 Welcome back for another episode of Domains 21. We have the distinct pleasure during this session to hear from Tim Clark and Laura Taub, who are both joining us from Muhlenberg College and hi Tim, hi Laura, how are you? Doing great. Great, so great, thanks for having, thanks for coming, I should say. Thanks for coming remotely, right? As you can tell, you're probably not in the arcade. You wish you were, but you're not. So let me just introduce you quickly. I know that Laura, you are the dean of digital learning at Muhlenberg, and Tim, you're an instructional technologist. So one of the things that really struck me as I was preparing to chat with you all is, Muhlenberg's been pretty, I would say, vocal about leading through what they call value-driven ed tech. And I'm compelled by this for various reasons, but I would love it if you talk a little bit about what that means and how you're doing that at Muhlenberg. Thanks, Jim. I'll open up with this question. We started formally with digital learning in 2014. So when the pandemic hit and all campuses went remote, we had a good five, six years of doing this work, including online and hybrid learning. From a liberal arts perspective, it's been really essential for us to ground this work since its inception in our values as a liberal arts institution. And so I want to just start by saying that begins with relationships. And you introduce Tim and I by our roles, dean, instructional designer. We really construct and enact our roles as pedagogical partners, first and foremost. We position ourselves in relation to faculty and students as learners alongside of them, as Tim likes to say, shoulder to shoulder. And so when we talk about a values-driven approach, it's really rooted in relationships. It's also rooted in reflection. Because folks listening to this are likely aware that, unreflected upon, technology introduces new barriers to equity, inclusion, and justice in educational settings. Technology has always been one of, if not the, preferred spearheads for commodification of education. Before I took on my administrative role, my scholarship in media and communication focused for two and a half decades on the commodification of learning and teaching through technology. And so the pandemic has really just amplified that political economic reality, decades in the making, a kind of plundering of our pedagogical relationships. So our work is really to lift up opportunities for critical reflection and practice. And so the values that we're bringing to this work and that domains and OER and open education generally help us to enact our justice, equity, and inclusion and all of our work in digital learning engages in ways that are really sensitive to power and privilege and how they operate in and through the digital. So the practices that Tim supports, that I support, really aim to promote work towards more equitable, just, and inclusive outcomes in teaching and learning. Now let me ask you, one of the things that's interesting is, so what does that look like on the ground? Because I have been struck. I did come to Muhlenberg. I don't want to put a date on it because I forget. But I think it was 2015, 2016. And one of the things that really struck me was the way in which you all have invested in a very kind of, I guess, shoulder to shoulder is a great way to say it, sense of community. At the time, you were talking about domains and donuts. And I know you have a new kind of community-based, community-driven kind of approach to getting people to explore the technology and think about it critically. Can you talk a bit about that and how you do that on the ground at Muhlenberg? Should I jump in here, Laura? OK. Well, it happens in a couple of different ways. I think we try to center students in all things. And so I'll start the answer by saying that we have a program, we call them Digital Learning Assistance, but we really emphasize peer learning and peer support in our digital learning initiatives. Digital Learning Assistance have a full semester of training and close interaction with Laura, myself, our other colleagues, Lynn and Jordan. And in that time, what we really emphasize is making a connection, recognizing that learning digitally can be stressful and recognizing that as you go through things, sort of centering the person that you're working with. And so students can always expect to have a peer partner with anything that they might be assigned in a class or even independent research that they might be doing. They're going to be able to work with someone who's knowledgeable, but who's also attuned to the person that they're dealing with. So that's sort of one area. And then we try to also model and embody those same practices as we work with our faculty and staff. So for instance, we have learning communities that might center domains. We call our Domain of One's Own initiative, Berk Builds. So we're now in our second round of a pedagogical learning community around Berk Builds. And the idea here of sort of forming a cohort is that these same sorts of faculty and staff relationships will develop and folks will support each other after the learning community concludes. And then the other thing is the physical space that we occupy on campus. Now, we're online, but we've tried to sort of recreate those same sensibilities in our online space. And one of the things that we do when we're in the library is we hold these drop-in sessions. We call them Domains and Donuts. It's really easy. It doesn't take any planning, really. Hang a few flyers and send out an email blast, but just having some donuts around and people knowing that they're not imposing or intruding, that it's space that's reserved for them to come ask questions, try things, show off. We always encourage a kind of show-and-share attitude because when people are fired up, it's infectious and great. And so that's what those are for. Can I just add one little thing to Tim's description there, which so aptly captures the context we're missing right now in our remote work? But one of the things Tim and I share, which is so delightful in our collaboration, is a real respect for and passion for community media. And so a lot of my earlier work grows out of decades working with youth media, creating community-based spaces for local youth to make their own media. That's partly what drew me to Domain of One's Own, the idea that this is a kind of community-driven, media-making endeavor. And so Tim and I both bring that kind of framework to the domain's work, to the kind of community-based work he was describing. And we talk a lot about community media. It's ethos, it's definition as alternative indie space from mainstream corporate media. And we bring that same ethos and try to enact that. So the hive where digital learning sits in the library, Tim and I try to fashion that as like a community media space. It's interesting you should talk about community media because to step out a little bit of the fourth wall here, like part of what we're doing with this whole presentation that's showing right now is playing with the notion of video and TV and the idea of public access. And the notion that there was a time before, and you're a scholar on this stuff, so I don't want to pretend, but like there was a time before, say, our moment, where these same values were real, whether it be eumatic 3 quarter inch tape or VHS or the actual old school like cassettes. The idea of mixing, maxing, and taking culture, or even the stuff we see with radio really does speak a lot to that. And learning and bringing forward some of the lessons of the 60s to 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and so on, seems super important. Not only the metaphors, but also lessons learned and maybe one of the bigger lessons is that corporate media seems to eat everything, and so how do we get back away from that? We might be far afield, but any thoughts on that given the work you're doing with domain, for example? Not far afield at all, Jim. When we talk about a values-driven practice in digital learning at Muhlenberg, part of what we are bringing to the work are those values from community media, not only in a US context, but in a global context. Tim and I have many conversations and share readings about historical moments, historical communities within which DIY, indie media, community-based media made all the difference in struggles over power, struggles over democratic participation. And I told you at the outset I was likely to take the kind of bird's-eye view in this conversation, but I don't think it's too high of a bird's-eye view to say that to be an educator, to be a learner, in the 21st century, in the midst of a global pandemic, is to be engaged in a kind of democratic struggle. If we're not, we can say goodbye to higher education as we know it. We ignore that struggle at our own peril. And so in the ways with the tools that are available to us, we see our work as engaging and engaging our community members in a kind of struggle for pedagogical practices that center the dignity and the right to participate, the right to voice an agency of students, as Tim emphasized, and our faculty and staff. Yeah, I would only add that this responsibility that we have to not only be consumers of information, but also creators, is democratizing. And when we set up a domain of one's own, when we set up burg builds, when we first go into classes and folks sign up for their domains, that's one of the things that we talk about, is that there is a cycle at work where new technologies, new communication technologies emerge. And in the first phase, there's this excitement and expansion and democratization and access to new ways of seeing and thinking. And then over time, there's this sort of slow contraction as corporate influences, as capitalist influences sort of take hold. And the thing that's amazing about the web is even in our sort of frustrating moment that we find ourselves in now, it's been tremendously resistive to that pressure to consolidate. And so we talk about Audrey Waters mentioning the template itself. If you look at social media platforms and the ways in which they limit how you might express yourself, how you might present yourself on the web, domain of one's own is an alternative to that. And so we really try right from the beginning to say, you can make as much or as little of this as you wish, but you have the agency, you have the power to do that. And it kind of runs central through all of the ways that we hope to present digital learning at Muhlenberg. One of the things that struck me as I was looking at bird builds as we prepare for this discussion is obviously domains plays a part, but it's not alone. It's one amongst many other tools that you all, whether it be hypothesis, whether it be Timeline.js, whether it be Padlet, like you're constantly engaging in providing other means of access to kind of do that outside of some of the maybe normalized things that we've gotten into, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. So like how do you, how do you go about that? Are those driven by the community? Are those driven by your group? Like what technologies and why? Yeah, well, it's really handy to have digital learning assistance occupy your workspace with you, to be your neighbors and your colleagues in a sort of physical space because you get to see what they're up to and what they're finding and what they're using. So that's one way. And then obviously, you know, our faculty are very creative and adventurous as well. So we try to sort of make sure that, you know, the tools that we support, the tools that we advocate for are good ones and they align with sort of our values. But we also think of a domain of one's own as sort of the container or the way in which all of these other kinds of things can be presented or can sort of interrelate. And so that's one thought that I have about that. I guess the other thing, well, maybe I'll throw it over to Laura here. Thanks, Tim, just to add that, you know, we do this work in the context of a residential liberal arts college where our mission is to engage students as learners as future leaders, as critical thinkers, as people who are skilled and able and know how to use the tools to imagine better futures. And so when a new tool or technology sort of comes to our attention, the first questions we ask are, you know, in what ways might this amplify student voice? In what ways might this afford students greater agency in their learning? Those are the key questions that drive whether we're going to invest time and resources in bringing a new tool to faculty and to students. And as Tim highlights, our digital learning assistants are key partners in discerning whether something is going to be at home in our particular context and assist us in advancing those institutional values as well. There's gonna be a lot of discussion and there is already a lot of discussion around at OER by Domains 21 around the idea of care, around the idea of the pandemic and what that's meant for instructional technologies which took a weird center stage. Again, after the MOOC moment, we found ourselves in another strange moment where it's undeniable how important the work we do is for the viability and future of our institutions. So one of the questions was how did that work out in terms of these digital learning assistants that you've referred to a few times? And it'd be interesting maybe to lay out that and how maybe you were able to kind of, you know, support some of the demands that started to come in as everybody overnight about a year ago to the day shifted to fully online learning as the pandemic took full hold, not only in Europe, but then in North America. So what was that like and did that make you, I mean, we've been talking about the digital learning assistants in relationship to like the Digital Knowledge Center at UMW as a way to kind of talk about peer learning and peer support. Did that pay dividends during this strange moment or not? And dividends might be the wrong word. So forgive me for using economic language. Well, I'll launch us into this and then I know Tim is gonna have some really important specific examples to share. I think it's critical that you mention the MOOC moment and the pandemic protracted moment as related moments. Related in the sense that not only do they highlight the role of technology in education for us as educators, but they also highlight the role of technology, the potential role of technology for I think venture capital. And so at both moments we saw, we are seeing unprecedented sort of banging at the gates, right? And so I think it's really insightful, Jim, that you frame it in that way. And we need to be thinking about those as related moments in the political economic push to drive technology to the very heart of the mission of higher education. Well, it's interesting too, right? Both Coursera and Canvas were valued at multi-billion dollar kind of, you know, ICOs and Zoom, like it's interesting, like there are the players who come out and the finances behind that. I don't know if you follow folks like Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein, but like, it's interesting how they've become almost like economic reporters of ed tech, which I find so strange. Like it's like they're the Wall Street Journal of our field and the field needs it because how important that to be called? As is, of course, Audrey Waters and the political economy of corporate ed tech that Audrey's been doing for so many years now and the others you mentioned is absolutely central because by and large it's not well documented in the mainstream press. But to your point about digital learning assistance, because our work has always been centered on students, it has always been centered on the meanings of technology in the lives of students and the learning of students that allowed us to ground our response to the pandemic, to ground the ways that we were going to respond as an institution to shifting to ubiquitous online learning. We had already a practice, a digital learning practice that centered students, not tech. And so in the examples that or the more sort of specific details that I imagine Tim is thinking of, you will see that a response that begins from students, not from tech. Yeah, and so having conversations about monitoring how you're feeling, monitoring anxiety and comfort in a face-to-face or shoulder-to-shoulder interaction really put us in a good place in having conversations with our digital learning assistance when we were all working remotely because they had already sort of had a reflective practice with respect to digital technology. And I think that that was tremendously important last year and now. And the other thing I think is, and we had no way of knowing, but because we've had so many conversations with our faculty and with our administration about values centered or values driven approach to educational technologies, I think that we had built up a fair amount of trust. And so as we're seeing this sort of crisis incentivize people to try and be more intrusive and more rely on surveillance technologies in education, I think that we were able to sort of resist that impulse because we could assure our faculty and others that there's another way to go and that we have experience with and history with doing things a different way. The trust Tim mentioned is so vital and it is absolutely something that has been built up over several years and allowed us to leverage the relationships that we've developed with faculty and students in the service of what I think I'm really proud of at our institution is a more just and equitable and inclusive response to shifting in this pandemic. And one mark of that is that our, the college committee that works closely on these issues, the college committee on technology and digital learning out of our work issued statements, policy statements about exactly what Tim is speaking of that the college rooted in its liberal arts tradition, rooted in digital learning practices that center inclusion would not engage companies that purveyors of ed tech surveillance, including both exam proctoring software but also inclusive access textbook publishers. So to have a college committee to have a voice in shared governance at our college that is kind of formalizing the message that the digital learning team has been trying to enact is very, very meaningful on our campus. And I also think that we're going to have some really exciting and amazing conversations when we are all back together again, making the case for open textbooks in OER for instance was a touchy conversation because folks are very fond of the books and they've put a lot of time into their selection and evaluation. But I think now as we've all recognized the ways in which this moment has exacerbated the inequalities that existed before it, I think that we have an easier in on that conversation. And so not only in terms of our technological infrastructure, you know, at Muhlenberg it's very easy for folks who start out with a WordPress site in a domain of one's own to make the leap to press books for instance and start to imagine how they might assemble or write a whole cloth their own texts for their courses. Now the sort of moral imperative, I think is gonna be a little bit easier to talk to and we already have that technological infrastructure that is ready for our faculty when they return to campus. Yeah, well said. I mean, and also the notion, broader notion like you brought up Laura is this moment has brought like different players to light. And I think the surveillance and tech proctoring companies have really taken center stage as like, the do no evil vision we had for this technology coming to a full stop and realizing that there are sides and there's a struggle and our choices matter both at the institutional and the individual level. And we've seen that in there's been no shortage of examples that we can point to during the pandemic. And it's telling. And so the idea of trying to galvanize that as folks come back together and hopefully like you're saying, Tim, not forget some of what we're learning right now is crucial and hard, right? Because a lot of us are gonna wanna forget the last year for various reasons, but there's some little nuggets we might wanna take forward. If we're gonna kind of not make the same mistakes we seem to make, you know, cyclically with the choices of ed tech more technology, more generally as a culture, so. And Jim, if we're going to, you know draw the lessons from the last year to make things better. So it's, it, you know, it will be one thing. I'm calling on Ruha Benjamin's words here, paraphrasing. It's one thing to critique the systems of power in technology that are bearing down on education right now. It's one thing to critique those and the ways in which they inscribe relationships of power and teaching and learning. It's another thing to imagine alternative worlds. And I think that that's the work that we need to turn to in the conversations that Tim mentioned and that we have reason to be excited for. We haven't seen students collectively resisting educational technology in the ways that we are seeing right now. And the more students have experiences with things like Domain of One's Own with being co-creators positioned as partners with faculty in pedagogical projects, like there's so many at Muhlenberg that, you know, that Tim could point us to where technology is integrated so that students have more voice, not less voice. We need to draw from those lessons and students are not going to forget these experiences. We may want to move on and get back to something like the before time, but students are not going to forget. And I think that is to our great advantage if we're listening. It's brilliant. Well, that was, I want to thank you both for taking the time and talking to us today at OER by Domain's 21. You both are doing some really cool work and I appreciate you taking the time out to share it with us, both the values and the ethos behind that tech. It's super important. So thank you both for joining us. Thank you, Tim. Good luck. Thanks, Tim.