Don’t fear complexity

This is a summary of my Lilac 18 keynote on the changing character of ‘information literacy’ – the talk was entitled “Posthuman literacies: reframing the relationship between information, technology and identity”. This was described as ‘the most cyberpunk title for a lilac talk ever’ (which I’m quite proud of) but could have been rephrased as “Don’t Fear Complexity”. There is a video of the talk and a shorter write-up from Shelia Webber.

Section 1: Two ‘new’ identities

As with anything relating to education it’s important to frame the ‘self’ before defining values and approaches. This is especially important with information literacy as the relationship between our identities and the information we engage with is now tightly interwoven. We can no longer work on the principle that we a neutral seekers of facts and truth traveling through a disinterested taxonomy of information. We have to frame the self or risk getting taken for an ideological ride.

Technoself

What it means to be human involves an ongoing incorporation of technology. Whether this is books, reading glasses, cars, the Web, connected devices etc. We (those who can afford to) quickly build the ‘new’ into social norms. For example, it’s now increasingly inappropriate to ask a fellow human a question which could easily be Googled. I encountered this at the doctors when I explained my mild symptoms and he replied “Why didn’t you just look this up online…?”.

This is the technoself: when we consider our phones, laptops, tablets etc – they are not just devices, they are an extension of who we are and an element of what it means to be human. The educational implication being that when we teach information literacy or advise on digital practices we are hoping the student will extend or change their who they are. Identity, information and technology flow into, and through, each other. The best way I’ve seen this put is that we are not addicted to our phones, we are addicted to being social. 

Dataself

The notion of the dataself has recently exploded into the public consciousness via the Cambridge Analytica story. I suspect the reason that story has resonated is as much to do with people feeling they have had something stolen as it is about fears around the erosion of democracy. Even so, it has made it abundantly clear that our interactions online generate a dataself or ‘shadow profile’. This highlights again that Facebook and others don’t simply ‘connect people’, they also connect people to organisations, institutions and businesses in ways which are unseen and anything but neutral.

The implication for information literacy is that it must reveal these mechanisms and reframe our relationship with information.

Section 2: Two forms of information

My response to the dataself is the need to now characterise information into two broad categories –

  1. Information we actively seek out
  2. Information we receive without consciously asking a question

In some senses category one has traditionally been the remit of information literacy while category two has mainly fallen under media literacy. I would argue that any critical approach to the Web has to combine the two.

The (Dave) White Ignorance Cycle

I’ve condensed the negative aspects of category two into a diagram which mirrors Kolb’s learning cycle (which I have never been particularly comfortable with). It is designed to capture what I see as a relatively new form of information illiteracy which might be better thought of as a lack of digital fluency.

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This process drives polarisation and cedes power via polaristion to both the providers of the platform and those paying for the targeted message. In short, we have a responsibility to make this cycle visible to students to equip them with the critical faculties they need to retain any real agency in the networked environment.

Section 3: It’s not about facts

“There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.” Jacob Bronowski

Firstly, let me be clear, I’m not a total relativist, I do believe that information can be more, or less, ‘true’. What I’m more interested in though is regularly questioning why we believe something to be true and, most importantly, focusing on how we respond to information. While information literacy clearly isn’t only about validating sources to establish ‘factiness’ I am concerned that this is how is often comes across. I worry that implicit in information literacy is the notion that if we could all understand how to separate facts from lies then the world would be a better place.

This implication plays into the hands of those that secure power through polarisation as it is, in of itself, a polarising approach. We can fall into the trap of arguing over ‘who is right’ rather than respecting and understanding diversity, different perspectives and experiences. Much of what society runs on is socially constructed, negotiated knowledge and understanding. There is very little in the day-to-day which is utterly objective. I’d argue that totally objective information is only that which has no moral or ethical implications. As a corollary of  that I suspect our desire to define something as a fact is often an attempt to portray our worldview as the ‘natural order’ and therefore not morally questionable. Mark Fisher put it well:

“Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.” Mark Fisher

As I alluded to earlier, the key to emancipation over polarisation is to always frame the self as integral to the process. I proposed the following practical response to this:

“Questioning why you agree with something is more valuable than bolstering your views on what you disagree with”

This is my antidote to ‘Truthiness’, a problem which has been amplified by the way in which the network facilitates both individualism and homophily.

“Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I *feel* it to be true, but that *I* feel it to be true.” Stephen Colbert

Truthiness is especially dangerous where the ignorance cycle has unconsciously and uncritically maneuvered an individual into ‘truths’ or a false consciousness which serve those in power.

Section 4: So what?

My conclusion is unashamedly educational.

At my institution, the University of the Arts London, we see the value in uncertainty. In many of our courses it is important that our students are in a liminal state for much of the time within which they are not quite sure of what they know. This is a key aspect of the process of creativity and it’s also central to my reframing, or extension of, information literacy. Questioning our self, our motivations and methods, for seeking and validating information is our only chance of maintaining our agency within complexity. Not being afraid of being immersed in complexity requires understanding the value of uncertainty. This is all the more important where we receive information as an effect of our interactions. To ask how what we engage with has arrived in front of us and why we are comfortable with it (in the context of our identity and position) has to be central to what it means to critically evaluate.

To maintain the agency of our students (and ourselves) and not fall into the trap of assuming a ‘natural order’ which just so happens to be our current worldview we must reveal, not simplify, complexity. In tandem with this we must provide the critical tools to navigate complexity without denying it.

———-

The new definition of Information Literacy which CILIP Information Literacy Group launched at Lilac 18 is well aligned with much of what I have discussed here.

 “The ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully with society.”

The next challenge is to develop pragmatic ways to respond to the new definition in educational terms.

Digital-magic and Power

Finding ways to articulate the flow of political and personal power online is inherently complex because it takes place across numerous contexts and at the intersection of many conceptual territories. Identity, gender, culture, class, to name a few, which then have to be considered within, or through, the lens of networks, hierarchies, communities, factions, nations, and so on.

Nevertheless, it’s crucial that we don’t let this complexity obscure the actions of those that seek power through manipulation, fear and coercion. Recently we have seen these modes of power acquisition move into the public, some would say civic, spaces of the Web. This post introduces a paper I co-wrote with Richard Reynolds which explores the visible, or surface, aspects of manipulation and control via the network. It does not deal with the undertow of algorithms and bots but with ‘magical’ modes of rhetoric which the disintermediated orality of Social Media makes effective at a scale we haven’t previously witnessed.

Last year Richard invited me to speak at his ‘Politics and Social Media’ event at Central St Martins which is part of the University of the Arts London. Richard opened the day with a talk on ‘Politics, Social Media and the Practice of Ritual Magic’ focusing on Trump’s use of Twitter and I followed by discussing ‘Trust and Digital Politics’.

There was an obvious resonance between our talks, so after the event we put together a paper combining our positions. We have struggled to find a home for this paper through traditional academic or journalistic routes as it doesn’t sit well in either camp so we humbly offer it here in its current, tidy-but-not-peer-reviewed state:

Politics, Social Media and Practical Magic_Reynolds White 

We have attempted present some of the shifting relationships between reason, belief and power in the networked era without falling into hard definitions real or fake. We are simply exploring ways of understanding the complex interplay of politics, celebrity and power as they are played-out through Social Media.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/37709691@N05/8692494129

Recently I have been strolling around the fringes of the Engagement in a time of Polarization ‘pop-up MOOC’ course, facilited by Dr. Natalie Delia Deckard and Dr. Bonnie Stewart. Through this I have found some great readings, including The Problem with Facts by Tim Harford. His article is a good companion piece to our paper as also discusses the way we tend to respond to certain modes of language in a non-rational manner:

“Several studies have shown that repeating a false claim, even in the context of debunking that claim, can make it stick. The myth-busting seems to work but then our memories fade and we remember only the myth. The myth, after all, was the thing that kept being repeated. In trying to dispel the falsehood, the endless rebuttals simply make the enchantment stronger.”

I think it’s important to accept that we all respond to the mythical as some level and that, unchecked, this can lead to intolerance and polarisation. Personally, I celebrate faith-based forms of understanding, wonder and fellowship. I hope by acknowledging that I’m not especially rational I can be more conscious of the ideological and belief-based manner in which I construct my worldview.

For me, this isn’t about not holding a position, it’s about being aware of my position and respecting those that differ. Crucially, it’s also about being able to identify when you are being sold a line which allows you to negatively stoke your identity (I’m in the right because I’m not like them, for example) while simultaneously feeding the power of those doing the selling.   

 

Richard, myself and others will be continuing our exploration of power in the digital era at ‘The Search for Privacy and Truth’ Steamhack event on 23th March. If you are near Central St Martins then do come along. (contact me for details)

Arguing with the Digital Natives guy in four vexations

This is difficult for me to write because I’m still tense about much of it. I have recently got one of those ‘health tracker’ watches and while reviewing the video of the session with Marc Prensky at Online Educa my heart rate did spiral upwards.

The debate was a chaired, hour long session, between myself and Marc which promised to ‘go beyond’ metaphors to discuss the ‘realities’ of how education systems should respond to digital. In the end we didn’t discuss Visitors & Residents or Natives & Immigrants directly (something Marc was careful to avoid). However, our underlying educational ideologies were laid bare during the debate and effectively revealed the thinking behind our respective metaphors.

A simple way to read the session is in cultural terms, as a colleague pointed out to me I had a European-style ‘critical thinking’ perspective while Marc has a ‘pioneering’ North American flavoured focus on ‘accomplishment’. If I was to put it bluntly, I characterised Marc as Libertarian while he characterised me as Elitist and an Ivory Tower academic.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cblSaK56AXQ[/embedyt]

Having reviewed the video of the session I can see that Marc’s point of view was generally geared around schools level education rather than higher education. In fact, his framing of higher education approximated Oxbridge of 30 years ago (or now depending which course you are on).

This is vexation number one: repeatedly being told by people that don’t teach that the education system is broken. Marc clearly has very little experience, or knowledge, of the majority of the higher education sector in the UK (in fact many of the speakers at Educa had little or no day-to-day experience of working in education institutions). Marc evidenced his lack of direct experience in a few comments:

  1. He described a form of group-based teaching as good idea, as if we don’t ALREADY DO THIS A LOT.
  2. He suggested we should do more project-based learning which is something WE ALREADY DO A LOT.
  3. He seemed to be under the impression that all we do is ‘think’, and teach students how to ‘think like us’, which he characterised as of little value, suggesting that it would be better if we thought less and did more.

Vexation number two: implying that ‘thinking’ is elitist. Working on the basis that you are either thinking *or* doing is ridiculous, but I suspect Marc was alluding to ‘academic’ thinking AKA ‘not doing anything useful’ rather than the thinking required to DO THINGS(?). I believe that having learned some literacies at school it’s part of higher education’s responsibility facilitate students in extending their ability to think critically and question intelligently. That’s not to say that, as Marc suggested, I assume that incoming students don’t know how to think. However, don’t believe that we are all ‘naturally’ good at this (Excepting those who are so privileged they are never put in a position where their actions are called out an unthinking?). Most of us benefit from some teaching and some challenging in this area.

So I take offence at the implication I’m elitist for holding the view that thinking is a good thing, especially as this is part of a process by which students can, I hope, reject or challenge dominant modes of thought and those who have taught them. I love a well reasoned argument from a student about why my views don’t stand up and I hope I’m open enough to take new ideas on board. (At one point Marc highlighted that I’d brought some notes with me to the session, as if this was somehow an elitist, academic move, rather than ‘being somewhat prepared’.)

Vexation number three: the repeated use of terms like ‘effective’ and ‘successful’ with no frame of reference. As you would expect, the Digital Natives guy basically espoused a kind of ‘let the kids get on with it because they have the Web’ approach whereas I suggested that we need to teach critical thinking and facilitate a broadening worldview. Towards the end of the debate I gave a little speech about privilege, quoting Orwell: “All animals are born equal, but some are born more equal than others”. If our education systems can’t provide opportunities to those born ‘less equal’ then what’s the point? Obviously my problem with Marc’s position is it assumes a Libertarian equity of opportunity and runs on the basis that you just need to be your best, most individual, self and you will‘ succeed. It’s easy to see how Marc, having been through Harvard Business School, might promote this idea and how this would be lurking behind the Digital Natives stuff. It’s the old ‘being successful means being like me’ problem.

Vexation number four: celebrating human doing over human being. For Marc, ‘success’ seemed to be about doing things to the world to ‘make it’ a better place, whereas I suggested notions of becoming and, I hope, being part of humanity. This is why I’m ok with the notion of, what is often described as, ‘learning for learning’s sake’ because I think it enriches us – it’s probably better described as ‘learning for our own sake’, and if we are active within our communities and beyond then ‘own sake’ means society as much as ourselves.

How about we focus on becoming decent, thoughtful, human beings before confidently ‘fixing’ the world? Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I’m confident that concentrating on the former is more likely to improve the general state of affairs. Ultimately, Marc sees the Web, or the network, as a largely non-hierarchical location in which anyone with some gumption can achieve great things, as if the Web was some kind of neutral space in which the ‘good’ succeed and those that sink only have themselves to blame. This is effectively the mantra Silicon Valley hides behind.

I hope that for those in the room our sharply opposing views led to a meaningful debate. I personally found it quite distressing but maybe I’m just not native enough to market-driven conference environments? 🙂

Having said this, now I’ve had time to reflect I have to admit it’s been a useful process for me. I’ve learnt a lot and I value the opportunity to debate with people who hold differing views. After all, where is the challenge in only speaking to people who already agree with us? So, thanks for your time Marc, I can’t see us agreeing on much but I’d be up for round two if you are.

Shaping the university in a networked era

The University of the Arts London is a dynamic environment containing a heady range of teaching and learning practices. What all of these approaches have in common is that they have to (if they aren’t extra curricular) negotiate the structures required to validate and quality control higher education degrees in the UK. As soon as any course considers the digital (beyond posting content in the VLE or teaching a specific software) they discover that they are caught between network and hierarchy.

CC – https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulgodard

To put it another way, they are caught between the Web and the Institution which operate on radically different principles. For example, within the institution the course tends to be the root organising principle with students grouped within it, whereas online the individual is the root, or the centre, and connects to groups. This is significant difference and while in recent years the university sector has claimed to shift focus onto the students (for example the emergence of the ‘student experience’ as an institutional concept) the core mechanisms of the university remain relatively unchanged.

One very good reason for this is because universities operate at scale. The other reason is that, again in recent years, universities have rightly been required to consider, and respond to, issues of diversity, inclusion, sustainability and equity. It takes a significant amount of ‘structure’ to create an equitable environment at scale. [What I have seen of ‘agile’ networked approaches to learning are often highly exclusive, favouring those with agency and various forms of privilege. I see similar effects when education is undertaken at scale in the digital but in a non-networked manner, for example MOOCs]

There are many examples of courses and groups negotiating the tension between the network and hierarchy successfully at UAL but they tend to have four characteristics in common.

  1. They are the smaller courses, with lower student numbers
  2. They are led by individuals with a clear understanding of the value of working in a networked (often Resident) manner
  3. The teaching team are happy to use a combination of institutional and Web-based platforms as appropriate
  4. Much of the networked activity is not formally revealed to the institution for fear of it being shut down

On point four, it’s of great interest to me how an institution (I’m taking in general terms here, not specifically about UAL) approaches the networked environments and practices. Most institutions now understand there is value in the network but often kill that value in the process of institutionalising it. For example, most Social Media policies stifle, rather than promote, the use, and potential value for the institution of staff being active in Social Media. On the other hand we are all aware of the ideological compromises, risks and potential exclusivity of many networked approaches such as running a course via Facebook.

My day job as Head of Digital Learning is at the nexus of these issues and tensions. For me it’s about designing ways of supporting networked approaches at scale (and articulating the value of those approaches) while keeping connected to the institution at key points (for example summative assessment). I don’t believe we need to redesign the whole institution to make this work but we do need to reconsider the principles our teaching and learning is based on. A few ‘design’ principles that I’d recommend:

  1. We need to find ways of operating in a networked manner which can work at scale but which don’t assume that technology is the ‘answer’ in of itself.
  2. We need to positively incorporate networked approaches and stop thinking of the digital as only ‘that thing we have to do because we have run out of floor space’, or ‘that thing we do because there are “too many” students’.
  3. We need to stop designing our courses with the underlying notion that the face-to-face is the course and the digital is only there to support the face-to-face. (most students spend more time learning online than face-to-face no matter how high their ‘contact’ hours are)
  4. We need to frame ‘independent’ study as much more than ‘doing the homework’ or (in keeping with the point above) what you do in between face-to-face sessions.
  5. We need to acknowledge that the network (the Web) exists and design our courses accordingly.
  6. We need to acknowledge that using disciplines as a primary mode of structuring our institutions has serious limitations for students in a digital era.
  7. Given the point above, we need to acknowledge that students operate in a much larger information and communal (possibly collaborative) environment than the university itself.
  8. We need to redesign the way we formally capture the design of courses and the way we articulate these designs to students while still being mindful of diversity, inclusion and equity.

There are two projects currently directly responding to many of these points at UAL: Modual, run by Fred Deakin and UAL Futures, run by Luke Whitehead. There are also numerous examples of courses at UAL which are well aware of these themes/issues and do a great job of negotiating tensions between the network and the hierarchy to the benefit of their students. In my role I attempt to identify inclusive uses of networked approaches and look for ways to embed this in the quotation of the university.

We are brilliant at working in an agile, networked manner in activities which sit alongside the machinery of running and awarding degrees – we also know what ‘good practice’ looks like within courses. Our challenge is in creating institutional structures (hierarchy) which can encourage and support those approaches while holding them in an open hand.

 

I am helping to run a, free, open to all, ‘Platform’ event on the 1st of December at Chelsea college of art entitled ‘Critical Creative Digital: Shaping the university in a networked era’. http://events.arts.ac.uk/event/2017/12/1/Critical-Creative-Digital-Shaping-the-university-in-a-networked-era/  (do sign-up and come along if you can make it)

 

Visualising digital practices using V&R

Myself and Alison Le Cornu recently published “Using ‘Visitors and Residents’ to visualise digital practices” an open access paper reviewing the development of the Visitors and Residents idea. The paper describes the heritage of the V&R mapping process and details a visual pattern-based approach to clustering and analysing large groups of maps. This is a significant step as it expands the Visitors and Residents work beyond a discussion facilitating metaphor to a workable qualitative research instrument.

At the heart of the paper is the presentation and analysis of data from a Higher Education Academy funded project which generated circa 400 V&R maps from staff and students at 18 higher education institutions from across the UK.

From: Using ‘Visitors and Residents’ to visualise digital practices
by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu.
First Monday, Volume 22, Number 8 – 7 August 2017
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7802/6515
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i18.7802   – (Graphic design by Paul Tabak)

I won’t rehash the description of the data collection and analysis here as that’s all in the paper, so do take a look if you are interested in using the V&R mapping as part of a qual data method.

What’s rewarding is to have finally captured the narrative of the progression of the work from ‘a fun thing to do in a conference session’ to an innovative research instrument. Significantly, the Visitors and Residents narrative contains contributions from numerous friends and colleagues who have enriched the thinking and taken the work in new directions. For me this is a perfect example of the richness of working opening and posting CC licenced materials online for others to use and modify.

I’m currently working with Ian Truelove on a version of the mapping which crosses the digital/physical space (locations) divide in teaching and learning. The mapping approach we are discussing includes ‘Independent’ and ‘Dependant’ for the vertical axis and the extension of Visitor and Resident metaphor into ‘hunter gatherer’ (Visitor) and ‘farmer’ (Resident). The plan is to use this with course teams to visualise and discuss how they provide ‘nutrition’ for students (and how they support students in developing their own, sustainable, forms of ‘nutrition’ – yes, this is a bit like the ‘give a man a fish – teach him to fish’ idea).

The original description of V&R was largely based on ‘visibility’ or leaving a social trace. That doesn’t operate as well in physical environments where it is possible to be visible while in Visitor mode, for example, studying alone in the library. The hunter gatherer/farmer interpretation allows us to describe learner modes of engagement in both digital and physical environments.

The vertical axis of Independent and Dependant draws out the important distinction between those times where teaching/technical/library staff are involved (this could be expressed as ‘contact’ time) and those times where students are working without direct input from staff. We have been careful to ensure that the digital/physical boundary is not tied to either axis as all modes of learning engagement can take place in either type of space.

I’m keen to counter the idea that particular spaces (physical or digital) are intrinsically linked with a specific pedagogy. For example, while a lecture theatre does engender or encourage (partly through tradition) more didactic forms of teaching it can be used in many different ways (especially when digital spaces are incorporated into the face-to-face teaching). Similarly, Social Media as a genre of space does not mandate a particular form of dialogue or engagement. The new mapping process we are working on is designed to explore the relationship between spaces of all forms and modes of teaching and learning.

Creative Digital Attributes

One of the challenges we face is bridging the macro and the micro of approaches to teaching and learning. On the one hand we have high level university-wide strategies and on the other the design of individual teaching sessions. The gulf between these two ‘levels’ is so wide that it can be difficult to understand how strategy might influence the immediacy of day-to-day teaching.

Generally, course validation process, handbooks and the design of assessments should bridge this gap but it’s rare to meet anyone in a teaching role that sees the course validation process as a positive design opportunity – one which draws clear threads between teaching values or principles and the day-to-day of running a course.

Incorporating digital into teaching and learning  inevitably suffers from the same problem. We can create strategies that talk of embedding digital into all aspects of teaching and discuss digital ‘tips and tricks’ for teaching sessions but struggle to define, or work with, course level digital learning design. The result is often laudable institutional aspirations and a smattering of ‘groovy’ digital interventions by confident staff who have agency through their structural position within the institution… 

This year the University of the Arts London launched its Creative Attributes Framework (CAF), which provides a valuable shared language to respond to the challenges I’ve outlined. It’s nine high level attributes which are clustered into three areas (all of which fall under the banner of Agency):

Making things happen Proactivity
Enterprise
Agility
Sharing abilities and accomplishments with others  Communication 
Connectivity
Storytelling
Life-wide learning Curiosity
Self-efficacy
Resilience

The CAF was designed by Careers and Employability at UAL and is a great example of how taking a ‘becoming’ rather than ‘skills’ approach to employability stops ‘getting a job’ being in opposition to ‘getting a degree’. Or perhaps it demonstrates that curriculum and employability can operate on similar principles if the focus is on personal development rather than on collecting-knowledge-and-skills. The CAF has been well received at UAL and because many aspects of digital teaching and learning are about ‘becoming’ it was an obvious next step to develop a digital lens for the CAF.

The CAF-Digital or D-CAF as it’s becoming known is currently a simple list of digital skills, practices, capabilities, literacies, behaviours… which operate on a meso level, providing bridges or stepping stones between the macro and the micro – a form of curricular or learning design scaffolding. For example:

  • Being able to switch between different discussions and roles online – in Agility
  • Managing collaborative writing or media production online – in Communication
  • Documenting, reflecting on and analysing the development of an idea online – in Storytelling
  • Managing and analyzing large bodies of data – in Enterprise
  • Constructively responding to critique online – in Resilience
  • Seeking out people from beyond your immediate community – in Curiosity

Trying to define the D-CAF elements as a particular type in terms of skills, practices etc is not the aim. What is important is that they operate at a meso, in-between, level and that we agree that they are a valuable aspect of developing a particular creative attribute in the digital. The elements of the D-CAF are designed to be contextualised by disciplines and courses, each of which can describe their approach to facilitating a relevant collection of the D-CAF elements. Importantly, courses can also map their curricular to the D-CAF to highlight which elements their teaching supports in a language students can relate to.

The current draft D-CAF has around 30 elements mapped to the nine CAF attributes. We are in the process of consulting with colleagues from around the university to ensure that these elements are in the best possible form before we publish/post a version 1.0. I have a basic rule that the D-CAF has to fit on one sheet of A4 paper, just to keep us disciplined… I’ll share version 1.0 here under a CC license. My hope is that others can build on the work and modify it to reflect the character/aspirations of their own institutions.

Future Happens – Social Media

On May the 5th around 49 people from 19 institutions gathered at LSE for the second Future Happens event – “Connect:Disconnect” focusing on Social Media in teaching and learning. The event was co-run by LSE and UAL, hosted by myself, Peter Bryant and Donna Lanclos. Over the afternoon we facilitated a series of ‘hacks’ in which we challenged groups to develop positive ‘principles’ in response to key areas. For example, how can Social Media practices help to:

  • Develop and share identity
  • Build and support community
  • Engage in debate and dialogue
  • Generate and share creativity

…in teaching and learning. This was preceded by an ‘intervention’ (via Skype) from Bon Stewart to get our minds up and running.

‘BURNT’ notes

(The background to the event is here http://www.futurehappens.org/future-happens-2/

The responses to the hacks were captured in a series of Google docs which can be found here: http://www.futurehappens.org/fh2/

Example principles generated on the day include:

  • Valuing difference in yourself and others, being civil and inclusive.
  • Enabling informed choice and empowering through awareness of options
  • Building communications channels and removing barriers to realise a connected community outside the physical space
  • Crowdsourcing/co-creation via social media enhances a sense of belonging and gives access to a greater diversity of perspectives, facilitating critical reflection
  • Encourage debate to span multiple spaces, including out of sight of the institution
  • Participation comes with an understanding that their are collective rights and responsibilities

We plan to gently curate the principles and make them available to help frame the collation/development of examples of teaching practice (or to inform the development of positive Social Media guidelines). The point being that the principles are not in-of-themselves rules or guidelines but principles-to-inform-practice. The hacks framed discussions that, within our institutions, we often can’t find the time for or which get bogged down by parochialism.  

Before we hit the hack section of the afternoon we ran an activity called ‘BURNT’. I believe we were referring to the notion of getting-your-fingers-burnt but we can’t exactly remember where the name came from. The idea was to bring all of the hopes, fears and paranoia surrounding Social Media to the surface to clear the air before we attempted to develop the principles.

Everyone wrote three post-its on this basis:

  • ORANGE: Imagined worst case scenario
  • GREEN: Super positive personal aspiration
  • PINK: True life horror story

(all in the context of teaching and learning)

Donna and Peter then clustered the results while the hacks took place. Clusters included:

Imagined worst case scenario

  • Disconnection
  • Psychological/Physical harm
  • Tech fail
  • Abuse of power
  • Reputation
  • Job security
  • Exposure

Super positive personal aspiration

  • Breaking down Barriers
  • Open and Flexible
  • Political activism/Citizenship
  • Connected Teaching & Learning
  • Career benefits

True life horror story

  • Bad things happen to me
  • Bad things happen to them
  • #fail
  • Falsification

With a few lone Post-its such as ‘@piersmorgan’ in True life horror story…

The BURNT activity did appear to clear the air and, we hope, helped groups to generate positive principles over the afternoon. We think there is something valuable to build on here in conjunction with the principles as a fairly mixed room produced BURNT items which clustered reasonably neatly (the true life horror stories we the trickiest to cluster). Alongside curating the principles we hope to get permission from participants to post the BURNT items online.

In parallel to this we also encouraged participants to note down learning designs or activities which had worked well using Social Media. For me, uncovering workable nuggets of teaching and learning is key to propagating positive practice.


Having initially run through the various outputs from the event it is clear to me than many of the risks associated with the use of Social Media in teaching contexts are the most powerful opportunities. For example, risks around personal and professional reputation are an opportunity to discuss ‘collective rights and responsibilities’. Similarly, unease around identity and credibility is an opportunity to approach, as one group put it, ‘understanding authenticity in different contexts’. Another example is the potential to explore issues of verification and epistemology in the context of fake news or disinformation.

If we take a positive teaching approach to Social Media then the very aspects of it that are held up as problematic become opportunities to explore pertinent themes such as, identity, authenticity, citizenship and diversity. For me, this is about framing or scaffolding our students forms of engagement with Social Media to foster awareness, reflection and critical thinking. All of which underpin positive identity formation and becoming.

An important ingredient in this is establishing trust between teaching staff and their own institution. Things can go wrong no matter how well they have been designed and framed. This is when the institution needs to stand by teaching staff who have taken the time highlight the risks to students and emphasised the personal responsibility each student has in public/visible environments (through teaching and not only by issuing a list of rules).


The next step for us after the hack is to post a lightly curated version of the work from the afternoon which can feed into post-hack events run by participants in their own institutions. I hope to run a post-hack at UAL in which we collate examples of teaching that build on, or respond to, each principle. Circulating well contextualised ‘learning designs’ that take advantage of Social Media as a teaching and learning space feels like a pragmatic way to build on the hard work and critical thinking of the event. Thanks to all who took part.

 

Politics and Social Media

Recently I was invited to speak at a hack event on Politics and Social Media for our Culture and Enterprise Programme at Central Saint Martins (the description of the event is below). The event was designed and facilitated by Richard Reynolds the course leader of the MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries (one of my favourite course titles of all time). Richard opened the day with a talk entitled “Politics, Social Media and the Practice of Ritual Magic” in which he made the distressingly convincing argument that Trump operates much like a magician or tribal mystic and his Tweets are in the form of ritual incantations.

I followed Richard with a talk on Trust and Digital Politics, in which I started by stating:

Not Trump – How Trump?

It’s easy to critique or satirise an individual but, following on from Richard’s talk, much more interesting to explore the factors that allowed Trump to gain and maintain power – especially as unless these conditions change we will see a succession of Trump-like leaders emerging in the West.

In terms of Trust I argued that the Digital has allowed us to Disintermediate institutions. The Web allows Trump to pronounce directly to ‘the people’ via Twitter, circumventing the media, the government and his own party.

A disintermediating Tweet.

Our trust tended to be placed in institutions which resonated with our values and we’d have faith, to a certain extent, that those institutions had integrity. Until recently political leaders in the West would represent or embody those institutions. Increasingly we see the emergence of the celebrity, or media, politician who uses political institutions as a vehicle for their persona.This is an inevitable effect of the cult-of-the-individual that the Web amplifies so efficiently.  So we have lost the trust-mechanism of institutions which, for better or worse, represented identifiable ideologies and are now left with individuals whose primary aim is to seek power. (The struggles of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK are demonstrative of this shift away from ideologically focused politics towards new forms of political persona)

The video of my talk starts from this point so I won’t essay it all out here.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AydoQtqM2Wg[/embedyt]

Ultimately, I agree with Paul Mason in his assertion that much of what we are experiencing can be understood as a “fight between network and hierarchy” which has been brought about by digital technology:

Paul Mason

I see this fight taking place in education as much as in politics as we respond to the all pervasiveness of the Web. This was writ large for me as I prepared a session on Networked Learning for our Postgraduate Certificate Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication. In a description of Connectivism George Siemens’ highlights the same tension between networks and hierarchies.

Hierarchy imposed structure, while networks reflect structure.

The challenge for us is in negotiating the relationship between network and hierarchy. Institutions embed and petrify power in structures which privilege particular groups. Networks tend to generate ‘mystics’ and ‘high priests’  who could, if they wished, operate without the balance hierarchical democracy can, but often doesn’t, bring.  (A phenomenon I’ve seen occur within Connectivist courses). It’s complex, fascinating, and requires our immediate attention.

 

 


A WORLD OF OUR OWN: POLITICS and SOCIAL MEDIA

“The Future of Trust in Digital Politics”

(event description by Richard Reynolds)

Many of us are living in a post-truth world, a world defined by ‘alternative facts’. The Brexit referendum and its aftermath have been shaped by irrational trolling and online ranting. President Trump tweets his policy decisions. Terrorists and other outlawed groups use – or attempt to use – the same online platforms as government agencies. States wage hybrid warfare, and use online disinformation as a tool in their blended online/offline military strategies. Access to news is shaped and distorted by each individual’s known tastes and preferences. Citizens have uploaded their political life and identity, and sometimes struggle to make any connection back to the politics of the offline world.

It’s scarcely necessary to describe the impact that social media is having on politics. We only have to look at the outcomes of elections, referendums and other political conflicts around the world. More than simply a tool, Social Media has changed the way that politicians structure their careers, and the ways in which voters (and non-voters) engage with politics and respond to political debates. Social Media has become central to the ways in which governments articulate and impose the power of the state over its citizens.

On Friday 24 March and Saturday 25 March, the Culture and Enterprise Programme at Central Saint Martins will be hosting a two-day immersive conference and hackathon on the future of politics and social media. Expert guests will be sharing their views on the present and future role of Social Media in our political life. All delegates will have the opportunity to participate in a two-day interactive group project, which will attempt to answer the question: ‘What is the future of trust in digital politics?’

Digital leadership framework

Last year I wrote a quick post proposing a simple way to manage high level discussions about digital. This came from my involvement in digital strategy discussions which often slid across thematic and organisational areas, ending up with a scattering of actions which looked like a troubleshooting list and a desire to ‘get involved’ with new technology. The framework I jotted down simply proposed that discussions should understand their location within three areas: Digital Culture, Digital Medium, Digital Service.

For a recent talk I was asked to give by the Leadership Foundation on Digital Leadership I refined the framework and illustrated it with categories which sit within each area. I started with three headlines which set the context for the framework:

Digital is not the future: An idea the formed the basis of www.futurehappens.org with Peter Bryant

To harness the digital at an institutional level we have to focus on the present and not place digital in that the-next-big-thing-will-save-us category. Clearly we need to keep an eye on the horizon but I know our students would thank us if we prepared them for the digital ‘now’ not an unknown and variously utopian/dystopian imagined future.

The digital and physical coexist – something I’ve written about as ‘coalescent spaces’

I’ve written about this before but in summary – we need to respond to the digital as one part of the ‘real’ world not as a separate entity. Digital and non-digital activities flow in and out of each other.

Digital is too big

It’s an element of almost everything we do and not a viable starting place for a discussion, hence the framework.

Culture – Medium – Service: A digital leadership framework

Clearly the subcategories are not exhaustive and some of the have an Art and Design twist but I hope they show how the main areas differ. What’s interesting is how decisions in one layer effect activities in the others but as institutions we struggle to make these connections. So for example we might install new technology in the service layer but neglect to discuss how this might affect teaching and learning in the Medium layer. We might make bold assertions in the Culture layer but struggle to understand the implications for the Service layer etc. This is why I think the framework is useful, assuming you can get the right mix of people from across the institution involved in discussions. Before I go any further I’ll quickly describe the layers as I see them:

Service

In a digital context this could simply be IT. It’s the layer students are most likely to comment on if asked about ‘digital’ because when most people think of digital they think the technology itself rather than their practices within digital contexts. If this layer isn’t working then the other two don’t stand a chance. There’s not much point in trying to develop a digital identity if the Wifi is down.

Medium

This is where most of our day-to-day activities take place. It’s where the digital has become the location for our work and the place where we connect with each other. This is where the real work of the institution is done, for example, teaching and learning. It’s also the layer which is often least discussed strategically as discussions swing from the need to buy more 3D printers to the risks of Social Media use and not much in between.

Culture

These are the high level principles which inform the character and direction of the institution. As is always the case with culture these are often implicit or assumed to be shared values. So, for example, in my institution we have a culture of creativity and the desire to help students develop their own creative practices. How this is expressed in the digital should be an ongoing negotiation. It’s also of note that emerging practices in the digital and new forms of access/connectedness shift culture or call aspects of it into question.

You could take the framework and use it with a second axis such as scale. So we could take teaching as a subject and consider what is needed in Culture, Medium and Service terms, mapped against Individual, Course and Institution. Or to be more specific we might take a particular question from the National Student Survey in the UK such as “My course is intellectually stimulating” and consider what is required to ensure this within that grid. Or we could map against the student journey of Pre-arrival, Induction, First year, Second Year, Third year etc. These are the kind of discussions I’d like to frame at my own institution to develop a better shared understanding of the digital which cuts across traditional structural areas such as IT, Teaching and Learning and Senior Management.

The framework was well received at the Leadership Foundation event I presented at. I hope it proves to be useful. Thanks to the many colleagues who listened to me as I was formulating the framework and offered useful feedback and advice.

 

What is the value of a library with no content?

This piece was written as an editorial for UKSG, an organisation “connecting the knowledge community and encouraging the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication”.

I don’t work in libraries but I often get invited to speak to groups of library staff about my views on the influence of ‘the digital’ in higher education. My role is teaching and learning focused and I argue that in the digital era academic libraries need to become a home for learning rather than content. Don’t panic, learning necessarily involves content.This is about emphasis, not a dualist polemic on throwing books away and making libraries into wifi flooded barns (those are known as coffee shops).

CC - Scott Library York U - https://www.flickr.com/photos/7883660@N05/466221141
CC – Scott Library York U – https://www.flickr.com/photos/7883660@N05/466221141

Many incoming students are caught in a trap. On the one hand they have been led to believe, sometimes explicitly, that knowledge captured in a physical form such as a book is good quality, or the home of ‘truth’. On the other hand they find much of the information they need for their studies out on the web in a number of different guises. The information they find rarely lets them down but they fear that much of it isn’t academically viable. Often they are right but this commonly has more to do with the strictures of academia than the nature of ‘non-library’ sources.

The trouble stems from our cultural love of certain forms of publishing and expertise over and above the substance of information we discover in any of the many forms it might take. For example, I remember a conversation with a publisher a few years ago in which he got excited about a near future when e-books could include videos, quizzes and be connected to the internet. I didn’t have the heart to point out that what he described was a website because I was pretty sure he wanted to sell ‘books’. . .

The other trap we fall into is confusing academia for learning. For the researcher or the postgrad these territories might naturally flow into one another but for an early-stage undergraduate the mechanisms, rules and culture of academia can often seem strangely abstract and obscure. An early-stage student I interviewed for a research project was struggling with just this when she commented that she had been told not to use Wikipedia because it ‘wasn’t reliable’ even though she had never found that to be the case. Her conclusion was that her institution wanted learning to be ‘difficult’ (but not in a good way).

Access to content ‘beyond’ the library is what’s new here and it’s at the root of these tensions. Unfortunately instead of responding to this new abundance of information by evolving and extending what it means to be a library some prefer to put effort into defending the purity of library content and historic, academic, ways of working as distinct from the web. This isn’t an approach that incoming students readily understand.

Many of our new students have a queasy sense that what Google points them to might not be the ‘best’ sources (without even knowing what ‘best’ means) but don’t yet have the academic tools-of-the-trade to discern or to harness the value of library-based content. Perhaps instead of showing incoming students how to use the library we should first be discussing why they should use the library or any source of information whether we ‘own’ it or not. So this brings me to the title of this editorial because rather than getting caught up in a discussion about the relative merits of digital and physical sources I prefer to ask, “What is the value of a library with no content?”. The simple answer is “expertise”.

In this era of information abundance what students desperately need is guidance not more content. A librarian should be an expert at navigating content, not owning it, and by extension they should be adept at helping students to navigate. This process is fundamentally a form of teaching which positions the library as directly responsible for learning rather than a ‘service’ one step removed from the pedagogical activities of the curriculum.

In addition to supporting what it takes to gain a qualification, a focus on learning, rather than content, is also required to foster digital capabilities which support what Leo Appleton described in an earlier editorial as ‘digital citizenship’. Here there is a clear opportunity to enrich students’ sense of self and empower them to influence the environments they find themselves in rather than simply working at becoming as employable as possible.

There are a number of challenges involved in moving any library towards this emphasis on learning:

  • there is inherently a huge amount of process based work in keeping a library running, leaving little time to help students navigate
  • it’s difficult to form meaningful teaching and learning based partnerships with academic staff are who are often too busy to engage beyond handing over reading lists
  • things have changed rapidly and many people chose to work in libraries because they like to commune with content and prefer strictly defined ways of connecting with users
  • libraries are not always in the habit of making the their staff visible to students as experts (see previous point)
  • current roles and responsibilities don’t necessarily reflect the emerging forms of engagement (off and online) that libraries now need to foster

Forgive me, this is my view from ‘outside’ the library and is somewhat reductionist but possibly not unrecognisable? On the positive side I see academic libraries as having the flexibility to continue to adapt within an expansionist higher education sector. Some of the most vibrant thinking around ‘what it means to learn and to produce knowledge’ in the digital era has been nurtured by libraries.

There is pressure on curriculum to respond to a growing set of policies and external measures which risks dehumanising the core of what students experience. Given this it’s crucial that libraries present opportunities to engage with expertise in a friendly and person-centric manner. In a time where students can Google their way to almost any ‘answer’, access to content has become less important than access to people who understand what that content means and where to head next.