Women Singing at a Table (Waulking the Cloth) by Keith Henderson http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/women-singing-at-a-table-waulking-the-cloth-94160
Last night I had dinner with some very clever women of my acquaintance. I mentioned to them that I had been on “unconscious bias’ training. ‘What does that even mean?’ they asked. Luckily, I was able to clarify as I have now had 3 different men mansplain it to me.
The University is on an equality and diversity kick. I have now been to 2 sessions on the topic. One much better than the other. I’ll be sending my feedback in. In today’s session I asked whether unconscious bias was the new name for prejudice. That didn’t go down well.
Clearly there are no women who can deliver unconscious bias training to senior university managers, which surprises me, since you would think it was a rich area of work. Perhaps all the female presenters and trainers are being kept in reserve for the Aurora sessions and Athena SWAN sessions.
One thing I have noticed though is that colleagues in the sessions seem reluctant to use the word ‘women‘. I have heard ‘girls’, ‘ladies ‘and ‘females’ repeatedly.
It was the repeated use of the word ‘girls’ and some rather off-colour anecdotes about lesbians which makes me mark down the second set of presenters. That, and some very uninspiring pedagogy. Surely we can do better than this.
Virginia Woolf wrote ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’*. A room of ones own is a luxury which few could afford at the time without help from husband or family.
As a woman who values enormously the space I have from which to write my blog, I am particularly keen to do what I can to lower the barriers and restrictions which stop any individual or group writing openly.
I was in Virginia this week to hear more about the ‘Domain of One’s Own’ project at the University of Mary Washington. The project provides all incoming freshmen with their own domain names and Web space. Students have the freedom to create subdomains, install any LAMP-compatible software, setup databases and email addresses, and carve out their own space on the web that they own and control. The University picks up the cost of paying for the domain as long as the student is a student. When they stop being a UMW student, they can choose to take over paying for the hosting or let it lapse. In the meantime they have learned valuable digital literacy skills and contributed web-based user-created content to all or any of their courses and activities. The university is not afraid of what the students might do in the space.
It seems to me that this approach is very much in line with University of Edinburgh’s recent ‘Digital Footprint’ campaign, and if we chose to follow it, would build on our commitment to developing the student experience. It is certainly one of the more interesting ways to link student use of the web to their time as part of the university community.
Unique creation by Sophie of Kellogg. Commercial use by negotiation.
Last night I dined at Kellogg again. Now that I am a visiting fellow rather than a resident one I was pleased to be invited to be guest Chamberlaine for the evening.
It was Scholars evening, so we celebrated the many generous gifts of donors to the College, some of whom are alumni, and others who just believe that the work of the College and the work of these individual students is worth supporting. I had lovely company at dinner sitting with social policy champion Amanda and Heather, Desmond Tutu Scholar and Wikipedia researcher.
I chose the importance of voting as the theme for my after dinner speech. We had a number of guests from Somerville College so I was able to make reference to Mary Somerville’s campaigns for women’s suffrage as well as the recent MCR elections, the Scottish independence referendum and the imminent general election.
I was also able to remind the current University of Oxford students that until 1950 as a graduate of that ( and this) university you would actually have had 2 votes in a UK general election. One for the area of the country where you reside, one for the university constituency.
The university constituencies, Oxford, Cambridge, University of London, the ancient Scottish universities and Queens Belfast all sent elected MPs to Westminster.
This was a wheeze started by the Scots and imported to England following the union of the crowns. It went on for a very long time. Several Cromwells, Pitt the Younger, Lord Palmerston, Francis Bacon, Issac Newton, Robert Peel and Ramsay MacDonald benefitted from the arrangement. Needless to say, it did nothing for the town and gown relations in any of the cities and was all ended by the Representation of the Peoples Act in 1948.
Two Men in an Interior . Sean Watson (c) University of Edinburgh ECA Collection http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/ex3a95
Last weekend I was in a conversation about the dearth of LGBT people in medical teaching cases. This may be because LGBT people never get ill and have no health, family or wellness issues. Or it might be that our curriculum doesn’t reflect diversity in society.
Never fear, I said, rather than start from scratch writing our own, lets go out to the OER-web to find materials which have been developed elsewhere that are available and licensed for us to use in our curriculum.
My colleague Jo quickly pointed out that the need for an ‘upperclassman facilitator’ might be a stumbling point if one were trying to replicate this teaching plan precisely. Luckily ,derivatives are allowed. We are free to remix, transform, and build upon the material . Phew.
Teviot Row House, Edinburgh, pen drawing, c1888.By Sydney Mitchell (Life time: 1930) [Public domain or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsTeviot Row house is celebrating its 125th birthday this year and alumni are being welcomed back to share stories.
It is the oldest purpose built student union building in the world and it is stunning. It was designed to be fit for purpose, politics, power and community: ‘And with a house furnished as our Union is, our fellow-students may rest assured that they have much in their power to promote their own welfare.’
If you have ever tried to navigate your way around inside Teviot you might wonder what the original architect* imagined would be going on in there, and there is something of Hogwarts about its staircases, turrets and towers**.
It is a slightly disconcerting space and it takes you a few tries to get where you are going. But if you persist there are rich environments, private spaces and favourite nooks to be found.
My memories of Teviot stem from my time as a student here, but also from the many summers it served as the Fringe Club during the Edinburgh Festivals. In recent years I have been lucky to spend time in there again as a trustee on the EUSA Board.
25th Oct 1889 description of Teviot’s opening, The Student
To assist in helping Teviot to celebrate, Claire found this snippet in the archives of The Student newspaper from 1889 when the Union first opened for all.
‘It remains with the students themselves to make the Union what it ought to be, and if they join it as they ought they will be the gainers from it.The want is now supplied, and we shall look with interest on the progress of the new factor in our University life.’
The funding for the building was generated through an early ‘crowdsourcing-initiative’ 1 from amongst the students themselves. It would be fascinating to see if there is any record of that in the archives.
There was a book written for the 100th anniversary, it’s probably in the Library, called ‘No spirits and precious few women‘, a reference to the fact that neither spirits nor women were included in Teviot until the early 1970s, which makes it sound like a rather dull place to me. Nowadays, however, it is lively and buzzing with student councils, ceilidhs and tasty snacks.
*The architect, Sydney Mitchell was an alumnus of Edinburgh too.
** The creator of Hogwarts, J.K Rowling, is an alumna of Edinburgh too.
For a technology conference which has its keynotes in a main hall for several thousand people, the Educause presentations were charmingly retro and hardly technology-enhanced at all.
Clay Christiansen (62) spoke about distruptive innovation using slides featuring small type, clip art, serif fonts, copyright assertions and some oddly watermarked images. He modelled the Harvard experience in front of an audience of 4000. He asked us to pray for Harvard Business School. Which we did.
Later on, national treasure Doris Kearns Goodwin (71) lectured for an hour reading rapidly from a pre-written paper accompanied by no visual aids. The audience hung on her every word. More proof, were it needed, that learning technology is grounded in the liberal arts.
I went sessions and presentations about the recent shifts in the open source open communities: Apereo, Kauli and Unizin. There was a lot of talk about freedom and control.
I was surprised how many people wanted to discuss the recent Scottish referendum. More talk of freedom and control.
Blended learning is all about breaking free of the restraints of space and time. You can do it any time, any place, any pace. Providing an technology enhanced campus is all about mastering space and time: what can you do in the space and when?
The distinction between IT and AV is becoming increasingly blurred- it’s all digital now. For many colleagues it is the technology context; the technology available in the teaching rooms, which influences their choice whether to use cameras, microphones, audio, video, images, visualisations, Google-earth fly throughs, clips from movies, recorded TV programmes, who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire-style voting, virtual worlds, touch screens, simulations, animations, infographics and datasets in their presentations.
For many colleagues it is their fear ( or prior experience) that the technology will not work in the room which exacerbates the stress of presenting. For many colleagues it is a complete mystery as to why the local IT staff who support the presentation machine do not support the data projector too. This situation is not unique to Edinburgh.
The layout of the room (and the number of power sockets) shapes choices with regard to students using laptops, cameras and phones to create learning materials for themselves. The strength of the wireless broadband determines whether video can be watched, shared and downloaded by many students at the same time. The comfiness of the seats, the ability to come and go and the proximity to coffee influences whether student choose to remain in this place while they learn.
When colleagues are asked to show innovation in ‘front of house’ teaching it behooves the colleges and schools to invest well in technology enhanced space for an excellent student experience.
The Learning Spaces Technology Section team work to ensure that teachers and students have the best possible, quality and consistent, choices of technology in centrally managed classrooms and study spaces. Jim and his team ensure that equal access to learning is offered via hearing loops, large projection and recordings for revision or transcription. When the festival comes they take our AV kit out, when the festival goes they put our AV kit back in. They turn around fast and they work to ensure that the kit will work when you poke it with your digit to turn it on. They will also train you how to use it.
If you are interested in knowing more about the kit in the classrooms, or having a practice to become confident in the digital skills needed to master it, do contact us.
(c) The University of Edinburgh Fine Art Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
There is a steampunk science public engagement event in Edinburgh on Friday* and it is the birthday of HG Wells today. It seems appropriate in that context to let you know that I have discovered a time traveller in the University of Edinburgh Fine Art collection.
I am in the enviable position of being able to choose art from the collection to hang on the walls in my office. It’s a tough gig; choosing between a Blackadder and a Bellany, a Redpath and a Rodger, but I struggled through. It has to be said that much of the fine art collection comprises portraits of dead white men with excellent facial hair, and there’s not many women artists in there.
My favourite picture in the collection is already exhibited ( quite rightly) in the school of Scottish Studies: Women Singing at a Table (Waulking the Cloth) by Keith Henderson is a stunning piece. I was offered a naked Sean Connery from his time as a life model.
The first piece I have chosen however, is this painting by AE Borthwick. It is entitled ‘A Rocky Landscape’ and clearly shows a young woman recklessly using her laptop for virtual fieldwork while perched on a rock by a river. The artist died in 1955.
*Attendees are invited to dress in ‘your finest corsets, spats and gasmasks’.
Charting the Nation Collection. University of Edinburgh Digital Images Collection
Last night I dreamt I went to Clackmannanshire again. It’s hard to know what to write the morning after. Last week we had a workplace debate about the referendum. Colleagues for Yes were a clear majority. There’s a lot of hurt being felt today. In the past I have granted compassionate leave following the loss of a loved one or the death of a pet. What should we give for mourning a dream?
The office is very quiet, one of the big topics of discussion is gone for a generation.
Picture taken by me in the street. No rights reserved.
I wrote a while ago about MOOCs as an extreme sport in a post called MOOC X-Games.
“Engaging in MOOCs was always a bit of a leap into the unknown, colleagues who MOOC look like they have been engaging in a high adrenalin extreme sport. They come back grinning from ear to ear. For them it has been a total rush.”
Perhaps this is what the X in xMOOC and EdX actually stands for, these are the new education x-games and there’s a hunger for it.
“Putting yourself out there, not knowing how it will feel, managing the experience of mediating learners in their thousands and surviving unscathed. They want to do it again and again, and they want to know ‘what’s next?’
They also recognise the role of support teams who made it possible. The striking benefit for institutions, beyond the increased dopamine levels of the individual teaching academic, is the renewed boost to the engagement of academic colleagues with the learning technology/ edtech/ instructional design/ media production teams on campus.
When you are standing at the top about to jump, the support teams play a vital part in getting you there safely and supporting you when things get hairy. They do the heavy lifting, they test the equipment, they’ve got your back. They do their best to help you manage the the high number of inherently uncontrollable variables. They give you the best advice they can on environmental conditions based on expertise and the best data they have.
Once you have had that experience together, you want to do more, you spread the word, you tell others how much fun it is, you encourage them to try too. There is now a queue of people, mustered, kitted up and ready step out into the void.
As with sport, whilst traditional educational success criteria may be adopted when assessing performance, extreme teaching performers tend to reject unified judging methods, with different MOOCs employing their own ideals and having the ability to evolve their activities with new developments in the space. That is what makes it edgy, the experience will be different every time.”
Discussion around MOOC planning is mostly concerned with sustainability, guessing how many times a course can run, how it can be monetized, how long its shelf life will be, how it can be broken down for parts and re-used.
It is great to see some MOOCs such as the University of Edinburgh Understanding the Referendum FutureLearn MOOC which pay no heed to that. It is a one-time only, once in a lifetime, global-reach MOOC designed to get real engagement and learning around a significant geo-political event which needs an informed and thoughtful citizenry*.
Sense-making in a maelstrom. That’s what universities are for. That’s our role in the digital space. Much credit must go to Amy and the teams involved in getting it to this point.
I’m kinda glad we don’t have to run it more than once though. This referendum has been invigorating, extreme, exciting but exhausting. I hope all the MOOC learners who can, will vote tomorrow.
