A brief history of the Web could read ‘In the service of profit, everything open was fenced in’, which sounds like an opening line from a Cormac McCarthy novel. The result is platform capitalism or vast walled gardens of data and activity. So vast we often forget they have edges.

AI follows this model, hoovering up all available data into an inscrutable set of probabilities shrink wrapped in language. This can be useful for ‘evergreen’ content but is limited when we want to go beyond anything which has gone before.

Whether it’s ‘classic’ search or an LLM, it is easy to fall into the idea that these ‘places’ contain all that can be known. That all answers are available because everything that it is possible to know is online. We assume the garden is so vast that the walls cease to matter. Of course, this is the impression that any large platform wants you to have, ‘there is no need to wander off’.

Hyponiscience

In effect we treat many platforms as if they were all knowing, or omniscient and thereby put ourselves into a state of Hyponisience. A false sense of epistemic mastery.

For most of the time this is relatively harmless. Most information seeking is within a standard canon; there are correct answers. However, when we are looking to produce new knowledge and new thinking, or even to expand our worldview Hyponisience becomes problematic.

While the emergence of AI is what led me to invent this term, it is not a new problem. It also describes the process of being algorithmically crammed into an ever decreasing epistemic space driven by an attention economy. Hyponisience is also a state of only believing the information within your bubble. A state which fuels polarisation and which is form many a haven in the face of the complexities and pluralism of information abundance.

How do we counter this false state?

All flavours of information literacy advise engagement with multiple sources. Now perhaps we should advise to engage with multiple platforms online, and occasionally offline. Rather than a hierarchy of quality (From Journal Papers through to Overheard in the Pub), we could have a quality of range: how many places did you draw information from? How distinct were these places? Reaching beyond the walls of a single garden and having a wander can only lead to a broader, more meaningful, view. This also opens up Post-Critical possibilities, whereby some of the ‘places’ we seek might be people and/or embodied knowledge.

For example, as I outlined in my ‘AI Learning Gambit’ post, a new literacy involves knowing when not to use, or to go beyond, AI. In a post-provenance era, the best way to maintain some agency and see beyond the walls is to actively choose the less convenient, but possibly more rewarding, options.

The majority of talks I attended at the recent CHEAD/UAL ‘AI in Art and Design Education’ were from academics discussing how they, and their students, have been incorporating AI into their creative processes. Many of the examples demonstrated how students are using image-based AI platforms to generate concepts and designs as part of building a portfolio response to a creative brief.

The attitude towards AI seems to have shifted from a defensive ‘it’s not very good at X or Y’ to more of a ‘it needs to get better at X and Y so it’s more useable’. I think this shift is because there is less fear that AI will consume entire subjects, and more confidence in incorporating as part of a larger workflows or processes.

Only one session I attended (apart from mine), a talk by James Dalby, was still exploring how AI functions and what the implications/limits of this might be. Whereas for most teaching staff there is an ‘it’s everywhere now’ effect. Students are using it because it’s available so we have to make sense of what it means ‘in practice’. Under these circumstances, how it works is less important than what it can, and cannot, do.

There was discussion about anxiety amongst students as to the ethics of using AI and the impact it might have on their prospects. One academic who simply said, ‘you need to run through the ethics first or students get quite anxious/angry’.

What I saw in the many examples of student work shown was a new form of context collapse. One in which the relationships between practice, medium and subject start to breakdown.

‘Classic’ Context Collapse

When the web started to become mainstream the fact that ‘anyone could publish’ created a frisson of excitement (crowd sourcing, the wisdom of the crowd etc.) and/or a sense of panic. Which side of this line you were usually depended on how much of your power was conferred on you by established knowledge institutions or The Fourth Estate.  

Assessing the validity and quality of information by checking which institution it was produced by fell away. Suddenly we had Wikipedia, which could be contributed to by anyone *shocked face*. We had individuals finding massive reach and influence without first having to gain power through institutional hierarchies with all their checks, balances and positioning (some might say biases).

In addition to this, the crisp boundary between the notion of ‘published work’ and ‘just saying stuff’ stared to get blurry. Yes, citation styles for blogposts and Tweets were invented, but what was the relative weight, or truth, of these media?

I must admit that I loved the period where longstanding, gatekeeping, institutions started to lose their monopoly on the flow of information but before things got truly toxic. We didn’t need to kick down the gates, we could simple go around them, and as someone who was suspicious of the hierarchies of academia, I was happy to use the web to get my ideas out there and to find a welcoming international community to be part of.

This was around the time social media was emerging but before it had become a finely honed attention machine. Manipulating behaviour via the algorithm was not so prevalent and the environment was yet to become dangerously polarised.

Classic collapse and education

For education, all of this was a headache. Knowledge was suddenly abundant and eminently copy-and-paste-able. Curriculum routed in the idea that information seeking is hard-work and has predictable frameworks for assessing quality and validity began to feel creaky. Pupils and students were bamboozled by edicts not to use Wikipedia, when they could see for themselves that the quality was as high, if not higher, than the dusty textbooks that were lauded as solid and reliable.

The link between the inherent quality of information and classic information literacy snapped. The context of production and the genre of the media was still important. If it was produced by the BBC or by a reputable university then it was probably solid, but there was a bunch of other choices now and some of them looked pretty good. There was also the problem that almost everything that was claimed to be ‘reliable’ demanded payment. The utopia of the web suggested that ‘information should be free’ which made the established institutions look like walled gardens (I was working at one which had gardens with walls round them at the time…).

Effects of the collapse

The classic collapse is still in full force and has led to the relativism of post-truth and alternative facts. Breaking the link between authenticity and ‘trusted’ institutions created a complex information environment which was difficult to navigate. Populist voices appeared with simple narratives that papered over complexity and assured the anxious there is a nobility in a narrow worldview.

In effect, we didn’t have the capability to expand our thinking and fell back into the certainty of difference over the nuances of plurality. ‘Progress’ was now presented as a return to simpler times and protecting one’s own. Technologies which had made complexity and richness of voices visible were retooled to maximise attention by playing to the comfort of prejudice, which includes the righteousness of outrage. The popularists are adeptly using the technologies which revealed a complex world to target their simplest messages.

The new collapse and education

The new collapse amplifies uncertainty by removing more of the anchors by which we have historically understood our world. Our educational notions of subject and practice are being eroded by technologies which can transmute media and genre. Now text can be audio, can be video, can be image. This is significant because our frameworks of understanding and evaluating are based on there being clear boundaries between mediums and genres.

A photograph is produced by a camera, a radio programme is produced by speaking, a written text is produced through the practice of writing etc. Everything is now simply data to be manipulated into a human-readable output, everything can be everything else. This is a realisation of Haraway’s thinking on data as a universal and dehumanising language. Now that none of these human-centric distinctions hold, our models of ‘subject’ become fragile.

In this new context collapse we lose form, practice and genre as epistemological co-ordinates for sense-making. When everything can be everything else without requiring significant practice-based skill to make those translations, form becomes mercurial and our systems of evaluation begin to feel arbitrary.

This is not necessarily felt at the point of production but given that almost all cultural production is now mediated through a screen this ‘form slidey-ness’ makes the work of interpretation challenging. Historically our institutions and the genre of production/communication have been our makers of authenticity. Add the old and the new collapse together and it becomes difficult to get a foothold via subject, genre or literacies. This is not to say that we now all make our own truth, but rather that we must find new approaches to negotiating collective understanding which don’t rely heavily on pre-collapse literacies.

Context collapses and Creative Education

I presented The AI Learning Gambit at the CHEAD/UAL event. One of the comments in text chat was ‘Creative Education is broad, and AI will impact subjects unevenly. Fine Art will probably be ok but Graphic Design might have a hard time’ (I’m paraphrasing).

My view is that the character and focus of subjects will shift (as they always have done) and some will be forced to change more than others. There will always be a need for individuals who have mastered a specific practice, but context collapse will reduce the numbers required (while also raising the status of these specialists). On the other hand, there will be an increased need for Design and Fine Art ways of working. By which I mean the ability to read the world, think critically and develop/assess ideas. Critical thinking and the production of new knowledge cannot be industrialised by any technology.

Design and Fine Art approaches become every more crucial

In their purest form, Design and Fine Art are based on producing new knowledge and developing new ways of seeing. Practice, style, media and technique are vehicles for something larger, rather than being the end in-of-itself. (Here I’m thinking of Fine Art in its more recent led-by-concept form rather than the traditional atelier, here-is-the-right-way-to-paint approach.)

Attempting to define Design and Fine Art is a risky business as any categorisation feels like drawing lines through blurry spaces. Even so, its worth mapping some of these out.

	Design	Fine Art
Impetuous	New knowledge	New ways of seeing
Driver	Extrinsic	Intrinsic
Approach	Innovation	Questioning
Direction	Convergent	Divergent
Identity	Brand	Artist
Grouping	Teams	Individual
Positioning	Objective	Subjective
Methods	Shared	Personal

It’s useful to see these a broad trends rather than distinctions, as it’s easy to think of examples where one, or many, of these are switched. For example, there are many Fine Art collectives (‘groups’) and many individual designers operate as brands (‘artists’). The interchangeability of these categories within Design and Fine Art exists because they are both underpinned by intentionality and agency. Strong work produced by both goes beyond imitation. At UAL many of our Design courses are underpinned by a Fine Art philosophy and Design-as-a-method is often used in our Fine Art courses.

I’m not suggesting all Creative Arts education should be Design or Fine Art courses, I’m suggesting that it would benefit our students if this philosophy and approach underpinned most of what we do. (and I think it does for the most part)

What is crucial for an increasing majority of our students is to be equipped with ability to develop new knowledge and new ways of seeing. These have the most robust currency in a screen mediated, context collapsed world, while the practices required to realise, or express, thinking and seeing remain important but secondary (again, to be clear – for most, not all).

In many ways I’m simply describing a well put together creative arts course. Valid responses to subject benchmarks and our UAL assessment criteria will incorporate reflective, critical and analytical approaches. As students move through any course/learning journey they should be developing their own position relative to subject, ethics and methods of production (labour). There should be a shift in emphasis from developing practice-based skills to using those practices in the service of their thinking.

In short, context collapse and emerging technologies don’t demand a radical change of direction for creative education, they demand we operate with integrity and confidence. As a general principle ‘doing less, better’ as a way of responding to the complexity of the collapses would be sensible. (i.e. don’t use technology to make a system which is already overstuffed ‘more efficient’ – deal with the root cause and give people more time to think.)

I was asked by Professor Maggi Savin-Baden to write a short piece on this for the forthcoming Savin-Baden, M. and Savin-Baden, Z. (2026) Realistic and Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence. Florida: CRC Press.

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In addition to AI’s ability to produce ‘natural language’ style text, there are also a plethora of platforms that can produce media such as images, video, and sound. For example, a request for an image of an oil painting of a landscape produces a convincing version of a work that doesn’t exist. At first glance, it appears that AI has made a successful incursion into the sacred space of creativity and the arts, but to what extent is this the case?

The question of AI and the Arts centres on our framing of creativity and authorship. What would be of more value, an image created by a named artist or an ‘identical’ image created by AI? We are attracted to notions the original, the scarce and the idea of the singular author. Once authorship becomes lost in complexity the value of the work diminishes.

The act, or the possibility, of mass production reframes what might have once been understood as creative into the mechanistic. By way of an example, I have two mugs I enjoy drinking coffee from. One is made by IKEA, it is a pleasing design and pleasant to drink from but embodies almost no cultural capital. The creative act of the original designer is disembodied-through-mass-production. The other is handmade, irreplaceable and slightly inconvenient in its design. The fact that I can see the fingerprints of the ceramicist, the artist embodied through their work, is compelling and confers significant value.

However, we should not frame AI and the Arts as the artist against the machine. The Arts continue to evolve, incorporating technology into creative processes, constantly redefining and extending what we mean by creativity. The need for a ‘creative’, the artist, to be involved always remains. A useful allegory is the game of chess. The computational model of the game has been ‘more successful’ than any human since 1997 and yet the game of chess flourishes. The relationship between the digital model and the players is nuanced and has pushed the game to new heights. The technology has been incorporated into the spirt of the game itself.

The problem in this debate, as with many emerging technologies, is an over focus on surface functionality and not the structural intent. AI is not a technological threat to the Arts; it is a business-model threat to artists. The plundering of work to train the machine is a serious problem. It will likely lead to less people being able to earn a living through their creativity. We risk automating the mediocre and disassembling our creative community.  

There are many hopes and fears surrounding AI which clip into the recurring cycle of emerging technologies, especially those which are located in, or adjacent to, cultural production (and therefore impinge on education). ‘Classic’ concerns around cheating, authenticity and an erosion of critical thinking have come to the fore when, for example, internet search, Wikipedia and smartphones etc. became widely accessible. The debates which ensue often fail to unpick convenience (if it’s easy and immediate it must be bad) with more substantial shifts in how we access, use and produce knowledge/work. 

However, AI ups and broadens the game once again. It amplifies and accelerates these classic concerns while expanding the possible use cases. Discussions with colleagues from the Edinburgh Futures Institute highlighted that the broad applicability of AI, the fact that it can be used in so many contexts, put it in pole position in the moral panic / furtive adoption stakes. So while some concerns are ‘generic’ to any emerging tech in the cultural production space we have to acknowledge that AI is powerful, full of risk, ethically fraught, and everywhere. It demands we make sense of it relative to our practices in a way which is more refined than ‘use it but also be critical’ – which is where quite a lot of progressive university guidance lands.

Balancing the generic with the specific

The question I’ve been grappling with is how to articulate the specific pros and cons of using AI in a manner which also acknowledges its standing at the front of a long line of technologies which have spun the hype-and-fear-cycle in similar ways. I think the ‘Agency vs Efficiency Gambit’ help here, but first I want to lay out some education and technology context.

Learning that does not converge on a ‘correct’ answer

At the University of the Arts London we are mainly focused on the use of technology in project-based work, where students are developing creative outputs and reflecting on process. What they produce might not always be original in the strictest sense but it will be a novel journey for them, with not entirely predictable outcomes. This is in contrast to learning which converges on an agreed answer or a process, where there is a predictable outcome which might, nevertheless, take a lot of work to attain.

Where learning is developmental, and the ‘goal’ is a change in the person (learning as becoming if you will) the process of learning itself is not primarily interested in efficiency in producing an academic or creative output. The output is only relevant in so far as it facilitates becoming. (see, for example, the educational benefits of failing)

Doing the thing and questioning the thing

Given this, we are much less interested in our students being efficient than them taking the time to be critical and reflective. This is not to say that there aren’t more, or less, efficient ways of learning but we want our students to do the thing and question the thing (not uncommon in higher education). We want our students to retain their personal agency to enable their questioning and consciously position their practice relative to the tools and tech they might use.

Technology is efficiency

One definition of technology is that it is a mechanism that allows you to get more work done in less time or with less effort, AKA efficiency. It’s confusing to be presented with a technology which makes a process less efficient. We all have stories where this is the case, but they are presented in terms of frustration and disappointment.

My point is that if we use technologies of cultural production to gain efficiency we become less active in the process, and lose agency. 

This doesn’t extend to all technologies. It might not matter too much if we are digging a hole with a mini-digger rather than a spade (not technologies of cultural production) but if we are generating text for an essay or a clutch of ideas to get us past the ‘blank page’ for a project then we have offloaded some of our agency-through-thinking to the machine. If the technology is geared around cultural production this offloading will always be the case. 

Given this, I’d argue that in the context of learning we are frequently trading between agency and efficiency when using technology, especially AI. Done consciously, with enough understanding of how the tech is operating, the more efficient route can be empowering. Efficiency is not fundamentally counter to learning but it does come at a cost. 

Significantly, to make this choice meaningfully requires a good understanding of the principles on which the technology is operating. Unless we understand roughly how the work is being done we can’t gauge where we are landing on the agency/efficiency continuum. Context is important and often the context we are working in is the technology itself.

The gambit 

So every time we incorporate technology, including AI into our practices, especially when learning, we should be weighing up the extent to which any efficiencies attenuate our creative and critical agency. I think of this as a kind of gambit which reframes the old Silicon Valley mantra of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ towards ‘Move Fast and Learn Less’. 

I’m not suggesting that we should always choose agency over efficiency, I’m suggesting that we must be aware of the gambit. It’s a continuum, not a binary choice – we can decide where we land. However, if as a student I choose to maximise efficiency a few times in a row I will be eroding the extent to which I’m learning and might want to change tack. Conversely, if I choose the pure agency route and attempt to largely avoid technology, I risk not getting far enough through the process to be able to fully engage with the intended learning. 

Assess less (a simple response to a complex problem)

Given that we are often pushed towards efficiency by a lack of time it makes sense to ask our students to produce less over a longer period of time. In simple terms this is a quality over quantity approach to assessment. I’ve not seen a Learning Outcome which says ‘you will be able to demonstrate that you can produce a huge amount of work in a limited time’ but I do often see volume of work used as a proxy of ‘academic rigour’. If it’s harder to write 2000 words than 5000 works why do assignments get longer the higher the academic level?

If we really value critical thinking then demanding less voluminous work for assessment is a more effective way to respond to emerging technologies than the intricacies of many forms of ‘authentic’ assessment. ‘You have time to choose agency over efficiency’ feels like an authentic and reasonable approach to me. 

All in *and* all out with AI
(start with assignments at both ends of the continuum)

Another way through this picks up on some discussion I’ve seen around not assessing material produced with AI but assessing reflections on that material. This approach asks students to use AI in the form of a questioning dialogue and then reflecting on the results.

At the start of given course-of-study some assessments can be designed on this basis and, as a balance, some could require students to not use any AI. It should be possible to explain the value of these two approaches as deliberately located at either end of the Agency / Efficiency continuum. Having experienced the extremes, students are then better equipped to make conscious Agency / Efficiency choices. With the right scaffolding they should be able to develop a usable critical position on the use of AI before they get to the more self-directed work later in the course. 

Is it possible to run an entire Art School style ‘journey’ in 25 minutes? 

(Side note: this post lays out and reflects on a 25 minute activity which took around one and a half hours to design and prep. I’m mildly overwhelmed (whelmed?) by how much is ‘under the bonnet’ of a process like this. It’s a useful reminder of how rich and nuanced an arts education approach can be and how the work produced is only a tiny aspect of what is going on. i.e. I didn’t realise quite how much was implicit until I wrote this up.)

I was asked to ‘fill’ 25 minutes at our recent team awayday and thought it would be a fun challenge to take the team through the ups and downs of a mini creative education journey from start to finish. The team is working with our colleges to develop fully online Post Grad courses. We are providing recruitment, marketing, design and production, and academic strategy to develop this fully online portfolio. 

Given the functions within the team, many people don’t have direct experience of creative arts education, so I wanted them to get a sense of ‘not knowing’ and creative risk which are inherent in our project-based pedagogies. Ultimately the process was about producing creative work in-the-open in a context with is no specific ‘correct’ answer but where some groups will get higher marks than others. 

The work produced in this session is a the end of this post, but hopefully you will see that the work embodies only a small portion of what was experienced.

The key elements I wanted the room to experience included:

• Negotiating within a small group (which might include people you don’t know very well)
• Interpreting an open creative brief (including considering how your work relates to two Learning Outcomes)
• Making creative work, knowing you are going to be assessed and that grades will be visible to all
• Working in the open, making work-in-progress visible
• Working with limited materials
• Interpreting work in the context of an open brief to award marks/grades

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The process

In this case we were all in the same physical room which probably helped given the limited time but there are plenty of ways, with a few tweaks, that this activity could be run online (For example, a bit of online break-out group wrangling and a shared Miro board with visual sections for each group).

The room was already laid out so that people were in groups of 4 or 5 around tables. Handily for me these groups had been designed so that members of the team who might not normally work closely together got to meet each other. i.e. Perfect mixed teams, which are crucial for this kind of activity and are time consuming to design. I am very wary of the “form teams of 4 or 5” instruction as you will always get divisive forms of homophony. For example, in this room it would have been comfortable for people to group by levels of seniority.

1. Introduction / framing

I explained that this was called ‘Concentrated’ Art School for the following reasons:

1. This was taking the essence of University of the Arts London pedagogy and concentrating it down to an almost ridiculous extent. If UAL is freshly squeezed orange juice then this process was more like concentrated orange juice made from dehydrated powder. It has similarities but is not anywhere near as good.
2. We had very limited time so everyone would need to concentrate. 

Roles

I then asked one person from each group to act as a tutor and move over to the side of the room and made it clear that the work would be being marked as part of the activity. This gave me 5 tutors.

2. The brief and the template

I thin introduced the brief but didn’t explain it in any detail. What people had to go on is what you see here:

The brief refers to a simple A4 template which was on each table and split into three areas

• Names (So work was attached to people in a visible manner)
• Work (The core output or ‘realised’ work)
• Why (Articulating the thinking in the work)

For the sake of accessibility/readability here is the brief in text. (The first version of the brief I showed was in French to make the point that many of our students are operating in an additional language. Half the room didn’t baulk at this as I could see them translating the best they could.)

The Brief:

In the NAMES area
Write your names

In the WORK area

• Respond to the term “Change”
• You can use the items in your envelope or anything else you can find
• You must not write in the WORK area

In the WHY area
Describe why your work is what it is in one sentence

You will be marked in the context of the following Learning Outcomes
LO1: You will be able to visualise themes and ideas through your creative practice [Realisation]

LO2: You will be able to explain and justify your chosen creative approach [Communication]
The items in square brackets refer to the relevant part of the UAL assessment criteria.

3. Activity

Each table had an envelope of materials they could use to respond to the brief. These were deliberately playful/ridiculous and included a small packet of Haribo sweets, various stickers, a felt-tip pen and, of course, some googly eyes.

They had 10 minutes to respond to the brief.

4. Tutors

While the groups were working I spoke to the group of tutors. I gave each tutor a strip of 6 star stickers and said they could award marks by putting these stickers on the work they felt best responded to the brief and learning outcomes. I suggested that they could, if they wanted to, give and single piece of work multiple stars.

I suggested that they could confer on how best to do this and/or have a wander round the room and see how the work was progressing. They all opted to wander and appeared to enjoy the role, casting a curious eye over the groups and occasionally asking questions.

5. Marking

After 10 minutes I asked the groups to stop working, and move away from their tables so that the tutors could mark the work. I asked the working groups to discuss how the process was making them feel. 

I allowed around 10 minutes for this part of the process.

6. Discussion

I knew we didn’t have time for discussion so I wrapped up with a couple of reflections and suggested that people might want to chat about the activity over lunch. 

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Interesting things that happened

Firstly, everyone undertook this in the spirit that was intended and it was quite jolly, but there was a strong competitive air too, way stronger than I expected. Every group produced something and there was significant variation in the work conceptually. 

Some groups were better at getting going and figuring out a response than others. The specific dynamics and atmosphere of the groups varied a lot.

One tutor asked me if the brief allowed groups to draw in the work area (e.g. arrows etc.). I asked what they thought and we agreed that drawing was probably ok. 

People really want to see each other’s work

The biggest unexpected happening (although in hindsight I shouldn’t have been surprised) was that when I asked the groups to move away from their tables for the marking process everyone ignored me and immediately started to wander round the room looking at everyone else’s work.

I suspect this is where most of the learning and critical reflection took place during the activity. There was a palpable engaged (but still jolly) atmosphere and quite a bit of discussion. In effect, the ‘student’ groups were weighing up the work for themselves in a similar process to the tutors, they just didn’t have any stars to handout. 

Grading is not much fun

The tutors did appear to enjoy the process of attributing stars but then there wasn’t too much at stake. However, the vibe of the group that got the most starts was definitely more upbeat than the group that got the least. Even in a frivolous environment nobody wants to come ‘last’. As the lead for the activity I felt slightly awkward about this. I was more bothered about it than I had expected to be.

The direct approach takes the lead when there is limited time

The piece awarded the most stars was the most prosaic and least conceptual response to the brief. It told a little story and was easy to understand. I also suspect there was some confirmation bias amongst the tutors which led to a clustering of stars. The group that were awarded the most stars also gave off confident vibes and were most noisy during the activity. Did appearing to have a good time imply they were making good work? (I didn’t think their work was the strongest, just the most direct).

Winning?

Later that day a member of the group which was awarded the most stars asked me, in a playful manner, what they got for winning. I questioned if getting the most stars was winning but was interested in this idea that you could ‘win’ at this kind of activity.

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Creative arts education is playful, difficult, and demands everyone involved makes themselves vulnerable

My agenda here was to run an activity in which everyone was likely to feel a little vulnerable in some way. The open brief, the group work, and most of all working visibly are all pretty standard creative arts pedagogy. It’s useful for everyone working in our team to have a sense of what creative risk feels like and the way this plays out for staff as well as students (For example, marking is also a creative/interpretive process with its own risks). 

The biggest implication for me was the desire people had to see each other’s work. Something which is hard-wired into a physical studio environment but which we have to deliberately build-in to an online course. It’s risky working in the open but it’s also where most of the learning happens.

Process and critical reflection is more important than the thing you make

The fact that the materials being used were gummi bears and googly eyes might have kept things light but it didn’t make much difference to the overall process. That is to say that had I given groups oil paints or Lego, the results relative to the brief would probably have been similar. But this is a reflection of my ‘There is no such thing as a good picture of a horse’ thinking and I could be wrong. There is such a thing as technical skill and process which I didn’t attempt to approach in this activity.

What would I do differently?

If I had a bit more time I’d have a second phase to the activity after a break and facilitate some structured reflection and feedback. I would have liked participants to have the chance to talk about the personal affect of the activity whereas they mainly got immersed directly and didn’t have the time to stand back. Despite process and reflection being paramount, this activity reminded me that it’s difficult to not become obsessed with the artefact being produced.

While there was no formal feedback from those involved I was in the position of participant-researcher and did get a good sense of what was going on. (I’ve run enough of these kinds of activities to be able to step back from ‘will this work?’ fears and pay attention to ‘what is happening and what does it mean?’. Some of this comes from experiencing sessions going slightly ‘wrong’ but actually being better for it. It’s better to follow where it’s going than to obsess over your original plan.)

Personal note

The core of the brief comes from an activity we were asked to do in my GCSE English class many, many, years ago. We were each given a small square of paper and asked to respond to the word ‘change’. I have no idea where this activity came from or why we did it. Our English/Drama teacher was quite eccentric in the way teachers used to be when schools were less professionalised and might have simply been entertaining himself.

I wrote a limp, dictionary style, definition on the paper along the lines of “Change is when something is different from what it was before”. I still clearly remember thinking about this a lot afterward and regretting that I hadn’t ripped a corner off the blank square of paper and handed it back. I have no memory of this activity ever being fed back on or mentioned in class ever again. It’s possible this was a pivotal moment for me. A realisation that it was possible and meaningful to go beyond a immediate ‘rational’ or practical response. There was something deeper which could be said by thinking and acting outside of the structures we had been taught.

To test of my own activity for our awayday I thought about how I would respond to the brief. I’d probably rip the Work section of the A4 template into about 20 rough pieces and scatter them across the table. In the Why section I’d put “You tell me”. I’m fairly confident that any group I was in would get me to back off on this idea but who knows? Maybe this whole thing was me looking to redeem my own, unimaginative, 16 year-old self?

The work produced

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.

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.

The University of the Arts London, where I am currently employed, has ambitions to widen access to creative education through fully-online provision. You can read about this in our university strategy. 

This isn’t in-of-itself radical excepting that creative subjects have not, traditionally, been the focus of online development. The ‘standard’ subjects for online tend to have a more defined scaffolding of knowledge and learning – there are more ‘correct answers’. Examples include, MBAs, Computer Science and Nursing where learning and assessment can be (if required) perpetuated without the direct intervention of academic staff, up to the point that reflection or individual projects come into play. 

Creative subjects tend to be built around the exact type of individual (or group) projects and critical reflection which require specific critical feedback and dialogue. At UAL almost all of our assessment is based on coursework, not exams, and much of this is evidenced through the development of personal portfolios. This is typically ‘Art School’ in nature and, as a colleague pointed out to me, heavily influenced by the traditions of Fine Art pedagogy. This is not to say that all creative subjects are a version of Fine Art. It’s that deeply held beliefs about what it means to nurture creative practice and thinking across many subjects are rooted in Fine Art style teaching methods. 

Four foundations of creative teaching

There are many ways to cut this in how we might describe the foundational components of a Fine Art, or ‘Art School’ inflected education. Here is my, not exhaustive, overview:

1. Teaching process, developing practice: ‘making’ skills, ‘craft’ or ‘technique’.
2. Teaching theory and canon: The history of the subject. Learning the tools required to contextualise practice and develop a critical position.
3. Teaching critical reflection: Applying theory to practice and vice versa, reflective writing, academic writing and research. Documenting (telling the story of) enquiry, ideation, process and realisation. 
4. Teaching-by-supervision to support individual and collective practice. 

(As ever, if we have a broad view of terms like ‘practice’ and ‘process’ then these four points cover most subjects taught at a higher education level – especially if we categorise ‘academic writing’ as a type of practice)

Supervision-as-dialogue is central 

In subjects where the focus is on developing a creative practice, supervision, often in the form of dialogue, becomes the foundation of the teaching & learning approach – the ‘signature pedagogy’. Most academics at my university would see this as crucial, almost axiomatic. If we are honest in our proposition that students can interpret project briefs/assignments creatively, then teaching must mold itself around the variation in those responses, it can’t be generic, it has to be thoughtful. Is a Fine Art course without dialogue Fine Art? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. 

I’d argue that the supervision model of teaching is the primary design consideration when developing accessible online provision. Developing workable models of supervision is at least as important as responding to concerns around materiality and physical making practices. The latter can be re-situated, up to a point, to be local to the student whereas supervision is hard-wired into the identity of creative education. 

For some, supervision is by definition the soul of the course. Dialogue, structured or serendipitous, with experts (academic and technical) is possibly more important than access to specialist equipment and spaces. When students describe ‘the course’ they are most likely to mention moments of real-time supervision coupled with stories of personal, or group, practice. They are less likely to mention text-based feedback even if that was influential. This could simply be because embodied, live,  moments tend to be easier to recall? 

Supervision vs access

The uncomfortable aspect of accepting this is that a supervision model of provision is in tension with access in a number of ways:

1. Supervision requires significant staff time which risks reducing access in terms of affordability for students.
2. Supervision is commonly framed around moments of ‘live’ (synchronous) dialogue which is difficult for students with busy lives, or across time zones, to frequently engage with. 
3. One dimension of increased access is greater student numbers. In a supervision model the limiting factor will quickly become the availability, or even existence, of teaching staff with the right balance of teaching and creative-practice experience. 

So we end up with a scenario where reducing the amount of supervision in creative education provision is not just a curriculum design choice, it’s an erosion of what we believe the subject to be and a dilution of what some students believe they are paying for. On the other hand, predicating any course (and here, I’m going beyond creative education) on supervision risks attenuating access across a number of dimensions. 

The powerful cultural/educational position of supervision is, I suspect, what underpins student demands for moments of ‘live’ teaching (in-building or online) which are then poorly attended. Students and staff need to know these supervisory, or live, moments are happening or they feel the course ‘doesn’t properly exist’. However, when students are not  in a position to attend, or the inconvenience of attending ‘live’ is outweighed by the sense that attendance is not contingent on success, everyone feels unsatisfied at some level. 

The importance of acknowledging ‘non real time’ supervision 

In response, I’m not suggesting that the supervision model of teaching is a problem to be solved. The troublesome aspect is not the practice of supervision but that it is too closely associated with ‘live’, or real-time, teaching. This is often cemented by legal and regulatory approaches to ‘contact time’ – as I’ve discussed before. 

It’s of note that the coupling of supervision and ‘live’ doesn’t accurately reflect day-to-day practice given that dialogue and feedback is often via text in the form of online messages, comments, annotations etc. In essence, the practice of supervision has adapted to incorporate the not-real-time opportunities of the digital environment but our conception of supervision seems stuck in a previous era. We need to accept, or rather acknowledge, that much of our dialogue takes place in non-real-time forms which are more varied than an epistolary or summative feedback.  

Unfortunately this means that we underestimate, or fail to identify, the actual volume of teaching which takes place. This inability to ‘see’ teaching as anything other than ‘live’ is partly responsible for creating unsustainable work loads. A course as documented and validated is likely to not capture this middle ground between ‘contact time’ and ‘independent’ hours, except perhaps as a vaguely defined form of administration (sometimes this also falls under ‘pastoral’, ‘community’ or ‘support’ type labels). 

Less ‘live’ and more ‘supported’

Extending our definition of supervision to incorporate non-live forms of dialogue is crucial if we are to balance subject and access. My team is defining this as ‘Supported’ teaching. A mode of supervision which provides flexibility for students and softens the line between ‘Live’ and ‘Independent’ teaching and learning. 

The question I’m exploring is how much ‘live’ can become ‘supported’ in online provision before the nature of the subject itself is changed. Or, to put it another way, to what extent is the teaching mode and the subject itself intertwined? If we don’t understand this entanglement then any design process where academics are famed as ‘experts in the subject’ and others are experts in ‘learning’ could grind to a halt. If particular teaching methods are part of the fabric of a subject then we can’t re-design teaching without re-imaging the subject.