I am delighted that a chapter I wrote, based on my research has now been published in the Handbook of Digital Higher Education
Chapter 28: The importance of diversity and digital leadership in education: a feminist perspective from higher education https://www.elgaronline.com/view/book/9781800888494/book-part-9781800888494-39.xml
I aim to promote an inclusive culture in my organisation. I have a focus on promoting cross-generational working. We welcome student interns as staff, and while not all students are young, they do tend to lower the average age about the place.
I am delighted to have such a great group of interns who will work with us all year across all of our teams and projects.
Joining our two Napier Web Development Interns (who work with us full-time) and our Web Governance Intern ( who has been with us for ages), we also have this year: a Digital Content Training Research Intern, a Digital Marketing Intern, a Diversity Recruitment and Attraction Intern, a Media Administration Intern, an Edtech Operations Intern, a Design System and Web Media Intern, a Nudge Intern, a Student Notifications Service Software Developer Intern, a User Research Intern, 2 Digital Learning Interns, 7 Learn Foundations Interns, 4 Web Content Migration Liaison Assistants and a Digital Skills Trainer – Coding Intern!
I will also be having regular ‘Heads Learn from Interns’ session where the LTW senior management team will hear recommendations and advice from the interns, based on their insights and expertise.
And yes, many of our interns do stay, or return and have careers with us after they graduate.
I am delighted to have been able to create a post this summer for a ‘Nudge Intern’ to work with us to think about how we can use Nudge theory in designing our services and supporting our users.
Annika has written a blog about her thinking and a report for me about why I need a longer term role in my team. I must say, she has convinced me and if she agrees, we will keep her as part of our team for the rest of this year.
“The team uses a human-centred design approach and an iterative development process incorporating feedback and gradual improvement. These similarities make the UX and Digital Consultancy team a great place to begin to incorporate nudges. There are complexities that make implementing nudges more challenging but should prove to be surmountable given additional time. It takes time to come up to speed on longer-term projects. Planning nudges should take place throughout the project timeline and be implemented as an iterative process with feedback. Additionally, the University structure with self- governing schools and deaneries makes it difficult to implement comprehensive nudges. Instead, individual nudges may need to be drafted for each.
Groups within LTW that already identify pain points are better prepared to start nudging. Being able to spot and define unwanted behaviour easily makes designing a nudge simpler.
The report provides recommendations for continuing the work of implementing nudges in LTW. The first recommendation involves nudging users toward creating better online
content. The existing resources are excellent but are being underutilised. I discuss recommendations to bring the guidelines to the users while using the Web Publishing Platform. Next, I outline a recommendation to enhance the use of data analytics within LTW. There is a need to combine the preexisting data into a format to facilitate and inform data-driven decision-making. The final recommendation is to introduce nudges in ways of working. This would increase familiarity with what nudges are and how to implement them.”
Read more about nudges How nudge can help you and your users – Website and Communications Blog (ed.ac.uk)
Stuart and I will be presenting at ALT conference in Manchester next month if you want to come see us tell stories:
Rapid adoption of learning technologies as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed shortcomings in our vision and understanding of ethical learning technology practices, with the potential for long term negative impact on students’ experiences of educational opportunities. It is critical that educational institutions consider technology decisions within the overall ethical responsibility for care and well-being of their students. Emerging frameworks and models of practice for learning technology ethics need further research and reflection in order to help practitioners navigate increasingly complex and widening ethico-political decision-making. In this session we will use storytelling as a means of exploring areas of light and darkness to investigate how practitioners balance different moral modes of thinking when presented with ethical challenges.
We will think about how stories are used as a means of management and control, to tame complexity and “suppress certain conflicts and mask multiple interpretations” (Leonardi & Jackson 2004, p 615). Even our own “capacity for imagining something new or different … is greatly influenced by prior imaginations” (Markham 2021, p 385). We draw analogies with fables and fairy tales as mechanisms for enabling or constraining different ethical ways of thinking. Fables “wear their moral messages on their sleeves, shut down possibilities for independent ethical development, and allow no freedom for the individual imagination”, whereas fairy tales, “open-textured from the perspectives of teller and of hearer … allow fantasy to flex our ethical and meaning-making muscles” (McKinnell 2019, p 197). In these stories we might recognise the different modes of ethical practice that address justice or care.
In this session we exemplify these approaches through storytelling, unpicking where we might want to tame or free ethical complexity in practice. It is through stories that we help inform the cradled practices of learning technology ethics based on professional frameworks emerging.
References
Leonardi, P.M. & Jackson, M.H. (2004) Technological determinism and discursive closure in organizational mergers. Journal of Organizational Change Management. 17 (6), 615–631.
Markham, A. (2021) The limits of the imaginary: Challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. New Media and Society. 23 (2), 382–405.
McKinnell, L. (2019) The ethics of enchantment: The role of folk tales and fairy tales in the ethical imagination. Philosophy and Literature. 43 (1), 192–209.
I am honoured that the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia UK offered me Honorary Membership of Wikimedia UK.
This is in recognition of the significant contribution that I have made to the charity over a number of years, as a long standing champion for Wikimedia’s role in higher education. In particular, in establishing a Wikimedian in Residence role at the University of Edinburgh, and for the ongoing success and impact of this programme.
I was delighted to accept, of course, but a bit embarrassed as I am not a particularly good editor of Wikipedia and I often get a bit grumpy when my edits are reverted. I support Wikimedia UK because it is the right thing to do. Wikipedia is the largest open educational resource in the world and essential for staff and students in higher education.
But I edit as a pass time, hobby, for my own distraction and amusement.
I also invented the category for ‘muses‘ which I note now has 130 entries. I started it for Stella Cartwright.
It has been noted that I have not blogged for a while. So I will give some updates here:
I am delighted to be continuing my visiting stint as a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. I was a Fellow when I worked at Oxford and the college generously allow me to keep that affiliation in the hope that I will visit and be a useful member of the Fellowship.
I don’t visit very often it has to be said, and I feel that is partly because whenever I have vacation time at the beginning or end of term, the Oxford terms have already finished. They are very short. But that’s just an excuse. I will try harder this year to get a time for an actual work visit.
After 2 years of keynoting from a comfy chair at home it was lovely to adventure again.
It was fun to be in Limerick, and the CONUL conference was both incredibly friendly and well organised. I was happy to have a chance to wear my space boots and stand up again in front of the slides Gill made for me.
if you were there and you would like a copy of the slides for the links, please email me.
On Wednesday 27th April. I’ll be keynote at UCISA’s spotlight. on Digital Capabilities: Digital skills, a priority or lip service?
https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/Events/2022/April/Spotlight-on-digital-capabilities
Training in educational organisations is a contested space, with some significant challenges in ensuring that IT trainers have the right skills to support adults learning in the workplace. The differentiation needed in these classrooms along with sophisticated classroom management skills is an area often overlooked by managers. The sheer hostility of many university staff towards being asked to take time to learn any new digital skills may surprise many people who work in the private sector.
In this session I will share insights into experience of successful (and unsuccessful) initiatives and suggest ways forward for ensuring that digital capabilities considerations are underpinned by a commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion.
I am very chuffed to see the publication of this book. Please buy it for all your friends.
It’s been a long time coming. In it I explain why dangerous women edit Wikipedia.
The book is a collection of fifty reflections on power and identity. The delay has meant that it has arrived at just the time I am reflecting on my power and identity as well as on being fifty.
I am especially chuffed to find that I am on the first page of contents, on the same page as the First Minister. I doubt there’s any specific power which flows from that proximity, but it is nice to be identified as a dangerous women alongside so many others.
I’ll be presenting again, on International Women’s Day. This time I’ll be in the online line-up up at University of Highlands and Islands.
I gained Principal Fellowship of The Higher Education Academy (PFHEA) in February 2022*.
It took me a long time to write because it is a very fiddly process of mapping each section, and statement within section, against not only the heading of the section, descriptor levels, and also the numbered items, core areas and required knowledge in the multiple themes of the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF). And there’s an aggressive word count.
I actually started writing my application in 2019, and gathered some advocate statements in support, but never completed the task and then some other stuff happened which pushed it further down my to-do list. I have been a fellow of the HEA since 1999. When I first started teaching I was a member of the ILT and of LTSN, when they merged I submitted my portfolio of evidence for HEA Fellowship.
I decided in 2019 that it was time to apply for Principal Fellowship based on my ongoing, sustained engagement with the activities, knowledge and professional values of the UKPSF across my career, and evidence of my impact within and outwith my institution. I am now working with Advance HE as a member of their Learning and Teaching Strategy Board so my new year’s resolution for 2022 was to get it sent, and I give thanks again to the people who wrote letters of support.
It’s a fiddly process for several reasons. I have to assume it is easier to complete if you are in a senior academic role rather than a professional expert. The references to use of technology for teaching in the UKPSF are a bit sparse (possibly not surprising as it hasn’t been updated for many years) but it is not difficult for a good learning technologist to demonstrate a thorough understanding of effective approaches to teaching and learning support as a key contribution to high quality student learning.
The evidence needed for Principal Fellowship includes:
Once again, I was grateful to myself for the time I spend writing this blog. I use my blog in several ways: as a reflective diary, as a notebook and aide memoir to record events, a place to develop ideas, a place to gather resources, record and share progress and as a tool for creating a community and conversation with fellow practitioners and leaders. I have done my research in an area where previously there has not been a lot of published work available so even my early thinking attracted some attention from my industry peers and I was invited to present my work at a number of practitioner conferences. My work as an insider researcher has been combined with what I have learned and how I have adapted my approaches to real world problems. My blog records my journey as a scholarly, and reflective practitioner and as a way for people to contact me if they invite me to speak at events.
I am grateful for the studies I’ve done (many moons ago) in gaining a Masters in Education and the time I spent (also many moons ago) as module leader on the PGCert LTHE at University of Leeds. That course really was ahead of its time and it’s fun to see how many ‘alumni’ of the programme now hold senior jobs in institutions.
UKPSF
The HEA application requires particularly evidence that one continues to ‘champion the UKPSF’ at all levels. Here is some of what I wrote:
During the pandemic year we recruited a dozen new learning technologists and in order that they were all able to join our community with a shared understanding of the technologies we have on campus, we put together a training programme to ensure that new recruits were quickly up to speed as expert users of the university systems. More than half of my educational design team have teaching qualifications and I sponsor research projects to ensure that ‘Edinburgh experience’ is reflected in scholarship of teaching. Their grounding in educational scholarship brings benefits to the university when we teach academic staff as learners through our staff development programme, which covers all aspects of digital pedagogy.
I am one of the authors of ‘Butcher, C., Davies, C., & Highton, M. (2019). Designing learning: from module outline to effective teaching’ which is widely used to support teaching in PGCert Learning and Teaching in Higher Education courses and I take care to ensure that the scholarship I undertook in writing that book underpins the services we offer. The work of my learning technology staff development teams, instructional designers, media producers and learning design teams directly aligns and embeds the UKPSF elements in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, (A5, V3)
I am a mentor as part of the University of Edinburgh’s ‘Mentoring Connections’ programme, which I find rewarding and interesting as a way to support others in their career progression. I believe that an important part of establishing strategies for supporting academic colleagues in delivering high quality teaching (A2) is to ensure that the professional learning technologists in our organisation are supported in their ongoing professional development. Their increased professionalism ensures that teaching and learning is better supported (K3).
I champion the UKPSF as a framework everyday through its alignment with CMALT -the framework for certifying the professional development of learning technologists . CMALT for learning technology staff is a key component of our staff development activity at University of Edinburgh. The more the learning technology staff can show that they understand how students learn and the use and value of appropriate technologies, the better. CMALT helps them to evaluate the effectiveness of tools for teaching and understand the implications for academic practice (A5). In order to ensure that our teaching support staff understand the UKPSF framework I offered a university-wide bursary scheme which provided support for CMALT applicants from across the university. The impact can be measured by the result that University of Edinburgh has a more professionally accredited learning technology staff than any other institution in the UK and the fact that our online programmes attract the highest level of satisfaction from students of any mode of delivery.
My teams design and plan learning activities and programmes of teaching. This work is a large part of the organisational strategy for supporting and promoting others in delivering high quality teaching and learning (A1, A2). In any given year my learning technology and digital skills teams will offer more than 700 pedagogical training sessions to academic staff and students. We review and evaluate that provision each year (K4 K5) looking at the data about uptake and engagement. We take care to ensure that our staff development courses for online teaching are mapped against the UKPSF and that they contribute as evidence for colleagues working towards FHEA.
I am happy to share the other bits of my application if that would be helpful. The generosity of my advocates and friends who shared theirs with me made a huge contribution to my success.
*actually on the memorable date 22/02/2022.