Collaborating openly when the doors are closed.

I'm revisiting this post made in 2017 during an open course called #BYOD4L which took place in Google + (remember that??) as a result of a suggestion that arose from a twitter musing:

 

lots of reminders of #byod4l in various timelines today - how times change @alexgspiers @neilwithnell @chrissinerantzi @suebecks @debbaff and so many others

— Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) January 16, 2021

Sheila's tweet quickly coalesced into a blog post and brought a group of us back together again to plan a proposal to #OER21. 

Since I wrote the Collaboration post in 2017 many things have happened. 

The Erasmus Plus Virtual Exchange initiative lasted 3 years and has had a huge impact as you can see in the reports hosted here.  UNICollaboration.org has been the lead partner on HEI work, delivering recognition through an open badge system based on a collaboratively produced competency framework and providing research into the impact of virtual exchange. This research has been further enhanced by the work of the EVOLVE project  which has shared outputs openly under Creative Commons licences to help HEIs deliver training and support for practitioners and internationalisation officers. So a good deal of concrete support has been available free of charge thanks to the European Commission over the past 3 years or so. 

More recently I retired from my role at Warwick but I am very happy to report that the Clavier virtual exchange continues thanks to the depth and personal engagement of our collaborators. Clavier is now in its 10th year and continues to work as a large scale opportunity for both staff and students to learn together. We celebrated with a badge of course!

The UK withdrew from Erasmus, a decision which shocked many around the world. A decision which has been called out by UK language communities.

The voices of the language community speaking out about the decision to take the UK out of Erasmus Plus:

#erasmust 

So many doors can close at many levels: personal, institutional, political, financial.  How does international collaboration continue when doors close? 

Here is what I have learned over the years. 

• Collaboration can overcome barriers if the purpose of the collaboration is shared and valued by those working together. Clavier has outlived loss of budget, loss of senior management support, even time constraints because we support each other. 
• Working openly helps strengthen collaboration. Choosing tools which are not dependant upon institutional finance and methods which make sharing activity safe but open leads to many unexpected additional opportunities. 
• You can learn lots if you are open to learning from others (including your students). Treading the trickier path described above meant getting a deeper grasp of the technologies we used, sharing critical digital wisdom, listening to all participants and being willing to try new ideas. 
• Celebrate your victories and hug your communities (virtually of course). Virtual Exchange is a hybrid, tougher than the "pure bred" systems which favour either all face to face or all online learning. These strengths have been of great comfort to virtual exchange practitioners during the current pandemic. 

Personally, the Clavier, UNICollaborate and EVOLVE communities have been hugely helpful in advancing my work in virtual exchange but these collaborations go much deeper so I need to acknowledge here the support, inspiration and collaboration gained from participation in these many open online communities of practice:

Open Ed SIG; ALT; Eurocall; #LTHEchat; #BYOD4L; Creative Commons; #femedtech; Open Recognition Alliance; Mahara; Global Education Conference; 

these networks have all been part of my professional and personal development and more importantly perhaps individuals within them have been the key to sustaining my progress whatever happens. Impossible to acknowledge all the individuals but worth saying a huge thank you to all who have worked with me in any way. Some of you have moved on to other careers and opened new doors. 

Collaboration and working collectively touches so many lives and brings so many possibilities that doors are no longer relevant. We've all gone open plan!

#eurocallgathering A meaningful mission on my road to retirement

 

Summer 2020 was to mark my the end of my teaching at Warwick. I plan to retire at year end and didn't want to leave the next cohort part way through their learning. These were just plans in my head, but they were of course affected by the arrival of a global pandemic - forecast for some years by experts and yet unexpected by the UK Government, which of course had their eyes only on the earning potential presented by their #brexit agenda. 

As it became apparent that we would not be able to travel easily, thoughts turned to how we could maintain some continuity in the Eurocall community which is almost entirely supported through an annual conference, already some way into planning to take place in Copenhagen. A difficult decision was made, we would not be able to go ahead. I had been co-opted to the board of Eurocall in 2018 and this organisation has a special place in my heart. 

As an early adopter of technology for language teaching and learning I had become aware early in my career that there was a group of academics who researched in this area. As a teacher, even as a head of subject I didn't have resources to enable me to join a physical conference. I read some of their work and attended local training events in Warwickshire but back then there was no easy access to information through the internet. In the 90's, when Eurocall was founded I used CD-ROMs such as Granville in my teaching. Later in my career, having moved to work in Higher Education I was able to track down Graham Davies, thanks to his ICT4LT website and twitter. I contacted him in 2010 as I had taken on a role to support staff development at Warwick Language Centre and he kindly agreed to speak to our teachers in his Second Life persona. Even with my very rudimentary skills in Second Life I was able to get my avatar to wear a Eurocall t-shirt! Warwick language tutors listened to Graham together and discussed how we could further embed technology in our teaching practice. I felt I was offering them the chance to connect with the leading edge of research and those with most experience. 

Graham and I shared a love of Europe and the need to support language learning:

UK withdraws from ECML, European centre created to support excellence in language teaching - reducing our influence over policy #mfl #sttf

— Teresa MacKinnon (@WarwickLanguage) October 28, 2011

Sadly Graham died 2 year later. I attended a celebration of his life in Second Life, a really moving event. He cared deeply for the fellowship he found in EuroCALL and I felt honoured to be able to pick up his legacy through working on the virtual strand blog. I felt that the challenges I had faced as a young teacher would not be going away. The opportunity to make the work of Eurocall more open and accessible to all who supported language learning was one I could not resist. For me this was personal

The idea of the #eurocallgathering event was born of the challenges presented by covid19 in 2020. 10 years after Graham had spoken to our teachers, I put a plan together to use the under-utilised capacity of our G Suite to ensure that we could still get the community together. I set up a site a hashtag and a You Tube channel and spent the summer months pulling it all together. Thanks to the support of the executive, the conference committee was able to transfer much of the planned event online. We didn't have the joy of visiting Copenhagen but we were able to share our work and and fellowship for two packed online days which will also leave a legacy behind them for others to find. 

The wide range of research which is generated by this community continues and #eurocallagathering only shows a small cross section and much of my work continues with UNICollaboration which was born out of the work supported by Eurocall. The stream is widening, as John Gillespie pointed out in his keynote.  

#BYOD4L: Thoughts on collaboration

Student created logo for the Clavier Project

As a language teacher, connecting internationally has always been at the heart of my work. My degree required a year in France (my second year was spent teaching English - mostly pop songs and popular culture) in Châteauroux, France in 1980. When I took up teaching I got involved in regular exchanges with our partner schools and accompanied the various associated trips such as the history department's visit to world war battlefields. 

In my teaching role in Higher Education I wanted to continue to give students opportunities to work on their language with real French speakers. Fortunately we have a very cosmopolitan campus and there were lots of opportunities thanks to a great student network. However, increasingly I was finding that the internet offered me lots of ways of keeping in touch with friends and trends in France and french speaking cultures. The skills I needed were relevant and I thought this provided a good way to cross formal and informal boundaries to support deeper language and intercultural understanding. I got involved in developing a virtual exchange in 2010 having met a colleague teaching in Clermond Ferrand by chance on a blog by Steve Wheeler. Explaining virtual exchange is not easy as many in HE are quite reluctant to take computer-mediated communication seriously. 

Over recent years, through my role as a learning technologist I have been able to bring my expertise in telecollaboration and computer-mediated communication to bear in a wide range of projects and collaborations. Most recently this has involved collaborating with colleague from the Open University to publish on the use of open badges in Online Intercultural Exchange (OIE) and working with colleagues from Australia (Monash) on papers to do with produsage and sustainability of teaching. I really enjoyed these collaborations, but collaborating can be very challenging. The language research community has been instrumental in producing research into the experiences of computer-mediated communication which provides great insights into success factors in this area. I am delighted that it has also now established a cross-disciplinary academic organisation to support all HE colleagues who wish to collaborate internationally called Unicollaboration. Please share the news with your telecollaborative colleagues as this will be a great way of sharing best practice and extending internationalisation in HE. 

Projecting the future

Having just emerged from the usual end of year exam marking frenzy I am now pushing ahead with a learning and teaching project supported by Warwick's International Higher Education Academy. The project team is an international mix, combining staff and students with a range of roles and experience and they are keen to investigate the new learning context we see all around us. We will be looking at how we can improve engagement in lectures, how the availability of information through digital devices changes the roles of student and teacher, how we manage our online presence and what sharing means today. 

For me, this is an exciting development as so far my thinking in these areas has largely been with others outside my immediate context, through participating in online interactions in and beyond my own teaching and ed tech communities. I am interested to see if our collaborative discussions help shed some light on where the newly founded School of Modern Languages and Cultures can progress good practice informed by these pioneer researchers. 

The project approach is heutagogic - participants will make their own decisions about the investigations they wish to contribute to, they will determine their own path, reflect on their learning and co-construct pages in Mahara (our e-portfolio tool) in order to make their findings explicit. Much of the activity will be mediated through our course areas and this in itself is a new challenge. My kick off meeting and drop in session so far have focused on making sure everyone gets to know each other and feels welcome in our digital spaces. We have a short project window (finishing at the end of July) and, given the nature of the project design each has to find their own way through our set of investigations, contributing to our shared goal as they go. Order will eventually emerge out of chaos, but we all have to be comfortable with the disruption involved in order to get to grips with some challenging ideas. Not surprisingly there are lots of questions for me as project manager: can I...? should I...? and the answer is typically Do you want to? Go ahead...try it...It is scary to have permission to follow your curiosity when you have been trained to meet targets and accomplish set goals. I am very grateful they are willing to give this a go. I can't wait to see what they think and to bring it back to the ALT conference in the autumn. 

IT, ET and UT. Rethinking the control of technology in education.

Crossed wires.

A photo posted by Teresa MacKinnon (@profteresamac) on Jan 13, 2015 at 9:28am P

 Working in educational technology and teaching at this time of rapid change I often find myself in uncomfortable positions, trying to navigate conversations with people who have varying levels of understanding of technical systems and priorities that are not my own. I try to understand their point of view and, if they are interested, explain how I see things. Some conversations end happily, with increased empathy, others are awkward. Control is central to the awkwardness.

In educational institutions access to technology, how it is configured and used and by whom has long belonged to IT departments.  Over more recent years, technology deployed specifically for teaching and learning (Educational Teachnology, ET) has seen the development of new IT roles, often combining the skills of technical staff and teaching staff working side by side. This is not always an easy relationship but does provide a bridge between the two areas of activity, allowing (at best) increased understanding of how to provide engaging online systems which meet user needs. 

However, we are rapidly moving to a new reality. 

The era of UT - ubiquitous technology. Our smartphones are often all that is needed to capture and share a learning opportunity. We share and message each other, building our own personal learning environment as we select our preferred tools, sources of information and interactions. The educator's role in this context is changing, no longer the sole purveyor of wisdom (if we ever were) we have to keep pace with the ever proliferating access to more interesting content in order to engage our learners critical skills and earn our place in their information eco-system. The image below, shared on Steve Wheeler's post summarises the changes clearly: 

Originally shared by Teacher Toolkit http://teachertoolkit.me/

The debates and concerns about control of IT systems are really as helpful as my tangled mess of wires. If institutions are to cope with the changing landscape, those in IT and ET need to accept the era of UT and work constructively in discourse, respectful of the rights all have to participation and preferences in choices of technology. Sure, there will be core tools we may provide but control of all technical tool use in unrealistic and undesirable, especially when you are working with young people who have only known a world mediated by the digital. There are more important things to worry about than control - the learning and strength lies in co-operation and distributed networks. Effective collaboration is the key.

As a youngster I would often sit and untangle the box of wires my dad kept for his hobby of amateur film making. Seems like I find myself in that situation professionally now. 

ST

ALT-C 2014 post conference reflections.

I always look forward to this conference and this year it was held at Warwick so it was a lovely opportunity to bring this brilliant community right to the heart of my work context. The keynotes were inspiring, the connections and presentations helpful, the sheer amount of experience and expertise in educational technology awesome. (and that's not a word I use lightly!) Since the conference finished on Wednesday however I have been mulling over my contributions. I spoke about #oie and #clavier on wed morning and Languages@Warwick development on the wed afternoon. I thought it might be helpful to summarise what I have learnt about using technologies for international interaction in a simple 5 point way for anyone who is thinking of taking this on in their own context. So here goes: 

 1. Choose your technologies carefully but choose your partners even more so! It may be almost impossible to find tech that everyone likes, but this matters not a jot if your collaborators don't trust each other. You will inevitably need to compromise on timings, activities, objectives - play the long game, agree to make progress gradually and take your teachers and students with you. If you're unhappy or resentful don't pretend everything's fine, establish clear communication right from the start and respect the opinions of others. 

 2. Connections precede collaboration. Allow time to let all participants get to know each other. Our experience shows that this is best done by proxy, that is to say carry out some tasks (profile writing,photo sharing etc) which allow the participants to discover each other without the pressure to work together immediately. If you are meeting in an online space each participant will want to build an identity in the space. Remember how you felt on arriving at the school disco or a party in a new house? You probably spent a while thinking about how to dress and then had a few drinks in the kitchen or chatted with familiar people first. 

 3. Ensure a good level of presence. There's little worse than entering an online space expecting to meet people and finding an empty space. Worse still if no-one replies to your messages. Tumbleweed moments! Plan to have sufficient "animators" in the space to welcome each new arrival and facilitate the mingling. Lead by example.

 4. Be open to ideas. Resist the urge to control everything. If people are to engage they must be given the space to make a contribution. They may want to do something you had not planned, you will not know how that will turn out unless you try it. Be flexible and generous with your time and support. 

 5. Celebrate every small win. It is important to growing the activities that you surface the impact of the activities you do. Use hard data as well as participant narratives to ensure that you have a clear picture. Communicate the findings openly and creatively so as to engage onlookers. Careful: Don't make unsubstantiated statements, that will come back to bite you! 

Collaboration is complex, see below the waterline!