Category: Learning, teaching and web services

will I strike on International Women’s Day?

Sadie, Beatrice and Joanna. 3 generations of international women.

Will I be on strike for International Women’s Day?  Well yes, I’ll have to if the UCU action carries on as planned.

But I have some questions.  The UCU strikes are on chosen days. How and why were these chosen?  We don’t strike on Friday, but we do on Thursday.  International Women’s Day is not, presumably, a surprise to UCU. Why not chose that as a non-strike day so that we can attend our events? IWD has its origins in the women’s labour movement, but to commemorate it at our university events this year is to ‘betray it’? I wish my union had not put me in this situation.

A nearby ancient institution has already got itself in a tangle by linking E&D initiatives with the pensions strike * . I fear this is why we can’t have nice things.

For me IWD is part of a bigger picture, I understand that women are disproportionately hit by pension changes, but lets use this day to talk about that and the many other inequalities. I am pleased that my University supports IWD and that there are events to raise its profile for staff and students and I want to be part of it.

I am told that there are ‘lots’ of IWD events being held by academics off-campus so I can go to those (please send more details). Or I can go to the UCU march.

Academic colleagues are not the only people who hold, attend and value IWD events,  and academics colleagues are not the only people in UCU, and they are not the only people who work at the University.

I would encourage staff who are not on strike to organise, attend and enjoy the University IWD events. It’s a great way to show your support for IWD and a healthy attendance will help to ensure that we get to do them again next year.

Here’s the post I was going to post for International Women’s Day:

The Red Thread

Did you know that IWD began with a strike by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU)? It was originally called “International Working Women’s Day“, its purpose was to give laboring women a focusing point in their struggle for fair working conditions and pay. This year International Women’s Day 2018  themes is #PressforProgress.

My great grandma Sadie was a member of ILGWU.  A Jewish woman working in dangerous factory conditions as a garment worker in New York.  My grandfather Stanley often complained later that he had missed out on jobs because his mother-in-law was ‘a communist’**. Occasionally I find ILGWU labels inside my vintage dresses. They are always well made. Here’s a picture of Sadie, and a picture of the ILGWU label in my dress today.

*St Andrews.

**Family lore is that she wasn’t actually a member of the Communist Party, but she voted for one, and that was enough to get her and her children on a list.

withdrawing the invisible glue?

The Hive, by Graham Sutherland. I don’t have copyright of the picture, but I do own this print at home and this picture is taken by me.

I appreciate being invited to sign the open letter that the University of Edinburgh professors are sending to the Principal. The UCU and USS are not exclusive to lecturers.  I also appreciate the effort my local UCU leadership made in talking with me about lecture recording policy in the run up to this industrial action. I also appreciate the support of my good friends who work in and around NUS Scotland who give me sage advice as I try to navigate the journey of being senior management and union member.

There’s an article in the THES today ‘USS strike: why aren’t more administrative staff on picket lines?’  It’s a good question. The article says some nice things about us like:

‘Academic-related, professional, technical and support staff are the invisible glue holding a university together and providing essential services to maintain the day-to-day running of complex institutions.’ and ‘While we all collectively work towards excellence in teaching and research, it can sometimes feel like a thankless task. Too often, administrators are blamed when things go wrong but are rarely praised when things go well. And too often they are overlooked in conversations that directly affect them.’

It suggests that there is a conversation UCU need to be having.  I think there are other conversations to be had more generally. There are conversations to be had between academic and academic-related staff, and there are conversations academic-related staff need to be having with each other*.

As a woman who has spent her entire career offering technology to lecturers who are then very rude about it, and setting her face to look interested as yet another colleague explains to her about the panopticon, I am quite looking forward to having a decent pension.

I do my best to keep relations good. I always encourage my staff to refer to ‘academic colleagues’ rather than ‘the academics’. I remind them about the fact that we all come from different discipline backgrounds, and to be aware that the kind of evidence which will persuade in one group will not in another. We talk about things you can count and things you cannot and the value of counting. I also try to discourage lazy stereotypes like ‘digital natives, ‘digital immigrants’, ‘luddites’ and ‘CAVEs’.

There are also conversations to be had about the different kinds of impact withdrawal of labour can have. Sometimes support staff withdrawing their labour will seem invisible.  I have a suspicion that if a large IT system goes down and no-one is there to pick it up the impact would be obvious.

“Are you even allowed to strike?” a colleague asked me last week.  It’s an interesting topic to discuss; the very different attitudes to being managed in the university. The lecture recording policy consultation has drawn out some fascinating stuff about informing, asking permission, agreeing, trust, ownership, rights etc from academic colleagues. It was instructive to hear some speak about their lack of trust with students, their managers and each other.

Management in the support groups is clearly different, as is the attitude to providing services**.

Do staff in support groups know/ want/ feel able to strike? Are we just as racked with guilt as lecturers who would rather be lecturing? Do we know what ‘action short of a strike’ means in our roles? all the guidance seems to the about marking and meetings. To what extent does the action itself rely on the university email for communication? To what extent should learning technology be used to mitigate a strike and how much should we help with that? Will academic colleagues stand with us if we refuse to? How many of our university systems have just one person as the single point of failure? and is that person ‘allowed’ to strike?’ Should teams cover for colleagues who strike? How rude will academic colleagues be if we are not there to fix the thing they are using, or using to work from home? These seem to me the kind of conversations we need to be having as IT professionals, and it would be great to have UCU in the room to advise.

 

 

*While I’m on the topic, I think support staff need to be discussed in a more nuanced way. I was reading our Athena Swan stuff and it seems like because there are generally more women than men in the support groups everything is fine. Until you look at the STEM bits of the support groups, like IT for instance!  ‘IT guys’ seems to be a stereotype the university is happy to perpetuate. Also, the promotions structures for academic -related staff are quite different from academic staff, and we don’t have the option to do consultancy work on the side. For academics apparently that’s a ‘nice little earner’.  I’d argue that perhaps the support staff are proportionally more ‘local’, are we a group being considered as beneficiaries of the City Deal investment? How many of us are in jobs which will be replaced by robots, and will those be robots we built ourselves?  And, you know there are going to be intersections of class, age, race, gender and academic snobbery to consider…….

** ‘you provide services and are thus a servant‘, someone once told me. I think you can guess at which institution that was.

 

 

 

 

steps to improve recruitment

SWAN leadership can be a dangerous place. Picture taken by me in the street.

With so many staff categorized as IT, the University of Edinburgh is one of the largest tech employers in the city. We aim to diversify our workforce but we are doing that in a very competitive labour market. Other tech employers in the city are also keen to recruit women into IT roles.

The University is preparing its silver Athena SWAN application. Input is being gathered and examples of good practice corralled.  Action plans will be set.

The University has a bunch of professional support staff. Numerically far more women work in Administration than any other job segment, and outnumber men at a ratio of 4:1 in these roles. Women also predominate at a ratio of greater than 2:1 in Alumni & Development, Human Resources, Finance, Library, and Marketing &PR .

Men dominate at a ratio of greater than 2:1 in Agricultural Work, Health & Safety and IT. Agricultural work has 7 people. Health and Safety, 17. IT has more than 700!

This is a a large group of people, we should make transparent what we are doing to address the structural issues which lead to this inequality – these are STEM careers after all, and the staff who work in these STEM roles are visible role models. Strategic diversity staffing initiatives are needed. I have been reading up on the topic. This chapter in the Handbook of Diversity and Work  provides a good literature review and suggestions as to what works. I have learned how organisations can tailor their  recruitment and selections systems to identify those candidates who are best suited to help achieve strategic objectives. We have to be proactive about this. We can’t rely on the same sources any more. It is important to think about how and where we advertise, what messages we send and who is involved in the selection process.

Here are just some of the things we do to support recruitment and promotion in ISG:

We have completed our gender equality survey and we keep regularly updated  HR dashboards of gender split by grade and by Directorate. This enables us to identify groups or areas of ISG where the gender ratio is significant.

When roles come up in those areas we take care to ensure that we attract a broader range of applications  internally and externally. For senior roles we instruct our search partners to find us female candidates and 18 months this has resulted in  3 new  Grade 10 directors being appointed from outside ( welcome Janet, Jen and Gosia) along with several new and newly-promoted grade 9s.

I am not convinced that  we are well served by the university advertising  IT jobs on Jobs.ac.uk as a recruitment source  That maybe good for learning technologists, and roles which need experience of HE ( do they, really?) but it’s not a place the best developers and IT professionals are looking.

Headcount of professional staff by job segment and gender, 2016/17

In an attempt to try to attract a more diverse workforce we* have established a Company page on LinkedIn, and we use the powerful data tools, targeted adverts and social media sharing to get more reach for our recruitment and to attract passive talent. We review job descriptions from other employers to compare with our own, and we have engaged with external groups such as Equate Scotland to give us advice on writing job adverts and role descriptors. We encourage our existing staff to share the job adverts on their own networks. We have become partners with GirlGeek Scotland to raise our profile as a tech employer which welcomes women and invests in their ongoing careers. We have established ‘Women returners’ projects with Equate Scotland. Research suggests that effective diversity management is the key to unlocking the benefits. It also suggests that university campuses are a great place to find diversity. In ISG we have established dozens  of internships for university students but no graduate recruitment scheme, as yet.

When our jobs are advertised on Jobs.ac.uk we are able to use the data  (along with the data from linkedIn) to understand more about who is looking at our adverts and make decisions . We were apparently the first people in the University of Edinburgh to ask Jobs.ac.uk for data. We need to pay much more attention to the wording of our job titles and adverts and think abut the messages they send. The aim of an advert is to get people to click to find out more. It is important that the messages presented make all applicants feel welcome. We use social media ( twitter) to promote our job adverts using combinations of hashtags such as #womenintech #womeninstem #girlgeekscot to encourage retweets and sharing.

Would we, could we be so bold as to say: ‘If we can’t shortlist diverse candidates, we will review the role and how we advertise it. We won’t proceed with an all-white, all-male shortlist.’  or is that a step too far?

We try to have diverse panels involved in selection and everyone involved in recruitment has done their equality and unconscious bias training. To support internal recruitment and promotion of women into more senior roles we participate in all the university initiatives such as Aurora and Connections and we activity celebrate Ada Lovelace Day and International Women’s Day.  We also have internal workshops and seminars  to explore the various issues such as age ( ‘baby boomers’ and ‘millennials’) , gender, sexuality, disability, race, parenthood (part time-working, fathers network) which combine and intersect to  have an impact on our workplace experiences.

We ensure that all jobs are advertised internally and that secondments, flexible and part time working are available as options. We encourage staff to gain professional qualifications where appropriate and have offered support for preparing CPD portfolios for membership of those professional bodies such as CILIP and CMALT. We pay special attention to areas of technology where there are few women, such as drone pilots, and encourage colleagues to gain their qualification. On top of all this we try to  highlight and celebrate success through social media, IS News and BITS magazine.

We are aware that the external perception of us as an employer is key to attracting staff. Research suggests that the images and  and stories during recruitment convey messages to applicants and specific diversity-focused statement bring positive outcomes. Our Linkedin site showcases the innovation and range of IT and media projects that we do, the benefits of working for a university and particularly highlights stories from within our organisation which reflect diversity and equality themes.  We showcase women in STEM roles and highlight career paths. Maybe once we have a head of communications we can think about impression management.

 

*when I say we, I mean me and my trusty LTWadmin and intern side-kicks.

lecture recording policy-have your say

Picture taken by me in the street. No rights reserved by me.

The University has offered lecture recording on an opt-in basis for around ten years and recently made significant investment to provide a new central lecture recording service, Media Hopper Replay, in September 2017.  The new service is running successfully so far with a good many colleagues using it to deliver recordings of their lectures for their students to review.

Beginning the second semester of our new service we have more than 60,000 recordings made to the end of December.  It is very popular with students with around 190,000 student views.  December was the top month for replaying content – over 70,000 hours.

 We are consulting, on behalf of Senate Learning and Teaching Committee,  on a proposed new lecture recording policy to support us in consistently delivering the benefits of the service both to students and to staff. .   Please submit your responses or questions by 19 February 2018.  

The new policy seeks to maximise the number of lectures recorded, and hence the consistency of the student experience, while retaining appropriate scope for a lecturer to opt out of recording a lecture where the interests in not recording outweigh the interests in recording.  It is intended that the lecture recording policy will provide the necessary clarity and reassurance to lecturers and students on data use, data security and data protection; intellectual property rights within the recordings; avoidance of copyright infringement; and equality of access to lectures and recordings. 

Assuming the new policy comes into force in Summer 2018, it will dovetail with an integration of the lecture recording service and the timetabling system and with an expansion of the service to cover nearly 300 rooms.  Indeed, given the ongoing expansion of the service, the availability of comprehensive training, and continued demand from students, I would encourage colleagues in all Schools to consider initiating or expanding their use of the service this semester. 

For the text of the proposed policy and full supporting information, please review the consultation website that is now available to all staff and students.  (EASE authentication required.)  While the consultation encourages colleagues and students to contribute to aggregate responses, it also leaves open the option for them to respond individually. 

In addition to responses from Heads of Schools, Colleges and Support Groups, we are also seeking the views of the trade unions, of students via the Students’ Association and of conveners of the Knowledge Strategy Committee, Library Committee, the Directors of Teaching network, the Lecture Recording Programme Board, Academic User Group and Engagement and Evaluation Group.

We’d like to hear from you.

co-curricular teaching for digital skills

I’m very pleased to say we now have more than 10,000 lynda.com subscribers  at the University of Edinburgh. Digital skills are in considerable demand as we know from the news and are also key to the capability within the institution for staff to be effective in their roles.
There’s only a small team in LTW but we augment that with a pool of 50 tutors from across ISG. This makes it possible to offer a broad programme drawing from experts in particular packages and technology areas. Because of this we are one of the largest training providers on campus, and key to ensuring that the University delivers on one of the elements of the people strategy: to ensure that staff and students have the digital skills that they need.
For students, the digital skills programme is co-curricular – it runs alongside the formal curriculum delivered in schools, and for many people it is an important part of the student experience- they can learn additional skills alongside and to help them with the subjects they study.
For staff it is available to all as centrally provided staff development  and we offer specialist schemes such as 23Things and  CMALT for particular key groups of professional staff.
We deliver a wide range of teaching  and learning and development,  Jenni and her team have been doing a lot this year to map our training on to the JISC digital skills framework  and to bring all the various skill training across ISG into one comprehensive programme. They have also delivered a huge training programme for the rollout of lecture recording.
Jenni has also been making plans to expand the programme by bringing students as tutors  into the team and developing a job description for  part time student trainers. For those students the job will provide an opportunity to get real work experience and teaching practice. The digital skills programme could not run without the contribution that colleagues make- it is a contribution to the staff and student experience, and a contribution of ISG in terms of the excellent services we provide. It’s also an important professional and personal development activity.
Being a good teacher is a skill- not everyone can do it and not everyone should. But for those who are good at it and do enjoy it is an opportunity to learn your subject inside out- to understand users, to engage with learners and to develop confident communication skills. If you feel you have something to contribute to the ISG Digital Skills programme, let me know.

wasted on the young

Trinity College Dublin, Jedi Archive. Picture taken by me. No rights reserved by me.

After swearing for years I would never sit another exam, I have finally bit the bullet and became a student again.

I am conscious that my development as a researcher will require me to think in new ways, but also that I will bring much of my own experience and previous knowledge to the task. As an experienced professional I have been successful in using those things which I ‘just know to be true’ as the basis for my professional practice without much reflection on how this knowing has been arrived at. I am well aware that particularly with regard to workplace issues of equality and diversity many of my colleagues do not think as I do, so it is not a position which can be assumed as shared. It will be challenging to go back to basics and understand why I think the way I think and make a clear justification for the approaches I choose. It will also be interesting to gain new understanding of the ‘researcher language’ of ethics, ontologies, epistemologies and the various ‘isms’. In the course of writing my first asssignment I have found myself referring to dictionaries and encyclopaedia in a way I have not done for a while. I have also had occasion to reach into my dusty book piles for Wenger’s community of practice , Schon’s reflective practitioner, Kolb’s learning cycle , Handy’s  organizations  and Lewin’s action researcher. It is nice to see these old friends again.

In the classroom it was interesting to become a student again. I did my masters more than 15 years ago. It was fun to see how a room full of successful professionals cope with being challenged to identify the sheer scale of stuff that they do not know when faced with the daunting writing task.  As well as researcher-thinking skills I will need to develop new digital skills. I’m fairly confident in searching the internet and library catalogues, and I think/hope I am ok at evaluating sources for credibility. Taking a critical researcher view again will be different. I will also have to learn to use Endnote and wrangle a large (document) piece of writing much longer than the reports and projects plans I write day-to-day.

 

last night I dreamt I went to St Cecilia’s again

Actually, I didn’t dream it. I was there to present to Academic Senate. Senate means ‘old men’, in case you didn’t know. It’s from the Latin.

Our Senate at Edinburgh University is actually fairly mixed, and the room was packed for a discussion about ‘The Future of Distance Learning’, and that is my bag.

St Cecilia’s Hall was looking lovely. Much better than the first time I visited.

I have to say though, the AV technology brought in for the event, while lovely, and useful, kinda spoiled the point of the venue. St Cecilia’s is famous for its age and its accoustics. It is set out with amphitheatre steps to sit on around the sides like those Latin-speaking senators might have done in ancient times.  I think we should have spoken from the performance area without ppt slides* and been our own projectors.

St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh

In case you are wondering , University of Edinburgh currently has about 2,920  distance learning students studying via online programmes at Masters level. We have 65 programmes – (with about 100 permutations).

In terms of cohort size, 7 out of top 10 are CMVM programmes. Surgical Sciences peaked in 2014/15 (155) and has returned to its previous steady state level (105).  Yes, we do teach surgery online. Most other programmes teach fewer than 35 students per year.

For the demographic fans amongst you we have 62% women studying online masters compared with 57% of all masters students. Our online students are also  older  than our on-campus ones.  88% are over 25. We have students from 134 countries studying online. 60% reside outside the UK; but that is not very different from the domicile of our on campus students. The top 6 countries are all English speaking ( Scotland, England USA, Australia, Canada, Ireland)  and account for 59% of students

A significant difference in the student mix is that there are few Chinese online students, whereas they account for 21% of campus based PGT students. Our MOOC learners come from all over the world… but despite there being 2million of them, only 80 apply for online masters.

Only 1.4 % of our online learners are  our alumni.

Alumnus is also Latin, it means ‘foster-son or pupil’. Alumna is for women.

 

 

*I had lovely slides designed by Yujia in a colour scheme to match the venue as you can see.

 

treat it like treasure

Cover of our BITS magazine designed by our ISG Graphic Design Service designers

This week is Information Security Awareness Week at University of Edinburgh. The graphic design team have made a range of lovely graphics for them based on treasure, phishing, pirates, datastewards etc. And I invented a tagline and hashtag for them.

The information, datasets and creative content we work with every day are valuable assets to the University and to other people. We should treat them like treasure. We should know where they are, how safe they are, who has access to them and how easily they might be stolen. Our feature topic for this issue of BITS is information security. This magazine is part of a University-wide awareness raising initiative for all colleagues and students to take care.

We have information and advice about what you can do to keep you and your work safe, and what the institution support services are doing to make that easy. Don’t underestimate how attractive even your most mundane information about people, processes and finances might be to someone looking in from outside.

The @UoEInfosec team have sometimes seemed reluctant to use the #treatitliketreasure hashtag in their tweets.
I wondered if perhaps they don’t like it.
I asked.
‘I don’t really understand how twitter hashtags work’ was the reply.
I wonder if that is ok?

what will you watch?

Students watching Replay highlights. Picture from University of Edinburgh Image collection. CC BY https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/a93pr4

We are more than two weeks into term now at University of Edinburgh.

My poem:

Lectures are being recorded.
The sky has not fallen in.
The service is called Replay.
Students like it.
Staff like it.
We are gathering data.
The learning technology teams have shown themselves to be expert in the jobs they do.
The learning technology teams have shown themselves to be excellent in the jobs they do.
I’m not shocked.
Well done all.

 

Wanted: Equality image intern

A cartoon in our archives showing Noreen Murray as a schoolgirl being reprimanded for making clones of herself in the laboratory (a reference to Noreen’s work cloning DNA)

University of Edinburgh Library and Collections has a huge number of image collections with a wide range of art, science, portraits, people, cartoons and photographs. We would like to open up some of these images to make them more discoverable and usable as images of role models, women in science, women in medicine, diverse groups and positive representations.

Job Purpose:
Your project will be to search our collections for striking, inspirational and engaging images and work with curators to describe, digitise, publish and share them in a way which makes them easy to find and reuse. Your work will be supervised by our collection curators and archivists who will help you to describe and interpret what you find.

This internship coincides with an exciting time for Information Services Group as we celebrate the diversity of our collections. Your work will be the starting point for future projects and give us vital information to help us plan new ways of working. This is an exciting opportunity to work with some of the UK’s most interesting collections and your work will have immediate and visible impact.

Working Hours:
Working hours are 6 hours per week. Flexible conditions (working pattern to be negotiated with the successful applicant).

 

Main Responsibilities:
•You will work closely with our archivists and curators to identify where in our collections there may be images (particularly of women and women scientists) which can be found, shared and re-used.
•You will take high quality scans and photographs of the images, create descriptive metadata, store files in line with agreed workflows
and regularly add the images with their stories to a library-hosted blog.
•You will work with our other interns to ensure that the images you find are quickly used.
•You will work under supervision, but on your own initiative to use your investigative, research and search skills to discover images with
stories and visual impact.
•Throughout the term of the internship you will find and share a steady stream of content that can be easily re-used in presentations and displays around the university.
•You will gain new skill in researching collections, understanding metadata, intellectual property rights and copyright, as well as using digital scanners and digital images.
•You will work as part of a large team and independently, managing your own work projects and time, reporting on progress, publishing your findings and attendingmeetings and presentations.
•You will gain a unique insight into the library andcollections and equality and diversity issues in that context.
•You will challenge us with new ideas and summarise these in an end-of-project report.
Person Specification:
Essential:
•A current PhD University of Edinburgh student (this post is designated for the purposes of student employment, therefore you must be a matriculated student for the duration of your employment).
•A background in a relevant subject area such as gender studies, art, sociology, information studies, literature, journalism, photography, science, engineering, education, humanities, library studies, archiving, curation, human resources, management or any other relevant discipline.
•You will have a keen eye for detail, be patient and accurate and understand the
importance, beauty and power of metadata.
•Experience of searching, researching and finding things.
•Initiative and judgment to resolve many day-to-day problems independently.
•An enquiring mind and an eye for detail.
•Strong written and oral presentation skills.
•Good IT skills for using social media, working with data and targeted communications.
•Ability to set, meet, manage and monitor progress against targets.
•An engaging interpersonal style and experience of successfully persuading and influencing colleagues.
•Ability to handle irreplaceable documents and objects with care.
•
Desirable:
•Understanding of relevant equality and diversity themes as they relate to equality in theworkplace and the importance of visible role models and positive representations.
•Experience of researching a topic in detail.
•An understanding of how cultural heritage collections can support learning and research at universities.
•This internship would suit someone with a background in equality or gender studies,change management or human resources or someone with a particular interest inpolicies and practicalities of gender issues in library, technology or STEM workplaces.
•Creativity and resourcefulness