Creative Education Online (CEO)

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 Education41(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?

Belonging is inconvenient

Over the pandemic there has been much discussion of the need for community and belonging as part of the education experience. The emphasis in these discussions is that online didn’t/doesn’t ’do’ community very well. However, it’s more accurate to say that that sudden shifts from residential provision to online caused by a pandemic are not ideal for sustaining community.

Residential assumptions

As we develop, or expand, our fully online provision it’s important not to fall into the trap of designing with ‘residential assumptions’. What I mean by this is that we can assume that online students will want what our residential students demand (or what they missed when things moved online). Part of that is the need for community and belonging.  

Inconvenience 

Belonging is inconvenient, it requires commitment, accountability and time. Any anthropologist will tell you that there is no short-cut to belonging. Strong-bond relationships are formed because much time is spent together and the good times and the bad times are shared alike. 

One of the key reasons that students can feel part of a community on residential courses is because they have made a huge commitment in time and effort just to turn-up. In traditional undergraduate terms this is likely to mean relocating the majority of their life to a new city for three years. It’s not just about the physical buildings it’s inherent in the format. In this sense, belonging is exclusive – available only to those who have the time to invest. 

Just visiting

Once we move away from this traditional characterisation of students the need for belonging and community shifts. For example, as anyone who provides upskilling or updating courses knows, students in full-time work usually just want to ‘learn what they need’ and get on with their lives (lives which already involve community and belonging in other areas).

This took me back to the Visitors and Residents continuum, which is predicated on modes-of-engagement based on forms of presence. As such, it’s a simple way to map the relationship between the pedagogy (or format) of an educational offer and how this relates to the need for belonging and community. 

A diagram of the Visitors and Residents continuum with a belonging and community curve mapped to it.
Visitors and Residents, belonging and community mapping

Modes of learning (Not learning styles…)

We can trip over the language here so I’m not going to be too precious about terms, but let’s step through the diagram:

Independent learning

“Independent from what?” That’s always my question. Generally what we mean is “Learning when a member of teaching staff is not immediately present, or nearby”. This is a definition which responds to ‘contact hours’ as the underpinning principle of an educational offer and is therefore quite dangerous, especially when we consider online teaching and learning.

It’s one of the reasons that asynchronous approaches get a bad press. In terms of belonging though, we can say that those who “Just want to learn what they need” and have the ability to learn without staff input are probably not looking to ‘belong’ because they don’t have the time or the need. Here flexibility and convenience far outstrips the value of belonging. We could go a far as to say that if belonging is inconvenient then flexibility is the antithesis of belonging. (which I offer here as more of a provocation than a solid statement)

This is not to say that ‘independent’ always means ‘on your own’, which is why the belonging curve tilts up before the middle of the continuum. Self organised student study groups in various forms are a crucial part of most courses. There are no staff present, but there is a lot of learning happening and it still falls under this definition of ‘independent’.

Independent blurs into communal where the belonging is student facilitated. 

In this mode we don’t need to facilitate belonging or community but we do need to acknowledge the importance of student led communities and be responsive in other ways. The danger here is that we see ‘independent’ as ‘not needing support’. This is where the concept of ‘mattering’, as discussed by Peter Felten here,  is more important than the idea of belonging.

Communal learning

Key idea here is that the middle of the continuum represents engagement with ‘defined groups’. This is where we are expecting to be co-present with others and leave a social trace, but within a specific group rather than totally openly online. Members of the group will have a sense of the ‘audience’ for their contributions and some trust in shared values. They will probably also know at least some of the other members socially and/or professionally (we could look at the Dunbar Number as part of the definition here). This is why platforms such as WhatsApp suddenly became popular because they handed us back the ‘known group’ principle of privacy (on a social, not a data level) which was less exhausting than the constant maintenance of a Digital Identity or performative identity in other Social Media platforms.

The concept of a student cohort and ‘safe-spaces’ within which to learn (digital or physical) neatly fits this definition of ‘defined group’ even though being a member of a cohort is not the same as being part of a community – that depends on how the course is run. 

Courses often rely on a communal pedagogy, learning together, shared endeavour (or the blunt version: ‘group work’). This is my favourtie form of teaching and learning and one of the reasons I currently work at an Art and Design focused institution. This is where belonging and community become a necessary aspect of the learning, and dare I say becoming, process of learning. It’s totally possible to support this online, but online or in-buildings, it’s expensive (time commitment, staff time, use of space, complex feedback and assessment etc) and inconvenient, especially as it usually requires some synchronous moments. Basically, you have to turn up, be present, be engaged and be prepared to compromise and negotiate. All the difficult things. 

In this mode we have to design learning with presence and belonging as headline principles.

Networked learning

At the Residential end of the continuum activity takes place in more open and visible spaces online. These are places where anyone can see your contributions without ‘membership’ being required in a social sense (although you might need a profile on a particular platform). For example, Tweets can be read by anyone, not just the people who follow you. Instagram works in a similar way and TikTok is the ultimate hyper networked, hyper-visible, communal-through-trends-not-social-connections platform right now.  

In learning terms there is perhaps less of a need for belonging and community here and more of a need to be established-within-a-network. The distinction I’m making here between communal and networked needs unpicking further but I’d suggest that a lack of clarity in this area is what has caused confusion and some anxiety in ‘open’ courses. Networked learning can fall into a performative-clique-plus-audience mode, technically ‘open’ but actually exclusive and not really a community. 

Perhaps in this mode we should not be obsessed with facilitating community and more focused on being inclusive.  

Multiple authentics

All of the above applies as much in residential education as it does in online. Just because students come to a building doesn’t mean that want to belong to a cohort or that they somehow automatically become part of a community. This doesn’t have to be a problem though, it’s about designing learning which is not always predicated on assumptions about our traditional, residential students (even if such a category really exists).  

Sometimes at my institution we slide into thinking which implies that full, residential courses are the authentic way to learn and everything else is either geared relative to this or simply a pipeline into it.  We need to design on the basis that there are multiple authentic modes of learning for multiple communities of students. Not all of these require belonging and community but where they do we need to acknowledge that it’s hard work, time consuming, and that access-to-a-building or being-in-a-cohort is not a proxy for membership-of-a-community. 

Pedagogy, Presence and Placemaking: a learning-as-becoming model of education.

In Art and Design the shared endeavour of learning is usually understood as an ontological process, a process of ‘becoming’.  

“The outcome of every learning experience is that it is incorporated into our identities: through our learning we are creating our biographies. We are continually becoming…” 

Learning to be a Person in Society, Peter Jarvis, 2009

I would argue that this is the case for all education. If our students leave as exactly the same people they were when they entered, we have failed them. Given this, and building on the importance of presence and place, I propose this model of learning-as-becoming which can be used to holistically reimagine our institutions at a time of great flux.

The learning-as-becoming model

A Veen diagram with 3 circles: Presence, Pedagogy and Placemaking

Part 1: Pedagogy as placemaking

Last year we took the University of the Arts London online in about three weeks and have been fully online, or heavily blended, ever since. Our teaching, technical and support staff have did an amazing job adapting working practices and redesigning courses so that our students had the best chance of learning and becoming during a global crisis. 

There has been a generosity within most of the feedback from staff and students, an acknowledgement that this has been a long-running emergency. Putting aside discussions about fees, our students appreciate the massive effort teaching staff have been putting in and everyone is aware of the struggles involved in both teaching and learning under difficult, and highly varied, circumstances.

Beyond the immediate health and wellbeing concerns I would say that the most challenging aspect of the last 14 months has been a loss of place. Our buildings are a focal point for belonging, presence and community. They are a physical metonymy, a powerful symbol, of the idea of the university itself. Being denied access to our buildings was such a powerful loss of place it shrouded the fact that the work of the university continued online.

The digital non-place

We immediately, and understandably, attempted to recreate a sense of presence and place in the digital environment via our webcams. Many of us have now moved on in our approaches because we quickly found that the ‘mirroring’ of our physical environment in this manner was tiring and sparked an ongoing ethical debate around private space.

Ultimately, the problem was that we thought our Zoom/Teams/Collaborate sessions would give us back a sense of place because, like our buildings, there were people ‘in them’. However, picking up on an idea from anthropologist Marc Augé I would say that these types of digital platforms are ‘non-places’:

“The concept of non-place is opposed, according to Augé, to the notion of “anthropological place”. The place offers people a space that empowers their identity, where they can meet other people with whom they share social references. The non-places, on the contrary, are not meeting spaces and do not build common references to a group. Finally, a non-place is a place we do not live in, in which the individual remains anonymous and lonely.”

Marc Augé, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, Le Seuil, 1992, Verso. – quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place

The notion of non-place encouraged me to think about the process of placemaking and how this related to presence. Last year I wrote about the importance of presence, suggesting that we should focus on “Presence, not ‘Contact Hours’” when teaching online. Alongside this, the presence-based Community of Inquiry model started to appear in many discussions on how to move from ‘emergency remote teaching’ to something richer and more sustainable.

It struck me that any form of ‘presence’ needs a location to occur within – presence, by its very nature, requires place. This was the missing piece in my thinking and something we perhaps don’t consider directly when we have access to our buildings, because we take their place-ness for granted.

The symbiosis of presence and place

Our buildings are suffused with cultural and social histories. They are full of artifacts and objects that are coated in the presence of people who passed through before us. Even the leftover coffee cups and the arrangement of the furniture speaks of the presence of others.

Our institutional buildings are more than spaces, more than somewhere to keep the rain off, they are places, full of people and echoes of people expressed through objects and architecture. In contrast, most of our digital spaces are non-places. They are transient, they have no shared geography and, if we think of Zoom/Teams/Collaborate type platforms, we leave little behind to be discovered by others. We are not ‘Resident’ in any form – nobody lives there and we don’t work there. 

Crucially, what makes a space, or non-place, into a place is social and intellectual presence. As discussed in previous posts, this presence can be realised, or expressed, in many forms (not just via the webcam). The semi-permanence of text, images, videos, digital post-its and the clutter of artefacts in platforms like Padlet, Miro and MURAL give agency to participants (assuming everyone is allowed to contribute) and build presence and place, especially because they have an inherent spatiality.

There is a complex interplay between the salience of our presence and the extent to which a sense of place is felt. Place and presence have a symbiotic relationship, they build on each other. However, in our transient-and-disembodied-by-default digital platforms we must deliberately set-out to set this symbiosis in motion.

Shared endeavour, leading with pedagogy

In both online and in-building contexts presence and place are catalysed by our pedagogy. That is, by the way we design and facilitate connections and collectively negotiate the shared endeavour of learning. The challenge we have been facing is that in the digital we start with a non-place, whereas our physical buildings have a place-ness we can build on before we even enter. 

The emphasis in the model is on a pedagogic approach which first-and-foremost facilitates connections and forms of interaction, creating social, intellectual and creative presence. Through this, the locations of our institutions, especially the digital spaces, become places within which our students have agency. This then increases belonging and supports learning-as-becoming. This is pedagogy as placemaking through the medium of presence.

Part 2: The need to go beyond a model of delivery. 

There is a certain pressure at an institutional level to develop models which respond to what we have experienced during the pandemic, reasserting the importance of our buildings and incorporating convenient online modes.There is a mix of motivations behind the development of these models:

  1. Responding to predicted shifts in student expectations, especially in regard to flexibility and cost-of-study. 
  2. Managing the expectations of teaching staff in the context of students’ desire to return to buildings.
  3. Exploring the possibility of expanding student numbers and/or to connecting with new communities of students, when the limitations of physical space are mitigated by digital modes. 

These models tend to draw on our in-building modes (lecture, tutorial, seminar, workshop, access to support and resources) and then discuss which of these modes are best suited to being ‘delivered’ online. The model then turns to what might be an acceptable ratio, or ‘blend’, of online to in-building delivery. 

Practices have changed

This is a useful piece of thinking up to a point, but it falls into the trap of perpetuating the well worn approaches defined by the affordances of our buildings rather than exploring or supporting the more flexible and fluid possibilities in the online environment. This also attenuates our ability to reimagine the use of our physical spaces, which continue to be framed as resources that can be used more efficiently rather than differently. In essence, these are new models of delivery and not new models of practice.

However, I would argue that our practices have changed, as has our understanding of what it means to successfully work, teach and learn. In a recent post James Purnell, our Vice Chancellor and President, explores how we might prototype the future of work. I hope we can also prototype the future of education in a similarly open manner.

Yes, we could take a ‘fill in the gaps’ approach and continue to pit the digital and physical against each other – but that simply uses a mix of locations-of-delivery to perpetuate models of practice which have been outdated by a global emergency. The ‘fill in the gaps’ approach is also not capable of ‘seeing’ the new modes-of-engagement which have developed during the pandemic, modes which don’t neatly fit our classic delivery formats.

This is why I have developed the learning-as-becoming model which is focused on reframing practice and paves the way for models of delivery which can incorporate pedagogic approaches that do more than mirror that which went before.

Spatial collaboration: how to escape the webcam

Like most of us I’ve been involved in many pandemic conversations about what we have lost, the moments that worked well and what we’d like to hold on to. 

Having given this much thought I believe that what we have been missing the most is not only being together physically but also the inherent spatiality of physical co-presence. Our ability to connect with each other and to learn is deeply reliant on social and conceptual maps – where things are located relative to each other – and maps are by their very nature spatial.

Our mistake has been to assume that if we can see each other’s bodies then we must be together in the same place. 

What the tech doesn’t give us

The pandemic ripped away our opportunities to be physically co-present and we immediately turned to our technology in an attempt to repair this loss. We wanted to ‘see’ each other and feel connected in meaningful ways. The result was a sea of live video feeds, stacked in shifting grids. This was certainly useful for attempting to read emotion and perhaps attention but it felt thin and lacking, insubstantial, often alternating and exhausting.

The technology appeared to be giving us a version of what we had lost and yet it never felt quite right.

Disembodied images

Image by Adrienspawn, via https://www.deviantart.com/adrienspawn/art/Narcissus-and-Echo-845287570

We could see bodies but felt disembodied. The reason being that there is no sense of space or location. What is the location of Zoom/Teams/Skype meeting? It’s a non-space, it’s only a time and a list of people – at best its location is ‘on-screen’, which is no place at all.

The grid of faces is constantly shifting and laid-out differently on each person’s screen. Add to this the fact that we see our own body reflected back at us and we are forced to ask ‘Where am I?’. I can’t be ‘with’ the people I see on screen because I’m constantly reminded by the digital reflection of myself that I’m in my room at home, hunched over a computer. 

Attempts to mitigate this detached feeling simply throw us into the uncanny valley. The ‘together’ modes, where our images are placed onto a static picture of a room ‘side-by-side’ just serve to remind us of what we have lost. There I am looking back at myself – a digital, synchronous doppelganger floating alongside images of people laminated onto a two dimensional surface like samples on a microscope slide. The result is a distressing panopticon where we are trapped under the omnigaze of all, while somehow not ‘seeing’ each other or feeling any meaningful presence. It’s psychologically and socially exhausting with very little sense of connection.

Skeuomorphic presence 

This situation had arisen through ‘skeuomorphic presence’. As with most technological shifts the initial phases reflect that which went before. We start by replicating the modes we know in new contexts, before we move on to reimagining ways of being. As such, we insisted on the connection between bodies, co-presence and togetherness. And yet, what we found is that attempts to ‘mirror’ the body into the digital feel unreal.

We can read emotion on the face, but that face is a simulacrum. We desperately tried to forget that the camera is a special effect, an image, a process of disembodiment like the floating smile of the Cheshire cat. We clung onto the body to such an extent because we assumed, as with physical co-presence, that putting bodies side-by-side must generate a place but this is not the case and it’s what we need to design back in.

A publicity image from ‘Zoom’ illustrating skeuomorphic presence

Schematic presence

The temptation then might be then to create a more ‘realistic’ and volumetric digital space by moving towards three dimensional imagery, such as gaming*, and further still via ‘immersion’ with VR headsets and haptics etc. While this has many merits, I see it as a red herring which can easily throw us back into an incredibly intricate and exclusive uncanny valley. What I propose is not reaching for the ‘real’ but building on our spectacular ability to work with the map not the territory – to be able to operate in an imagined spatial-conceptual, or topological, manner. 

A great example of this is the London Underground map. It allows us to understand the ‘place’ of London schematically. It is not attempting to be ‘real’ and in doing so, gives the most relevant information we need to spatially and conceptually navigate the system it represents. So what might be the equivalent of the Underground map for our online lives?

Detail of London Underground map
Detail of London Underground map

Creating maps to build shared locations

A couple of years ago I was helping to run a set of design workshops with students with Fred Deakin. We were based out of the Design Museum but ran a number of the days fully online for flexibility and to help the students tune into online modes of collaboration. One of the exercises involved a kind of round-robin where an idea was passed round the group for comment and development. The key was that everyone would go in turn – but how to decide the order of speakers in the Zoom-like platform we were using?  

My suggestion was to draw a very simple diagram of a table (just a square) and place each of the participants’ names around it for each group. We then shared this simple ‘map’ into the non-space of the platform and asked the groups to go clockwise around the table. This was an easy way to establish the order the discussion should go in, but I also noticed that there was suddenly a greater sense of togetherness and place. You could imagine who you were sat next to or opposite, and while this didn’t change the functionality of the technology it did change the psychology of it. It didn’t take much to help people imagine themselves into a shared location. 

A simple graphic to share into a discussion amongst these eight students to give a sense of location. Currently our platforms don’t have the functionality to automatically produce schematics of this nature but it would be relatively easy to have a number of ‘layouts’ of this type to chose from. I’m not suggesting overlaying the video feeds where the names are, as this would simply replicate the problem I’m trying to avoid. This is a deliberately imaginary location.

Spatial collaboration

Diagram of the modes of space explored in this post
Modes of space explored in this post

Whether it’s the location of topic areas in the library, the paragraphs in an essay, the bullet points in our notes or the way we arrange files on our computers, understanding (how we arrange and develop our thoughts) has a spatial element to it.  Even the phrase ‘making a connection’ is inherently spatial. In a similar manner our social relations are spatial, from where we sit in a meeting to if we spend most of our time in the kitchen at parties. Both the social and the conceptual involve us creating schema and maps to navigate by.

Recently I was developing a set of ‘practice-genres’ to help define what areas of practice any given digital technology could help to facilitate. For example, the VLE/LMS might fall under the ‘organizational’ genre, while Zoom/Teams/Skype would be under ‘real-time teaching/collaboration’. One of the more interesting genres was ‘real-time spatial collaboration’ in which I placed Mural, Miro and Padlet (Although there are plenty of other examples that would fit the genre). 

Spatial collaboration is inherent when we are co-present in buildings but often lacking in the online environment. It is a form of collaboration which I’ve found the most rewarding during the pandemic, most notably during a session I ran at the Digitally Engaged Learning conference. In the session I asked everyone in a Zoom ‘room’ to join me in a Mural whiteboard. About 30 people appeared in the form of named cursors and answered three questions with digital sticky notes while we discussed via voice. I think only I had my camera on but nobody was looking at it as we were all concentrating on the Mural space. What we saw was a ‘collaborative swarm’ of cursors which was a little distracting at first but as the sticky notes appeared it suddenly felt like we were together, in the same place, working on the same thing. This is then not an attempt to recreate the physical, it is an imagined space and all the more powerful for that. 

A crop of the Mural board from my conference session

There was no uncanny valley here because there were no bodies present – the cursors and notes were enough to give a sense of where people were in a spatial-conceptual hybrid. We were building a map of thinking in a location where we felt co-present, embodied by our work, not by images of our bodies.

This hybrid mode, which maps both the thoughts and the location of individuals in a shared space generates a sense of co-presence which is more substantial and sustainable than a ‘sea of faces’ skeuomorphic presence. I believe that stepping away from our bodies in this manner is what is required for us to create the most rewarding and valuable forms of togetherness online. 

*Gaming 

It would be remiss for me not to mention what I believe to be the most successful form of online spatial collaboration which is multiplayer gaming. However, this is a complex area as a game will be geared around its own world, goals and challenges. It will not be designed to help get work done other than the work of the game-world itself. There is also the risk of the uncanny valley, here generated by attempts to render the ‘real’ in photorealistic CGI rather than by beaming in our webcam feeds into a grid. The results can be similar though, unless you are prepared to role-play. This is why games like Minecraft are so successful, they create an authentic sense of space and a dependable world with knowable rules and effects but, while it is aesthetically consistent, it is not attempting to recreate the ‘real’ in visual terms. This schematic aesthetic allows us to imagine ourselves into the space in a manner which more ‘real’ simulacra push us away from.  

A not ‘uncanny’ Dave

It doesn’t have to be ‘cutting edge’

As with my earlier example of the simple map of a table this approach doesn’t have to involve fancy platforms like Mural or game-worlds. Schematic presence comes in many forms. For example:

  • Co-editing an online document when each person’s cursor/location in the document is visible.
  • Creating a schematic of the ‘main’ and breakout rooms in a synchronous online session so that people can imagine moving between them spatially.
  • Using the whiteboard to answer a question in Zoom/Teams etc

The principle of schematic presence also applies to non ‘real-time’ situations too. It is possible to create a schematic of how different platforms or locations fit together when working on a project or a course. This provides a useful map to help navigate what could otherwise be a totally conceptually disconnected scattering of spaces (or non-spaces). Through developing and iterating a map of this type a group can negotiate their way towards a shared understanding of the imagined space. 

The key is to step away from the body as the primary instigator of presence and to generate schematic or topographic forms of location. Avoid trying to recreate the ‘real’ and instead concentrate on providing cues which help to spatialise thinking and identities.

Desituated Art School (a provocation)

Recently I had an interesting conversation with Professor Susan Orr in which she highlighted the current importance of rethinking the ontology of the Art School in the context of COVID and lockdowns past, and maybe future. This encouraged me to consider how the identity and approach of creative disciplines, especially ‘making’ focused disciplines, might need to shift where there is little or no access to physical spaces. This, I believe, is an important question to ask even when we do find our way back into our buildings.

Desituated Art School – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ-FoZFtRq0

Lockdown has highlighted that teaching online has significant advantages over working in-buildings. This includes, flexibility, forms of inclusivity, expanded forms of access, international/transcultural opportunities and the potential for more open and connected forms of education. Clearly, we lose a lot when we are denied our buildings but that doesn’t negate the importance of the question posed by Prof Orr.

The Digitally Engaged Learning conference

My submission to the Digitally Engaged Learning Conference responds to this in the forms of a short video-based provocation. It is designed to facilitate discussion in my session on how we might reimagine, rather than replicate, our institutions online. I’ve focused on the Art School here but I believe the ideas I raise apply to any higher education institution which is predominantly thought of in terms of physical spaces.  

The Digitally Engaged Learning Conference is fully online and free to attend. It takes place 24-25 September 2020, hosted by Parsons Design School. This is the link to register.

References in the video:

Other influences on this line of thinking.

Earlier in the year I was lamenting the narrative that universities were ‘shut’ when teaching was continuing online – only the buildings were shut. I had this in mind when reviewing the data from a survey we undertook with staff and students about the effects of COVID on teaching and learning. It struck me that much of what students appear to consider ‘teaching’ online is a mirror of modes which take place in our buildings. Lectures, seminars, tutorials. Asynchronous activities and the provision of recordings is much appreciated in terms of flexibility but generally not thought of as part of teaching.

In this sense the physical building, and the teaching modes associated with it, are still what defines ‘teaching’ even when we are fully online. Online is not yet conceptualised as a teaching location in its own right when students are taking part in what is considered to be a face-to-face course, even when the design of the course involves a significant amount of online activity.

I have also been influenced in my thinking by colleagues who have been exploring what it means to teach creative subjects online. Tobias Revell has been defining the Desituated Design Studio. Tobias and his colleague Eva Verhoven have been running design studios fully online and across multiple locations internationally. Their approach doesn’t start with the building as a paradigm but with modes of interaction. The work of Dr Mark Ingham, who is a Reader in Critical and Nomadic Pedagogies, is relevant too. Mark’s work isn’t about digital per say, it’s more of an ideology which looks for the liminal spaces in which learning takes place. The value of liminal moments is keenly felt socially but is it always understood in pedagogical terms as well?

It’s time to reimagine

My headline from Lockdown is that we (including students) often have a too narrow conceptions of what constitutes teaching. We need to expand what we think of when we say ‘Art School’ or ‘University’ to integrate online or our students will not see the value of much of what we now offer.

The digital erosion of trust

This post is an exploration of a theme which I mentioned in the 16/04/2020 edition of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast with  Bonni Stachowiak and Jose Bowden.

it was also part of the discussion at the online workshop Bonnie Stewart and myself ran at OER20.

Given the dangers currently involved in daily life it’s understandable why many people want to employ every aspect of information which can be reaped from the digital environment to reduce risk. In China we hear of an app which shows the body temperature of your delivery driver and in the UK there appear to be plans for an app which will tell you if you have been in close proximity to someone who may have the virus. Forms of surveillance that only weeks ago would have been considered such a serious infringement of our rights they might have been left unsaid, are now being mooted on a daily basis. 

CC:BY Peter Leth https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterleth/4505254988

This is where I find the phrase: “Just because we can doesn’t mean that we should” extremely useful. The reason being that once technology presents us with an opportunity to reduce risk – with the inevitable negation of trust* – we feel a pressure to employ it (who wants to be the person who has to say ‘We decided not to use it’ when something goes wrong?). This plays out in numerous ways across society and in education, which myself and Bonnie Stewart explored in our session for OER20.

Our OER20 session

Care vs Surveillance 

In preparing the session, Bonnie suggested that many of the most contentious issues around the use of technology for teaching can be expressed as a tension between care and surveillance. For example, it could be considered caring to track students in digital platforms to understand how they are engaging with their learning. It can also be considered surveillance. In technology, care and surveillance tend to go hand-in-hand.

If we ignore this data and don’t identify that some students have all but dropped out then are we failing in our duty as educators? Once this source of information exists we have to be extremely deliberate in our reasons for using it or avoiding it. In a sector which is increasingly massified, data often stands in for relationships as the notional medium for care, and yet no institution has ever increased surveillance without claiming its role is to create a more caring, or safer, environment. 

Trust vs Fairness

The main casualty here is trust. Whenever we introduce something to increase ‘fairness’ we also reduce trust. For example, with online submissions of assessed work we track very closely if students hand-in work late. We can also identify which student we think submitted which piece of work by looking at their login. In many cases we don’t need to trust students to do the right thing because we have a digital process which negates trust in favour of fairness.

This could also be seen as protecting the reputation of the institution and the value of what it awards. Trust vs fairness and surveillance vs care are not simple problems to solve, they are tensions which require complex negotiation across managers, teachers and students. Even so, we all have stories of technologies which have been introduced that circumvent any negotiation by reifying aspects of surveillance and fairness as standard ‘features’. This often makes concrete an implicit aspect of institutional culture which actually required significant discretion.

Upholding freedoms 

As education moves online we are going to have to get better at stating, and upholding, our values around trust and care with the concomitant acknowledgment of the risk we are accepting to protect certain freedoms. If not, then education will continue to merge with the corporate/civic surveillance state we are now only too aware of. To avoid sleepwalking into this new normal there will be times where we must deliberately refuse to use aspects of the data and control which technology offers, even when there are demands framed in terms of fairness or reduction of risk. 

Freedom is risky and risk requires trust. I believe that educational institutions, especially universities, should create spaces of negotiated risk. My hope is that we can do this in both our physical and digital spaces so that the latter does not become a surveillance tool we use to ‘balance out’ trust gifted in other environments. Certainly now is a time to uphold trust in the face of surveillance whether that be with our students as we teach online or in wider society. Extending our ability to know and control is not axiomatic as it is better to be free than to be risk free.

The Global (viral) Village

Back in the day, when the internet was a place of hope, upbeat phrases abounded such as: Information SuperHighway and Web Surfing. The Coronavirus has illuminated the fruition and implications of one of these classic West Coast style phrases, The Global Village.

Thought experiment

To explore this idea I’m not going to claim any solid evidence or analysis but would like to pose a question: “How has access to the Web influenced the UK population’s response to the Coronavirus?”

I suggest that without access to an abundance of information on the spread of the virus and national responses beyond the UK we would not be ahead of Public Health England’s timings on social distancing and the closing of institutions. I also suspect we would be seeing less panic buying and less anxiety about a ‘lack of action’. 

To be clear, I’m not commenting on the rights and wrongs of any course of action. I only wish to explore the influence of the Web as a global network. 

By https://www.pixilart.com/santaclawswolf

It’s a big heap of everything – like a village.

One of the aspects of the Web which makes it so difficult to make sense of is that it’s always operating in multiple, intersecting modes. For example, what we see on a daily basis online is a chaotic mix of official announcements and total speculation. We see complex data next to pure antidote – published ‘fact’ interwoven with conversation and gossip. The traditional demarcation of ‘information’ and ‘speculation’ by notions of public and private has dissolved. Just like a village, word travels fast and the community decides how to respond whatever the leaders might be saying. 

If we wind back around 20 years then we would be receiving news of the virus mainly through broadcast and print media.There were news websites back then but they tended to operate in a broadcast mode. In 2000 around 26% of the UK had a connection compared to over 96% today and, of course, there was no Social Media to speak of. The information environment was largely as it had been for the preceding 60 years or so with institutions we trusted conveying the ‘truth’ of events. 

While broadcast media would have given us a sense of what was happening ‘abroad’ it would have seemed more remote and any scare mongering would have been done by outlets which were known to do this as a matter of course. Even as the virus appeared in the UK it’s difficult to imagine mass panic buying of toilet paper before any state of emergency had been called.

It’s a two-way street

One of the main factors in the ‘it’s a big heap of everything’ effect is that anyone with a connection can publish. This means that the Web is a powerful communication network for ‘us’ as well as ‘them’ – however you want to ascribe that distinction. As such, if an institution wants to cancel events ahead of official advice then it can, and at negligible cost in terms of communication. 

We have access to an abundance of hybrid, village-like information. We also have the means to take mass action – a shout from the village green which can reach tens of thousands. There is no need to go through official channels, so we can both decide and respond without the nod from the institutions which used to control-the-message.

What is Rome? – Whatever it is, it has blurrier edges now.

My hope is that we will respond to the effects of the The Global Village coming to pass by collectively admitting that the biggest challenges we face do not respect national borders. So far, on a national level, our membership of this Global Village and the complex world it reveals has amplified our desire to run back to simple, often negatively defined, forms of identity. When the virus is past its peak and we have done all we can to keep people safe will we better understand that our planet is now more of a village than a collection of nations?


Undisciplined advantage

We regularly use the word ‘practice’ at creative arts universities to denote an area of expertise and tends to relate to a general discipline area. For example, people will broadly associate themselves with Fine Art as a practice or Media Production. Many colleagues in my part of the university would see themselves as having an ‘educational’ practice of some form. 

Snakes and ladders
The pros and cons of being disciplined (CC-AT Matt Brown)

A lack of practice

A couple of weeks ago I was asked what my practice was and I struggled to answer. I started work in the late nineties, just as the Web was gaining ground as a new location for media, design and tech practices. I’ve taught in communications media, made digital media prototypes for the BBC, developed online distance courses and undertaken national research studies on digital education. Ultimately though, I don’t associate with a particular discipline and, as an extension of that, I don’t feel I have a practice. I also don’t hold a PhD and so am missing an easy identifier of expertise.

Given this lack of easy labels I’m often defined as ‘digital’ which is never very helpful as digital is a medium, not a practice. Claiming digital as a practice is like describing carpentry as ‘wood’ or painting as ‘art supplies’. The result of this miscategorisation is I’m often asked to ‘fix the screen’ in meetings when the presenter is struggling to make their slides appear. I have, at times, gone as far as to hide my technical skills so as not to be given the ‘tech-guy/digital’ mantle which risks my exclusion from strategic activities in favour of being brought in to fix things when they are ‘broken’. 

In many ways my lack of a practice has been a huge advantage. It gives me a clear perspective as I don’t come to an understanding through the specific lens of any given discipline with all its attendant histories and politics. In essence, I don’t need to be territorial to establish my credibility and can choose methods, tools and modes-of-thinking from disciplines or practice-areas which are most likely to progress a project or illuminate an area of complexity. 

Working in a third space

I was reminded of this when reading about a partnership between Central St Martins (one of our colleges) and Tokyo Institute of Technology. This has been designed as a hybrid, transdisciplinary partnership between the arts and sciences. This approach and philosophy is elegantly elucidated in a piece about the partnership by Dr. Betti Marenko in which she discusses the location of transdisciplinarity as a ‘third space’, sitting outside other disciplinary spaces while drawing on, and making connections with them. 

“Transdisciplinarity allows us to go beyond what exists already. Instead, it pushes us to make the present more complicated, more interesting, and richer. It is within this space of risk, the unexpected, and positive uncertainty that the real adventure of thinking together becomes palpably alive.”

Dr. Betti Marenko

This resonated with me as it set’s my lack of a practice and disciplinary home in a new light. I’ve always enjoyed questioning the structure of any given mode-of-thought or method and have often felt restless when I become too comfortable with a particular genre of understanding. I also feel restless when I’m travelling towards the center of a given community as I can sense the emphasis shifting from questioning to interpersonal allegiances and politics. The all-too-common academic milieu where who holds what position becomes more important than the value of the thinking itself. 

For me, all disciplines bring depth but often with the cost that what constitutes a legitimate question and approach is narrowed. I want to stay in the ‘space of risk and positive uncertainty’ which is one of the many reasons I enjoy working in and around the creative arts. If this means that I lose easy identifiers of expertise and practice then that’s a price I’m willing to pay. I’ll never gain the kind of credibility colleagues who become experts in their field will but I might be able to make connections that they can’t and I reduce the chance of becoming stuck in a specific currency of expertise.

Travels with an alt identity

Over a decade ago, I took a home brewed virtual ethnography approach to a project looking at communal and cooperative player behaviour in World of Warcraft. It appeared to me that the teamwork and sense of belonging in the game was exactly what we were trying to foster in online learning. 

The method I used was to sit with a player as they gamed, asking the occasional question while I set-up screen recording software. I then left the hard-drive with them and asked them to record any moments that they thought were significant over a period of about a week. I picked up the recordings and made notes as I watched them. Then I went back to the player with specific questions about aspects of the play and the dynamics of the gaming community I needed interpreting. It worked well and led to my thinking on ‘Social Capital in the Pursuit of Slaying Dragons’.

Four turtles and a Moorhen
Feeling very ‘alt’
( John K CC BY-NC-SA)

In the world and of the world

What was clear was that the players were extremely present in the game world, as embodied by their player avatars – they weren’t controlling a character from afar, they were within the world when they were gaming. The game was a space in which they were co-present, which is one of the reasons that an ethnographic approach worked. This principle influenced much of my subsequent work and I find it useful when considering the notion of digital fluency. In essence, you can’t understand the modes-of-engagement of a space by only learning it’s technical functionality as if it were a tool – you need to understand how it works as a social space. A simple example is Twitter – learning about ‘at’ replies, retweets and direct messages doesn’t tune you into the culture or discourse of the network of co-present individuals. You completely miss the role and value of Resident-mode platforms if you only consider how it works in abstracted, technical, terms.

So when it comes to teaching about the potential role and value of Resident online spaces I tend to take a digital fieldwork approach which draws on this ethnographic thinking. There are usually decent guides on the basics of online platforms you can point people too so, beyond this, what becomes important is the fieldwork brief which provides a motivation to engage with the dialogue and the culture of the space. This is what I had in mind when I designed the digital fieldwork activities which we used as part of the Teaching Complexity seminar series.

Digital Fieldwork activities

The activities range from simply appearing in a Resident space (for those that have never operated in this mode) through to experimenting with an alternative identity or faking out a social media platform. The six activities come with a short video intro from me as explaining the context for the approach is extremely important. This is especially the case for the activities which involve experimenting with identity as it’s not about tricking anyone, so participants need to be sensitive in the way they present themselves and connect.   

2min intro to the activities

The identity based activities are inherently self-reflexive as they encourage participants to not be ‘themselves’ – this creates contrasts which can be reflected upon. In our daily engagement with Resident online spaces we will struggle to ‘see’ how the platform is influencing us because we are generally connected to like-minded, similar people and are therefore focused on the substance of those relationships rather than on the structure or culture of the environment. 

This is similar to the anthropological principle that it’s difficult to see our own culture because we are normalised to it, which is why when we travel we gain insights through the contrast with other cultures. Taking on an alternative identity online is the equivalent of going ‘abroad’. The same Social Media platform is many different places depending on who you appear to be and how the platform encourages you to build your network based on your personal characteristics (age, gender, location, ethnicity, and anything else it can glean from your data)

My Instagram experience with an alt identity

A good example of this in the digital fieldwork was my own experience of the ‘Try on a New Identity’ activity. I started an Instagram account (having not had one before) as an alternative persona and began by following profiles/accounts suggested by the platform. The result was extremely informative. I gained an insight into the predominant aesthetic (in terms of fashion and ‘look’) of the platform and found just how much more sophisticated Social Media had become in shaping connections since I last ‘started from scratch’ in Twitter over a decade ago. Because I was an alternate persona it was extremely obvious why Instagram was throwing certain things at me based on my apparent age, location and gender. 

It was now clear to me how the platform might cause anxiety through the pressure to conform to a very particular body image, mode-of-speech and lifestyle. It was also clear that various forms of authenticity were being performed which appeared to shift as accounts became more popular (the I’m-so-popular-I-can-now-reveal-the-real-me effect). Lastly, I was shocked that despite certain flags from the platform it was impossible to tell the difference between a person and a brand. I didn’t know when I was being sold something and, in some senses, everyone was selling ‘self’.

For me it was a distressing window into the convergence of self/product/brand which I often hear discussed but hadn’t seen so directly. The experience gave me a real insight into one of the potential reasons why our students can feel anxious about the online environment. Instagram implies that everyone can be famous but only by conforming to very particular ways-of-being (or performed ways-of-being). Obviously I had experienced a very limited and, in many ways, naive window into Instagram, which is what I had set out to do. There a many positive aspects to engaging with the platform which I didn’t experience because of the route I had taken.

Caution

My advice on approaching the identity related activities

To be clear (and in keeping with my own advice on the fieldwork) I was careful to only like posts and never commented or got into conversation. I didn’t gain access to anything that wasn’t already openly visible on the Web.  I also only ran the account for a couple of weeks and it’s now mothballed. The activities are not designed to be used as research and as you can see I’ve been totally non specific even in this reflection. The persona I chose was not special, famous or someone anyone could have hoped to gain something from. I wouldn’t claim any persona is ‘neutral’ but I tried to be as boring as possible. 

Reflections from participants

You can read some participants’ reflections on the digital fieldwork activities on the Teaching Complexity website. One of the most encouraging aspects of the approach for me was the depth of discussion generated by participants simply considering, but not doing, the activities. There was much discussion and reflection in the online sessions from people exploring why certain activities made them feel uncomfortable and the implications this might have for students who would be navigating similar choices. Ultimately, the activities are a useful prompt to generate thinking about how our identities are being used, and possibly abused, online and how this is now inextricable from the overall student experience. 

Please talk while I talk

One of the highlights of last year was designing and running a series of open, online seminars with our online Visiting Fellow, Dr Bonnie Stewart. The ‘Teaching Complexity’ series was 100% open, in the sense that anyone with a connection to the Web could attend for free. The territory the seminars explored was the complexity of the digital environment we now teach in and how we might respond. 

The topics covered within the seminars all responded to the opportunities and challenges of the networked environment. A common theme being how to counter the creep of polarisation and support a diversity of voices within digital spaces.

One advantage of the seminars being open is that all of the materials (slides, recordings, comments etc) are available at the Teaching Complexity website which I created using our blogging platform. I’ve included a list of the seminars at the end of the post and know that quite a few people caught-up with them this way after the live ‘event’. 

The motivation to run the seminars was two fold:

Understanding the new teaching environment

Responding to the complexity of the Web as a teaching and  learning environment is an important topic to discuss. I now work on the principle that ‘All Courses are Blended Courses’ as I’d argue that any student, on any course, will spend significant amounts of time online. Some of that time will be spent discussing, or negotiating, the course with peers even were there is no, formal, online aspect to the curriculum. You’d be hard pressed to find a student who isn’t keen to develop their ability to navigate the Web for study or to make contacts which might lead to work. The Digital Creative Attributes we developed at UAL are a reflection of this but I realised that while I had clear principles in mind as we developed the DCAF I had not provided many examples of what a good response to the DCAF might look like in design terms. Hence Teaching Complexity.

Teaching Complexity

A good example of open practice

It was clear that for some the Open Practice Values I introduced at UAL caused some confusion. I personally see my approach here as a failure of communication on my part with some useful institutional lessons learned. I spend quite a lot of time considering open approaches and feel part of a community of open practitioners, so I underestimated how alien this line of thinking can be to people who are mainly (and rightly) focused on keeping the wheels of the university turning. When I presented the Principles at committee they split the room, with some immediately seeing the relevance (both in the manner in which the university could connect outwards and in the way our colleges could collaborate more closely) and some clearly worried that this would be yet another, distinct, layer of work which would detract rather than enhance, day-to-day teaching (A dis-integrated view of Open Practice). Given this, the Teaching Complexity Seminars were my ‘Show not Tell’ example of what teaching which embodies the Open Practice Values can look like. 
——————————————————-

Attendance and feedback

We had between 50-100 participants at each of the main seminars and more will have caught up with the recordings later. Those that responded to the evaluation questionnaire were mainly teaching staff, in roles overseeing or enhancing teaching or people involved in staff development of different forms. People attended from across the globe with the main locations being Europe and North America. Having been involved in this type of teaching quite regularly I’ve become a little blase about the geography involved and have to remind myself how incredible it is that we can facilitate these kinds of international moments so easily. 

The feedback was almost universally positive and at times effusive. A number of participants commented that they have very little staff development opportunities at their institution so the seminars provided a rare moment for them to consider and discuss themes which were unlikely to appear in the normal flow of their work. I feel that working in an open mode is integral to my work, especially as I represent a large institution with the capacity to be outward facing. Given that, I hadn’t thought of the seminars as ‘generous’, but this is how many participants respond to them. Overall I would have liked to have seen more people from my own institution at the seminars but UAL tends to be attracted by creative arts rather than teaching themes. I need to put some more thought into how best to describe opportunities like this in a manner which resonates at home as it were.

Some key points I took away from the seminars:

Be explicit

Given that anyone could turn-up and type in a name of their choice there was always a risk that someone could be disruptive with no cost to themselves. My view is that this would be extremely unlikely unless the topic under discussion is contentious or the facilitator is particularly famous/notorious. I equate this to Wikipedia vandalism – yes, the articles on Trump, Iran or Transgender are likely to be the focus of edit wars and vandalism but articles on Contructivism or John Dewey are unlikely to get messed with, because where’s the fun in that? The Teaching Complexity seminars definitely fell into the latter category – as would most teaching scenarios. Even so, I made sure to introduce every seminar with a brief and friendly talk about the social contract of the space. We were there to explore complex themes through mutually supportive discussion. I also highlighted that the sessions were being recorded and would be made openly available. This, I felt, gave me the right to remove people from the room if they stepped outside of these bounds. We never came close to anyone breaking the trust of the room but I still think it’s worthwhile being explicit about social and collaborative expectations. If you’re upfront about this then any disruptive individual is, in some ways, excommunicating themselves through their actions and you mitigate being placed into a ‘policing behaviour’ role as it’s likely there will be, post-event, group consensus on removing people.

Is anybody with me? 

Small moments of sharing go a long way in creating a sense of belonging online. For example, we would sometimes ask what the temperature was at participant’s locations with a notional prize for the highest and lowest (the range was always spectacular). The ‘live slides’ where everyone could write (or scrawl) a response to a question on screen on the whiteboard gave a powerful sense of being in the same, communal, space. In webinar type spaces like the one we were using it’s crucial for people to get a sense that they are co-present with others. This does not come for ‘free’ as it does in face-to-face environments, so these small moments of sharing become very important.  The risk of people moving slides, drawing all over the screen or accidentally un-muting their mic at a random moment was more than balanced out by the inclusive atmosphere that giving people these options supported (we did have a few strange moments but they were all harmless). Giving everyone ‘moderator’ status by default was a good way of subverting the didactic design principle of the platform we were using (Blackboard Collaborate Ultra).

A favourite moment for me was when Dave Cormier asked people to play with the whiteboard while we waited to get started. This is the result:

This is a good example of responses to a ‘live slide’ question. One of the interesting aspects of this is how people started to highlight or draw around answers they felt were important as the seminars progressed. The messiness here creates a friendly atmosphere which somewhat counters the slightly sterile and inhuman feeling of the default webinar platform.

I also very much enjoyed how quickly somebody (in about 5 seconds…) wrote ‘Moms Spaghetti’ on the following slide (see the ‘classic memes’ section of pop-culture…).

Please talk while I’m talking

Building on the point above, I’m a huge fan of encouraging people to use the text chat while the seminar is in progress. Actually getting this going requires some facilitation in itself which is why all of the sessions would have a lead facilitator and a kind of support facilitator who could give some momentum to the chat and highlight interesting questions. When you have 50 or more people the chat can get quite lively and really helps the facilitators by giving a live indication of how well they are connecting with the group. All the facilitators for the seminars were experienced in speaking online so could respond to the chat as the seminar progressed. This is one of the distinct advantages of the online space over the face-to-face as it allows sessions to be discussed in the moment – it erodes the ‘expert broadcast’ aspect of online teaching in a very pleasing way.

If it could have been a video, you’re doing it wrong

I have a general rule of thumb that if, on reflection, a synchronous online event could have been a YouTube video then you have got the approach wrong. Why turn up ‘live’ if there is no interaction? Even though I was vocal about this in the planning stages, a few of the sessions had long sections of ‘just talk’. What I’ve subsequently realised is that these sessions were not actually all that long but that our concentration threshold is somewhat shorter in a webinar room than in a physical room. Some of that is to do with there being less to look at – less, or no, physical presence. It is also to do with the culture of the space, by which I mean that when we are in front of our laptops we are used to interacting quite often unless we are in ‘Netflix mode’. The differing socio-cultural expectations of online vs face-to-face are probably more of a factor than the notion of a concentration threshold as, by my estimate, it’s acceptable to speak for at least 20 minutes with no interaction face-to-face but this is probably reduced to around 7 minutes online. Beyond 7 minutes I suspect we start going into Netflix mode or getting distracted by the other tabs we have open. 

Be clear it’s not about absorbing everything

Speaking to a couple of UAL colleagues in the following weeks I discovered that the seminars had been quite overwhelming for them, with ‘a lot going on’ at the same time (i.e. the facilitator speaking, parallel text chat, whiteboard interactions, voting and Tweeting). It was a useful reminder to me that I personally enjoy navigating, and reflecting on,  multiple channels simultaneously but that this is not the case for everyone. So, perhaps my 7min threshold is too short and people need longer periods of ‘broadcast’ mode to be able to take in new topics. Overall I suspect the biggest cognitive shift for many is paying attention to the speaker while simultaneously keeping up with the text chat. That would certainly be overwhelming if you felt you had to take every detail in, so a message at the start explaining that the aim is not to absorb everything that’s happening on screen might help.
————————-

Learning from the seminars

The substance of the Teaching Complexity seminars was extremely interesting with sessions like Inclusive Spaces exploring ideas which are often not considered in digital contexts. Commonly the notion of ‘innovation’, which is often attached to digital approaches, avoids difficult thinking around inclusion and exclusion by implying that it’s going to change the way we interact so the problem simply won’t exist and therefore does not need to be confronted…

Beyond the ‘content’ of the seminars, I will be incorporating what I’ve learnt about the format of the sessions (the modes of interaction) into future work. This includes a project which is looking at transcultural arts education across an international partnership of arts schools and the development of more sophisticated ‘hybrid’ events which take place face-to-face and online in parallel.

1. Connected Teaching  – Jan 8th 3-4pm GMT –
Recording and slides
Designing ‘connected’ teaching and learning which works on and offline.
Facilitators: Bonnie Stewart, Amy Collier, David White

2. Openness and Prestige –  Jan 29th 3-4pm GMT
Recording and slides
Exploring how ‘giving stuff away’ and working openly online can be good for you and your students.
Facilitators: Bonnie Stewart, Catherine Cronin

Digital fieldwork part 1 – Feb 5th 3-4pm GMT
Recording and slides
Get tooled up to undertake some exploratory digital fieldwork.
Facilitators: Matt Lingard, David White

3. Complexity and creativity –  Feb 19th 3-4pm GMT
Recording and slides
Learn how to take a creative approach to complex subjects.
Facilitators: David Cormier, Tobias Revell

Digital fieldwork part 2 – Feb 26th 3-4pm GMT
Recording
Sharing your digital fieldwork experiences.
Facilitators: Matt Lingard, David White, Sheldon Chow4. Inclusive spaces – Mar 5th 3-4pm GMT
Recording and slides
Ensuring digital teaching and learning welcomes a variety of voices
Facilitators: Bonnie Stewart, Maha Bali , Chris Giliard