Month: July 2021

CPD workshops

Delivering leadership workshops for continuing professional development networks is an important contribution to developing our community.  These opportunities for knowledge dissemination and industry engagement offer routes to integrate critical analysis with practical, meaningful links from the research findings of information professionals.

This year I have ensured that the work we are doing in researching higher education has been disseminated via the ALT and UCISA CPD programme.

I have  delivered CPD webinars for ALT and UCISA membership.  In each case I am drawing upon new data and evidence gathered from staff, students and professional service colleagues in higher education. In each case I am celebrating and showcasing research done by the women with whom I work.

The workshops have been:

‘Diversity and Digital Leadership’- based on my research
Digital leadership is an area of leadership studies which is gaining popularity as organisations seek to ensure that their businesses are best positioned to thrive in an increasingly digital world. Digital leaders are often at the forefront of change, leading departments which are inclusive and empowering. People and culture are key to ensuring that staff are treated well and feel an ongoing loyalty to their organisation, but there are risks for digital leaders who push for change on too many fronts. This session is an opportunity to hear some of the latest research on building inclusive workplaces and consider the recommendations for understanding data about your people.

‘The challenges of attracting staff to skills training’  with Jenni Houston
Why is it so challenging to attract colleagues to training in digital skills? How can we create a learning culture within our universities and colleges? This workshop will explore some of the successes and challenges of offering a comprehensive digital capabilities programme in a large institution and suggest possible strategies for overcoming the Dunning–Kruger effect which causes people to overestimate their ability.

‘Who is getting hurt online?’ with Vicki Madden
Online harassment is very much part of our students’ experience. Ethnic minority and female students experience the more harmful forms of online harassment in comparison to their peers. Disabled students and those from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups are more likely to be harassed on institutional platforms than their peers. What is your institution doing about this? Although most institutions have support services in place for students and staff who experience incidents on campus or amongst people who can be identified, Student Services and Wellbeing staff may be unaware of the nature of cyberstalking, doxing, online shaming and revenge porn. This workshop will explore some of the risks associated with offering services dealing with social media behaviours.

‘Uncovering the real value of academic engagement’ with Lorraine Spalding
What are teachers’ hopes and concerns in using technology with their students? How can academic engagement enhance our major educational technology projects?  Hear more about how the Learning, Teaching and Web Directorate at the University of Edinburgh, is engaging academic colleagues in a strategic way to implement large institutional changes such as the rollout of lecture recording and a VLE service improvement programme.  This presentation will also reference useful resources for supporting engagement and effective communications practices, such as the ucisa communications toolkit.

‘Over a year of hybrid working: What the data tells us (about women)’ with Lilinaz Rouhani
At the University of Edinburgh, we conducted University-wide surveys in 2020 and 2021 to understand people’s experiences of homeworking, taking into account their demographic differences. This gave us a rich data set from which to understand the experiences of women in IT during the pandemic. This presentation focuses on what we learned, and takes an intersectional approach to how different aspects of jobs were affected by off-campus working. The presentation adapts an EDI perspective, discusses if and how different groups had different experiences, and how these differences can be taken into account when developing policies for hybrid working in the future. The session will be a presentation of findings, and a discussion of how the findings are being used to develop policies. The session will be interesting as it is evidence-based, using data over two years. In some instances, it will be interesting to see the change of attitude from 2020 to 2021, while in some instances, settling into home working did not affect people’s opinions. The surveys took into account 19 demographic variables and it will be interesting for the audience how these variables affected home working.

growing your website? deadheading is key

For those of you who are a bit green fingered and like gardening. You’ll know we always have to remember what to dead-head and what to leave. We dead-head flowers so that they don’t go to seed. Unfortunately  that has happened all across the university estate.

If you want to grow a successful, health, well-stocked and well-designed web garden on your digital estate you need to get ruthless with your deadheading and weeding.

In order to improve the quality of our website content we have conducted the first University-wide website content audit.

Let me introduce the University of Edinburgh ‘100K content pruning challenge’, aiming to remove unnecessary/duplicated content. #deadheading https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/content-audit-findings-and-the-100k-challenge/

attack of the 50th Women in Red editathons

Attackofthe50ftwoman A huge fifty, 50! Women in Red editathons have now been held at University of Edinburgh. Every month we gather together online to hack away at the skewed content.

Hannah’s video on how to make Wikipedia articles has had a towering 18K views since Sept 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBCxb9oaz5s).

Join us at our Women in Red monthlies https://edin.ac/3gh243I

Pick up an article that interests you.

If not you then who?

If not now then when?

Dress code: casual.

adressing the pay gap

Front Cover Issue 9 – Image of woman with household items: iron, thread etc. Usage terms: © Estate of Roger Perry Creative Commons Non-Commercial Licence – See more at: http://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/articles/design-and-spare-rib#sthash.LtV84Eu5.dpuf

That feeling when you discover that the bit of the organisation  of which you are in charge has a gender pay gap in the ‘other’ direction.

Addressing the pay gap is one of the  commitments directors in ISG have made as part of our EDI plan.

This is, I think, the sort of equality data in which sex matters although presumably sex and gender are being used interchangeably in the reporting context.

The average full time equivalent salary of women in ISG is 16.97% lower than the average salary of men. This compares to 9.59% across all Professional Service Groups and 16.18% for the whole University.

The median full-time equivalent salary of women is 25.48% lower than the median for men. This compares to 14.87% across all Professional Service Groups and 11.10% for the whole University.

Gender pay balance is different in the various Directorates.

LTW has a gender paygap in the opposite direction. I have overshot and I will now seek to correct, as all gaps are bad.

With regard to senior management the gender imbalance and broad salary range within grade 10 have a major impact on the University’s overall gender pay gap. When grade 10 staff are excluded from the dataset, the University average and median pay gaps reduce to 8.8% and 8.5%. However, this is not the case in ISG where the numbers of women and men are roughly equal and are paid much the same ( apart from the CIO/VP who skews the data obv).

The University’s average salary disability gap is 1%; there is no median pay gap. However, at 3%, the rate of proactive disclosure by staff renders it difficult to make meaningful observations regarding any pay gap between staff who have disclosed a disability and those who have not.  For ISG, 4.5% have declared a disability and the average disability pay gap is 3%. Interestingly, when the recent home-working survey was done ISG recorded a much higher rate of disability than our HR data would suggest and than other parts of the University.

The University’s ethnicity pay gap is 1% (average) and 5.7% (median) in favour of staff who have proactively declared their ethnicity as ‘White’. While these have reduced since the 2019 audit (8.8% and 8.4%) there has been an increase in the percentage of staff whose ethnicity is unknown/withheld (to 21%) rendering it difficult to draw overall meaningful conclusions regarding the pay of our BAME staff. For ISG, our ethnicity pay gap is 19% (average) and 24.6% (median) and the demographic of our staff ethnicity declaration is: 75% White; 8% BAME; and 8% unknown. Although our Learning Technology colleague Rachael features widely as the face of the university, including on the equal pay report!

LILAC Hindsight 2020

‘The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo’. Picture of art in my home. No rights reserved by me.

In 2009 I delivered a keynote at LILAC  conference.

I was the new Head of Learning Technologies Group at the University of Oxford.

The talk  was titled ‘Managing Your Flamingo‘, an analogy from Alice in Wonderland, where Alice is trying to play croquet and every time she goes to play either the flamingo’s head pops up or the hedgehog uncurls and walks away. The challenges of getting our back end and front end systems  working together are not much changed.

Wonderland analogies are timeless and rife at Oxford and I own a print from the original Tenniel woodblocks.

This year I am hosting a panel at LILAC which brings together  Josie Fraser, Jane Secker and Allison Littlejohn. Each of our panel have more than 10 years as change agents in information and digital literacy and have led high profile initiatives to shift thinking and disrupt traditional ideas in (in)different institutions and sectors. Together they will bring unique perspectives on the topic of ‘2020 hindsight’. Come along to find out if their radical inclinations have been tempered by their time in institutions.

The conference is delayed by a year and as Josie has pointed out, you get one year’s extra reflection for free.

Hindsight bias can be dangerous if it leads us to think we ‘knew it all along’ . We all suffer sometimes from memory distortion (“I said it would happen”), inevitability (“It had to happen”), and foreseeability (“I knew it would happen”). Our panel will join you in reflecting on, considering and explaining what has happened and how things that didn’t happen, could have happened. How would things be different if we knew then what we know now?

Is there such a thing as lilac-tinted spectacles?

Back then, I spoke about different types of literacy, (digital, media and information) and questioned whether they were all comparable concepts or subsets of each other, and how far IL should integrate itself into these other literacies. I encouraged librarians to contribute to a digital literacy framework (i=skills) and encouraged everyone to edit and contribute to the digital literacy page on Wikipedia.  And media literacy is a hot topic because of the Internet Safety Bill.

The wikpedia page about digital literacy has been much improved this year, but mostly by north Americans. I continue to encourage librarians to edit Wikipedia. And I continue to invest in Wikimedians in Residence and wikipedia in the curriculum.

In 2009 I predicted that all graduates, not just computing graduates, needed algorithmic modelling literacy and back then, Oxford was  working on a Modelling4all project.  Check out their website, The Epidemic Game Maker provides a way to quickly and easily make models of epidemics and turn the models into games.

In 2009 I predicted that Youtube U (an educational YouTube) was just around the corner, in much the same way as the University of Oxford had just launched on iTunes U in October 2008. ItunesU and podcasting were a huge success for Oxford, we even featured in the ipod advert on the telly. Who’d have thought that podcasts would be having such a renaissance a dozen years later?

Our partnership with Apple on Itunes brought massive scale and reach, millions of downloads for openly licensed recorded lectures. When Coursera and Edx came in 2012 I thought the reaction would be similar but I struggled to get Oxford interested in MOOCs. They never did, and have suffered no ill-effects as a result.  I moved institution and Edinburgh now boasts a boat-load of online open courses. Sometimes it’s you, sometimes it’s them.

I was also wrong about YouTube U. But I have spent some years building something similar in-house. The widespread use of lecture recording has added a whole new type of ‘learning resources’ which are part of the way students learn, study and revise.  Huge, born-digital collections.

No-one can really predict how the future will be. We learned that last year. But we can pay attention to signals and think about readiness. I know that the work we did at Edinburgh around business continuity for snow and strikes served us well for Covid.

It is perhaps challenging for online learning leaders and learning technology aficionados to come to terms with the fact that we did not deliver this change through careful support, inspirational argument or the power of convincing evidence. We had to do it  in ways we never anticipated. We have been forced to do things we hoped we would never have to do. We have put in place systems and support for rushed replication of on-campus delivery online.  We have become middleware.  We are at the same time  essential and largely irrelevant. And we are caught in a crazy world in which students and staff who would previously have mounted barricades to resist the use of technology in their teaching are balloting their unions and lobbying management to insist on it.

How will this play out? If students do well in their exams this year will we hail the lift and shift as a success? Perhaps all our previous insistence on planned, careful design was unwarranted. Are exam results the measure of good teaching and learning? If so, it’s a good thing each institution has autonomy in assessment and everything is open to interpretation. In whose interest is it for the shift to online story to be told as a huge success or a massive failure?