 Okay, I think we're ready to go. Welcome everyone, thank you for being here. We are here to speak about developing an anti-racism toolkit for technology enhanced learning. And the three of us. Yeah, the slides should appear. Brilliant, thank you. So welcome to develop an anti-racism toolkit for technology enhanced learning. I'm Samantha Rahern. I'm Minister Kootle. I'm Coco Nyhoff. Okay, so the things that we want to talk to you about this morning is we want to talk to you about the anti-racism and learning technology group, which we're all a member of. Why create a toolkit? So why do we think this needs to exist? So Coco is going to talk to you about that. Alistair is going to give a run through of the toolkit and what we've developed so far. And then I'm going to go through next steps. So this very much is a community project. We want everyone to be part of it. And we want everyone to feed into the development of this work. So it started with an email. So about a year ago, I think this is something that a lot of us have been thinking about for a long time in our own reading. And it's, you know, and Angela Sani's books have been getting a good bit of press. And there was an event that our kind of colleague from this week, Matt Lingard, went to. And he literally sent this email going there. There's a bit of a problem. I think we should do something about it. And from that came this community practice, this working group. And as part of that week, we have three subgroups. Myself, Alistair and Coco are part of the guidance for content developers. So a lot of the work we're presenting today is framed in that viewpoint. There's research connected activities group and there's recruitment and staff development. And these were kind of the three things that us as a community thought that we really needed to grapple with. And some of the stuff that we've done so far is that we have had a series of blogs published on the main org blog. So some introducing the group, introducing our subgroups. We've already written about kind of frameworks to help you think about this to a certain extent. And this is kind of a natural extension of that work. And the research group led an all C session at the main conference. And there's there's another session today by one of our groups as well on this thing. So I'm now going to hand over to Coco to talk about why a toolkit. We will have a mentee poll shortly and the code should appear in the chat. So if everyone wants to just stand by with the mentee ready, ready to respond, that would be good. So yes, if you're unfamiliar with the anti-racism and learning technology group now a special interest group, there was a series of blog posts that Sam mentioned, and a pretty succinct one about this content developers group. So basically, I mean, the aims of the overall group are to unpack the idea that technologies are not apolitical, they are socially constructed. And we need to find ways to act so that we're not complicit in this. And this toolkit that we're about to speak about is a practical way in to do that, we hope. Alistair will give you a tour of the toolkit shortly and talk about how we're going to look for feedback on it. So as a way to lead into the value of the toolkit, I wanted to just briefly give my individual take on anti-racism and learning technology. I come from a library background, so I'm here a bit as an interloper, because I'm not a learning technologist. I happen to line manage a learning technologist, but I feel like I have that other perspective. And in my profession, librarianship in HE, there are a lot of frameworks in use. I love a framework. So for example, we have information and digital literacy frameworks, some of which are nationally recognized, some of which are locally developed by the institution. And these encompass, among many other things, how people engage with and question sources and producers of information. Critical literacy in libraries takes this even further with the social justice component, considering, among other things, the ways in which marginalized groups are represented or not represented in the information world, as well as considerations around access to information for all, which is, of course, a human rights issue. And there's a growing body of literature about whether existing information literacy frameworks are adequately presented to address critical literacy. And that's quite an interesting discussion. So a framework or a toolkit, as we're calling it, and to some extent, these two terms are kind of interchangeable in terms of underpinning the work you're doing and providing a baseline of guidance. This is a practical way that we're offering to examine anti-racism content. This content is very challenging. We recognize that it can be unwieldy for all of us to find a way in to talk about racism or anti-racism. So the toolkit provides a baseline in the form of questions to use as prompts when we don't really know where to start. It's a thinking tool to find your way in. And you'll see shortly that the toolkit provides a sort of a menu of choices that will lay out considerations within broad areas that can be applied in a bespoke and appropriate way for your specific context. So the idea is to be able to layer the framework's content on top of local curricular content. And one thing that librarians and learning designers, learning technology professionals have in common, which is really important to me, is that the content we're often working with is produced by other people. It's often produced by academics or other people in the more sort of visible sphere of teaching in our institutions. So that right there provides a whole discussion, a whole layer of the hierarchies within HE in terms of social capital. So another point of reference is that there are now some racial literacy frameworks being developed in librarianship and in the field of education. These elevate the idea of anti-racism as a part of a taught curriculum and making it more visible. So frameworks can also underpin the development of a holistically designed program where course content is given a consistent treatment, be it at a module level, year level, level, and course level. So in short, we want to stress the value of the toolkit as a common point of reference for individuals, teams, as well as institutions, to use and to adapt. And it's intended largely for the learning technology community. However, when we ask for feedback, it would be appropriate and welcome to have that feedback from any and all colleagues, including your immediate team or others. The toolkit we're introducing also refers to some prototypes and you'll see a number of external links throughout. So in a way it provides a kind of a survey of some existing anti-racism or inclusive learning design frameworks and initiatives in the sort of sphere of learning technology, presenting the opportunity to choose what's most appropriate for you. So this is some signposting that's built in to demonstrate that we're not working in a vacuum. We're giving a lot of consideration to what else is out there because we aim to take a joined up approach. So you're about to see the toolkit. None of the questions are compulsory. And again, we'll walk you through how you might use it and what it includes. So we also recognize there is a lot of emotional labor involved in considering anti-racism. We've built in ways to address this. We hope that you can dip into as you find appropriate. And we're really keen to consult with you and the community to get feedback. Can I have the next slide, please? You may be aware that the alt framework for ethical learning technology was recently developed and launched and the ethical framework is in its first year with a focus on collecting examples of case studies and policies at the moment from individuals and institutions and industry. We would like to create links between this framework and the anti-racism toolkit so that the two can inform each other and refer to each other in meaningful ways. We do believe that an anti-racism approach to learning technology warrants its own framework, that is the toolkit. But we do hope that the toolkit ties closely to the values presented by the framework for ethical learning technology. And you'll see that the anti-racism toolkit underpins and can link to the ethical framework in a number of areas, including promoting fair and equitable treatments, designing services and technologies for accessibility and many other areas. So consider how you may wish to link the two. Now, we'll move to some mentee questions. So they're two initially. The first one is a, what is it? Likertscape? No, Likert, but a, you know, a continuum. Okay, a continuum. So we're just asking you if you would please answer where you stand currently with anti-racism initiatives in your institution, in your department and in your own work. And we'll give you a moment to respond to that. And this will give us a flavor for where the audience is at the minute. Okay, so yeah, I'll give you another quick moment to respond to this question. Everyone's kind of in the middle so far. With the people attending this session a bit further ahead in their own work. Okay, great. Thank you for that. Still kind of hovering around the middle for all three. So we'll move on to the next question then. And this one is an open text question. And we'd like to know. Oh, we didn't wipe out the dummy comments when we were testing. Welcome to live broadcast. Yeah, so please do give us a bit of text, your own words about what the anti-racism initiative might look like in your institution. And we'll just take a moment for that. Interesting. Yeah, I think even with a few responses, there's going to be a lot to unpack here. So please do carry on responding to this question. Dummy initiative. Well, yeah. I said that that's my bad for not clearing the test comments from yesterday. That's okay, because we're real live human beings. Student resources. Long term goal. Okay, excellent. So these are starting to roll in. Please do continue to add to this. And we'll hold on to it and do something with it later. But let's move on now. I'm going to hand over to Alistair to show you the toolkit. Yep. Okay, so I'm just sharing my screen now. Okay, yeah. So and we'll drop the link to this site in the chat. So what I'll do is briefly run through the prototype site and tools on it. And the introduction here links to that introductory blog post mentioned earlier for the content developer subgroup of the anti-racism in learning technology group. And there's also got a link at the bottom here to the Slack community for the group. So if you're wanting to join or just to kind of see what kind of conversations are going on in that group, that's the kind of best link to start with. So just before getting into the content, again, there's kind of coca rich and what we're wanting to do is know whether this toolkit is kind of along the right lines and your thoughts on it. So with that link that's in the chat. And this kind of link here is to once you've kind of had a look around it to a feedback form about your thoughts on, you know, does this kind of fit a gap or these are the right specific prompts we're using kind of all of those comments are super useful. So again, as Katie was saying, often learning technology, we might not be the owners or creators of the content that we're working on. So this this toolkit is kind of being created for the kind of scenarios you might encounter in our field. And there's a very brief kind of anticipated scenarios area on the site here. Building up kind of case studies of applying these tools in those kind of scenarios is one area that might be interesting to explore in the future. And obviously, one of those key scenarios is on facilitating learning or instructional design workshops, where those workshops draw on frameworks that are explicitly anti racist, for example, it can be difficult to know how to address that. So this part of the toolkit kind of offers guidance on where you can incorporate kind of anti racism in that scenario for a wide range of frameworks. So it's not here, and Carrero, the ABC learning design here. So these are if you like points in these other frameworks, if you're running a workshop, for example, where you might be able to kind of naturally linking anti racist thinking and kind of work, kind of, even though they're not necessarily explicitly built into those frameworks. And so the prompt tool, which I'll just open up on this part of the site was built by the subgroup based on the work of a number of other tools out there. But as mentioned, it's intended to be tailored to our field. It's in the form of the form in this kind of prototype stage at least. And as I was saying, it consists of a series of prompts that one could use whilst working on a very technology project or piece of work. So reflecting on those prompts and considering what actions could be taken from that reflection. We went with that approach to try and emphasize that there aren't any set answers necessarily or kind of no script to follow. But putting the emphasis on reflection on action, and engagement with the resources and conversations kind of out there. So for each of the prompts, there's some further resources on the site to that end, and I'll show those as I'm referring. And again, it's worth flagging that the tool itself as we decide is a prototype. So this form, or those in the form of form, it can't actually save your answers at this stage as it might. I'd say it will save the answers, but it won't send them back to you. So if you have a comment about the question, some feedback on the question, pop it in the space, because then that helps us kind of review the question and so on. So it's helpful for us, but not at the moment as helpful for you as we would like. Thanks, then. And yeah, so the preamble here is more or less what I've just covered. And also flags as Pico was saying, the emotional labor involved with working with anti-racism and racism, and the fact that there's a host of potential kind of internal and external challenges. So thinking about what self-care and support is possible around that is obviously important. The broad categories of prompts, as you can see, are around communities, around the project team, learning content, tools and platforms that have been used for the piece of work, and around post project reflection. So if I take us to a communities area, so the prompts here in this area kind of ask if there's ways in which different community audiences might be excluded or privileged by the particular project or piece of work you're developing, and what the historical context of the work might sit in, and reflecting on whether there are ways to equitably engage with excluded audiences over it. As you can see, the format here is for a free text entry for the reflection, and the following one for thoughts on actions and next steps that could follow for those reflections. So if I just flip back to the further resources section of the site here, you can see that they sort of speak to each other as well, how that bit's tied together. So these resources are sort of badged under the different areas that the prompts fall in. They're not intended to be definitive at all. As with the spirit of the tool, it's not intended to be a kind of this is what you should know and this is how you should do it. It's again kind of indicative and a way to just tie into those discussions and the literature that's there. So I'm going back to the phone. Yes, so there's next areas around project team, and that's about reflecting on who is making the work and what impact that might have, what your own place in that is, and whether there's any groups of kind of allies that you might potentially engage with it over, kind of institutionally or beyond. So in terms of learning content, the prompts are around the ways in which content might preference or exclude an audience community and whether there are any guidance materials you can draw on, for example, over imagery or language or decolonizing guidance in the specific discipline of the content. So if you're making a piece of content that's around medicine, are there any decolonizing medicine guidance areas that you might be able to engage with? So the prompts around kind of tools, platforms, so for example, I'll ask you to reflect on whether there might be a whiteness to the technologies themselves and also if there are social or having resources that are needed by an audience community to make the most of them and obviously how access to those resources might vary. And the last section is around post-project reflection. So the prompts are around reflecting on this or a previous piece of work. Obviously, if you're using this tool early or mid in a bit of work, you wouldn't be able to kind of do the post-project reflection then, but you know, drawing on a previous piece of work would still kind of generate the value we hope. So reflecting on that for lessons learned along ways to potentially get future direction from potentially excluded audiences, emphasizing obviously in a non-harmful way. So that's the prompt tool part of the site. And the hope is that it's flexible enough to be used in a number of ways. So potentially as an individual or as a team, or kind of as Kate was saying earlier, to use it as a way to start having conversations about anti-racism or even to kind of be incorporated as part of the project methodology. And so from that, we have a couple of minty-meter questions if it's possible to share back to Sam. Yeah, so these couple of questions are obviously it's a fairly whistle-stop tool. And again, having the link being in the chat, we hope that you get a chance to kind of look through it and kind of offer some feedback. That would be fantastic. But based on that whistle-stop tool, yeah, the first question is obviously whether you think this tool will be useful. Yeah, okay. Well, that's great to see, I suppose. And again, you know, as before, the intent is for it to be community-led. So if there are ways in which you don't think this will be useful, then absolutely, you know, we would love to have the feedback on that. That's as important as anything. And perhaps we might, although they still look like they're still some coming in, they can be hovering around there, a sort of steady rate. And perhaps we might move to the next minty question. Yeah, so this is, as you can see, what your initial thoughts are on the tool. And again, obviously this is after a very whistle-stop tool, where you're kind of viewing it through someone else's screen. So I appreciate that you may not be able to kind of, you know, be able to delve deep into it. But again, I'd encourage you, if it's of interest, to kind of have a look at the site as the link was in the chat and delve into it further and feedback via the form on there as well. I can see a couple of comments in the chat about whether it's ready to be shared yet with teams. So the site is kind of open to kind of, you know, to anyone as it were. I would say that, yeah, you know, we're kind of going out. And, you know, Sam will talk a bit about kind of next steps. So that's perhaps I'll park that at least until that's a bit later. Sorry, jump in a bit. But yeah, really, thank you very much for the comments. OK, so we really want your feedback. So the idea is that this is the point of the sessions that we're actually opening up a community discussion about it, that it will be a community developed tool. So with that aspect, we really want your feedback. So we'd like you to go to the Reflect site, have a look at the draft tool. As I said, you know, there is the option, both forms are anonymous, so we don't know who's written what. And we hope that will encourage you to be honest and give us truly authentic feedback. So please go through the draft tool. If you've got comments on the questions, please add them. Try it out. If you can answer our feedback survey, there is a box at the bottom about if there's anything you think we've missed. And can you please share it with colleagues and kind of ask them to do the same really? You know, it's kind of for everyone, you know, but we're looking at it with different lenses, ourselves within the subgroup. But as Coco said, you know, it's kind of relevant kind of across the board, we think. So we've kind of got a rough timeline for how we see this development of time. So obviously, we're kind of launching this now. It is a draft. We'd like to get feedback by the end of January with the aim of working with people, with colleagues, you know, within all within the group to make improvements and to come up with something a bit more kind of formal that we can soft launch over the summer. And then hopefully, we'd have something to launch kind of formally in the autumn at the main auto conference. So with that, I know that we've got a couple of minutes left. What questions do you have for us? We have a few really great chat comments. And I hope that the indicative timeline addresses some of these, for instance, whether it's ready to be shared with teams yet. I mean, for feedback, absolutely, with the understanding that it's still undergoing a revision kind of process to without a full launch. And someone says it would be good to see it embedded in the Seamult framework. Yes, we'd love to see that in the future, if that's desirable and feasible. And then there's a lot of love for the library community and former librarians. So the form will collect information. It just isn't sending you that information at the moment. So. Yeah, it is useful for us. I don't know how useful for you. But I mean, the plan is that this will be CC licensed properly at some point. So please, you know, copy the questions, use them, try them out with your teams. And and, you know, let us know how it actually works. Yes, I can. I was just mindful of of it being very much a draft at the present. But yes, I can tweak the setting to a receipt so you can get the answer. I will do that. Yeah, that's a good point. That answers would be beneficial to the person filling in the form. Yeah, to refer to later. Oh, yeah. And people are also asking about open license. Yeah, absolutely. This wouldn't be like that would be kind of like flying in the face of the very premise that it's about to make it not open content. So we'd love to work toward that as well. Yeah, it will probably end up with a CC by essay license. Laurie, we haven't got that far. We are very early doors. But if you have any guidance on that, that would be very greatly received. So Laurie's question is that, you know, given that this kind of falls sits within HR, are we joining up with HR orgs? Not yet. I mean, that's actually a really interesting question to unpack and something I struggle with as well because on the one hand there is anti-racism or decolonizing or geographic bias or however you want to label it in terms of the curriculum. So we hear about decolonizing learning technology, decolonizing the library, decolonizing the curriculum. And then there is the recruitment and staffing side, which is another subgroup and we just heard a talk from Monica and Terewani a little while ago about that very real issue of recruitment and how does this work into the language of job efforts and so on. And I think they're both quite important and I'm still not completely reconciled to how those two are related. I think that's a big big topic. So thank you for raising that. I think we're talking about the curriculum, but obviously that doesn't exist on its own. Terewani, good question. Will there be a list of good and bad technologies in terms of being inclusive? In terms of talking, no. I don't think that's something that we can do. I think that a lot will depend on context as well. So we know that there are technologies that we are unhappy with in general. But I don't think it's easy to kind of declare something good or bad and I don't think it's our job to do that as such. We just kind of want you to think about the why and the implication of something. I think when I say it's not the same thing we get that. Yeah, I think as you were saying if one of the hopes is there may be developing case studies out of this and kind of people applying that and that might be people grappling with technologies and finding ways that they might be able to minimize the negative aspects. But as you said I don't think that's going to end up in a list of yes, good, bad but those kind of ways which people are engaging with them and finding ways to work with them hopefully that something more on those lines is something that could come out of this in the longer term. Yeah, I mean we are working in shades of grey so I think it just helps you navigate the shades of grey if that you know and kind of dip behind the shadows a little bit is our hope. Yeah, and particularly without being prescriptive but allowing people to dip in and really just ask questions and these questions may not even be comprehensive or thorough but it's a starting point and a thinking tool. So yeah, if you think we missed anything please let us know but that's kind of part of what the consultation is all about. So it is- Thank you for all the comments this is really interesting thank you for the chat comments and questions and thank you all for attending and thank you to you too for making this really interesting endeavor. Well, not quite thank you, it's easy. Okay, so I think we'll be shut down any second now.