 Hi, how's it going? Good. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks. I'm very excited to see this. I missed it the first time around. Oh, okay. Yeah, thank you. It was busy at Reclaim, so it's kind of hard to, it's kind of hard to see them all. That's why I'm glad about the streaming as well. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for coming back to re-record. Yeah. Very exciting. Yeah. So Lee Scalarupassette is here today to represent her presentation from Reclaim Open. The future is minimal. Lee, do you want to introduce yourself and just talk a little bit about what's up here? Yeah, gladly. I, as I said, I'm Lee Scalarupassette. I am the assistant director for digital learning at the Center for New Designs and Learning and Scholarship, also known as Candles at Georgetown University. Prior to that, I worked at the University of Mary Washington at the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. And yeah, I'm going to talk today about the future being minimal. I'm glad to have the chance to re-record this so that I'm presenting it at a reasonable speed as opposed to the hyper-speed. I was trying to present it at the Reclaim Conference. And yeah, so let's just dive in and get started about how the future is minimal. Sounds good. Awesome. Take it away. Yep. All right. So you can access these slides at the Bitly slash capital M minimal, capital E-Ed, capital T-Tech. The references are in the notes to all of the Google slides. So again, they're there for you to, they're there for you to peruse and read up more about what I'm going to talk about today. I am ready writing on pretty much all of the socials that we've been forced to sign up for, like Blue Sky or Threads or Instagram or Twitter if you're still there or Mastodon, I'm ready writing there too. So find me on any of the socials if you have questions or you want to talk more about this. So before we get into the idea of minimal, I want to talk about Big Ed Tech. And this was done by, this was posited by Ben Williamson in an editorial about how Big Ed Tech has set up the narrative that they are inevitable, right? Big Ed Tech is inevitable. They have completely taken over our narrative and our imagination for the future. There is one story, it is the story put forward by Big Ed Tech and that it is just going to keep getting bigger. Bigger and more computing power and more environmental destruction, more surveillance, more and more and more. It's always going to be more. They've got billions of dollars in marketing behind them to be able to reinforce the inevitability of this particular narrative. Silicon Valley more generally wants tech solutionism still for all of our problems. The answer is always bigger, better, better quote-unquote technology. And so one of the things that Williamson says is that we need to start imagining differently for our future. And we need more and better stories about what our future could be. And so part of what today is is that it is getting us into a different mindset for thinking about different futures, for breaking from the Big Ed Tech narrative that has been positive as inevitable and that is so inevitable that we have trouble thinking outside of this narrative. And so today is about really trying to break from that. And the way that we want to do this is a thought exercise that involves the concept of minimal computing. Now minimal computing is a concept that comes out of the digital humanities. And again, it's a shame that in a lot of cases digital humanities and Ed Tech units on campus typically don't speak to one another. We have very much that digital humanities is largely concerned with research and research projects, although digital pedagogy is starting to make its way through. And Ed Tech is in UIS or your IT departments, we call it UIS, University Information Services at Georgetown. And then of course the digital pedagogy exists somewhere in between, sometimes in teaching learning centers, sometimes in their own unit, but very rarely do these three disciplines, these three professions, these three units on campus, rarely are they in discussion with one another. And yet we all have a shared interest in the technology that we use to teach, to learn, to do research, to run the institution. And so minimal computing came out as a response to that, as a response in the digital humanities to the unsustainability both environmentally but also accessibility of a lot of big DH or digital humanities projects, how they require a lot of computing power, how they require a lot of manpower or person power I should say, how they require programmers and support and long-term funding, whereas the product that is created then is not accessible to people in the developing world who might have or are even in our own backyards who don't have access to high-powered computers that don't have access to high-speed internet and maybe don't even have access to projects that are held behind a paywall. And so when we talk, when they come up with the concept of minimal computing is they're talking about just making accessibility and sustainability at the heart of the question. And so what they're talking about when we talk about minimal is, you know, you can see the list, you're probably looking at it while I've been rambling on about the very brief history of minimal computing. And but what they want instead in terms of access, in terms of maximizing access, accessibility, justice, negotiation, mobility, et cetera, et cetera, want to empower users to be able to create, to be able to access, to be able to, in a lot of cases, democratize digital humanities. And so I've always been really, really interested in that kind of concept because my thinking is, is what if we took the concepts of minimal computing and applied them to ed tech? What if we thought about minimal design, minimal use, minimal consumption, maintenance barriers, internet, externals, automation space, and technical language? What if we applied these concepts to thinking about ed tech, right? Go in the exact opposite direction of the big ed tech narrative and go small, go minimal. What would that provide for us when it comes to our, when it comes to our thinking? And the other thing that I really appreciate about the minimal computing movement in the digital humanities is that they talk about wanting to break open the black box of computing about how things are done. How you'll have computer experts and the academic experts, but the academics don't necessarily understand about the computing and experts don't necessarily understand about the academic side, the research side, and nobody really understands how it works, right? It's auto magic. The people who think that the internet is magic and will make anything happen, but not understanding how or why these things are happening. And I think we see a lot of that as well in ed tech, right? Most people don't understand that this is just websites behind a firewall, right? That it's coded in HTML, which is the basis for the web, right? That our websites are database and not flat HTML, right? These are things that most people don't understand about the web, don't understand about the tools we use. And so in applying this idea of minimal computing to ed tech, we want to be able to think about even our learning management systems or VLEs, is that what they're called in the UK? Anyways, the canvases, the blackboards, the Moodles, the D2L, all of those. And so here's a quote from Shawn Michael Morris from What If Bell Hooks Design in LMS. Is that, you know, the problem is that whether we are using blackboard or teaching canvas or building a mains project, we are most likely not doing thinking that is liberative enough. The point is not just about platform, the point is about praxis. And that's really where we can also come into this idea of minimal computing and imagining ed tech through a lens of minimal computing. To be able to make the point about praxis, right? Where we can imagine something that is built around what exactly our needs are. Now, an example of a minimal computing platform developed for in the digital humanities is a platform called Wax. And Wax has been developed as a alternative to OMEKA. OMEKA is a popular digital humanities tool. It was developed at George Mason University and the Library and Museum experts. It was developed to prioritize metadata and to be able to create exhibits. But it is run off of a database. It's run off of a database and an awful lot of plugins. It requires a tremendous amount of server space. And there is quite a large learning curve and most of the time developers need to be involved in the building and maintenance of the OMEKA exhibit. And so enter Wax. Wax is done on, as you can see, it's hosted on a Github. This particular site. It is flat HTML. It is built off of a spreadsheet with some bootstraps. Now, again, this still requires some technical knowledge. It takes some more of a learning curve to set it up. But once it is set up, it is fast. It is sustainable long term and it can also be maintained by people who are not technical experts, right? There is no plugin updates that will break entire sites. There's no access issues. It could be put on a thumb drive as flat HTML and looked at on a browser that isn't connected to the Internet. So these are all considerations. I invite you to go and explore and look at Wax and what it can do. But it's not a teaching tool. Again, you could use it as a teaching tool in the same way OMEKA is used as a teaching tool. But it's not a teaching tool, right? And so what we want to think about here is, again, the question was what if we apply the concepts of minimal computing to a platform like OMEKA. Now, what I want you to think about and the prompt that I have for you and the prompt that I want you even to bring back to your own units is the following, right? What if we thought about ed tech through the lens of these four questions? These four questions come from recent Neil in a recent special issue of digital humanities quarterly devoted to minimal computing. They were, again, applying it to the digital humanities, but I think these four questions are really great are really great prompts for us to think differently about ed tech. And those questions are, what do we need? What do we have? What must we prioritize? And what are we willing to give up? Right? What if we imagine a future of the institution around the kinds of technologies in ed tech we will be using that prioritizes these four questions? What would it look like? What would it be? How can we imagine this future? What I really want you to focus on is not all of the ways this could never work, right? Because that is not going to help us break out of the big ed tech narrative. It won't. So we need to really think about where we want to go. What it could look like. And then we can start figuring out ways to get there, but right now we don't even know where we want to go. And so these are the kinds of questions that we need to ask and address in order to start writing different futures. And so what could ed tech look like in the future if we applied the concept of minimal computing? What we have here is a link to a jam board and yes, it's not very minimal of me to be locked in the Google ecosystem but bear with me, we use the tools that we have available to us until we can imagine differently and apply it. And so this is a locked version of what was said at the Reclaim Open conference. We ended up having a I went through that a lot faster and I allowed for about 20 minutes I think for people to discuss in small groups and share on the jam board. Now I'm leaving that jam board closed for now because what I'd like you to do is in the Discord chat or in the little chat that's next to the screen I want you to share your futures for it with the people who are here thinking about it. And as I said I want you to bring this back, another reason why I made my slides available is because I want you to start having these conversations with your units, with your faculty, with your students, with your administrators to start being able to imagine differently about the future of ed tech. Start imagining it differently. Now before I sign off and allow you all I apologize that I'm not going to be there to moderate the discussion in Discord. I'm going to be at a conference about WordPress of all things. But before I leave I want to leave you with two visions. One of them is the platform Hacks that I hope that you listen to earlier on. I really invite you to go and re-watch the Hacks the WordPress killer presentation because I think that that is a perfect example of imagining differently and not just imagining differently but implementing differently. I also share a little bit of my own vision from a publication on minimal computing access and online learning so not necessarily just ed tech but online learning but think about it within the lens of ed tech as well. I'm going to do the cardinal sin of reading off of a slide but that's where we are right now. Imagine that instead of paying millions for enterprise solutions and the people to support them the institution invests in more and different people who are experts in learning design and minimal computing to assist faculty members in building their distance courses differently. Instructors are already struggling with the technology provided largely because it is bloated complex and unintuitive so why not embrace a more inclusive and environmentally friendly approach and support of minimal computing. What if institutions did not have to pay did not have to pay not only for the software programs but also for the service based around them effectively instead relying on lower bandwidth and lets complex digital and technical solutions. What if most faculty members did not require the most up to date and powerful computers to run their online courses understanding that there would be those doing research and teaching courses that require more processing power but because their minimal computing courses would be accessible even with basic software programs and processors and what if we invested in more staff who would support instructors pedagogically using this approach. So again I thought not just about a minimal computing to individual courses for online learning but institutionally what it would look like in this essay and pause it and ask these questions and I don't really answer them and again that's what I'm inviting you to do here is to as I say imagine differently and so again I welcome any and all imaginative futures around minimal ed tech approaches in the discord and I'll go back and read them I also again invite you to do more reading up on the concepts of minimal computing again there's lots of great references in this slide deck in the notes and to start to start firing up your imaginations and to really break that break that big ed tech narrative so thank you so much you know let's go for a brighter more minimal future thank you Lee that was great thanks yeah I I really liked getting to I the we had the XMS presentation recently rerun last week I think and this is really cool to see in the context of that you talked a little bit about XMS but thinking about just sort of waxes an alternative to omega and I know there were a lot of conversations that came out about how to sort of as you're saying yeah minimize your digital footprint and think about other better more sustainable ways of doing things yeah well and Tom Woodward had his presentation so it's funny at the reclaim open conference there was my minimal computing and then immediately after in the same room there was hacks was presenting and so there you can actually hear in his presentation there's a bit of a dialogue there because I had literally just finished speaking and now I'm going afterwards so I can reference back to it which is fun but also reference forward where Tom Woodward talks about how your website is a carbon bloated carbon spewing you know monstrosity yeah where he talks again about a lot of the same things around the environmental unsustainability not just our websites but big ed tech generally but you know I came I really was looking at it initially from an accessibility standpoint around low bandwidth low computing power the concepts of digital redlining you know the idea that the majority of the world does not actually have the latest iPhones or smartphones but actually are using five dollar you know android phones so again thinking about you know we want to be able to make our courses our tools our materials accessible and maximally accessible you know again that's the thing we cut down on the reliance on database on high powered processing on all that kind of stuff well then we maximize accessibility right and so there's that push and pull of the tradeoff we also minimize surveillance right which is another big thing that is coming up on the conference surveillance takes a lot of computing power that was one of the accessibility debates around proctorio which we're going to hear about in one of the keynotes for the virtual conference and you know we learned during the pandemic you know what kinds of computers what kinds of bandwidth what kinds of you know privilege you needed to have even just to be able to run proctorio the way some faculty wanted to run proctorio right you couldn't run it on your phone could run it on your tablet you had to have you know a working webcam you had to have a stable internet connection you had to you know all of these kinds of things that a lot of people just didn't have access to during the pandemic so again like and we would have a whole and we will probably have a whole debate there's another one about privacy and all of that kind of stuff but you know again if we minimize that then what do we gain right and I think that that's one of the core questions as well and one of the core concepts that minimal computing in the digital humanity was trying to get at if we give up all of these things what do we gain and that's why also like those four questions what are we willing to give up and I'm just thinking in terms of like the fact that we are lucky enough to have these resources and sort of take them for granted means that we can sometimes use them as a shortcut for doing rather than putting in the work that you're talking about to build these and it's really not that hard there are tools that people are making available like wax like wax to make why do they all have axes at the end I don't understand but anyways that's it it's a brand thing yeah it's a brand thing but the idea of as we get used to having huge amounts of processing power and resources like that we use it as a sort of a crutch to avoid we don't have to think about efficient design as much because our concept of what is efficient has changed because we have all of this available to us what does it mean to be efficient and to be minimal I don't know I have this conversation again I mentioned how a lot of the times faculty and even some students think of the web as a magic that there's a wand I can wave my internet wand and make the website do whatever they want it to do and so I teach a class with students on helping them think through and build their e-portfolios in our learning, designing technology masters program that's the other thing I do I teach in our learning design and technology masters program at Georgetown and we do a lot of work on digital identity and all that kind of stuff and it comes to actually building the website the students very often have these grandiose plans for interactivity and slide shows and auto plays and all of these things and I'm like can I do that there's probably a plugin in WordPress but do you need to do that right? what is it at? does it help and so we work on again I love core questions who is this for who's the audience what is it for or what's your purpose and then ask does this really have a value add to be able to address the people that you're trying to reach with the message you're trying to reach them with yeah right just because you can do something is that why you're doing it yeah exactly and so and sometimes the answer is yes right? like I even said there are some faculty who are doing if you are teaching a course on databases well you're going to need some computing program and a program to run my SQL that's fine but if I'm teaching a literature class do I need the most high powered computer to house a bunch of PDFs to read and a few YouTube videos that are about it right? I don't think so exactly so I would say 90% of the cases much of what an LMS provides is overkill yeah right like we are trying to kill a fly with a you know with a I was going to think bigger than a sledgehammer or a cannon you know go bigger and the cannons all we got so we're just going to shoot the cannon at every problem we have where sure it probably solves some things and again that's where the questioning comes in is like what do we actually need what are we willing to give up and sometimes you need the things LMS you need again talking about proctoria well we have a nursing program and in order to remain accredited they need to have proctored exams right that is not our decision it's not even the nursing program decision it is the accrediting body that has said you need to have this and then that becomes the need right we're not going to we want an accredited nursing program so therefore we need proctoring software and so there's always going to be some needs but that doesn't mean that everyone needs it and that it is the best answer for everything and again that big ed tech narrative is like no no no it is the answer to everything and anything trust us we know best look at how rich and powerful we are let's be right and so again it's really getting outside of that narrative thinking outside of that narrative imagining outside of that narrative and trying to create different visions and different futures and this is just one prompt right the minimal is the one that I've been drawn to because of these questions of accessibility is because you know I like putting stuff from different disciplines and fields and conversation with one another and particularly fertile for me but it's not the only one but I just I really want people to start imagining differently yeah so I guess that's been about a half an hour so and that seems like imagine differently that's the perfect notion exactly it and you know keep the conversation going in the discord ping me on various socials as I said I'm very writing this is I'm currently I'm currently editing a special issue of learning media and technology with my colleague Rupika Riesem at Dartmouth on minimal computing and ed tech so look for that in 2024 because you know it's a journal so it'll take a while but already really excited about some of the submissions we're getting and I think it's going to be again just more more fuel for the imagination awesome alright thank you so much Lee thanks everyone take care everyone bye