 So, I think we're there. So, I'd just like to say a really massive thank you and welcome to Anne-Marie, to Brian and to Amy and Tom who will join us shortly and I'm really looking forward to their session co-designing the Higher Education Surveillance Observatory. Really looking forward to this session, thank you all for coming and I will pass over to you. Thank you, thank you very much Kerry and good morning, good afternoon everybody. We are, well, we're all joining you from somewhere but I'm joining you all from to Kim looks to Sequipment where I'm an uninvited settler here on the traditional and unceded territories of Sequipment Hulu. In Western Canada, though many of you will know me from other places and obviously the accent not Canadian. We also have Brian Lamb who is at Thompson Rivers University who's here with us and Amy Collair and Tom Woodward who are from Middlebury College in Vermont. But we are here to represent a global network, mostly North American or Northern Hemisphere I have to say, Collegy After Surveillance and it's a site project that we've been involved in for a number of years. And one of the pieces that we've been discussing within that network is this idea of a surveillance observatory, a higher education surveillance observatory. And we've tossed around the idea of this might be quite a lot within our group, done various bits of research. We started back in 2019 or so really thinking about this and pandemic put it on hiatus for a while. But really we want to use today as the opportunity to open up a conversation about what this idea of a surveillance observatory might be. Because although it seemed like a good idea in 2019, I think our pandemic experience and some of what's happened over the last couple of years has shown us that it's probably a pretty vital thing for many of us now. So we're going to use today to kind of introduce the thinking that we've done to date and some of the exploring we've done. Talk about why we think it's important. Talk about what we think it might contain or look like. And then we really want your feedback and contributions and help us understand what would be useful to you. And then we've built, we, Tom in fact, has built a really good prototype which we'd like you to explore and really again give us your feedback and help us understand how to shape this idea and what would or wouldn't be useful. So quite participatory, quite hands-on hopefully. And that's why we'll stop the recording once we get past the intro stuff because we want people to feel free to share whatever it is you want to share. What we will do is capture some of the conversation at a pretty high level but clearly we'll keep anything anybody wants to say or not on us as well. So on that note, I'm going to hand off to Amy to introduce us. And talk a little bit about why we think is vital and what our network is about. Over to you, Amy. Excellent, thank you. I am both driving and speaking here for a moment. So please forgive me if I'm a little not all put together. So thank you, Anne-Marie, for setting this up. The origin of this observatory, as Emery said, has really come out of conversations of this group higher education after surveillance last year. And as we said, it's kind of a response to the pandemic, a subset of the higher education after surveillance group collaboratively authored a paper, which was published in early 2022. So just a couple of months ago in the Journal of Digital Culture and Education. And the title was Surveillance Practices, Risks and Responses in the Post-Pandemic University. And the quote that you're seeing right there in front is from that article. So in that article, we describe surveillance practices as the ways in which student and educator activities are monitored and rendered as data by digital platforms and as the insertion of database digital platforms into the core activities of the university. So these practices reflect broader social practices, the ways in which information about people and behaviors collected and analyzed and sold by platforms for monetary gain. And that's what Soshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. In education, these practices are often justified as solutions to problems. For example, the problem of student disengagement or student withdrawal, the problem of campus safety, the problem of ensuring academic integrity. And so we adopt these practices as a way to solve the problems that we see. Now we're not saying by talking about these surveillance practices and the issues that we are going to raise. We're not claiming that data has no place in higher education. Nor are we suggesting that monitoring is always oppressive or that audit trails have no value in decision making or learner support. That's not our argument. But we are raising concerns in the paper and today about the uncritical ways that these technologies and surveillance practices are used. And we want to highlight a set of risks that we see that we talk about in the paper. So the four kind of areas of risk that we talk about are the risks to learners and learning relationships. So surveillance has been seen as or can be seen as undermining relationships of trust. Trust between faculty and students. Trust between students and the institution. Trust between faculty and the institution. So data collected through surveillance practices is seen as a way to address questions of trust. So we use data as a way of avoiding the danger of placing trust in something that we see as unknown or in professional judgment. Or we see it as a way of bringing objectivity to trust relationships. And our group really thinks that there might be a lot lost when we place trust relationships in conversation or kind of with a foundation of surveillance. Another area of risk that we talk about in the paper is the risk to academics and to professional staff. We see an increasing displacement of professional tasks associated with academics, a displacement of those tasks to platforms, and to datafication and automation. And we argue in the paper that this displacement risks fragmenting educators work and devaluing certain kinds of work. And for instance, more feminized aspects of academic work, such as caring and supportive behaviors. And so with that displacement, first of all, we see it as fragmenting the academy and we see it as likely to increase. Because with austerity measures taking hold at our institutions, many of the kinds of work that we have traditionally placed within academic work is being kind of displaced through these platforms. We also see the risk of reinforcing the extractive economy. And in the paper, we highlight ways in which the surveillance practices are extractive and move value from the public sector to the private sector. Proprietary platforms we use in education, even ones we tend to see in a more positive light, like Canvas, I won't say blackboard because I don't know that we have such a positive light around that. But even ones that we tend to see as more positive, those platforms don't always provide meaningful transparency into their data practices, especially transparency to teachers and students whose data is being collected and used by those platforms. And these platforms further reinforce business models that extract from our students and from educators for their gain for the platform's gain, not the gain of students and educators. So that is a risk that we see. And lastly, the kind of fourth risk that we talk about is of increasing inequities. The use of technologies, and I would say particularly during the pandemic, but even before then, the use of these technologies for surveillance technologies have exacerbated inequities that our students face. And the burdens of the risks associated with those surveillance technologies weigh most heavily on our marginalized students. So we can point to countless examples of this from online proctoring tools that flag and harm trans students and students of color and neurodivergent students to learning analytics platforms that normalize specific learning behaviors and problematize others. There are so many examples. I know we could talk all day about the examples of these inequities and the ways in which they play out when we use these surveillance technologies. So in the paper, we talk about these risks in more deep detail, and we also offer a wide range of responses. And that include resistance, education, institutional and professional engagement, regulation, and investment, and alternative or open approaches. And then considering these responses and how we might engage with those responses. We identified a particularly vexing gap that very little about the harms of these surveillance technologies is shared in a way that supports collaborative action and institutional engagement and decision making. So I'm an administrator at Middlebury College and part of my work involves thinking about how do we make decisions about the platforms that our students and faculty will use. I might need data and stories that help shape both the institutional values and the decision making about those platforms. And by and large, that kind of collection of information and data is missing. And so that is the gap or the issue that this group in thinking about developing an observatory has started to try to address. I'll pass it over to Anne-Marie. I see the slide has changed, but I'm not hearing Anne-Marie. So I'm just gonna jump in in case Anne-Marie might ever might see it. Okay, I'm back. I muted myself and then forgot to unmute. Apologies, thanks, Brian. And yeah, I was saying that we started looking at other observatories and the kinds of things other people were doing in observatories. So we were thinking about how might we gather data? How might we analyze data? What kinds of research, what kinds of activism might become possible if we could mobilize and gather and share? So we looked at a variety of different examples. There are lots and lots and lots of examples of observatories out there. We may be focused on digital ones, ones looking in the digital space a little more closely. And if you want to explore some of these examples yourself, please do. But they are the idea of an observatory is used by lots of different kinds of organizations. The first one on that list is University here in Canada. Several more are kind of consortium groups, quite often underpinned by European money. So the Digital Platform Observatory is a European level project, which is aggregating sub projects. The Observatory for Political Conflict and Democracy in Europe. That's an interesting one because it's a publishing site. But it's also a site where you can download research data and carry out further research on it. So it's dissemination, not just of information, but of data and tools and starts to create some sense of activism as well. Workers Observatory there takes that a step further. That's one and actually someone else in our after surveillance network that Karen Gregory University of Edinburgh was involved in creating. And that's looking at workers in the the gig economy in Edinburgh and giving them the tools to to get their own data about their own work and then be part of guilds that can start to analyze that data to really understand their own working conditions, which, you know, many cases are governed by platforms. So there's lots of different things that these observatories are doing. They're sharing information, they're disseminating information. Quite a lot of it is quite straightforward, publishing blogs, think pieces, white papers, information about events, networking opportunities. The last one on the list there, Web 3 is going great, is one that Tom shared with us, which is not a official observatory. It's a but it's an observatory like project. It's another data analysis site. Really looking at Web 3 crypto currencies and and starts to get into that idea of what Amy was talking about, about documenting harm and in that particular case, it's documenting money lost. And there's a neat little counter at the bottom of the screen as you scroll the timeline of various events, it counts up how much money has been lost in crypto scans. So that's really quite a compelling presentation of of that kind of harms record that Amy was mentioning. But as we dug deeper into this idea of what our observatory might be, I started looking at citizen observatories which come out of that citizen science space. And this I find is really compelling because a lot of these observatories are designed explicitly for data gathering. And citizen observatories is a little definition here. Any use of earth observation technology, citizens collecting data, participating in environmental management. And that that that little bit about environmental management really struck me because we talk about our tech space, particularly in higher education, using natural world metaphors. We talk about ecosystems, we talk about learning environments. And actually, if we scroll down a little bit more, there's even something from one of the graphic from Holonik, one of the venture capital insights companies that swirl around and they present a tech as a landscape. And they use these metaphors of what's the period table that they're drawing on there. So again, these natural world metaphors. So that that really struck me in terms of the data collection aspect that we look at. And mobilising us as a community, as stewards of this educational technology, higher education, digital environment that we all live in. And we want a healthy environment. And so there's a stewardship and a monitoring and a data collection aspect there. But the kind of citizen science aspect that we found compelling as well. So these are some of the background. This is some of the background research that we've done that took us to kind of start to characterise what we might want to see on our own observatory. I'm going to hand off to you now, Brian, to talk a little bit more about that. Right. Thank you. So I think just for this little part, I'm going to kind of try to just draw a few connections between the things that Amy was talking about and that Anne-Marie was talking about. And then hopefully open that up so we can all just kind of talk about why we're trying what we're doing, whether it's worth trying. And if we do try whether we want to continue with it. So so obviously the after surveillance group really was catalyzed by the work that Amy and General Ross have done. And I think Amy set the stage for that really well in her section. You know, that sense of I think it's something that surrounds all of us in our practice. And but at the same time, there's that question of how we respond. So, Henry, if you would scroll down just a little bit. You know, when we got talking about, you know, these are the issues, how do we begin to respond? So Henry's already talked about, you know, what observatories do. And I have to confess I was new to the concept myself the first time I actually heard of an observatory was in one of the group discussions. And also later being exposed to the work of Karen Gregory's that Ann Marie was referencing. And so just kind of trying to talk about, you know, what are some of the pieces? And I just want to talk maybe a little bit again about maybe my personal rationale because I come to this group as an administrator, not as a researcher. So, you know, Amy's wonderful phrase, the vexing gap. You know, there's so many vexing gaps in our practice. And I think one of the ones that I think we've created for ourselves is the gap between where our discourse is and what we need to actually operationalize our useful information to make decisions. And so, you know, we do peer-reviewed research really well. And obviously when peer-reviewed research finally makes its way to our eyes, it's usually very sound and it's been reviewed and it's, you know, it's detailed and sourced and all those things. But of course, we all know it can take a long time. Sometimes there's access issues and also discoverability issues. You know, and then on the other end, we have online opinion. And this hasn't been a great week for Twitter. I've seen more negative opinion expressed about Twitter in the last week than I've probably seen in months. So, you know, that to me strikes me as a vexing gap. We have, you know, fairly sound, formal processes, which can be time consuming and arguably a little bit unwieldy. And then we kind of just have online opinion, which feels at times unreliable and insubstantial. And then there's the state of just coverage of the field of certainly learning technology. And I'll just indulge something I saw on Twitter today, an article making the rounds, I think it was published in Inside Higher Ed, but I think it was co-branded with time to higher education. I think it was called online exam cheating is up. And that's a, you know, a striking headline. And the debate got me to click. And we learn when we go in that that is actually all pretty much the opinion of one person who works for a proctoring company. And yes, thank you, Tom. And, you know, there may well be something to that. But if you just take a look at that article as a standalone piece, I think just when we think of perspective sourcing and analysis, again, to use Amy's, Amy wins the day with her phrase, vexing gap. I think vexing gaps there. So, you know, we start to talk about, you know, whatever things we could start to do to track troubling developments to to to take a look at elements of these things that are coming and then and then move forward with it. And I just say, you know, from the point of view of an administrator almost a perspective of institutional self-defense. So, for example, I thought I might share this during the part where we pause the recording, but I'll throw it out now. I'll be just a little bit vague and maybe a bit more candid later. Let's say you're in an institution where a vendor product is announced and that decision is coming from, say, the finance section of your university with minimal communication or consultation with the academic side of the house. And that vendor product is problematic. At that point, if you're troubled by it or if you wish to engage a more vivid and thoughtful discussion of whether this thing should be adopted, much less stop it or use terms like resistance, you need to be able to move quickly. And and you need to be able to move with clarity and authority. And that's, you know, that was a case where I felt that that was actually happening at my institution right when the discussions around a potential observatory were happening. And I was feeling that vexing gap acutely, that sense that I wanted to be able to mobilize good information to mount a counter argument, but I was also acutely aware that if I just kind of engaged in Twitter style, you know, clickbait type posting that I could undercut my authority and actually potentially, you know, undercut any any potential for resistance. So I guess that's again, where we'll turn to some of the things where we actually started to think about the tool where we're now prototyping and about to share with this group. So we thought, you know, what are things we can do to capture what's happening, not only in the coverage in the wider world, but to also be able to share stories from individuals. And I think those are elements that if you take a look at the examples that Emery shared earlier, those hyperlinks, you can see these are observatories that do it. But we wanted to make it easy for people to add information. So I think, you know, with the prototype we have now, if there is interest, I think it's safe to say we may add different dimensions to how the information is captured. And I think hopefully, too, it would provide the raw materials that might allow people to pull things out. So reports on transoractivities or interventions or ways to capture forms of resistance. Now, this isn't going to be one of the things we share today. But as we were preparing this, Tom, who I see has joined, you know, shared an editable document talking about forms of resistance, how we can, in our practice, put our ethical concerns into action. And one of those was Emery, for example, declined a keynote at a prominent conference. And that prompted some really wonderful badges from Tom that I hope Emery will one day proudly wield in her profile for her admirable sense. So I think I'm going to move this. I'm going to invite the other participants in not only my co-presenters, but anyone that's, you know, willing to join to talk about, you know, if these are the if this is the problem and if if these are the vexing gaps we've identified, what are some some kind of resources that would be helpful to us here? I think we do believe in our group that some form of an observatory, if we can get the critical mass participation would be useful. But is it? I'd be really interested in any of anyone's opinion, not only the other presenters, but any of our participants that have joined us today.