#InnoConf21 keynote. Carving a better future from dark matter.

 

Who would like one? Will not be able to send them until mid-Sept. https://t.co/Slwt4Y922c pic.twitter.com/PYJZtg3gml

— Dr. Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) August 25, 2018

 

I'm very excited (and a little nervous) about my next challenge. I will be opening tomorrow's #innoconf21 which is hosted by Reading University with a keynote which will address the use of educational technologies (edtech) in language teaching. I am very grateful to the organisers for giving me this opportunity to curate resources, reflect and present my insights into the work of language teaching and I hope that by the final plenary we will all have a clearer vision for how the next 5-10 years of language teaching could look. 

Here is the abstract for my keynote:

Carving a better future from dark matter. 

A dramatic turn of events beset our lives in 2020, a global pandemic. Everyone had to face a new and daunting reality that touched every aspect of our lives, both personal and professional. Our working lives faced huge disruption and, in order to continue to function at all, we all became more reliant on technical “solutions” to connect us to each other. For some this was a continuation or extension of familiar territory, for others this was a new endeavour. For all it brought huge challenges, long days and complicated negotiations with students and colleagues. The “pivot online” revealed many areas of university teaching which were unresolved, from “delivery” to assessment. Intensive innovation was the order of the day and such rapid change is not without pain. As we face an emerging reality in which ongoing disruption is likely, how can we be better prepared for a more positive future in which our processes and pedagogies support learners and staff alike? 

 

In this keynote, I will not shy away from the very real challenges we face.  I will however offer hope for a more sustainable future for language educators through collaboration beyond our usual hierarchies and borders. 

Slides:

In my preparation I have drawn on the work of many people, curating a padlet wall of resources which includes links to additional sources for those who want to dig deeper. I will be inviting participants to join the conversation in the zoom chat and also respond to some shared questions through the vevox poll. My slides will be shared online tomorrow morning, look out for the #innoconf21 tag.

The pandemic has of course been hard for everyone. Many are now gearing up for further challenges in coming academic year. As I stand on the sidelines now I am hoping to use this platform to inspire and support my colleagues.

In keeping with our focus on shaping the future for modern languages I would like to encourage all participants to arm themselves with the tools to carve out their future, both individually and collectively so we can sustain our important role in connecting the populations of the world for the huge challenges hurtling towards us. Use the force!

 

A swan song

 

My final teaching commitments before I retire are fully online. I have taken on 2 groups of Business School Master's level students of Management who would like to learn some French, some are absolute beginners, some have experience or speak another romance language. This is not for credit, it is an optional course for which the resources have already been placed on a moodle course and which has previously been provided as a face to face experience. Attendance is the only criteria for assessment. There are over 100 students on the class and all share access to the moodle environment. They are not grouped in any way, all can see everything. I have about 40 of them and this week I met them for the first time in a Microsoft Teams channel I set up for our synchronous sessions. There will be 8 weeks @ 2 hours a week, all running at night. They are joining me from wherever they happen to be right know due to covid, some in Warwick, many in Asia. 

Anyone reading this with any teaching experience will be able to decode what I have just described - a highway to hell in teaching terms! A hiding to nothing perhaps. Putting to one side the pedagogical challenges of designing for this mixed ability, time poor group of students I would like to capture here some of the many issues that present themselves in the light of my rich experience of teaching with technology. 

Closing psychological distance matters.

In a physical classroom there are many techniques I use to do this. Some may call them ice breaker activities but they go beyond the "first impressions" stage in a language class. My constraints in this setting are imposed by the requirement to teach using MS Teams. This (like many of the tools institutions provide for teaching) is not designed for teachers. It is cobbled together from the leftovers of tools created and sold to businesses, often with the tagline that they are solutions to better team work. In MS Teams case it remixes a huge investment made in buying Skype (see this from 2011) with the extensive use of MS Office 365 in HEIs. Recouping return on investment whilst claiming to be a covid solution. So, once the students have their email address (courtesy of Office) they can join a Teams channel and hold meetings. So far so business like. They can even join as a guest but they will then have restricted access. However, in a teaching context where one is trying to establish a collegiate, collaborative and welcoming environment this just increases the work the teacher must do. Student names appear in the room in surname/first name order. Many of my students have very long names, meaning is is very difficult to see their first name in the participant pane, so I have to cross reference with a separate spreadsheet to avoid mistakenly speaking to people using their surname. No possible renaming as we have in zoom, no freedom for students to access under a name of their choice. Reminiscent of a public school classroom from the era of Jeeves and Wooster. So far so colonial.

Feeling at home.

The combination of a Teams space and a moodle course means that tutor time has to be invested in a guided tour. Despite already having a recorded version of this prepared before I started teaching, most had not seen it and so some serious hand holding was needed. I used screenshare to show everyone around both spaces, sharing links in the chat so they could investigate further. I designed a task in sub teams (group work within MS teams) for students to input into a notepad shared document how they wish to use our precious time together. This gave them experience of jumping into a different virtual room and collaborating together. This is do-able in Teams and by and large we got through it but it is very clunky compared to the interfaces I am used to for breakout rooms (in Zoom/Bb Collaborate for example). No quick room allocation through drag and drop, no one-stop recall message to call everyone back in 5 mins, instead I visited each room in turn to invite them back the main room, interrupting whatever they were doing to demand their presence. I certainly didn't feel at home. 

Emotions matter. 

We know that learning is positively or adversely affected by one's emotions. Most virtual rooms acknowledge this by offering a range of emoticons or reaction images which participants can use during conversations, giving a guide to the "room temperature". In MS Teams you can raise your hand and just like in school you can be ignored! It is not easy to navigate through a large group of students in order to ensure everyone feels heard. I became very reliant on good old fashioned teaching skills - namely my voice - to inject warm and welcoming vibes and encourage everyone to use the chat so I could deal with their queries. People who don't feel heard just get noisier or withdraw. Another cultural reference came to my head: Joyce Grenfell.  Those were not the days! Of course there were individuals for whom I didn't have a Warwick email address and they couldn't participate in the group activity as their guest status prevented them from seeing the subgroups. More work for me to sort out and update their details and more disappointment for them. It is lonely when you can't get through the door. 

So all in all, this term will be a challenging one. One where I am constantly reminded that my 10 years of experience through virtual exchange, although it has equipped me for anything, has failed to result in evidence informed technological provision for great teaching and learning. Plus ça change! 

On the sustainability of teaching

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Recently I contributed to this final Future teacher 3.0 session by briefly sharing why I work in the open and support open educational practice (OEP) for teachers. I cannot separate that journey from the decision to learn more about ownership of digital learning objects and the use of Creative Commons licences. 
Sustainability is at the heart of that decision. Teaching as a profession is about creating the conditions for learning and growth and currently our wealthy economies are dominated by austerity and the drive to reduce regulation, resulting in open season on working terms and conditions. The gig economy continues to grow  and we will reap the negative effects of the societal impact.

The human cost of forgetting our humanity, our responsibility to one another, in favour of short term rewards is shocking. 

Gert Biesta: Teaching is not an intervention on objects but an encounter between subjects aimed at calling forth the subject-ness of students #CCCUedconf pic.twitter.com/DW9tKQIsC3

— Dr Lee Hazeldine (@CccuEd_blended) 7 February 2019

In my discipline the race to market language learning has decimated a real understanding of the fundamental fact that language is a human act, to improve you need to use it with real humans! 

Extracts from an interview for EFL teachers with Ross Thorburn.
A. What are the biggest changes that you've witnessed in how languages are taught and learned since you started your career in the 1960s? pic.twitter.com/6RHdkFsMI6

— Vivian Cook (@VivCookMC1) 16 February 2019

It may seem dull to learn how to operate and share resources online legally but at the heart of that learning is freedom which is central to the sustainability of teaching. Already inequality of access to language learning is growing, access to learning resources more widely is being limited according to wealth:

In #copyrightreform legislators should care about teachers, not publishing market, which is the “largest cultural industry in Europe”and“shows signs of a new phase of sustainable growth”according to a FEP report from 2017, @AxelVossMdEP, https://t.co/MvZCTg9Nf9 pic.twitter.com/0ewQJcoEUS

— communia (@communia_eu) 14 May 2018

These threats should be resisted by us all, but particularly by teachers. In a typical tongue in cheek tweet, Dave White commented on the difficulty of replicating human interaction through AI:

If only people were computers this would be a whole lot easier... I mean, people - it's almost like they aren't just a stack of maths in some meat.

— David White (@daveowhite) 3 July 2019 

To sustain a good quality of human life we must first value each other, whatever our talents, flaws, differences and challenges and then refuse to support changes which undermine our collective potential to thrive. 

Creative Commons Remix assignment

I'm about at the half-way point in the Creative Commons Accreditation course I am doing this summer. The video above is a submission for this task:

 Create a remix in any medium (e.g., photo, video, audio) for use in a course you teach. If you aren't currently teaching a course, create a remix for use in a future offering of the CC Certification course. Your remix must meet the following criteria:

• be comprised of at least five (5) pre-existing CC licensed works,
• contain appropriate attribution for each component work (remember to think TASL!), and
• be a legal remix (that is, the licenses of all component works must be compatible).

You are welcome to include your own original work in the remix but this is not required. Be sure to create a remix and not merely a collection.

For inspiration, see Montgomery College’s Open Pedegogy Assignments (click on one of the links under Assignments on the left): https://cms.montgomerycollege.edu/mc-open/unesco-sdg/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..

Post your remix online. License it with a Creative Commons license (be careful that the license you choose is acceptable given the terms of the component works included in your remix!). 

I will use this remix as part of my new module LN306 Developing Teaching in Languages. This year will be the second iteration of this course and I found from feedback last year that my students, although they appreciated open education as "a good thing",  it wasn't very clear to them what it meant for their practice. The student group are linguists who have worked in schools abroad and/or worked as tutors and are considering entering a career in teaching when they complete their degree. I wanted the remix to demonstrate what can be achieved and why it matters to engage with open practice. 

The remix (originally created as a contribution to video in education project ViLTE)  includes sections taken from RIP A Remix Manifesto (already a remix of many other works, licenced CC BY 3.0 and my own additions including an image from Flickr which uses a licence which prevents derivatives. It exemplifies the discussion I co-wrote about the issues faced by language educators when using contemporary cultural artefacts as produsage in their courses. I have messaged the poster of this image to see if he is OK with its use in this context. I have used the image without any changes but this licence would prevent me applying a CC BY licence on the finished work so I need the permission of the owner in order to include it. If nothing is forthcoming I will have to replace it with another image. Update: the video above is a remix again as no response came from the ship image creator. (UPDATE 2: The original image creator responded to me via Flickr messaging to ask a few further questions about the purpose I wanted to put the image to. Although I had already removed the image, it was good to see that contacting an owner through the community on Flickr could work). This serves as a good reminder of the detailed level of understanding of Creative Commons licencing needed by educators in order to operate in the digital domain. Real scholarship is required to work confidently online. 

Once the remix was ready to share I uploaded it to my YouTube channel. Another problem: YouTube do not have a full selection of CC licences available, just CC BY. This is my preferred licensing option in any case and (provided the Flickr image owner gives me permission) is fine for this remix. 

I am submitting my assignment within a blog post (my blog is CC BY) as I think the context and issues for remixing are as important as completing the assignment. Here are the questions that arise during the remixing process:

• when remixing using content which explicitly allows remixing (eg CC BY) where do you attribute? In the video itself? In the description on the streaming site? Is a link within the blog post enough to provide the TASL requirements?
• If the licence on an image (for example) is too restrictive for inclusion, can this be ignored if the owner gives his/her permission for your use?
• What if the sharing site used (eg. You Tube) does not support the full suite of CC licences? How can we influence site providers to offer better display of licensing options?

Finally I decided to create a further remix of my own resources around open educational practice: