In June I am heading to Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops on what is a long awaiting (first) trip to Canada. Thanks to the organisers of the ETUG 25th anniversary conference I have a wonderful and rare opportunity to meet with colleagues in British Columbia and visit a community that has much in common with my own organisation, ALT – both long-established Member-led professional bodies committed to Learning Technology and sharing similar values and priorities.
The ETUG Twitter account has been sharing news about the event, which has a movie inspired anniversary theme of Back to the Future: Looking Back, Moving Forward and so as one of the keynote speakers my own planning and preparations have long been underway.
You can watch a short video of me talking with Clint Lalonde here as we get very excited planning for my talk.
And that got me thinking about all the work that goes into crafting a keynote for an event like this and the opportunity it presents for me to read, research, remix, make and think about things. Back in January I contributed to the #SocMedHE18 conference and the talk I ended up writing (Community, Openness, Equality: a keynote in three hashtags #SocMedHE18) was the result of a really inspiring process in dialogue with the conference committee and following the Twitter conversation, creating new artwork and images along the way.
Whilst I do give a lot of talks the kind of opportunity to give a keynote of a more challenging or creative nature is rare for me and I value the chance to start from a blank canvas and re-imagine, re-think my ideas and views from scratch.
One of the things I like best about crafting new keynotes is creating the artwork or images for the slides and I usually use my own or remix them. This time, I am hoping to remix a lot of images and use them to underpin my argument visually. It’s a great creative outlet for me to make openly licenced slide decks that I can then share back for others to use or remix. It also allows me to give credit in my talk to all those whose work I build on.
But writing keynotes or planning them ahead of time is also very practical. After all, few people can create an engaging narrative with a strong argument on the fly and some of the speakers whose talks I have most enjoyed certainly write and think out what they will say well ahead of time. I find writing a summary at least, that I will then flesh out in the month before, adding slides and key points to remind myself is not only useful for me, but also provides transcripts for others to refer back to later or indeed remind myself of what I said or meant to say.
But this keynote that I am working on just now may end up having a playlist more than a list of references and I think that is to do with what I took away from OER19 and the collection of reflections I have been reading. For one reason or another I missed all of the keynotes at the conference this year and like many who were not able to attend themselves, I have been going through the programme and listening to and watching the sessions we recorded – but my strongest impressions of the speakers has been through the memories and reflections of others who have written about them. And that has been quite an extraordinary experience because much of what others took away from the talks seemed to be about values, about what the speakers and their practice stand for.
Being a keynote speaker can be a powerful thing particularly if you choose to use the platform it gives you for a cause that chimes with your audience. And it seems that in the case of OER19 that definitely happened. So much emotional investment and enthusiasm is rare at conferences I attend and as we are now nearly two weeks after the event and the posts and discussions keep on flowing this is further reflected in the continued engagement and activity. So there are fresh role models for me to be inspired by, keynotes to relive that really struck a chord and transcend what you can normally expect from an hour in a lecture theatre. And indeed there are many involved in making OER19 happen whom I have been inspired by in the past, like the Co-Chairs Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz, alongside Jim Groom, Lorna Campbell and Sheila MacNeill, or Bon Stewart, Martin Weller and Maha Bali and Jane Secker. All of whom have kept their audiences spellbound at previous OER or ALT’s Annual Conferences and I remember sitting back, listening, enjoying what each contributed to those events and to my own thinking. Some of these talks opened up my perspective to completely new concepts or problems, others inspired me with their example and encouraged my own practice. But each have made the hour I spent listening and participating very special, a moment stuck in my mind.
We have all met speakers and participants who turn up for their session, who seem to have missed all instructions or information provided beforehand, who run over time, who don’t answer questions, who don’t speak on what they promised and who don’t really contribute.
Fortunately, there is also the opposite of that. Keynotes who make the best participants and participants who make the best speakers and OER19 felt a lot like everyone’s places could be swapped around every few hours because everyone was working so hard to contribute, to listen, to make it happen for everyone else.
And that is a big inspiration for me to take away and apply to participating and contributing when I head to Canada in June. And I am remixing and making and crafting to a soundtrack of inspiring working songs. Because sometimes music says it better and the mood from OER19 is not easily contained in words or even pictures.
Hello and welcome to this month’s post on leading a virtual team. In this post (cross-posted here) the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), continue our series of openly sharing our approach to leadership.
If you are new here, you can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for as senior staff. We really appreciate comments and feedback and welcome questions or suggestions for future posts.
March
Maren: this month I’m keen to pick up on a couple of things we started talking about in the last podcast, talk about all things open as we get ready for OER19 and also discuss a book you recommended, Invisible Women. It’s an awesome read full of interesting facts and laugh out loud moments (car manufacturers’ advice to lower my voice to help AIs understand my ‘atypical’ high female voice made me giggle it seemed so ludicrous) and there are many things that really chimed with me in the context of this series on open practice, starting with how important it is for women & men to each contribute their perspective to policy, research and practice equally. The joint keynote we wrote for International Women’s Day at UHI is a good example of this – neither one of us could have written the talk on their own.
It’s the open collaboration, the dialogue, that produces deeper insights. Gender data gaps discussed in the book provide countless examples of where that kind of dialogue is lacking from workplace practices (biases in recruitment software) to disaster relief (male only committees designing shelters without cooking spaces). Another point the book prompted me to reflect on is how important transparency and openness are for promoting equality. There are countless examples of complex technologies, especially AIs, that are proprietary and don’t permit us to investigate potentially biases much less address them. The two overarching thoughts I took from the book are that firstly, in one way or another, women, and by extension anyone who doesn’t fit the ‘template’ is made to adjust in order to fit – even if changing the underlying policies/design/structures would have bigger benefits for all. And secondly, how we always prioritise something else, focus on the next crisis, instead of focusing on gender equality ‘because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest’.
Martin: ‘Fit’ is an interesting topic. As part of our talk at UHI I thought I’d look at the findings of the ALT Annual Survey to see if there are any notable differences for survey responses based on gender. This was a very quick analysis so I can’t say if the results are statistically significant but it was interesting to see differences in areas such as enablers/drivers for the use of Learning Technology by male and female respondents. Fit, and in particular culture fit, features as a chapter in ‘The Open Organization Leaders Manual’, which you recently shared. In this Jen Kelchner’s writes about “Stop hiring for culture fit“. As part of this Kelchner argues that instead of cultural fit organisations should recruit for ‘alignment’:
“Fit” implies that your organization seeks to indoctrinate new members into its specific way of life—to clone its vision of the ideal member in everyone who joins it. When we talk about “fit” we create the potential for exclusion. It prompts us to seek someone who already embodies the values and principles we think are best (then seek to “fit” them into a pre-existing spot in our organizations), and ignore others. Achieving “alignment,” however, is different. Alignment involves embracing diversity of thought and building inclusive, innovative, community-driven teams that are all oriented toward shared goals, even if they look and think differently from one another.
‘The Open Organization Leaders Manual’ uses five principles as part of it’s Open Organization Definition: transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration and community. In terms of transparency it’s highlighted that:
In open organizations, transparency reigns. As much as possible (and advisable) under applicable laws, open organizations work to make their data and other materials easily accessible to both internal and external participants; they are open for any member to review them when necessary (see also inclusivity). Decisions are transparent to the extent that everyone affected by them understands the processes and arguments that led to them; they are open to assessment (see also collaboration). Work is transparent to the extent that anyone can monitor and assess a project’s progress throughout its development; it is open to observation and potential revision if necessary (see also adaptability).
I feel to our members and the general public that our operations are very transparent (our joint posts being a case in point). In terms of our distributed team it feels like more effort is required to be transparent, as in “to the extent that anyone can monitor and assess a project’s progress throughout its development”, than if we were all physically in the same office. We’ve previously talked about the challenges of virtual operations and the removal of some of the affordances of being physically co-located. Even though we are over 12 months into our move to operating as a distributed team this feels like one of the areas where we have the most continued evolution in our systems and procedures. This is also an interesting time as our staff team will have a number of new faces and I’m interested to see how candidates align to ALT’s values.
Maren: I like the concept of ‘alignment’ instead of ‘fit’ and it is a useful way of thinking during recruitment in particular. But whilst I found the open org manual really useful, its perspective comes from open source/software companies. In our context, in a small charity with a wide breadth of projects it’s harder to make the kind of internal ‘joined-up-ness’ work for everyone than when you are all focused on making a product shipping deadline. There’s a balance to be struck between enabling individuals to get on with their work and effective team communication. And it can be hard to determine how much information is actually useful and why. For instance, I’m finding it rewarding to develop and improve our internal processes for reporting, budgets and project overviews. It’s part of the ongoing effort you refer to helping us as a team work together even better. Like you, I have a lot of enthusiasm for an iterative approach to designing processes. That said, I’m also acutely aware that any change requires time and effort that would not be needed if we just kept doing things the same way. It’s a big ask (and one that requires a strong common understanding of the reasons behind it) to spend time and energy changing things when there’s so much to be getting with. Especially when things don’t look ‘broken’ but still need ‘fixing’ to avoid disaster in the long run it can be a hard argument to make. As well as requiring time and effort, changing internal processes can also temporarily rob us of the comfort and confidence that comes with familiarity. Which leads me to reflect on what alternative sources of comfort I turn to when uncertainty and change are a constant. One example of what I do is to look beyond a period or process of change, and thinking ahead to what things might look like 3 months into the future or a year ahead. And it can be useful to do that as a team as well to create a greater measure of the kind of transparency you speak about. Here’s one such approach, similar to a SWOT analysis, that I found interesting and maybe we can try something like this at our next team day in April.
Martin: Your comment on things that “don’t look ‘broken’ but still need ‘fixing’” made me smile. I’ve some wooden decking at home that falls into that category thanks to some rot, but I get we are talking about something very different here. Having recently gone through my annual appraisal thinking ahead is still fresh in my mind. It’s interesting to reflect on personal goals and I can also see the benefit of exploring and articulating team goals. As often with these collaborative posts they are an opportunity for me to start googling for answers to questions that pop into my mind. Something I started wondering was the impact of churn as staff move on and new faces join virtual teams. I didn’t find anything in particular that talks about this and I suppose the stronger influencer in this instance is less on whether or not you are dealing with a virtual team but the size of the team you are dealing with. As part of my search Google Books did throw up ‘Leading Effective Virtual Teams: Overcoming Time and Distance to Achieve Exceptional Results’ by Nancy Settle-Murphy. As part of the uniques challenges of virtual teams Settle-Murphy highlights that “it’s harder for team members to tell whether they’re out of alignment about important issues … and once out of alignment, it takes virtual teams much longer to pull back together”. Settle-Murphy goes on to highlight one of the challenges for virtual team leaders is “ensuring that all share the same understanding of team goals”. The modified SWOT approach you mentioned looks like it should help with identifying goals, the issue I see is the timing as we’ve potentially got two new starters joining us after April. In a team of six, two new starters make a big impact and with a high percentage of the team changing it’s going to be interesting times but the timing is good as whilst not a lull it does mean we are not throwing our new starts straight into our Annual Conference.
Maren: ever since I took on a leadership role I’ve waited for the right timing for all those things, for the mythical steady state, that blank slate from which to start planning and doing afresh, ideally with all aims clearly defined and understood by everyone. But leading organisations or teams, working with technology and with people is always messy. There’s always history, legacy, mess you inherit, missing pieces of the puzzle and my favourite – the unknown unknowns. Our work is always work in progress. That’s why when you have a moment when things work out, when you achieve something or can enjoy something, it’s worth pausing and revelling in the moment. Send a hug, share a smile, take a breath. And then take that next step towards the inevitable chaos that will no doubt put an end to that peaceful moment.
OER19 is nearly upon us and as part of the organising team the next two week will be really busy for me. I am really excited about the event this year and so while there’s still time, I want to share my thoughts in this preview post.
I’ve also been reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (it’s an excellent read) and one of the points I took away from the book was how women’s rights and gender equality more broadly are treated as a minority interest, something that is never at the top of the list of priorities for government or industry even though we have evidence that shows why it should be. Instead it’s treated as a ‘nice to have’. This is far more eloquently expressed in the book, but my own day to day experience reflects this attitude very clearly: every time I speak about the issue somewhere there are those who roll their eyes or those who nod along patiently waiting until the talk turns back to things that really interest them, things that really matter as if they’re thinking ‘who cares about the gender data gap when there’s an AI revolution to profit from’.
Now, openness I find provokes a very similar response, and is equally demoted to the bottom of the list of things to do, because it also seems like a ‘nice to have’. To those who don’t know better openness is the domain of the dreamers, the prerogative of the privileged, a idealistic idea that doesn’t fit into the education industry of today other than as window dressing, as a veneer to enhance current business models.
In both cases short-sightedness, self interest and lack of imagination present real barriers for meaningful progress – but that isn’t to say that there is none. Fortunately for all, those committed to driving forward the open agenda are succeeding in winning many arguments, changing policy, winning funding and developing viable business models all across the world. This year’s conference programme is filled with examples (https://oer19.oerconf.org/programme/) from a broad spectrum of practice, research and policy making. From institutional case studies and national reports to individuals collaborating on open projects the programme includes sessions that set out to tackle the difficult questions and dilemmas that will come to define the future of openness.
Openness is many things to many people and the vision that the conference co-chairs have brought to the event has really inspired me and helped me reach a new understanding of the challenges we face by including more diverse voices and perspectives and also by ensuring that openness has been stitched into the fabric of OER19.
In turn, that has inspired the work that ALT does to support this conference in the run up to the event such as tweaking our systems to encourage more sharing, the Board of Trustees funding more scholarship places for students than ever before, contributing to global events during Open Education Week led by the Open Education Special Interest Group, and post-OER19 to the Creative Commons Global Summit.
Openness is a very practical core value for ALT as an organisation but it’s also become a more practical and fundamental aspect of my own thinking and practice in particular on open leadership and also contributing to the oer19 open space for femedtech has been inspiring.
Thanks to everyone involved, everyone who puts time and effort and resources into making OER19 happen, I feel like actually getting to go to the event in Galway is just the finishing flourish. OER19 has been a living, breathing, inspiring part of my professional practice for over a year already. But when I watched the sun rise over Galway Bay nearly a year ago, I didn’t realise how rich, how thought provoking and nourishing a journey working on this event would be. I’m grateful that I have been able to contribute, and I look forward to playing my part in making it happen and to build on what will be shared at OER19 to continue to promote openness and support those involved in the coming year, weaving a stronger thread of openness into the fabric of things.
I have chosen to focus on the question: “How do we manage sustainable spaces for exploring challenging issues around open?” and my response has also been inspired by a recent blog post by Martin Weller on ‘Learning the rules of predicting the future‘. In the post, which deserves extra credits for inspired use of Parks and Recreation gifs (note to self: up your GIF game), Martin sets out the following “rules” for predicting the future for education (I am quoting only very briefly here, so you should really read the whole post, as it makes for excellent reading):
The first rule to learn about change in higher education is that very little changes, while simultaneously everything changes.
A second rule is that technological change is rarely about the technology.
The third rule is to appreciate the historical amnesia in much of educational technology.
The fourth, and final rule I would suggest is that technology is not ethically or politically neutral.
And that has inspired me to think about rules for making sustainable spaces, which links to the broader question of who takes responsibility and how to take responsibility for the future of open spaces of all shapes and sizes. It also relates to the question of permanency on the web and in technologically mediated social spaces in general (I have written about Cemeteries of the web: parallels between Victorian burial culture and digital infrastructure previously). So here goes:
First, I would argue that in most cases planning for the long term, for sustainability in any sense, does not come into the development of new spaces, platforms or tools. So many sites and systems come and go, disappearing often with all the content we have created and without much notice or help for migration. Interoperability standards, transferable file formats and all that goes with it are rarely at the top of anyone’s priority list whilst iterative, agile approaches to development force users to move along regardless. When funding dries up or business models change repositories, community sites, communication platforms etc become unsupported, derelict collections of broken links and unanswered support requests. This is not only inconvenient, but has serious consequences: it makes it difficult to have a sustained critical debate as we constantly loose records of what we have already done; it puts the focus always on reinventing, re-establishing, re-designing new spaces and it promotes the kind of historical amnesia in much of educational technology that Martin Weller warns us about.
Sustainable spaces for exploring the challenging issues around open also require us to address the question of who has ownership of those spaces, both in a practical sense, i.e. who owns the domain, who controls access, who pays the bills, as well as the social aspects such as who controls the conversation, who records it, who can participate and who ends it. Some of the hardest questions we must ask have strong political and ethical dimensions. If the organisation or entity that hosts or supports such a dialogue has a strong agenda, be that commercial, political or social, then we need to question how that impacts on the kind of discourse we can foster and also how this may impact on the sustainability of the project. Open means many things to many people and there is a whole range of motivations to get involved and try take ownership of spaces that support open communities.
One of the things that’s really tricky about both open in education and technology in education is what Martin Weller describes as ‘very little changes, while simultaneously everything changes’. I find that is often to do with our goalposts constantly moving further ahead and at the same time the spectrum of individual and organisational practice spreading out. What I mean is that the range of challenges we ask technology to help us meet is huge – from basic infrastructure to educating millions across the globe. Similarly, when it comes to thinking about open, there is a vast array of situations to tackle. It all depends on the perspective you start from and it can be difficult to find common ground in a conversation that brings together many different contexts – this is exactly the reason why an open space like this one can help.
I don’t seem to have come up with very clearly articulated rules, but rather characteristics and questions around the lack of long term planning, questioning ownership and motivation and the need to appreciate different perspectives from which what we find challenging about open can be explored. One very generic sounding conclusion to draw is that the only rule is to make use of your voice, to continue to engage and question, not to become indifferent or disengaged no matter how difficult that can seem at times. But it is, for me, a powerful reminder that we each have agency, and that taking part, contributing something that helps others understand our way of seeing the world, our perspective on open, our world view (as a women, as a feminist, as a contributor in my case) is a meaningful and important act.
It’s my second time to volunteer as a guest curator for the @femedtech Twitter account and in the past year, since my last time as a curator, much has changed.
In 2018, I followed Helen Beetham, being only the second person to try out how to be a guest curator. At the time, the account had 122 followers, had tweeted about the same number of tweets and we were just in the process of writing some guidance for the activity, making it up as we went along and learning from the wonderful examples of networks around us. Frances Bell contributed the slide below to the community-sourced slides for International Women’s Day 2019.
So what is it like to be a guest curator now, that the following is ten times bigger and the network is growing rapidly, organising activities around events and interests?
I start each day by checking in with the account, checking first on the notifications and new followers. Following back those who are new and welcoming them is one of the key things I try to do each day. It’s fascinating to see who follows the account and often I come across individuals and accounts I also want to connect with in my personal capacity.
Then I look for new tweets that have been tagged with the hashtag #femedtech and like or retweet those. This can open up quite a few new rabbit holes down which my time disappears as I find a new book, artist or research that I want to learn more about. In contract to my own Twitter world, there is a much more varied and unexpected range of things being posted. Here are some examples from recent days:
You can see, there is a really varied range of things being posted, so I strongly recommend you follow the account yourself and join in.
Then, each day, I try and find and contribute something new, something from my own network or frame of reference, and which I can share to enrich the conversation or open it up to include new accounts. So this week I posted:
Looking for a creative challenge every day? Follow @ds106dc and the posts that happen each and every day
And I also work to communicate from what the network does in my day job, for example this week I had the opportunity to speak at the 13th Research and Innovation in Distance Education, and eLearning (RIDE) annual conference and I included a section on promoting equality in my talk, specifically focused on new analysis my colleague Martin Hawksey did of ALT’s Annual Survey focused on comparing gender perspectives, and his related post makes for interesting reading.
Being a guest curator for the #femedtech network really opens up new perspectives for me, it helps me get into the mindset of being a volunteer (and my day job relies heavily on the goodwill of volunteers, so that is particularly helpful for me) and it’s a powerful reminder that whilst we are making a lot of progress, there is always so much more to do to create a more equal and equitable society.
And on that note I’d like to mention a last opportunity to make your voice heard, to join in the conversation, which is a new open space for femedtech created in the run up to the OER19 conference. You can read all about it here and consider the following questions:
How do we balance privacy, openness and personal ethics?
How do we mediate our place in the open community, aspects of which might conflict with our personal ethics?
Is openness an act of conformance and / or defiance? And are there performative aspects to openness?
Do we feel pressured to be more open than we are comfortable with, or do our boundaries constrain us?
How do we manage sustainable spaces for exploring challenging issues around open?
Given that it’s early in the year and a cold, dark morning in Nottingham, UK, I felt it would be useful to start this talk with a sunnier view of beach near Sligo, Ireland, a place to feel the sun and the sea on your skin, a place to take some time to reflect and breathe and take a break. Those aren’t things that I generally associate with social media, in particular in Higher Education. Social media often comes with a general sense of the superficial, showing just the best side of myself, trying not to avoid being vulnerable for social media can be a toxic space for many, particularly for women, for people of colour, for anyone whom the trolls choose to single out. So if you are already a place in your year where you feel your digital shadow is looming large, maybe it’s time for a digital detox https://datadetox.myshadow.org/en/detox . I came across this useful tool via Mozfest a few years ago and I found it helpful as a way to check in with my relationship to social media.
Slide: Social media is powerful. Social media is personal. Social media is pervasive.
It’s important to think about because social media is powerful, it’s personal and pervasive. It’s part of our personal lives and professional practice in education. It’s part of what our colleagues do, how our learners work and part of our social reality from citizenship and dating to job hunting and even death and remembrance. As human beings we rely on our social interactions no matter how they are conducted and in this age social media is part of how we live for an increasing proportion of the global population. Because it is important, we can’t leave it up to others. Because it’s important, social media needs us. Social media needs us to question, investigate, reflect on, engage with, challenge, shape, control, monitor, analyse, track, investigate, govern and take ownership. And that’s what I’ll explore in this talk in three hashtags:
How is social media changing professional practice? How does social media support openness in education? Social media for social good?
Slide: #altc – a perspective from Learning Technology
The first hashtag is #altc and it’s probably the biggest hashtag in my working life. To begin with the hashtag was used only during events, mainly ALT’s Annual Conference and it changed each year. Since 2014 however the hashtag has been used not just for the conference, but increasingly throughout the year. To begin with the “c” stood for “conference”. Now the hashtag has come to mean more than that thanks in large part to the vision of ALT’s Martin Hawksey, now the “c” stands for community, conference, create, collaborate, communicate and so forth. And it now generates more tweets in a single week during the Annual Conference than we previously recorded for an entire year. It’s developed far beyond the single use event hashtag it started out as and that reflects how the activities it supports have expanded also. As a membership body for Learning Technology professionals, ALT has become very active on Twitter and our network and the conversation is growing – you can see how this is visualised here on the TAGSExplorer view of #altc .
Slide: TAGSExplorer view of #altc
The community is now active throughout the year and the way that social media is used really varies and includes individuals actively using the network to share practice, ask questions and celebrate achievements. ALT as an organisation is powered by its Members many of whom volunteer for the Association and one of my favourite examples of using social media and the #altc hashtag last year was celebrating ALT’s 25th birthday. We wanted everyone to be able to celebrate whatever is important to them, to add their own voice and for the anniversary to reflect some of the diversity and breadth of the community we serve. On social media you could thus create your own celebration postcard, including your message and image, remixed under a Creative Commons licence using the Remixer developed by Bryan Mather/Visual Thinkery (go to https://remixer.visualthinkery.com/ and have a go at remixing yourself). It’s a small way for individuals to have a voice in ALT, be able to shape the organisation and reflects its values and aims to encourage participation and collaboration and openness.
Slide: collaboration and events #altc
Beyond individuals we have leveraged the power of our hashtag to collaborate with others and to enable relationships between Member-led initiatives and the centrally supported network. That’s particularly important in Learning Technology as much of the work we do reaches across disciplines, sectors and often beyond the UK. This approach to social media isn’t about distributing marketing messages or one way communication. Our aim is to support and develop a positive online space, a social media channel that Members and the wider community can make us of and have ownership of, a space that supports our work in strengthening professional recognition and advocate for our Membership.
Our Members meanwhile have a strong open ethos and much of what we do is consequently openly accessible to the benefit of the wider community. Openness is so important in Learning Technology because the tech landscape develops at such a rapid pace that the most effective way to keep pace with it is in collaboration with others, by sharing resources, research and reflection. Like social media, openness is not unproblematic and like social media openness has great potential in education. And that brings us neatly to hashtag number two and also to my second question: How does social media support openness in education?
Slide: #open
I want to start by highlighting two examples, two policy developments in Higher Education, that I have worked on, firstly the Higher Education Funding Council for England Consultation on the second Research Excellence Framework and then also the Open Education and OER – A guide and call to action for policy makers. The first is particularly relevant because it provided an opportunity to argue the case for the role of social media in how impact is measured in Higher Education and the second as it highlights how Open Education and OER can expand inclusive and equitable access to education and lifelong learning, widen participation, and create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners, preparing them to become fully engaged digital citizens.
But are policy developments such as these making a difference in practice? Has policy changed much since 2014 when for example The Metric Tide by HEFCE was published (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/year/2015/metrictide/#alldownloads)? It’s aim was to “reduce emphasis on journal impact factors as a promotional tool, and only use them in the context of a variety of journal-based metrics that provide a richer view of performance. Publishers should also make available a range of article-level metrics to encourage a shift toward assessment based on the academic quality of an article rather than JIFs.”
Social media plays an important role in the alternatives to the traditional Impact Factor and is increasingly used not just by publishers and authors, but to recognise the important role of peer reviewers and support their recognition, too. Research in Learning Technology, the journal ALT publishes, is of special interest to me because I was part of its pioneering transition to become the first Gold Open Access journals published by a UK professional body. Since then I have had hands on involvement in two further transitions between publishers, leading to the journal now being independently published by ALT, financially supported by Members and edited by a group of volunteer Editors who lead peer review and author support.
It hasn’t been awarded an Impact Factor to date and we are actively investigating all alternatives, how their are used, how they are developing, what their longevity is and how sustainable they are. Open Access has seen the readership and reach of the journal increase from hundreds to hundreds of thousands. Social media supporting innovative ways of measuring impact may help its impact grow further. For now, openness helps ALT influence policy makers, increase the impact of research for public benefit, build a shared vision for the future of professionalisation in Learning Technology and grow our community of Members.
Slide: Impact Factor and (social media) alternatives
I now want to look beyond organisational boundaries to focus on individual professional practice and how social media supports open practice to foster criticality and enhance scholarship. In my experience there is no better example of this than the work that is happening around the #oer hashtags, no, conferences, and the way in which social media is used here to address some of the most difficult questions including how privileged participation in such events is, how we can find and support the voices of those we are not already hearing and how we can meet some of the global challenges that education faces through openness: access to education and equity.
It’s become somewhat of a social media tradition that the blog posts and tweets start long before an actual OER Conference, last year reaching such a large volume that there was more conversion online than anywhere else. It connected those who couldn’t attend in person (to some degree) and enabled a much richer discussion, more criticality and scholarship than before.
Slide: social media supports open practice to foster criticality and enhance scholarship
And as an open practitioner myself I am inspired, challenged, prompted to try and step up in my own work, to contribute something, to question how I could do things differently, better. And last year was very much a year of collaboration in the open for me, with many projects taking place on social media, including twitter chats and many blog posts.
Slide: open approaches to collaboration on social media
I wanted to progress leadership as an open practice – which, incidentally, is one of the sections in my CMALT portfolio and something for which I get a lot of feedback and input on social media. But the collaboration which has prompted me to reflect the most on the pros and cons of open practice on social media is my work with Martin Hawksey on leading ALT through its transition to becoming a distributed organisation and establishing a new working culture as a virtual staff team. Our monthly series of posts has been at the heart of all my work last year, touching on everything from people management and well being at work to the technical challenges of remote working and the nuances of working in the open. Writing these posts whilst everything is actually happening, rather than sharing output from work that is in the past, felt far more scary than similar kinds of work I had done before. There is much of what I do day to day that I hadn’t managed to make part of my open practice before this collaboration – leadership, management… these are not the most straight forward topics to share (especially when you are everyone’s ‘boss’). There are a lot of pros for me in this kind of approach, but also some downsides: sharing work in this way puts you in a vulnerable position, for example if someone personally attacks you, if you are not performing well, when you make mistakes or when things go wrong. Social media can be a scary place when you are not sharing success. It’s always personal and there’s a limit to how well you can protect yourself once you are out there, in the open. But on the other hand, I want to be open about how to lead, how I work. I want to show that things do go wrong, that mistakes happen and how to work through them. It’s important to share questions and doubts. It’s part of my ethos, my approach to leading a team, to leading an organisation, and I want my presence on social media to reflect that. When I first became a CEO I found it really difficult to find role models on social media (and indeed in real life) and alongside all the people who have inspired me along the way, I want to try and help others find the right way of building their professional identity.
Slide: #femedtech – Using social media to promote greater equality
And on that point, thinking about identity, we arrive at the third and final hashtag and the last part of my talk: #femedtech. The challenge here is using social media for social good. And in terms of equality, and equality in Learning Technology in particular, we still have a long way to go. Equality is for everyone, it’s in everyone’s interest and it’s everyone’s look out. Femedtech is a growing network and I am a volunteer and supporter, giving my time and voice to help promote a cause I believe in.
It’s only one example of how we can use social media to engage and empower in education and to make use of the digital, critical and technical skills we have to take some ownership of how we grow, support and chart the development of our network. And that is an important point to consider, because it is the skills and knowledge that we have that enable us to do that – the fact that we know quite a bit about social media, technical infrastructure and how data is generated and used. It’s our skills that enable and empower us to use the tools and platforms to enable and empower others – hopefully leading to greater equality along the way!
Slide: The problem with perpetuity… how a domain of one’s own can provide control and continuity
With that, we are not just going against the grain of the traditional power relationships that govern education and by extension Learning Technology. We are also going against what social media and online platforms in general wish us to do. They want our data, our attention, our engagement and in return they promise us much.
Now, I should pause here briefly, because the relationship between Victorian burial culture and digital infrastructure may not be immediately obvious, and I suggest if you are interested to read my blog post on the subject – but suffice to say that I have a PhD in cemeteries and with that comes a frame of reference that I find is very applicable indeed to thinking about our relationship with technology.
One commonality between Victorian burial culture and digital infrastructure, for example, is that a lot of digital infrastructure gives a promise of permanency in order to secure our engagement and content and Victorian entrepreneurs created urban cemeteries with the same promise. In the digital realm and in particular on social media your posts, pictures or updates remain in place while their are valuable to the platform, but can disappear or become inaccessible with little or no notice. The newly created burial space in Victorian cities would similarly be described as a place for eternity, not just safeguarding bodily remains, but securing status and remembrance for future generations. And like its digital counterpart, cemeteries, too, could disappear for building projects or urban development with gravestones stacked unceremoniously against a wall or used as paving material.
A domain of one’s own (alongside the aforementioned skills and knowledge) is key in my mind to a more empowered relationship to technology and social media. Post on your own domain, repost everywhere else – and when everywhere else stops their service, you still have your posts on your own domain. I am really inspired by the work Jim Groom has been doing in this area and I suggest you read his post on a related project.
The kind of relationship that I envisage us to have with technology and social media has a lot to contend with: we have questions about who controls the dominant discourse and how to foster diverse voices inside filter bubbles, we have a lot to work out around privacy and the right to be forgotten, the ownership of data and data literacy and the future of social media.
Slide: Social media needs us.
I hope that brings us to a point where we can explore these questions further, putting the emphasis not on the technology, but on human agency:
How can we use social media to enhance our professional practice? How can we use social media to support openness in education? How can we use social media for social good?
A big thank you to all whom I work with, who I have been inspired by and in particular the participants and organisers of the #SocMedHE18 conference for listening.
