following two quotes give you a better idea (feel free to skip this bit, it gets less dense again further down). The first one is by Barbara Bender (2006) , an Archaeologist and Anthropologist who wrote much about landscapes but her work could be equally applied to cityscapes and urban sprawls:
‘Landscape’ is . . . ‘the world out there’ as understood, experienced, and engaged with through human consciousness and active involvement. Thus it is a subjective notion, and being subjective and open to many understandings it is volatile.’
The second quote is from Chris Tilley, who alongside Barbara Bender was at the Department of Anthropology at UCL when I was a student there and my PhD supervisor.
He talks about how we as human beings experience things, places or objects, through our senses, i.e. an embodied perspective, shaped by our physical bodies. He argues in his introduction to Identity, Place, Landscape and Heritage (2006) that ‘as our ‘involvement in the world is always situated as taking place from a point of view’ and also situated in time what we can capture and communicate is necessarily limited. Or, as he puts it,
‘The body is both interpretational constraint and enabling condition for the construction of meaning.’
If you don’t find this kind of phrasing particularly accessible, then you know now what my years as a research student were like.
What is relevant to me is that a lot of technology places an emphasis on only one of our senses, the visual, and often neglects all the others. This doesn’t just hold true for how we use tech but also extends to representations of the world that are based on data we collect, on words and images and other information. So if I walk down a street and I smell a bakery, I might go there and buy a donut. A drone wouldn’t. What smells delicious to me may not appeal to you. What feels like a steep climb or a tall step or a big jump to me… may be perceived differently by someone who is taller or stronger or braver. My primary way of making my way through the world is to rely on my body, hence it enables me to make sense of the world. And as there is no other way for me to be alive (AI evangelists need not apply here) it is also a constraint, i.e. the only way for me to make sense of the world.
Add to that all that ‘being me’ brings with it and add that to the way I interact with the world or with particular places and then multiply by all the other people on the planet and you get what Barbara Bender means when she says our involvement in the world is always situated.
Complicated quotes aside, the situatedness of human experience is a concept that is very relevant to human-computer interaction. Without sufficiently being able to understand and plan for that element of human social interaction problems of mutual intelligibility arise, and Anthropologist Lucy A. Suchman has written much on this subject, including this book which I will be adding to my reading list (and which I came across in a post on situated degree pathways – thanks 🙂 )
Already 1,000 words written and lots of obscure references thrown in and I haven’t even gotten to the second idea I wanted to discuss yet. I am not sure that bodes well for this new blogging venture, but we made it to the beach now in any case… .
Another book I came across (and which is now on my reading list) is The Beach Beneath the Street – The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark. According to Wikipedia, McKenzie Wark is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City. Wark’s work sounds really interesting and whilst I have come across some of her writing on technology, there is clearly a lot more to discover.
Thanks to Wikipedia (and as I don’t have any of the source materials to hand) you can read a very comprehensive summary of what the Situationist International movement was all about. Although its active period as an artistic and later political movement (1950s-1970s) is behind us, its critique of advanced capitalism is directly related to the concerns about surveillance capitalism, social alienation and passive consumption that we currently discuss. The beach metaphor comes into it in relation to ‘situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life’.
Drifting through the city, following wherever your feet may take you, stepping off the map, getting lost in the sprawl of the metropolis… following your curiosity. Taking time, being present. Not being tracked. If the Situationist International movement was revived today it would probably be a mindfulness tracking app with ethical, vegan wellbeing product tie-ins on Instagram. I don’t want to look for it in case there already is one.
But the radical vision at the heart of the movement, the anger and resistance that found its expression in the insurrections in France in May 1968, must not be lost. The desire to be liberated from the capitalist quotidian, to find alternatives to the prevailing social and economic narrative, is now more relevant than ever. Looking up, reclaiming our streets and cities from row upon row of homogenous shops and offices for communities not corporations is a fight to be fought now as it was then.
But there is no time as we are on our way to 10,000 steps a day. No time to stop, slow down.
Which is where the Neon Flaneuse and its origin come in.
I imagine, that if you were invited for tea by the heroine of my story (she only drinks Lady Grey, in case you are wondering) and had a look at her bookshelves, you’d find a book that every self respecting Flaneur ought to own: Momo by Michael Ende. Published in 1973, one of the book’s themes is the commodification of time, but it also features a ‘living doll’ and many other technologies which a few decades later read like an edtech development plan or marketing manual (not a lot has been written about Momo, but this article in Kronoscope contains a useful summary).
One of the main characters in the book is the tortoise Cassiopeia, a magical tortoise which can communicate through words that appear in glowing letters on her back: FOLLOW ME.
By following the tortoise, and walking at the pace of the tortoise instead of rushing faster and faster, the girl Momo makes her way to try and save the world. The pace of the tortoise is important in the story, and as a metaphor it resonates with the concept of “flanerie”, of slowly walking through the city. The pace at which you may perceive and discover things, get lost and drift for a while.
It’s a romantic metaphor I admit, but it is also a radical one. It is radical in part because it rejects our path as a linear narrative from A to B, it rejects conformity in favour of curiosity. It is radical because it is about stepping off the grid and onto the beach, to really look. Perception that may lead to reflection and resistance.
‘Follow the Tortoise’
Soundtrack for this post: Heart of Gold by Neil Young and his album On the Beach.
Welcome to this month’s special podcast (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. If this is your first time visiting this post series or you’d like to review what we’ve posted in 2019 Maren has a Virtual Teams summary page.
This time we are joined by our special guest, Olaf Hubel G Suite Developer Relations Team Leader at Google. Together we talk about what it takes to lead a virtual team, collaboration and team communication.
This month: podcast with special guest Olaf Hubel (Google)
Martin: So Maren what were your main takeaways from our podcast with Olaf Hubel?
Maren: I really enjoyed talking to Olaf and I got a lot of food for thought from our conversation. One topic we discussed was how important interaction is for virtual teams and Olaf described the different approaches he uses to manage that both formally as part of team meetings and informally through things like water cooler hangouts and chat. We have a water cooler chat channel for our team and recently there were some real stand out moments for me, such as the morning when we all met a new puppy of one of our colleagues or when I was mid transit whilst travelling and the chat was suddenly all about domestic chores with a lovely pic that made me smile 🙂 Leading a virtual team requires us to be more intentional when it comes to informal interactions like that. We can’t rely on serendipity (and I’d argue you shouldn’t for co-located teams either). Providing tools is only part of the equation. We also need to put in place & maintain the necessary structures and that is something I feel we’ve learnt a lot about in the past two years. We’ve moved from experimenting with different formats and strategies to a more regular rhythm of working together. Hearing Olaf talk about focusing on team interaction as both valid and important really chimed with me. What about you? Are there any talking points that stood out for you?
Martin: It was striking to me the number of similarities in the way that our team operates to Olaf’s team. This is perhaps not surprising as given ALT uses a number of tools that have been developed by Google. There were some small things I had never considered before until Olaf highlighted them like by default your webcam is on when you join a Google Hangouts Meet to encourage you to use video. As ALT has a number of video conferencing tools at our disposal with some to default to video off it’s interesting to reflect on the behaviours it encourages. Like you I found it interesting to hear about how some of the informal interactions were sometimes orchestrated. Besides the water cooler chat, ideas like the Monday morning social where Olaf’s team hangout just to share non-work related things like things they got up to at the weekend seemed like nice opportunities to build social connections. It was also interesting to hear how Olaf organised some of the formal interactions, in particular, dedicating a day for scheduled catch-ups with team members. As someone with a touch of OCD I could see how having a regular timetabled slot each week could be useful. The final thing I’ll mention was Olaf’s reference to Google’s Project Oxygen where “Google set out to determine what makes a manager great at Google”. We didn’t go into much detail about Project Oxygen but subsequently I know we’ve both explored the re:Work website which “Google and others to help share and push forward the practice and research of data-driven HR”. What’s your take on re:Work and Project Oxygen?
Maren: it made for interesting reading for me! One key point it got me thinking about was scale. The more people are involved and the more levels of management you have the harder it becomes to get a sense of what good practice should look like and what is happening on the ground. Project Oxygen, for me, is an expression of meeting those challenges and providing output that can be scaled up to the size of a global corporation. The 10 behaviours of good management identified in the report all read like common sense, but putting that into practice consistently remains a challenge. The example you picked up on, scheduling catch ups for everyone at the same time each week, is particularly relevant to me. I already have weekly catch ups planned, but the process of scheduling them in itself is very time intensive. Each week or month I need to repeat the process. Taking inspiration from Olaf, I’m going to try the approach he shared, and by sending out one repeat calendar invite per person and in this manner I’ve now scheduled weekly catch ups with everyone for the whole year. For me, that’s a big win. Yet, beyond the efficiency, the regular schedule should also help to create a better rhythm for us as a team, with specific days each week for different meetings, both informal and formal. It should help everyone structure their time and that is particularly relevant for you and I, as we always struggle to carve our sufficient head space for strategic planning. Structure is so important for us as a virtual team and it can be hard work to create and maintain that when each week the calendar looks completely different. I LOVE planning support, structures, evaluation processes and so on and it is so attractive to look at the reporting and tools being shared on the re:Work site and try them out in our context. That said, I also know first hand that much of what makes work life tick day to day is hard to capture in quantitative data sets. Olaf emphasised the importance and value of spending time, communicating, building relationships and that I really chimed with me. It’s a constant regardless of whether you share a desk or whether you are an ocean apart.
Martin: Another aspect of relying on quantitative data, particularly when what is being measured leads to reward is Campbell’s Law, that is “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor”. Looking at the Google Manager Feedback Survey, which is based around 13 quantitative and two qualitative questions I could see it being an easy to fall into the trap of managing to the survey. Perhaps this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing because as you mentioned these questions are designed to measure behaviours that appear to be common sense and personally I value a manager who ‘assigns stretch opportunities to help me develop in my career’, ‘communicates clear goals’, ‘gives me actionable feedback on a regular basis’ and so on. Saying all of this Olaf doesn’t seem like the type of person who teaches to the test. I hadn’t actually appreciated the size of Google as an employer. When we spoke to Olaf I mentioned ‘ten of thousands’ of employees. As of Q3 2019 Wikipedia lists Google as employing 114,096, which is a scale I find hard to get my head around. With that scale it’s perhaps not surprising that the re:Work site includes a section dedicated to ‘People Analytics’, something not really needed when you employ 6 people … I would guess, or do you see it differently?
Maren: We are definitely on the same page here. For me, it comes back to values. From the outset our journey to become a virtual team has been informed by our values, and over the past two years we have learnt much about how to put those values into practice at different levels and we’ve blogged about it along the way: from an employer perspective we’ve talked about formal policies, financial support and flexible working; reflecting on our organisation we’ve discussed priorities like support for staff, professional development and our technical infrastructure; as senior staff we’ve shared the challenges of managing a crisis as a virtual team, delivering large events and our team culture; and as individuals we have thought much about the personal dimension of being a home-worker, from mental-health and well being to work/life balance and physical work spaces. Talking to Olaf brought into perspective that we are no longer in the process of ‘setting up’ a virtual organisation but that we are actually running a highly successful distributed team (and thanks to our recently published Impact Report 2017-2020, we have the GIFs to prove it ;). When becoming a virtual team was still nothing more than a spreadsheet, we talked about how leading a transition like this would be a unique opportunity for us and it has been an extremely rewarding one. Hard work for sure, but rewarding nonetheless. That said, I feel that now that the set up period and transition has been successfully concluded, working in this manner is just as interesting and keeps bringing up new things to learn, think about and share. From your perspective, would you agree that we are in a new chapter and is there anything ahead that you are particularly curious about?
Martin: I agree there is a maturity in our organisations approach to being a distributed team and as well as policy and procedure our team seem confident in our approach. Speaking to Olaf has been incredibly beneficial and I hadn’t anticipated how useful it was to speak to someone in a similar position and reflecting on the discussion afterwards. It was good to hear from Olaf and discover that there are a number of areas where our working practices are similar, which feels like validation of our approach, but also to learn about some of their working practices which we don’t already do but have started implementing. In 2020 I think it would be useful to find other people to speak to and share both the conversation and reflection so if you’d like to join us in a future podcast and share your experience of leading a Virtual Team please get in touch with us.
It was a rainy night and the neon lights of the arcades were reflected in the pools of water on the streets… in the air was the smell of wok fried herbs and spices from the street food vendors and a chill wind was coming up from the docks. Above the rushing crowd of late night shoppers and workers hurrying to the train home stood the towering office blocks and residential high rises. … Welcome to the edtech sprawl… where the future is all light up in neon… a dark figure… follow her footsteps… and meet our heroine:
The ‘Neon Flaneuse’ 2019
Welcome dear reader…
This is the first post of a brand new blogging project and that’s a special moment. But before we jump right in, here is how this all began:
The idea of the Neon Flaneuse was originally inspired by the Call for Proposals of the Domains19 conference for which I wrote the following submission:
The Neon Flaneuse: taking steps towards empowered professional practice
The flaneur or flaneuse, a person who saunters around observing society, a loafer, a lounger, was a popular figure in 19th century Paris. A model of the urban explorer in shopping arcades lit with gas lights. Walter Benjamin later popularised the figure of the flaneur in his Passagenwerk as an archetype of the modern, urban experience.
The flaneur combines a keen sense of observation and curiosity with a the slow pace of leisure and contemplation. A tortoise, the preferred pet of the flaneur, could set the pace of exploration. Yet as the industrialisation of cities increased and the pace of life grew more rapid, the figure disappeared. Enter: the neon flaneuse, the explorer of edtech sprawls who turns her critical gaze on the rapid pace of innovation, who poses questions about our relationship with technology, data and an uncertain future.
This short talk lights up in neon light not students or institutions but the people that make it all happen: whether your work is teaching, technology or training others, you can take steps towards empowered professional practice by exploring:
How to work in the critical age of educational technology?
What are the risks and upsides to working, thinking and reflecting in the open?
How can we promote equality through empowered professional practice?
Like the flaneuse of the 19th century, it can feel like we are running out of space to wander, explore and ponder and out of time and privacy in a world of social networks and constant connectivity. Like the flaneuse of the 19th century we work in a context where the dominant perspective is still that of the privileged, male, white classes – a gaze that we need to develop awareness of and critical approaches to challenge and subvert.
The final avenue of exploration will be the growing #femedtech network, a professional network curated via the @femedtech Twitter account. As one of the volunteers active in the network I will share ideas and lessons learnt as well as a call to action to get involved in promoting equality for everyone in educational technology and establish a more empowered professional practice in the process.
So join me and the Neon Flaneuse on this saunter through the edtech sprawl of professional practice as we explore how we might light up the future. Hoverboards welcome 🙂
… As it happens, I wasn’t able to go to the conference or deliver that session as planned, but I liked the idea so much that it kind of stayed with me. At the same time, I have been thinking about how I could make something more of my fledgling thoughts about edtech, art and anthropology.
So this newly minted blogging project, which will hopefully become a sketchbook of drawings and words and maybe even GIFs, is a bit of an exercise in connecting the dots between my different academic interests but also a prompt for me to think about educational technology in a different way, taking a step back from the work I do day to day.
It’s the darkest time of year and like many I sometimes struggle to find ways to express my thoughts or find the will to keep writing, to keep articulating and sharing, to use the voice I have and value it regardless of what else might be going on. So as well as being about art, anthropology and edtech this is a venture of joy and resistance.
I want to use the metaphor of the Neon Flaneuse to explore, to wander, to get lost in new ideas and ramblings. To create something that will give me joy and provide inspiration. It’s about the kind of alternative futures, the hope that Laura Czerniewicz so eloquently searched for (and found) in her OEB keynote. It’s my way of thinking about the stories that Audrey Watters reminds us we need to tell about edtech, its history, theory and its future. Our future.
I’m not sure where this will go over the next year and that is a good thing. I have this big blank canvas on my own domain to play with and I’m going to follow my feet and see where it takes me, tortoise in tow.
Soundtrack for this post: A rainy night in Soho by The Pogues – further listening suggestions for the playlist are welcome 🙂
