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. 

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 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. “

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:

• Dave Cormier
• Richard Hall
• Ian Truelove
• Lawrie Phipps
• Mark Childs
• David White

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.

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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)

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.

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.

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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.