Blame Descartes: why the way we work online is difficult to describe.

October 14, 2024

During Covid lockdowns I wrote about the need for presence not contact hours. This was a simple way of rewiring thinking about teaching which explained why moving in-building approaches online felt so exhausting. 

Recently I’ve been looking more directly at how we employ academic staff for teaching in the UK and the way in which this obscures one of the key ways we work online. This problem extends well beyond academic roles into all types of strategic and operational work.

Being in a room with students

The simple version is that we define ‘teaching’ as being in a room with students at a specific time and ‘teaching related activity’ as preparing to be in that room and/or marking student work. Digging deeper and discussing this with colleagues it became clear that the implication of ‘being in a room’ fell into two major categories, or two modes of activity:

  1. Delivering material (The traditional lecture)
  2. Facilitating dialogue (Q&A, seminar, tutorial)

These two could be in any ratio or mixture, for example a lecture might be ‘interactive’ or a tutor might share useful insights in a seminar. The point being (as far as I understand it) that there is a two way thing going on. This exchange might be as simple as ‘being able to see students and them being able to see the tutor’ or it could be in the form of discussion and debate. I work at a specialist creative arts institution so we also have supervised studio time and crits which fall into the dialogue category because it’s assumed that staff/faculty will be discussing the development of work with students in-the-room. This is what constitutes ‘teaching’ as described contractually. Interestingly, feedback is not defined as teaching because it is a one way process, assumed to be in text form and therefore, alongside marking, sits outside ‘teaching’.

Difficult mapping

The reason this construction of teaching and not teaching is important is because it erases, or fails to see, a significant mode of interaction which has emerged with the digital environment. In short, asynchronous activity cannot be defined as teaching within this model. This is not to say that this type of teaching is always not recognised or paid for, it’s more that it’s difficult to acknowledge and define using a model which predates its existence.  

It’s difficult to map asynchronous activity back into this model because:

  1. You are not in the same physical room as students.
  2. Most people appear to not understand asynchronous exchange as dialogue.

I now see why there was such a desperate attempt during lockdowns to make the online environment into a ‘mirror’ of the physical rooms that in-building teaching took place in. The reason so many people insisted on so much synchronous teaching online wasn’t entirely because we didn’t know any better, it was also because unless we were in a room (or as close to this as possible) with students what we were doing couldn’t be teaching. 

The tempo of consecutive exchange

The dialogue point is more nuanced. This appears to come down to how long the gap between statements is, or the tempo of consecutive exchange. Unless it’s close to immediate then it doesn’t seem to count as dialogue. For example, is a discussion in an online forum which takes place over a week a form of dialogue? Is a succession of text comments about a piece of work on a Miro board dialogue? Personally I think it is. It also has the advantage of a certain type of flexibility for all involved. However, our current model of teaching would not register this. It would perhaps be seen as some kind of sequential ‘feedback’ or a collection of one way statements. 

Text vs speech

There is another distinction here which comes into play and that is the difference between spoken and text-based forms of exchange. Our formal definition of teaching appears to favour the spoken word as exchange. My sense is that this is because historically we were either talking to each other ‘in the same place and same moment’ or exchanging letters. This is not to say that epistolic approaches are not valued, it’s more that they are seen as a form of academic exchange and not as teaching. 

There are many examples of teaching-via-letters but these tend to be on a one-to-many basis (much of the New Testament or correspondence courses being good examples) and it’s probably the one-to-one tradition of letter writing which frames it outside of teaching. It’s also possible that this is where teaching shades into supervision, as academic supervision tends to assume one-to-one.

Not quite real time

A long time ago I claimed that the future is ‘not quite real time’. Here I was highlighting that the web had ushered in new forms of text-based communication which were not necessary in the same place and in the same moment, nor were they strictly epistolic. Discussion forums, instant messaging, posting on Social Media. None of these fall into our well worn categories of exchange. 

This is explored by Stewart in her insightful ‘Collapsed publics: Orality, literacy, and vulnerability in academic Twitter’ where she draws on ‘Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word’ by Ong to propose that Twitter could be encountered, or used, both as a kind of oral dialogue, or as a literary form. It is variously interpreted as both of these because we haven’t yet developed a third category. 

This causes no end of problems as in any given moment text posted in Social Media, what I’m calling ‘consecutive exchange’ can be thought of as ‘just chat’ or as a published work. This is also the reason why we can’t agree on what constitutes acceptable email practice. Is email a letter or is it a conversation, is it a discussion or is it a formal documenting of agreements? Email is a good example of consecutive exchange in that it fall between these definitions.

We have not culturally adapted to the idea that text can be dialogue or that dialogue can be text. Or, perhaps, we have not yet managed to institutionalize this idea because our institutions are built on the strict demarcation of published/recorded vs chat/informal.

Venn diagram. Two circles 'Epistolic' and 'Dialogic', with 'Asynch Online Exchange' in the overlapping space.
This crossover space is not yet institutionally understood.

It’s all a bit new

So despite the fact that we spend much of our time working and learning in this hinterland oral/published mode, we haven’t found a good way of describing it. This seems fair given that, as a mode of exchange, it emerged rapidly and very recently. However, it does make it difficult to account for asynchronous (we are moving to the term ‘Guided’ in our model) forms of teaching and learning.

Right now, it means I have to pretend that one of our most valuable forms of teaching is actually an indistinct mix of ‘teaching’ and ‘prep’. That’s fine for now if it’s used as ‘talking with students via text’ (teaching) and ‘considering and reflecting on student work in progress’ (prep). Effectively I still have to slice up all consecutive or asynchronous work into a version of either epistolic or dialogic rather than claiming consecutive exchange is a category in it’s own right, one which gives both staff and students significant of agency over when and how they engage.

I’m going to blame Descartes for all this complexity as mind-body duality seems to be behind it. What’s the difference between thinking about work and doing work? When it comes to teaching, and many other types of work, I don’t think there is a difference. I’d go as far as to say that defining work in these terms is a category error. This unhelpful duality amplifies our inability to define not-quite-real-time forms of text based exchange as dialogue and erases a key mode of work from our institutional consciousness. No wonder we feel overstretched when much of the work we do is difficult to account for.

Digital Natural Law

September 17, 2024

(A post about a the power of something that doesn’t exist.)

In my last post I explored how the students on the ALT-C 24 conference student panel were suspicious of ‘innovation’ with digital technology and appeared to prefer incremental improvements that had a more direct, meaningful, impact. From their point of view the term innovation is now close to synonymous with ‘over sold’. So now, when a lot of effort, design-work and creative thinking is put into a quiet, but extremely useful, improvement it’s not considered an innovation. A good example in my world would be increasing the student centred flexibility of provision. This is difficult to do and highly technical across digital, policy, process, and often institutional culture. 

A regimented stack of red-green apples.
Photo by chichacha –https://www.flickr.com/photos/chichacha/2387957261

So how did this come about? Why is it that, by definition, work that makes things better is not categorised as innovative (even when it is innovative)? …and just to be clear, I’m not complaining about this phenomenon, I’m trying to unpick why it happens. 

I like to propose there are three key reasons we have got to this point. The first is simple:

1. Hype Ennui

Too much hype from those that get funded by being the-next-big-thing. There is no need for me to go into this apart from to say that the investment cycle doesn’t require any innovation to actually become the next-big-thing, it just needs enough people to believe that it might for a short while.  It’s interesting that moral panic about a technology is now considered valuable evidence that it will live up to what’s promised. If the tech is slated to destroy/disrupt-and-save civilization all the better. Move fast and break things is the mantra after all.

2. Normalisation

The second reason is straightforward but always difficult to navigate. One definition of well designed technology is that it ‘vanishes into use’. Most interventions, upgrades, redesigns, that help do this by reducing cognitive load. One definition of technology is that it allows you to do more with less effort. You might notice the first time you press that strangely convenient button which does just what you need when you need it, but you don’t notice the second, third or fourth time. It’s just ‘there’ in a process of rapid normalisation bordering on entitlement. Which brings me onto the third reason…

3. Natural Law

We imagine there is a Natural Law of Digital. This is not something we consider directly, but it’s there, right in our central, conceptual, blind spot. We each have a vague, but compelling, model of how everything Digital should work, if it was really working, if the universe was in correct balance. It’s a kind of digital Garden of Eden state where everything ‘works intuitively’ in a manner which releases us to only have to work on things we believe to be authentic and meaningful.

The massive, glaring, downside of this Digital Natural Law is that it doesn’t exist. So we operate less on ‘I know it when I see it’ and more on ‘I don’t know it but I know when I can’t see it’. A sense that the digital environment is in a permanent fallen state of grace that needs repairing towards a state which none of us would agree on even if we could describe it.

This then allows us to respond to meaningful innovation as simply an incremental step back to what should have been the ‘natural’, rightful, state of digital all along. When the wifi gets faster that’s because it was slower than wifi should be beforehand. When a website becomes easier to engage with that’s because some of the bugs, the brokenness, has been fixed. When my new phone has a bright screen it’s because the previous one had a screen which was far too dim. etc etc. Digital Natural Law thinking compels us to believe that the best it’s ever been is simply the closest to ‘fixed’ we have ever experienced. Our ability to upgrade this ‘natural state’ at each step and encounter innovation as an implicit right is partially fuelled by consumerism, it’s also just a bad habit on our part.

I’m not sure what to do about this

It’s difficult to know what to suggest to counter Digital Natural Law thinking. One method would be to ask people to describe this halcyon state in terms other than ‘intuitive’ or ‘personalised’, but people tend to get cross when their utopias crumble. Maybe we have to accept that anything which is part of the fabric of daily life gets sucked into an under considered idealism, I’m probably only truly conscious of my car when it’s broken or my bins when they aren’t collected. 

One strategy which is enjoyable but inadvisable is what I used to do with my kids. When they demanded to know why the wifi was down at home (with the implication that I would somehow fix it?) I would say ‘Of course it’s down, do you have any idea of how complex it is? It’s a wonder it ever works at all!’. Personally that’s how I feel about all digital technology.

I’m in a permanent, low level, state of surprise and wonder that my tech works on any level (except for printers, they are just annoying and wrong). This isn’t because I’m enlightened, it’s because I’m old enough to remember when digital tech was broken-by-default, or at least when you had to jiggle cables and lean on superstitions to get a BBC Micro game to work. 

It is good to see the extent of the scepticism that meets PR heavy digital innovation and maybe that’s half the battle. The students on the ALT-C panel were very appreciative of what some might call ‘the basics’ and the default view of tech was constructively critical. The Digital has had some of the shine scuffed off it it recent years and that can only help to reveal where the meaningful work is being done.

“Please don’t innovate” (with technology)

September 9, 2024

Last week I was busy helping out and learning things at the Association for Learning Technology conference in Manchester. I’ve been the president of ALT for around four years, leading on the ALT awards and various other stuff with support from the excellent ALT team. There has been a colossal amount of change during my time as president, much of it kicked-off by Covid and all the pros and cons of Digital Education becoming strategically and operationally mainstream. Our new CEO, Susan Martin arrives at a time of great potential as we think about the future of ALT and explore how best we can support a rapidly changing community.

No hard sells

This year at the conference I managed to get to a lot of sessions and was pleased to find that nobody was attempting to sell the use of a specific tech ‘for education’. (Even the vendors at the conference trod carefully in this regard and took more of a ‘this can help to improve a practice’ line than a ‘this will solve education’ approach.)

Panoramic picture of a large conference room with a screen, a stage and people sitting round tables.
Me attempting to get the attention of delegates at the gala dinner. Image by Kerry Pinny

Ten years ago (maybe less) the most popular conference sessions were often framed as “Using [Insert the latest tech here] for education”. We were in solution looking for a problem mode and quite often got it wrong, especially with anything supposedly social or community focused. 

Flexibility more important than ‘innovation’

In this year’s student panel keynote, when asked what the most positive aspect of technology was within their studies the answer was not AI or XR, it was ‘flexibility’. The agency to choose how and when to engage. One response during the panel could be summaried as ‘please don’t innovate, just work on making things better’. It seems that the term ‘innovation’ in the context of EdTech has come to mean “playing with that new thing in ways which don’t really help’’. 

Making the education we offer more flexible to access and engage with is more about process and culture change than about ‘using the latest tech’. In higher education we have a bad habit of adding a layer of ‘innovation’ on top of a fixed model of operation. It seems our students can spot that from a great distance and are not impressed. They were, however, very positive about a bunch of other digital related stuff and precise in identifying where the use of technology supported meaningful learning and where it could be corrosive.

Weariness

Perhaps we are all now wary-by-default of the revolutionary/radical/disruptive narrative around digital technology. For example, there was an ambivalence around AI this year, it has already become an auto-satirizing theme. This is not to say that it can’t be useful in some very general and very specific ways, it was more of a weariness born of ridiculous promises that it appears nobody believes. The most disruptive aspect of this hype cycle being the way that it regularly distracts from the hard work of quietly, and unglamourously, trying to make things a bit better.

Instead of luxuriating in hype, the sessions I attended discussed things such as improving the clarity of assessment processes for students, developing more relevant inductions, surviving in a sector where crisis is the new normal and understanding the lived experience of disabled students. All of which involved extensive use of, or reference to, digital technology.

AMEBWHIT

So perhaps it’s not the Association for Learning Technology but the Association for Making Education Better Which Happens to Involve Technology. AMEBWHIT is not the most usable acronym but it’s a more accurate description of the work of the ALT community. My hope is that in the coming years we can find positive ways of communicating the reality behind my infeasible acronym and grow the community by inviting in (and being useful for) a new generation of individuals and roles. The tech innovation cycle will take care of itself. In the meantime we can focus our innovation energy on setting the direction for ALT in an era where Digital Education is omnipresent.

The online crit and imagining the not yet realised

May 30, 2024

On the 7th of June I’ll be in conversation with Professor Paul Lowe about the ‘Online Crit’ as part of our online seminar series (you can sign up here).

An interesting idea surfaced during the chat we had in preparation for the session: being able to imagine the not-yet-realised is fundamental to the creative process. There is no making without intent, and there is no intent without the imagined.

CC Chris Richmond https://www.flickr.com/photos/35652152@N07/24955436862

This idea is so embedded in creative work that I wonder if we forget it’s there. It’s certainly important when considering Online Creative Education as the move to online tends to raise questions about the material which risk demoting the importance of the conceptual.

Realisation

However, this must be considered not only in the context of creative practice but also creative education. The education process, writ large, being learning and becoming expressed via making, the ‘via’ being key. This is reflected in our assessment criteria which covers Enquiry, Knowledge, Process, Communication and Realisation.

While we might be assessing technical skill within these, when we consider Realisation we are most likely to be focusing on the Realisation of an evolving set of ideas. Given this. the final output or artifact offered in response to a creative brief becomes an emblem of the overall creative process. It should be used actively as a gateway into telling the story of that process and the thinking therein. This is why we ask students to submit a portfolio which contains that story and not to simply hand in a final piece.

The Crit and the physical

The traditional crit involves a group moving around a studio variously questioning and defending thinking-as-represented through a key pieces of work. Of course, technique and craft are likely to be discussed but they should only form part of the conversation. The crit is not a technical workshop in this regard and, if done well, should be scaffolding for telling the story of process, reflecting on thinking and imagining that which does not yet exist (as distinct from attempting to hone in on a ‘correct answer’).

Given this, physical presence is not fundamental to the crit and it could be argued that taking the crit online helps to focus on critique (in the best sense) development and becoming precisely because it is ‘immaterial’.

I’m not claiming that the tactile, the olfactic or certain forms of spatiality are not valuable in some crits, but they need not be fundamental to the process. For example, it would be rare for anyone to touch work as part of a crit.

Creative Education Online involves geographically dispersed making connected by collective questioning and critique. These things combined become ‘studio’. The online crit can, and should, be central to this as a location for telling the story of the work and imagining the not yet realised.

The problem isn’t AI, it’s the zero-sum future we’re being sold

May 15, 2024
Upside-down version of Blooms Taxonomy with an explosion of 'create' at the top.
Turning Blooms Taxonomy upside-down and removing the lid – CC BY 4.0 David White

A couple of blog posts ago I suggested that our response to AI is pushing us into a dangerous model of humanness.

“There is a tendency here to imply a zero-sum principle to humanness: the more the tech can do the less it means to be human. This feels wrong to me and isn’t helpful in an educational context.”

https://daveowhite.com/pointy/

I explored this zero-sum idea at a recent talk to staff at Kingston School of Art. To support my line of thought I picked up a quote in a post from Tobias Revell. The quote refers to Science Fiction (SF) but as Tobias points out, our current futures are largely based on SF thinking.

“I would argue, however, that the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the “real” future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.”

Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future? 
Fredric Jameson, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, Utopia and Anti-Utopia (Jul., 1982), pp. 147-158 – via https://blog.tobiasrevell.com/2024/02/07/box109-design-and-the-construction-of-imaginaries/

Questioning the future

I’m not a futurist but when it comes to emerging technologies it is useful to question what model of the future we are working with. How that is shaping our present and how this is, in turn, painting humanness into a corner. In short, the specific technology is less problematic than version of the future being sold.

The model of the future promoted around AI, and picked up in education, contains many assumptions and tacit implications. The main one being that once AI systems reach a certain level of complexity and/or have enough data to feed on they will reach ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ (AGI).

“…a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can perform as well or better than humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

An image of intelligence entering the station?

A quick scan of the Wikipedia article on this makes it pretty clear that we are nowhere near that and there is little evidence that AI systems are actually on that path. However, the assumption that this has already happened or that it is inevitable is what is behind the zero-sum model of the future.

When I see articles with ‘this feels like AGI’ in them it reminds me of the train entering the station story from the early days of cinema. People allegedly panicked when they saw the film and cinema was, and is, a technology with a massive impact but what people saw was an image of something and not the thing itself.

L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat

We are not computers and intelligence is a sibling of mystery

Some of what drives this is a collective forgetting that the brain is not a computer and that that idea is merely a metaphor. So, building a hugely complex computer can only ever make a metaphorical brain. Or as Mary Midgley argues in Science as Salvation, the problem isn’t that we are operating with myths, the problem is that we have recategorised myth as fact, and therefore inevitable.

Add to this that there is no agreed definition of intelligence, and everything suddenly becomes very murky (Helen Beetham writes elegantly on this point).

My personal view is that we are extending the ‘Chinese Room’ in a manner which is impossible to understand (the way a neural networks operate in programming means that it’s not possible to deduce the process back to any kind of human-readable form). Our working definition of intelligence is then an absence or an ignorance, in that it’s a notion we ascribe to that which remains a mystery. This is another salient factor driving the zero-sum model of the future.

The problem with the pointy bit

When I first pointed out the zero-sum problem, I helpfully provided a bad diagram.

A red triangle diagram with yellow at the top.
A techno-evangelist, overly simplistic interpretation of education triangle diagrams post-AI? – CC BY 4.0 David White

The quick version of this being that many educational models are triangle shaped and the ‘higher order’ learning is in the pointy bit, often labelled as ‘creativity’ or something similar. The reason I called the diagram bad is because it perpetuates the zero-sum model of the future. Technology might help us to move into the pointy bit faster, but the diagram implies that the strictly human nature of pointy bit thinking and learning is small and constantly being chipped away at.

This is the problem with triangles, they get progressively smaller at the top until there is no space left at all. If we go with Blooms Taxonomy here, then it implies that human creativity is finite as if it was possible to complete being creative. Clearly this isn’t what is mean by the diagram, but these implicit notions are powerful and persistent. Having given this some, let’s go for a walk and have a think, time – I came up with a brilliant idea which it turns out a bunch of people have had before.

Flipping Blooms for unbounded creativity

What if we simply turn the triangle upside down rip the lid of it off (this lid ripping is my contribution).

Upside-down version of Blooms Taxonomy with an explosion of 'create' at the top.
Turning Blooms Taxonomy upside-down and removing the lid – CC BY 4.0 David White

What if remembering, understanding, applying etc. are what you dip into to support a process which starts with creativity? That would certainly chime with how students at the University of the Arts London work. Significantly, what if creativity wasn’t a finite pointy bit but was a jumping off point into a space which, by its very nature, cannot be bounded but opens out into unknown possibilities? Moreover, it could be argued that the relative educational weighting (if we go by the size of each slice) is a better reflection of where the educational emphasis should be in an era of information abundance and AI.

Certainly, a model of the future based on a lidless upside-down Blooms Taxonomy would be less fearful than the one we are currently being sold. In this lidless future, emerging technologies become a vehicle for us to explore the ever-expanding outer reaches of creativity rather than the thief of our humanness. I seem to remember that was the model of a technological future before technologists became our new high priests and I’d argue that the move to the zero-sum model is a failure of secularism (a topic I find fascinating but which is too big to get into here).

Not my idea

As I said, I wasn’t the first to up-end Blooms. That idea I’ve managed to trace back to around 2012 and relatively early discussions of the flipped classroom. For example this via Shelly Wright, which I traced back from this Open University post by Tony Hirst.

The OU post also links to a piece from Scott McLeod for around the same time which delves back into the thinking behind Blooms Taxonomy and how it was never mean to imply ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms of learning nor that each slice should be seen in terms of ‘amount of learning’. Given this, I suggest that putting it into a triangle was a spectacularly bad idea which, as Scott points out, has perpetuated a pretty impoverished approach within formal education. Hopefully, my lidless upside-down version of Blooms goes someway to redress this.

Embracing a squiggly future

Ultimately my favourite antidote to  the triangle is the squiggle. My favourite struggle of all time being Tristram Shandy’s diagrams of his approach to storytelling in a novel by Lawrence Stern.

A set of four lines with different patterns of squiggles on them.
Lines showing the direction of storytelling in the novel Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Stern – Wikimedia Commons

In the novel Shandy gets side-tracked so often that he never even gets born in the telling of his own life-story. And yet, somehow we learn an enormous amount about him through this wandering and the story is hugely entertaining. For me this is a fabulous touchstone for the principle of assessing the journey and not the output in education.  

The-squiggle-as-process is a much more honest metaphor for learning than the rigour of the triangle because a squiggle is messy, sometimes beautiful, and everyone takes a different route. We squiggle all over Blooms as we learn and we potentially squiggle our way out into the unknown beyond the lid of upside-down Blooms. So here’s to a creative, squiggly future in which education does not fear technology and our humanness knows no bounds.

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning report

April 30, 2024

This week I was on a panel hosted at the House of Lords to discuss the launch of the Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning report. The research is from the Higher Education Commission, written by Alyson Hwang.

Close up of red and green wallpaper with an heraldic pattern
Very House of Lords wallpaper

The report’s research heritage has its roots in scrutiny of online learning during Covid lockdowns but things have come a long way since then. The Office for Students commissioned a review of blended learning, led by Professor Susan Orr which was published in October 2022 which forms a basis for this new research. The key finding from that 2022 work was that teaching quality is not relative to mode:

“The review panel took the view that the balance of face-to-face, online and blended delivery is not the key determinate of teaching quality. The examples of high quality teaching that were identified in this review would be viewed as high quality across on campus and online modes of delivery. This also applies to examples of poor teaching quality.”

Blended learning review,  Report of the OfS-appointed Blended Learning Review Panel, October 2022

It seemed that everything moving online during Covid had caused a culture shock and certain voices in Westminster decided that learning online couldn’t possibly as good as learning in buildings. Plus, some students were making the case that they were paying the same fees for an inferior experience.

This was more about university as a cultural-rite-of-passage than as an educational journey, but it largely got framed as being about ‘learning’. A valid question here would be ‘which students are we taking about?’ and ‘on what basis?’. See this recent piece from the Guardian by Roise Anfilogoff, who points our that for many students university became significantly more accessible during lockdowns.

The new report

The Commission found that blended learning has the transformative potential to widen participation and access to higher education for all, improve equality of opportunities, and enhance learning outcomes.

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 20

The Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning report builds on the Review of Blended Learning, adding information from evidence sessions, interviews and written submissions to support a rangy set of recommendations. The case studies root the research in current, successful, practice.

It’s notable in how positive it is about blended learning and while there are many caveats, all the case studies and stats are upbeat. I’m sure this is an effect of asking institutions to share stories, rather than a taking a detective work approach. However, given the Covid heritage of this line of reporting it’s interesting that nowhere is blended learning portrayed as a bolt-on or fundamentally ‘not as good as’ being in physical rooms. I sense we are heading towards post, post-Covid times in quite a helpful way.

The report covers a lot of ground, ranging from the need for leadership to the state of the ed tech market. All-in-all it’s a useful body of work to support institutional strategy and to make the case for investing in Digital Education in the broadest sense.

Year zero

Much of what is covered and recommended are things which those of us in Digital Education have spent many years arguing for. In this sense the report is largely describing the current start-of-play rather than presenting possible futures. Covid is taken as a kind of year-zero for blended learning which doesn’t change the value of what is being said but always feels strange for those of us who have been working in the space since the 90s.  

The following recommendations in the report are ‘classics’ and well underway in many places:

  • The need for senior leadership roles that own and promote blended learning.
  • The need for more staff development and time to be made available in workload planning for this.
  • The need to incorporate digital literacy/capability into all curriculum to equip students for the workplace (and, I’d add, life…)
  • The need for commercial ed tech development and procurement to be more agile, and possibly collective (Open Source doesn’t get much of a look-in).

Certainly the Association for Learning Technology community have been extremely active in these areas and are well placed to contribute to any cross-sector work.

Asynch

The aspects of the report which open up the most interesting areas for me are around how we might develop more nuanced models of ‘blended’ as a practice and how ‘Quality’ might then be defined. The report proposes the following model:

Time, pace and timingSynchronous and Asynchronous
Space Place and Platform
MaterialsTools, facilities, learning media and other resources (digital, print-based or material)
GroupsRoles and relationships (teacher-led and peer-learning, varieties of learning groups)
Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 7

This is a useful and useable set of categories and it’s heartening to see the concepts of space and place in there. The report goes onto suggest how quality might be overseen, or measured, in recomendation12:

The Office for Students should establish a single, coherent approach for assessing the quality of online and blended learning as the designated quality body, ensuring that metrics do not impose additional bureaucratic burdens on the HE sector.

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 6

This is complex and problematic because, as the report mentions, all provision is blended to a degree and so any coherent approach for assessing the quality of online and blended learning will actually be assessing all provision. Moreover, if we believe that this is about the quality of teaching (and design of provision) rather than the mode then why would we want to focus on mode? Not to mention that we already have a significant burden of regulation which the report alludes to as potentially distracting.

The HE sector is facing a significant challenge due to the regulatory landscape’s lack of consistency and stability. This diverts resources from developing teaching practices, investing in digital infrastructure, and improving students’ experiences.

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 33

Teaching beyond mode

This all comes back to a knotty point that, in regulatory terms, we don’t have a workable definition of teaching that operates super to mode and can be applied across face-to-face and digital. For example, when you sift through the OfS Conditions of Registration the examples given which relate to teaching have their roots in face-to-face, ‘synchronous’ practices. There are refences to the need to use ‘current’ pedagogies in digital delivery but these are not described. As in this ‘possible cause for concern’:

The pedagogy of a course is not representative of current thinking and practices. For example, a course delivered wholly or in part online that does not use pedagogy appropriate to digital delivery, would likely be of concern.

OfS Conditions: B1: ‘Academic Quality’, B1.3
High Quality Academic Experience, Cause for concern 332H (b.)

It’s reasonable pedagogic specifics are not described given that ‘current thinking’ is a moving target. However, the side effect of this is that teaching is frequently refenced but never described, which means we fall back into a ‘contact hours’, teaching is the live stuff, way of thinking. Ultimately, most of our measures of teaching quality are proxies via student experience. There is plenty of merit in that but it contributes to the problem that our shared understanding of what teaching is (and what it isn’t) is always implied, or assumed, and never made explicit.

The asynchronous unicorn

Although the regulatory body provided some practical guiding principles, the metrics for assessing the quality of blended provision could be clarified to guarantee quality education rather than penalise innovative practices.

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 32

This is important because until asynchronous forms of teaching are actually understood as teaching we won’t be able to describe the value of blended, or fully online, learning. Until ‘non-live’ pedagogies are mapped into our understanding of quality we won’t, as a sector, be able to see our own provision clearly.

The effect being that the way in which the digital can support truly student-centred flexible provision will not be acknowledged and much progress in access and inclusion will remain ‘invisible’ to quality frameworks. This extends to the way we design contracts, manage workloads, increase student numbers and widen access. The latter being a key hope attached to the hypothetical flexibility of online and blended provision, especially for those already in work:

Contributors to the inquiry voiced how student needs and demands are changing in line with the economy – more than ever, students are benefitting from flexible, personalised, and accessible delivery of their courses.

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 4

As mentioned, the key here is to describe and communicate-the-value-of ‘non-live’ teaching in a mode agnostic manner. This isn’t about Digital, it’s about teaching and flexibility– it just so happens that Digital allows us to undertake many forms of ‘non-live’ teaching (whereas non-digital forms of asynchronous largely rely on a postal service).

(aside) What do we think of when we think of teaching?

I’d like to undertake a research project where we ask a cross section of staff and students to describe what they understand by the term ‘teaching’. I suspect views will vary wildly and worry that many of them will be quite narrow.

What can we take from the Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning report?

There is plenty of useful stuff here and I’m sure it will be quoted in many strategies and budget asks. It’s a useful step forward, not least of which because it reflects the reality of the majority of the sector and not some kind of Oxbridge cultural romanticism, projected out from, bricks and mortar.

Overall, I’d ask where the investment and capacity might come from during nervous times and I’m wary of a narrative which is based on the White Heat of Technology as it’s never really about the tech, it’s about the business model. Certainly, in a sector where we are generating an ever growing staff precariat, introducing technology to make things ‘more efficient’ is likely to contribute to instability. I say this not entirely from a Marxist perspective but because I believe that meaningful teaching will always involve confident, highly capable, professionals.

To give the report it’s due, at no point does it suggest that we should do everything with AI or something along those lines, it’s driving more of an access than efficiency agenda, but it’s focus on mode, rather than the practice of teaching could lead people the wrong way. My hope is that the constructive and measured character of this report will provide a basis for us to develop more sophisticated models of practice and quality which are not tied to mode and therefore don’t segregate digital.

Creativity with, or against, the machines?

March 28, 2024

A recent Ed Tech/HE conference I attended opened day one with a high production value, inspirational, video. Traditionally at this event the opening video has outlined how technology is the future and will enhance everything ‘Empowering students to shape their destinies’ type stuff. (This is normally expressed through metaphor, and images of VR-ish stuff happening).  

However, this year while the main message had a similar drive there was a new subtext. The video showed a young woman who appeared to be suffering from creative block, but through her own determination she broke through this, her ideas flourished, and she ended up inspired to paint and draw etc. I don’t recall much technology being involved beyond some laptop pointing and a bit of indistinct VR use. The human was central.

This seemed to be making the case for what, might be, unique about being human and how technology could support that. Another interpretation is that the video was actively defending humanness in an era of rapidly developing digital technologies. I’m sure this wasn’t the direct intention, but this theme did carry through the opening keynote from a Futurist who insisted, in the way that Futurists do, that we should try to imagine many possible futures. i.e. Not just the future that the technologist insist is inevitable on a hard dystopian / utopian split.

What do we bring to the table?

What I think I’m seeing is a post-AI shift towards a defence of humanity against technology. Or a gentler view might be that it’s an assertion of what is unique about being human – an attempt at defining what humans ‘bring to the table’. This theme isn’t new for example, in the nineteenth century Ruskin advocated for human centric values in the face of industrialised work which separated individuals from craft and nature. Harraway argued against the dehumanising drive of computational and technological ‘progress’ back in the 80s and the ‘what makes us human’ theme has been shot through literature for thousands of years (angels, Der Golem, Frankenstein’s monster, aliens etc.).  

The new aspect for me is that this was an Ed Tech conference, not a symposium on gothic literature, a meeting of theorists. The organisation running the conference are techno-evangelists of sorts and have facilitated and funded a bunch of useful digital things for Higher Education in the UK. And yet their ‘this is what we value’ conference opening video could easily be used by the marketing department of my own university (The University of the Arts London). Our strap line is ‘The World Needs Creativity’. The strapline of the video could have been ‘Being Human Still Has Value’.

I wonder if we are seeing the culmination of a technological narrative which has been building for years. Wherein those promoting the tech must switch to promoting humanness and how the tech amplifies, rather than reduces, our ‘uniqueness’.  There is a tendency here to imply a zero-sum principle to humanness: the more the tech can do the less it means to be human. This feels wrong to me and isn’t helpful in an educational context.

It’s more than the pointy bit – but it is the pointy bit.

I mentioned a few blog posts back that, for me as an educationalist, the role of technology is to give us the opportunity to spend more time in the pointy, top-end, of the educational triangle diagram (you can pick any educational triangle diagram – they all imply that the pointy bit is what we are aiming for). Creativity, or something akin to creativity, often labels the pointy bit for example, in Bloom’s taxonomy the term ‘Create’ is used. In other frameworks it relates to agency and identity – various forms of self-determination and expression.  

A triangle where the bottom two thirds are labelled 'The bit technology can do' and the top third is labelled 'The human bit'.
A techno-evangelist, overly simplistic interpretation of education triangle diagrams post-AI?

The downside of these triangles is that they imply ‘development’ is a kind of ladder. You climb your way to the top where the best stuff happens. Anyone who has ever undertaken a creative process will know that it involves repeatedly moving up and down that ladder or rather, it involves iterating research, experimentation, analysis, reflection and creating (making). Every iteration is an authentic part of the process, every rung of the ladder is repeatedly required, so when I say technology allows us to spend more time at the ‘top’ of these diagrams, I’m not suggesting that we should try and avoid the rest.

I’d argue that attempting to erase the rest of the process with technology is missing the point(y). However, a positive reading would be that, as opposed the zero-sum notion, a well-informed incorporation of technology could make the pointy bit a bit bigger (or more pointy). The tech could support us to explore a constantly shifting and, I hope, expanding, notion of humanness. This idea is very much in tension with the Surveillance Capitalism, Silicon Valley, reading of our times. I’m not saying that the tech does support us to explore our humanity, I’m saying it could and what is involved in that ‘could’ is worth thinking about.

It’s pleasant, in a quiet way, to see technologists reach for a simplistic only-the-pointy-bit version of creativity as the go-to concept when promoting a human-centric view. This is probably also comes about because the auteur-ish, ‘expressive’, aspects of a performative creativity make for good video visuals. My hope is that the new habit of defending, or promoting, humanness by technologists will lead to an increasing understanding of why ‘Art School’ values around not-knowing, risk, ambiguity, play and general graft are exactly what’s needed to continue to expand what it means to be human.

Creative Education Online (CEO)

March 15, 2024

A conversational seminar series exploring the future of creative art and design education in digital spaces.

The material in the digital.

Digital spaces and practices are evident in almost all creative and learning journeys. This is reflected in students’ experience of Higher Education and in the Creative Industries’ increasing emphasis on online collaboration.

However, fully online creative education remains difficult to imagine as it appears to contradict key characteristics inherent in ‘residential’ provision in various ways, for example:

  1. The ‘desituating’ of material practices, embodiment and notions of co-presence.
  2. An assumed lack of ‘togetherness’ and group cohesion through increased flexibility of provision.

In conversation with experts this series will explore the challenges and opportunities for fully online and digital creative education, the implications for the identity of our subjects and institutions.

To what extent does online provision amplify and reflect current tensions around access, scale, and creativity? What aspects of subject tradition should be questioned in the attempt to be more inclusive and what should be protected?

Context and call

I’ve been working with Chris Rowell and Ruth Powell in the Teaching and Learning Exchange to put together a seminar series with a focus on fully online creative education. The format will be similar to Chris’ excellent ‘AI conversations’ from which he produced a digital book: ‘AI Conversations: Critical Discussions about AI, Art and Education’.

Each seminar will be a 30-minute informal interview, or conversation, with an expert on the relevant theme followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. They will take place on the 1st and 3rd Friday of each month, hopefully starting in May 2024. Below is a brief description of the series and a selection of draft themes.

If you are interested in being the ‘expert’ half of a conversation on one of the themes below, or if you’d like to suggest your own theme within the framing of the series, then let me know on david.white@arts.ac.uk. The questions for each conversation can be agreed in advance, with a focus on fully online but with space to go wider if relevant as almost all themes will have implications well beyond any single mode of ‘delivery’.

Suggested themes

Not all of these themes are my ideas, some came from Chris Rowell and Ruth Powell. I did draft them all, so they are written from my perspective. You might like the look of a theme but want to rework it so it comes from a slightly different perspective. Some of the themes are quite well thought through, while others are just the sketch of an idea. You might also notice that a similar theme has been expressed in more than one form.

Hopefully they give a sense of some of the ground we’d like to cover.

Desituated curriculum

What does it mean to teach creative subjects with little or no shared access to buildings?

Or

What are the implications of teaching and learning having no clear ‘situation’? Everyone involved is embodied in different locations, potentially with no geographical or spatial resonance?

The ‘virtual’ crit

The crit is central to Art School teaching, a practice with a heritage in Fine Art which carries through to many creative subjects and is commonly viewed as a signature pedagogy. Inherent in the crit dialogue in a communal situation. How does this play out online where a sense of togetherness is perhaps more ephemeral and the artefact under consideration will be digital or will have been translated into the digital.

What does an authentic crit look like in online spaces? What is gained and what is lost as we transpose a revered teaching practice into a new context?

Anti-oppressive online

Beyond notions of inclusion, we can ask what it means to be anti-oppressive online. What pedagogic practices “…legitimate students’ epistemologies, foster reflection and discussion, establish expectations of critical awareness, and democratize educator and student roles.”* 

How does the principle of anti-oppression operate in digital spaces and places? How do we successfully navigate the ‘built-in’ power assumptions our online platforms and our own institutional cultures?

*Migueliz Valcarlos, M., Wolgemuth, J.R., Haraf, S. and Fisk, N., 2020. Anti-oppressive pedagogies in online learning: A critical review. Distance Education, 41(3), pp.345-360.

AI and creativity

Does AI make us more, or less, creative? How is It being incorporated into creative processes? Where is it redefining, or erasing, practices? Where has it morphed esteemed practices into ‘skills’? What are the implications for creative subjects and identities if we consider AI as a technology of cultural production?

AI literacy, AI use

What literacies and uses are emerging in creative education. Exploring day-to-day practices and implications (staff and students). What aspects of AI literacy should we be focusing on as creative educators?

Translate to engage?

Instantaneous text-based language translation was an early, widely available, use of Large Language Model AIs. Now the same process can work in real time with text or audio.

In UK Higher Education there is anecdotal evidence that some students who have English as an additional language habitually translate teaching into their primary language to engage.

Is this a technology of decolonisation and inclusion or a twisty example of cultural homogenisation by Silicon Valley? What does this mean in terms of belonging and the intercultural in an education system which is resolutely ‘taught and assessed in English*’?

Can we imagine the 100% translated course?

*If we are speaking from a UK perspective.

Assessment, feedback and tech

To what extent has a move into the digital environment modified our assessment and feedback practices? Are we replicating or reimagining?

For fully online provision, what does it mean to be assessing a digital simulacrum of material work? Is a shift in emphasis from ‘realisation’ to ‘process’ in assessment a radical turn or simply a reflection of ‘good practice’?

Dispersed materiality

How do we reconceptualise ‘Studio’ as a concept (a shared space, a set of practices and dispositions) when making is dispersed, distributed across time and geography?

A lack of object-ivity?

How does/should object based learning work in the immaterial digital environment?

The tantalising prospect of digital ‘immersion’ – placemaking with VR/XR.

One response to the immaterial nature of the digital environment is to simulate the ‘real’. To what extent is the use of VR/XR a legitimate method of ‘uploading’ art and design practices into the digital? Does spatial tech draw us together by providing new places of co-presence or does it exclude and isolate?

Being and belonging

Creative arts demand a pedagogy of becoming – being through doing. Given the flexible and dispersed nature of online education how do we ensure we are creating the conditions for this?

Digital mess

The spaces of online education are commonly designed in the context of a corporate philosophy of efficiency and task management – they are spaces as imagined by Silicon Valley. Add to this the inorganic nature of computing and the creative possibilities inherent in the massy and the unpredictable become attenuated. To what extent can we co-opt these environments towards mess and chaos-within-bounds which so often inspires the creative process?

Digital and climate emergency

To what extent is moving creative education online an effective response to climate emergency. What are the factors in designing a low carbon digital curriculum? Are we simply dispersing our responsibilities across a myriad of physical locations or does a reduction in travel immediately make fully online education the most climate-ethical mode of education available?

Lumpy stuff and digital

The plastic arts, getting your hands dirty, materiality etc. Where do we handle the ‘lumpy stuff’ in online creative education? What happens when the tactile, the visceral, cannot be sensed or shared through physical co-presence. Is it possible to meaningfully ‘make’ when dispersed across many localities. Additionally, how might we transpose the lumpy work into the digital without losing its essence. What does it mean when all work ends up as a digital image?

Creativity in corporate spaces: i.e., “Microsoft is the location of your college”

Similar to the Digital Mess theme but with more focus on the implications of relinquishing our spaces to Silicon Valley. There is something here about the corporate ownership of communal spaces and notions of the ‘safe space’ online.

Flexibility vs communality

Fully online education is a pragmatic option for people will full lives. It can be offered flexibly to account for the ebb and flow of work, caring responsibilities and ‘life happening’. However, this flexibility erodes the notion of the cohort and the shared experience of a group going on a journey which is ingrained in creative education. To what extent is flexibility the enemy of communality and belonging? What are the possible design responses which create the potential for communality without always mandating that students ‘build their lives around the course’?

Immaterial making

A Fine Art educator once commented that during an online Fine Art MA the students central practice became the art of making PDFs.

How do we ensure that the screen does not dominate in making subjects? What might be effective and enjoyable methods of sharing and communicating the material via the immaterial?

Access vs supervision

Creative arts education is centred on the development of individual and collective creative practice. This lends itself to a ‘pedagogy of supervision’ which supports individualised dialogue and questioning. While this is likely to be meaningful and inspiring for the few who can access it as a form of education it is inherently expensive, demanding significant amounts of academic/teaching time.

To what extent does a financially viable and accessible approach to online education negate a supervision approach? Is it possible that accessible online education unpicks the very nature of creative subjects, or perhaps demands that they be reimagined?

Structure vs reflection

All creative processes require moments of reflection, space to think, space to forget and then reconnect etc. In contract, good practice in online education tends towards structure, and the granular quantification of attention and focus. Given this, how might we design creative online education which scaffolds but does not suffocate, which provides space-to-think but not an absence of purpose? What does it mean when the most intense moments of learning and creativity are often those times that cannot be measured or entirely predicted?

From Skills to Virtues: A model for the design of Higher Education

February 16, 2024

The ‘SPAV’ Model (Skills, Practices, Attributes, and Virtues)

A diagram containing nested categories of Skills. Practices, Attributes and Virtues.
Skills, Practices, Attributes, Virtues – CC BY 4..0 David White

The model lays out a continuum spanning from Skills to Virtues to be used as a high-level tool in the design of university education. Underlying this is a doing-to-being continuum which is based on an ‘education as a journey of becoming’ principle. In short, we create the conditions for our students to develop as individuals over the time they are with us. Hopefully they leave as more knowledgeable, better equipped citizens with nuanced, and ethically informed, worldviews.

When considering the design of curriculum, the model is intended to be used as a touchstone which provides a holistic view of various strategic drives commonly applied, often unevenly, in the development of HE level courses. For example, many universities have a skills agenda, a set of Graduate Attributes and a Social Justice/Purpose strategy or themes*. These might be expressed separately, leaving those developing curriculum to interweave these educational aspirations which could, on the surface, appear to pull in different directions.

The model is intended to help those that design Higher Education navigate the breath of offer which spans from ’employability’ to ‘making the world a better place’. I believe these can, and should, inform each other but in the day-to-day of university activity they sometimes feel like dis-integrated layers.

*Examples would include positions on Anti Racism, Inclusion, Sustainability, Decolonisation, and Climate.

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It is possible to insert institutionally specific frameworks into the categories to inform design. So the model will stay relevant even as institutional drivers and aspirations change over time. For example, at the University of the Arts London we have a Creative Attributes Framework (Attributes) and a Social Purpose Implementation Plan (Virtues). These are subject-agnostic, whereas frameworks in the Skills and Practices area will differ by school, faculty or subject.

A specialist process

The categories in the model are geared towards the design of education, which is a specialism in its own right. As such, they are not intended for a broad audience without translation or simplification. For example, employers tend to mix aspects from across the model under the banner of ‘Skills’. A survey of employers by Kingston University indicated that ‘Problem Solving’ was the most valued ‘Skill’. Whereas in educational design terms, ‘Problem Solving’ would be a Practice which incorporates relevant Skills and Attributes, guided by Virtues or values. Even so, I wouldn’t attempt to rewire employers use of language. The broad use of ‘Skills’ is fine as long as we, as educators, work with more nuance behind that term.

Similarly, how these categories interrelate does not always need to be made explicit to students, but a good understanding is required across the continuum to inform design. For example, a question or brief might be posed which focuses on developing a Practice but encourages this to be contextualised in terms of Virtues/Social Purpose even if these terms are not used directly.

Definitions if the categories within the model

(Health warning: The categories bleed into one another. For example, one person’s ‘Skill’ is another’s ‘Practice’. The model should be used to inform design and discussion about what is being covered in curriculum, and how it interrelates. It is not attempting to categorise definitively or be an arbiter of semantics. The discussion the model engenders about what and how to teach is more important than trying to make everything ‘fit’ in the model itself.)

Skills

These are usually instrumental, and straight forward to assess as there will be clarity around what mastery of a Skill looks like. This could be understood on a case-by-case basis, or via established competency frameworks. A Skill is likely to be an isolated competency which is expected to be combined with other Skills, or incorporated into Practices, to complete assignments/briefs. For example, brazing two copper pipes together is a Skill, knowing how to install a central heating system is a Practice. Basic numeracy is a Skill, solving a maths problem is a Practice. In short, a Skill can always be gained through a training style of teaching.

Practices

These are where Skills are applied in context to generate new knowledge or understanding (Sometimes the term ‘literacy’, as in Digital Literacy, is used in this area too). Practices can be institutionally defined (where there might be a ‘correct’ approach) or developed by the individual. Often they are a combination of both, whereby they are initially learnt in an agreed form then adapted and owned by the individual over time. As such, Practices can combine aspects of both doing (externalised actions) and being (internalised to the person). Good examples of this would be the Practice of academic writing or the Practice of drawing. Each of these has a raft of accepted techniques and skills which can be adopted and adapted by an individual in the development of a personal style or approach, namely, the development of a personal Practice.

Notably, students will often already have a collection of Practices and skills they ‘own’, which they will bring into an educational process. Curriculum which assumes that students ‘start at zero’ across any of the model’s categories is unlikely to be inclusive in nature.

Thanks to Georgia Steele at UAL for the definition of Practices used in the Model.

Attributes

Often presented as ‘Graduate Attributes’ These characterise an individual’s approach to undertaking work and engaging in the culture of work or scholarship. Attributes underpin an individuals’ ability to ‘make their way in the world’. Higher Education emphasises Attributes as important characteristics of the person (how being informs doing) which usually go beyond what is directly accredited. The successful graduate is then ‘greater’ than the sum of their Skills and can continue to adapt and learn over time in a changing environment.

Commonly referenced Attributes include ‘communication’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘resilience’, but I think more mundane categories such as ‘reliable’ and ‘personable’ give a better sense of the value of Attributes.

Virtues

Being virtuous has negative, entitled, overtones but virtue, and by extension, virtue ethics are useful when defined as ‘striving to do good’, even when doing good is not necessarily expedient – i.e., it’s complex and difficult.

Institutionally, ‘good’ is often expressed across numerous social, cultural, and environmental areas. These are now being gathered under the banner of Social Justice, a term which feels fresher than ‘virtue’ and helps to reveal what could otherwise be ‘Hidden Curriculum’. Being clear about Social Justice values helps to avoid what I call a ‘guess the culture’ approach for students, where students who are culturally aligned to the institution’s values do better in assessment while those who are not tuned into this struggle to understand what they are doing ‘wrong’.

Interestingly, while accruing wealth and power are highly prized elements of ‘success’, they are not inherently virtuous. Given this, Social Justice, as a proxy for virtue, is a useful way of promoting that an institution, and its graduates, are not only driven by revenue and profit. This is increasingly important if universities are to remain distinct cultural entities. Importantly, virtues must be lived-out by the individual and cannot be performed, they require integrity. Where Attributes might be a characteristic of a person, Virtues are embodied. Virtues, and how they relate to the development of worldviews, are therefore closely tied to notions of becoming.

Operating across levels

The model can operate across all HE levels: at the higher levels (in the UK, levels 6/7) students are expected to generate a narrative of their work which interweaves and interrelates multiple categories in a sophisticated manner. This would include the use of theory and relevant frameworks to structure, contextualise, and reflect upon interrelationships across this model. Whereas at lower levels we might expect a student to articulate connections across fewer categories. For example, discussing how they have applied certain Skills to develop a Practice.

Using the model

I’m planning to incorporate this model into our Learning Design process to help us to develop curriculum which is balanced across the categories. I see it as a tool we use at the start of the process to help shape a course or module and something the check-in with the end. Does the design cover relevant categories to the right extent? Does it connect those areas in a manner which aligns with the level of the course? Does the design of assessment reflect this?

Below are further thoughts which I wrote as a ‘way into’ explaining the model. I thought I’d include them here as they might be useful context.

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Virtuous becoming and Constructive Alignment in Art & Design education

UAL teaches subjects which are highly ontological. That is, they aspire towards becoming and the incorporation of practice and knowledge into the identity of the student as they develop nuanced and ethical worldviews. There is a requirement to incorporate anti-racism, climate crisis and sustainability, and decolonisation into curriculum in tandem with inclusive, diverse and intercultural approaches to teaching and learning. This Social Justice imperative is a form of human practical ethics which should inform Skills, Practices and the development of Attributes.

This pushes the boundaries of the Constructive Alignment approach in the design of teaching and learning, as Learning Outcomes which require a particular worldview to be demonstrated could be in tension with inclusion and decolonisation. To what extent should an institution define the ‘correct’ way to be? In this sense, as we move through Attributes and towards Virtues, Learning Outcomes could blur into something we might call Becoming Outcomes, which could be problematic or, at the very least, stretching the idea of Learning Outcomes to breaking point.

However, I suggest that Learning Outcomes can be designed which operate at this end of the continuum if they are centred on developing a position or support informed critical reflection. i.e. They do not mandate a particular view is held even where this might be in tension with the stated Social Purpose standpoint of the institution. Clearly, a student taking this approach would have to develop a line of argument which is articulated with great clarity but in an inclusive, pluralistic, (and I would argue, fundamentally educational) environment this should be possible.

The ‘Art School’ heritage of Practice

The use of Practice within this model has it roots in ‘Art School’ forms of education where Skills are applied to materials through practice to produce new work and new knowledge. This mechanism of applied Skills can be extended beyond distinctly creative contexts. For example, in the UK we might demand a specific level of English language Skills which can then be applied in the practice of academic writing. Similarly, we might require numeracy Skills which can be applied in STEM-based lab Practices.

Levering open the Practice space between Skills and Attributes

Practice is a location in which the academic and the practical can inform each other and is therefore crucial in the design of contemporary Higher Education and is in some sense what binds the model together. Practice can be theorised, and theory (including certain aspects of Social Justice) can be applied to practice. Including Practice in the model also reduces the risks of skills and attributes collapsing together and becoming a confusing, interchangeable, mix of doing and being.

How ‘Art School’ teaching avoids a losing battle with technology.

February 9, 2024

(…or there is no such thing as a good picture of a horse.)

A little while back I was invited to give a talk at the University of Sydney where I argued that “The ‘Art School’ approach is increasingly relevant across all university-level teaching to avoid our graduates getting drawn into an impotent skills race with technology”. This post is a condensed version of that talk.

The full video of the talk is here: https://vimeo.com/896653558/bbc141a5e1?share=copy

(Thanks to Professor Peter Bryant and the folk at the University of Sydney Business School for the invitation and the excellent hosting)

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No correct answers

I often joke that I help to run a university with 25,000 students who are mostly studying subjects with no correct answers. This can look like a bit of a conundrum, especially when it comes to assessment. We can unpick this if we take into account two Art School-esque principles.

  1. The emphasis is on assessing the creative journey, or the narrative of the work, not the output or the ‘product’ of the work.
  2. There is no such thing as a good picture of a horse.

Before I deal with that second point, it’s worth noting that the ‘the narrative, not the product’ is a version of the idea of ‘assessing the learning not the thing’. In that sense, all of higher education should be taking this approach in one form or another. For example, an exam shouldn’t be assessing how good you are at exams… 

No such thing as a good picture of a horse

If we did operate on the ‘good horse’ or ‘correct answer’ basis then I suspect our marking criteria would look like this:

A drawing of a horse which moves from figurative to a cartoon in style. The figurative end is awarded a first, the cartoon end an 2.2.
Art School assessment practice, if we marked based on the idea of ‘Good’?

This isn’t the case though as while there is significant merit in, and respect for, technical skills these are not the point or the aim. To explain this, it’s useful to consider that ‘all creative work is conceptual’, but sometimes the concept is really basic. For example, the concept might be ‘a painting of a horse that looks very much like a horse’ but it could be ‘a cartoon of a horse which encourages us to question the limits of Generative AI’ . Hiding in this ‘it’s all conceptual’ notion is something I return to a lot, namely a pedagogy of questions, reflection and critique. 

Let’s say I set you the task of creating a picture of a horse, you can achieve this any way you want. The catch is that you have to explain why you have taken a certain approach, what you think the value of this approach is and the extent to which you have been successful relative to that value. (Importantly, you can also reflect on how you might have failed to do this). 

You can use all kinds of tools to construct this story: theory, method, process, your identity, your cultural influences and experiences, a chosen canon of relevant work etc. This forms the narrative of your work and this can be assessed. 

Beyond skills and knowledge

This pedagogy is not radical but it tends to be more prevalent at the ‘top end’ of education systems. The PhD viva and the notion of a ‘defense’ being the classic example. Intriguingly, in arts education, students encounter this form of pedagogy from day one. That’s a tough gig and figuring out how to gently scaffold students into this form of learning is an ongoing challenge. It might be a ‘defense’ in some sense but we don’t want it to be defensive as this simply privileges the privileged.  

The upside here is that an ‘Art School’ approach equips graduates with the ability to go beyond the ever shifting currency of skills and knowledge by developing the ability to question and critique context. To tell a story as much about the ‘why’ as the ‘what’. Our graduates can ‘see’ systems and structures which can then variously be navigated, made visible, modified, avoided or deconstructed. All extremely useful attributes for employers, assuming they work on a trust basis. 

Avoiding a skills ‘arms race’ with technology

So perhaps our marking criteria should look like this?

A drawing of a horse which moves from cartoon to figurative in style. The cartoon end is awarded a first, the figurative end an 2.2.
Nope

Well no, because we are looking at an output here, not the story. Any of these representations could be strong or weak pieces of work depending on how they respond to the brief and on the quality of the critical-creative narrative of their genesis. 

What we can say is that the front of the horse is the most imaginative and the least likely to be reproducible algorithmically. The cartoonish image doesn’t go head-to-head with techno-solutionist approaches because it simply side steps mainstream notions of ‘good’. It’s genuinely difficult to get Gen AI to produce the crazy looking cartoon because it simply doesn’t have enough to go on. I’m not saying this won’t improve, this is more a point about the limited value of ‘Good’ when processes can are automated. When I tried to generate ‘both ends’ of the horse with Stable Diffusion (as a prompt novice) it produced this:

Two pictures of a horse. One is a fairly figurative black and white drawing, the other looks more like a photo.
My attempt to recreate the aesthetic and character of both ends of the horse using Stable Diffusion an image based Gen AI.

In the talk I used this Gen AI example as the current exemplar of a long line of what be usefully termed as technologies of cultural production. 15 years ago I might have made similar points about Wikipedia, there are many similarities in the questions raised by Gen AI and Wikipedia because they are both technologies of cultural production which rapidly emerged in the public domain. This is a category of technology we consistently struggle with because it recategorises forms of labour and professional identities.

Imagination not imitation

As mentioned, Gen AI, as with any algorithmic technology, imitates but doesn’t imagine (Yui et al. 2023). Here is where the ‘Art School’ approach becomes crucial as reproduction and remixing of canon, i.e. ‘elegant imitation’, is rapidly losing its currency. In the same way that copying and pasting from Wikipedia has very little value but can be very useful, so too with Gen AI. In practice this means much of what we characterised as creative work is being merged into broader notions of ‘production’, something Tobias Revell has discussed in terms of Design potentially ceasing to be a specialist field. 

This is where we again connect with the limits of focusing on ‘Good’ as the principle of good tends towards imitation as it’s a comparative concept. Good is almost always relative to what has come before. I’d say this is also the same with the idea of being ‘correct’.

Under these circumstances there is an imperative to teach beyond ‘good’, thereby equipping our graduates to swim to the surface of imitation and operate above the ever rising tide of skills-that-can-now-be-done-by-generalists. Now that the sanctity of writing has also been eroded by technology, I’d argue that the ‘No such thing as a good picture of a horse’ approach goes beyond creative subjects and is necessary across the majority of higher education.

 

Yiu, E., Kosoy, E. and Gopnik, A., 2023. Transmission versus truth, imitation versus innovation: What children can do that large language and language-and-vision models cannot (yet). Perspectives on Psychological Science, p.17456916231201401.