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

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

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

Being in a room with students

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

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

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

Difficult mapping

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

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

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

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

The tempo of consecutive exchange

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

Text vs speech

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

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

Not quite real time

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all a bit new

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

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

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

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new report

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

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 20

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

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

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

Year zero

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

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

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

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

Asynch

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

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

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

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

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 6

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

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

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 33

Teaching beyond mode

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

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

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

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

The asynchronous unicorn

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

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 32

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

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

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

Digitally Enhanced Blended Learning Report, pg 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untangling Creative Education (Is subject inextricable from pedagogy?)

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. 

Messy abstract painting in a spectrum of colours
Abstract detail (painting by David White CC BY 4.0)

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. 

How technology redefines learning (and why this isn’t a problem).

(This post was written before the main wave of interest/anxiety around AI/Large Language Models hit. As such, it’s delightfully non specific and an attempt to outline implications in principle. For me, this is summed-up as follows:

  1. Efficient access to abundant information (the Web) reduced the value of ‘remembering information’ as a skill.
  2. AI reduces the value of synthesis as a skill.

In some ways, technology is climbing up Bloom’s Taxonomy and pushing more of the learning process in the pointy bit of the triangle. Although, interestingly, it does skip some layers which could be a problem. Jumping from knowledge to synthesis and circumnavigating comprehension, application and analysis might prove dangerous. (not that I think we should always run through those things in strict order).

Anyway… below is what was my first run at some of this thinking)


A developer friend of mine recently told me a simple coding task they set when interviewing new staff was successfully answered by a chat bot. My response was, “Chat bots can Google, so I’m not sure what the problem is?”. In the days following my trite response I found myself coming back to the topic and realised that the chat bot ‘problem’ is part of a long history of falsely imagining ‘learning’ to be a fixed concept we are more or less distanced from by technology.

Detail from an abstract painting, mainly in blues and blacks, by David White (CC:BY)
Detail from an abstract painting by David White (CC:BY)

In 2014 I gave a keynote at the Wikipedia conference entitled, “Now that Wikipedia has done all our homework, what’s left to teach?”. This was intended to be a playful way of highlighting that the ‘problem’ was not with Wikipedia but with an education system which placed too much value on answers and not questions. Wikipedia was ‘too good, too available and too accurate’ for a system which was built on the principle that information is difficult to access and recall. 

Looking back, the Wikipedia ‘problem’ seems like the quaint precursor to the lively AI-will-kill/save-education discourse. (all tech debates decend into the kill/save dichotomy, so it’s better to step back from this and ask why this comes about.)

Good / Bad – *yawn*.

Firstly, any institution or system which claims that technology becoming ‘good’ at something is the central problem won’t last long in its current form. Within Capitalist Realism, you simply never win this argument (and yes we could go to the barricades but I’m writing in the context of where we are now). Secondly, withholding technology to force people to ‘learn’, incorrectly assumes that the notion of learning is fixed. Let’s be honest, telling school kids to not use Wikipedia was never going to wash, especially as schools tried this line at around the time they stopped giving out textbooks on the (never to be said out loud) hope that the kids all had access to the internet. 

Saying AI is bad (or good) is a super dull discussion. Admitting it exists and that we will use it for anything that makes our lives a bit easier is a much more interesting starting point. (side note: when I use the term AI, I really mean ‘elegant computer code that does things we think are useful or entertaining’). A brief history of humanity has to include: “We will always use all available tech for good and bad and this process is continually redefining what it means to have power, have skills, be intelligent and be creative.”  These values and how they operate as currencies is always on the move and always has been. 

Is ‘being right’ now wrong?

What my developer friend’s chat bot couldn’t do was reason out, or tell the story of, how it had arrived at its answer. This is how we frame ‘learning’ at the University of the Arts London, we don’t assess the end product we assess the narrative of how the student travelled towards the end product. The narrative is the learning, the artefact (often a creative output at UAL) is the output from that learning. The end ‘product’ is symbolic of the learning rather than an embodiment of it, it needs a narrative wrapped around make meaning out of the process. 

The photography(tech)-drove-art-to-become-more-conceptual argument is a useful touchstone here. If we imagine a near future where most, traditional, assessments of learning can be undertaken successfully by code then our approach to education has to become more about narrative and reasoning than about ‘being right’ or ‘reflecting a correct image of the world back at ourselves’. 

We are feeling our humanity squeezed by tech that can mirror what we, historically, defined as human. This is not a fight with tech but an opportunity to redefine and reimagine what we value. I’m hopeful that this will allow previously marginalised voices and identities to become heard.

I’d argue that ‘being right’ is this century’s outdated skill – this is a good thing.

Just as purely figurative Fine Art lost a bunch of its value as photography gained ground, being right will lose its status relative to being-able-to-think within our networked-tech suffused environment. In many ways, current political and identity polarization is an effect of the rise of networked technologies, both in social (the internet) and neural network (AI) terms. It’s a grasping for the comfort of ‘being right’ in response to a painful, and unsettling, shifting away from the certainty of that very rightness. 

Save and adapt

Back in edu-land: A good essay is a narrative of reasoning, so it does or should, operate as an embodiment of being-able-to-think. Sadly, we have fed so many essays into the network that technology can now reflect a performance of this learning back at us. I have no sympathy for educational institutions who have a naïve understanding of data and also claim that tech which endangers its business model should be shut down. We can’t complain about tech when we use the very same tech to increase revenue. We also can’t de-tech without damaging access and inclusion.

Let’s not to fall into academic navel-gazing on the what-is-learning/what-is-the-academy questions though. Instead let’s focus on how we adapt our lumbering institutions to shifting tech-driven redefinitions of value, while also calling our unethical practices of all kinds. I’m not an accelerationist, I believe that we can adapt while not erasing historical forms of value. Universities are ideally placed to ‘protect’ that which might be destroyed by the headrush of technology but they must not be defined by that impulse. 

The university is not ‘shut’

Of the many things the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted about higher education, two have become very apparent to me over the last couple of weeks: 

  1. The notion of ‘university’ is still, for the most part, linked to a set of buildings.
  2. Language is largely embodied – we struggle to express how we interact online in a non deficit manner.

This thinking was sparked by my vexation at theCoronavirus: Students to pay full tuition fees even if universities are shut headline in a recent article in the Times. The full article is behind a paywall so I can’t comment on that. The headline, however, rather negates all the hard work of staff and students who are actively working together online. At my institution the majority of us are busier than ever and we have plenty of examples of attendance and engagement improving as compared to a ‘normal’ term.  

It’s not the same experience but it’s not ‘shut’

Clearly, for those students expecting campus-based activities the experience has become limited. My eldest son ‘took issue’ (he’s a first-year History and Politics student at Sheffield University) with my critical retweet of the Times story. His point was that even though his course is online he is missing out on student life, so for him university is ‘shut’ as a cultural experience (I also can’t go to the pub but I do understand what he means :). Those institutions that were not already operating online had quite a task just moving a viable curriculum online. The social, cultural and ‘ambient’ aspects of university don’t automatically appear as a side effect of curriculum online – they have to be designed in.  

Similarly, many of the students at my institution rightly expected to be able to undertake all manner of tactile and embodied making and performance practices. While some of the learning around these practices can be undertaken online there is no digital equivalence for the tactile, for the feel of different materials or the experience of various spaces. It is also difficult to create those moments of serendipity and inspiration which come from wandering around a building which is full of creative ideas and work. I miss all of that, but I don’t think my university is ‘shut’.

The need for non-deficit language

We have to start finding better ways of talking about online teaching and learning which are not poor echos of physical paradigms if we are ever to break the ‘deficit-by-default’ conceptualisation of digital in education. This is going to be crucial as the Times headline suggests that students will not be willing to pay full fees while universities are thought of as ‘shut’. At a teaching focused university a significant portion of fees goes on paying teaching and support staff who will be working just as many hours online as they would have been in a normal term. If we can’t acknowledge this just because we aren’t in the same building then the whole sector is going to struggle during COVID-19 and beyond.

Networked Making – Podcast

On the 10th July 2019 we ran the ‘Networked Making’ event at the University of the Arts London. This post introduces a podcast in which myself and Jon Martin reflect on the ‘Making Networks’ workshop activity we designed for the start of the day
(with input from Dr Sheena Calvert and the ‘Interpolate’ student group) .

The activity was described as: “A workshop session in which participants collaboratively make and reflect on a physical model/metaphor of their networks.”

The Making Networks space

The Podcast is offered here unedited. I may try and edit it down to around 20min for Spark, our UAL creative teaching and learning journal.

https://daveowhite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/networkedmaking.mp3

Themes touched upon in the podcast include: reflection, thinking-through-making, ambiguity, risk, trust, play.

There is also a YouTube version of the podcast if you require captions

https://youtu.be/7nJWGPxeo7E&w=640&h=385

Sheena and two Interpolate students, Jack and Safiya, helped to facilitate the activity.

Participants were asked to ‘make’ a version of their networks and were presented with a number of peg-boards, a few other objects, cord, index cards, pegs, pens, various fasteners etc. The boards had labels on them such as ‘Work – Mode’, ‘Tool – Space’, ‘People – Institution’ and ‘Desire – Aspiration’.

Around 30 participants engaged with the activity for about half-an-hour then we convened a short discussion.

The best way to get a sense of the activity is to watch this very short video:

Networked Making – Making Networks from Teaching and Learning Exchange on Vimeo.

The full description of the event:

Whether it be through collaboration, in a collective or as part of a cohort, the practices of making are never without context and commonly not undertaken alone.  We understand that our students are keen to make and work in disciplinary and interdisciplinary networks as this nourishes and
supports creative practice, reflecting the fluidity of the professional environment.

Networked making, including writing, is often facilitated by digital connections which allow us to go beyond the physical boundaries of the studio, seminar room or lecture theatre. Yet, while we all work online’ in some form, the practices of networked making are still emerging. The diversity of
voices the digital allows us to include and connect encourages us to reconsider our modes of learning and teaching for making.

This UAL Teaching Platform invites participants to discover and explore the potential of networked making through collaboration, discussion and, of course, making. “

Too postdigital

Back in 2009 I was one of a group of men with the time and money to get together and attempt to make sense of what was going on with digital technology and the Web. What we came up with was the notion of the postdigital – the original proposition is here: Preparing for the postdigital era.  

It’s a short document which explains a simple idea: now that digital tech and the network are so prevalent our thinking should go beyond the tech in-of-itself and focus on the way our interactions are played out in/on the digital.

For me the idea was a useful counter to techno-centred narratives of the time which pushed new platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as things everyone should ‘get into’ but without really discussing why. It all felt highly uncritical and implied that the tech, rather than those using the tech, was ushering in a new era. I was bored of talking about how ‘revolutionary’ technology was and saw the postdigital concept as a good way to take a shortcut past the shiny surface of the machine to discuss what might be happening in socio-cultural terms.

At the time the idea was met with a mixture of mild confusion and ambivalence. Broadly it was misunderstood as an attempt to negate the importance or existence of the digital and just an exercise in coining a phrase. It appeared we had decided that just at the moment digital went mainstream we thought it would be radical to not-talk-about digital. There is some truth in this but things have moved on…

So now, in 2019, the notion of the postdigital has gained some ground. Not necessarily as a response to our original paper but in parallel and in a number of locations. One of these locations is the newly founded journal of Postdigital Science and Education edited by Petar Jandrić. Petar discovered our paper along with some later reflections and requested that the group revisited the theme a decade after its inception.

The group is currently posting their 2019 reflections:

Postdigital in 2019

There is much discussion of how the technology is becoming ‘transparent’ in the 2009 paper. This transparency is framed as an opportunity to be less tech, and more person-centric when considering digital. In 2019 we are unknowingly postdigital, not because our tech objects have become transparent but because the network they are part of is not, and never has been, visible. We don’t ‘see’ the infrastructure because we are still enthralled by the obscuring new-shiny surfaces of our phones/laptops/tablets/tvs. We are happy to swap understanding for ‘intuitive’, ‘frictionless’ and convenient tech. This is reasonable but dangerous.

I don’t want to return to the days when the tech infrastructure was so tenuous that I spent more time trying to get-it-to-work than doing the work I needed it for. Nevertheless, I think those moments of failure, when the connection goes down or the software crashes, are important in revealing just how quickly we pass through the digital to the postdigital. In 2019 many people are surprised when the tech stops working, whereas I’m constantly surprised it works at all, given how complex it is.

What we have failed to comprehend in the last decade (or didn’t want to think about) was the complexity, power and intention(s) of the network and those that control it. The network has never even gone through a ‘digital’ stage (in the terms of the paper) where we get over excited about its newness, it has in some sense never existed in the public consciousness even though it saturates our lives and our spaces. When we buy a new phone we are told about how amazing the camera on it is, not the fact that we are renting a node on a network which is a vast, relatively unregulated, corporate space.

Only very recently has the nature of the network appeared via stories of ‘bad actors’, the manipulation of democracy through globalised targeted propaganda and the aggressive use of ‘personal’ data to feed uncanny algorithms. In 2019 I’d suggest we need to be less postdigital about the network. There is ongoing work to reveal the network, making it un-transparent and to educate and regulate towards a place which supports citizens over and above the drive for power and capital. The trouble is that it’s super boring compared to the latest app or a few more megapixels and if you want keep a secret, don’t hide it, just make it super-dull.

While we play at being human on the surface of the network we simultaneously being dehumanized, converted into forms of interoperable data. Here is where Donna Haraway’s, A Cyborg Manifesto was so prescient. Writing before the Web in 1984 she highlights our rush to convert all things into the universal ‘exchange’ language of code:

“No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so well.”


A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Donna Haraway

There is a section in the original postdigital paper which speaks of our hope that the digital environment will be a place where we can ‘become’ in positive and connected ways. It’s difficult to retain that hope in 2019 but we know that negative stories travel the fastest. Ultimately society has moved online, and while it might seem misanthropic, I’d argue that the pettiness, hate and abuse of power is evidence that we are now postdigital and that this is what it looks like when (almost) everyone gets online. More sinister is that while this sound and fury is played out on the cultural meniscus of the Web we are simultaneously being codified in the networked waters that lurk beneath. Ironically it is this process of digitising and ‘codifying’ being which is moving us from the digital to the postdigital at such a rate we can’t even see it happening.



Some thoughts on the production of the original position paper

Looking back over the original position paper I feel a mild sense of guilt. We appear to have been naively working on the assumption that the technology was neutral. In 2009 none of us were really aware of how our data was being used and abused. If I recall correctly the principle that ‘if the platform is free to use then you are the product’ might have been starting to surface but most of us interpreted this as the risk that we might have to look at a few adverts.

Certainly my thinking in this area was still based on broadcast media and crudely targeted ad campaigns which had to scatter their messages far and wide in the hope of making a sale. We hadn’t understood the manner in which politics and ideology could be embedded in code. We were keen to develop language and models that would somehow explain what was really going on if you could pull away from all the ‘newness’ and increasing corporatisation of the Web which up until then had mainly been endearingly shoddy, slow and full of nerdy guys like us. We wanted to mansplain what was actually interesting to all these newcomers who we felt were hypnotised by the shiny tech. We wanted to own what it all meant, in the same way we had owned what it all was.

I still believe postdigital is a useful concept because it shifts emphasis away from the technocentric. I also feel uneasy about our motivations for developing the idea and the manner in which it came about. It’s fair to say that the reason we didn’t discuss the potential negative aspects of the digital is because we were not in marginal or precarious positions and so didn’t have perspectives that arise from vulnerability. (perhaps I should say ‘I’ not ‘we’ as I can’t speak for the other members of the group)

Don’t fear complexity

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

Section 1: Two ‘new’ identities

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

Technoself

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

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

Dataself

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

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

Section 2: Two forms of information

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

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

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

The (Dave) White Ignorance Cycle

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

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

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

Section 3: It’s not about facts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Section 4: So what?

My conclusion is unashamedly educational.

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

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

———-

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

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

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

Digital-magic and Power

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

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

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

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

Politics, Social Media and Practical Magic_Reynolds White 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Creative Digital Attributes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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