 I'm delighted that so many of you are able to join us today. With me are two other experts in this area. I am the Chair of ALT, but I'm joined by some real experts in this particular topic area, John Traxler and Agnes Chagona. So I'm delighted that they're able to lead this session for us today. What we have is a number of really good speakers as well who are joining us, and there are going to be plenty of opportunities for discussion as we proceed through this hour. But first, I just want to highlight a couple of housekeeping pointers. And those are that we have a chat function available for us today in Collaborate. Hopefully many of you have used this solution before, but if you haven't, just click at the bottom of the screen. There's a little sort of purple Chevron icon. And then within there, you can then see a chat button that you can then click and see the chat. So please use that for any questions or any comments that you have through the session. And we'll pick up those when we have our chat and our panel discussion. Also, there will be some polling activities towards the end of the presentation. So please look out for those links, and we'd love for you to join in on those. We'll also be recording this session, as Maryn said, and hopefully try to share that with you within a day or so. And also, I've just included here just an applied message that if you do have video, maybe it's best to disable that, because we have people joining from all over the world who just want to save bandwidth and not sort of have any impairments to the experience today. And also just a mention of the hashtag of this session today. It is hashtag alt WM underscore decolonize. So please feel free to use that to post your comments, your experiences of today, and anything else that you want to share with the rest of the world. OK, so I just want to hand over now to Agnes. And Agnes is going to introduce the sessions that we have today. Agnes. Thank you, John. So OK, hi all. Thank you for joining this webinar. My name is Agnes Tugona. I'm a professor in the faculty of education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town in South Africa. And my research interests are in ICTs in education. I am very much passionate in digital pedagogies in teacher education. So I'll be chairing this session today. And as you know, the session is about decolonizing learning technology. Yes. So I was looking at the meaning of decolonization. And the Oxford Llanars Dictionary defines decolonization as the process of a colony or a colony is becoming independent. So in the session, I am interested in getting answers to questions about the extent to which our digital pedagogies technologies we use for teaching and learning are perpetuating the colonization or assisting with decolonization in education. So I think I shouldn't take much of the time. But we are privileged to have experts presenting their research within the field, helping us understand what decolonizing learning technology is and how we can go about it. And our first presenter is Professor John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton. He is presenting about decolonizing technology. So Professor Traxler, you have seven minutes for the presentation. And that will be followed by questions for three minutes. So over to you, John. OK, thank you. And John, you're driving the slides. Yeah, that's correct. So you should see the first slide on the screen now, John. Just say whatever you want me to change the slide for you. Well, no, sadly not. I'll have to guess. I don't know why. Probably better to press on. I mean, yeah, and I hope to say, well, thanks for that introduction. And I think Agnes poses the right question or at least half of the right question, because I think decolonization certainly has many different aspects and appears in several different guises. And so there is an experience of colonization in the X colonies of the European colonizing powers, of which obviously South Africa is one, but there are plenty more, and of which other members of the European community have also got their legacy. And that's one half of the picture, or maybe only one third. Another portion, another third of that picture, is the extent to which migrant communities from the X colonies of those empires now live as migrants in the host communities of the X colonial powers. So we have all manner of communities in the UK, but there are similar parallel communities in France and probably, I guess, Spain and a variety of other countries as well, all of which experience colonization, colonization of educational technology and the learning in their different ways. And as someone pointed out to me recently, the de-russification of, for example, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, or perhaps the Baltic states, Latvia, for example, might also have a parallel agenda in that they're attempting to reassert or develop some national identity, and clearly education and the technologies that must be a part of that. So, yeah, thank you for the introduction, Agnes. I was hoping to keep my remarks as short as possible, and to that end, I posted a couple of blogs on the alt website, which maybe say nothing new. They reflect thinking of a year or two, three years ago and attempt to pull them together. And one of those bits of thinking relates to the technology itself and the extent to which it is permeated by colonial thinking values, concepts, and so on. And I'll come back to that in the course of the slides. We are also running two more webinars where we hope to do justice to more of the contributions and more of the ideas that come up. And in some senses, we're... Well, I am certainly apologizing for us being taken by surprise with this webinar and the extent to which there's been so much interest in it, and we're running to catch up. So hopefully we'll do some of that catching up in the subsequent webinars. Okay, John, next slide, the one entitled definitions also, please. I hope this isn't kind of a sterile academic exercise looking for a definition. But nevertheless, it does point out some aspects of it. I mean, the first one is actually from an African newspaper and sees it in African terms. I mean, in the way perhaps Agnes was portraying it. The other one comes from the University of Kiel. Rather ironically, or perhaps rather sadly, I noticed they've used the American Spelling, which kind of tells us something. And as I was saying, there are a variety of definitions, depending on whether one's coming at it as it were from a domestic point of view or overseas, points of view. And also I suppose the extent to which it's on the one hand an issue of historical injustice, I mean, in our relationships to other people in other countries and their experience of learning technology, but also if you like a current threat, when we look at the global dominance of digital corporations and where they come from and the values that are embedded in them. Yeah, so really I'm just drawing attention to the many different facets of this issue. I suppose needing to place us in some respects within a wider context of decolonization. I mean, on the broader extent, I suppose you can align it with Black Lives Matter and Roads Must Fall in different countries in different ways, but also actually the appropriation of indigenous knowledge, the attempts to preserve or appropriate cultural heritage, and also recent attempts within the last few days to discuss the repatriation of Benin bronzes to Nigeria or to repatriate the... Sorry, and I have to say Elgin models, which is clearly the wrong name because they're the Parthenon freezes back to Greece. So yes, it's part of that wider context within the sphere of education. We're seeing quite a lot of work around decolonizing the curriculum and decolonizing research. And the work of decolonizing the curriculum can sometimes be presented as opening up opportunities to those communities that are underrepresented or disempowered, but I think actually, whilst that might be true, it's also worth thinking about the extent to which decolonizing the curriculum represents a much, much richer, wider curriculum for everyone involved in the education system and not just for minority and migrant communities. So that's a kind of attempt to provide some sort of definition. If we move on to the next slide, John, it just points out that certainly from my personal history, I realize I must have been thinking about this issue over the last maybe decade and have made several different attempts to think about it. And this represents three of those attempts, the technology itself of learning technology, the theorizing of it, and the digital literacy which underpins it. So if we move on to the slide that says some questions, these were just the kind of things I think we ought to be asking ourselves in relation to, well, our students' experience, but also our lecturers and staff and researchers' experience of the day-to-day use of learning technology and asking ourselves what white European influences do we spot when we're using those technologies? And I suppose white European might be a term we can extend to white settler influences if we're looking at the scope and prestige of the USI. And maybe there's also a phrase that would embrace other colonializing powers and their influences, Arabic ones across North Africa, for example. And below that, I just enumerated some more specific questions in the hope they'd provoke you to spotting it in your work, really. The issue of icons, gestures, emojis on your phones, on your tablets, on your laptops, on your desktops. And certainly in the blog I'd identified some of those, but even so, I keep spotting more. And I think back with a certain amount of embarrassment 20 years ago running a European project that included Italy and we thought with English developers what we needed to do was scrape off the teacups and the red buses and put on some coffee cups and some green bendy buses. But you can start at that level scraping away, I don't know, white paper bins and files and egg timers and clocks. And then you find another layer and another layer and another layer. So John, you've got just 30 seconds to go. Oh, dear, sorry, that's really hard, isn't it? Okay. Yeah, so you can work through those questions and hopefully everyone will contribute their own examples. And there's one more question on the following slide, just to draw your attention to the various people who might be affected or afflicted by these experiences. So not just African communities, but also, as I say, Burba or Cree or Urdu or Kikuyu people. Okay, two more slides. One more, next one, John, the one about digital literacy. So we've got one about learning theory here, John. What do you want on the next slide? Okay, sorry, the question there is actually just spot the theorist who isn't the white European. And the last one about digital literacy. It's slightly random because I'm sure there's a whole bunch of issues but it is the foundation of our digital learning. But I worry about the extent to which the way the world is thinking about it is modeled upon European expectations, experiences, values and technology and pedagogy as well. And so I think we need to be very, very cautious in other countries importing what we have done that has built on a European context that is completely irrelevant in other countries. It is, as I say, the foundation of digital learning and we have to be careful that we're not building other people's digital learning on our conceptions in Europe of digital literacy. Okay, I hope I kept to time. Thank you very much for the opportunity for that high speed. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, John, for the presentation. Yes. And now we have questions for you. The first question I see, thinking of the practices that technology enables inclusive, exclusive, etc. What do, what we do with the technology and the structures it supports perpetuates or perpetuates? So, John, are you there? Sorry, I said, I was muted. I'm sorry. Can you repeat that, please? I think the question is about these, what these technologies are perpetuating. I also had that similar question that, you know, so if I take our example, South Africa, most of the technologies we use for teaching and learning are coming from the Western countries. And now how can we decolonize that same technology and be able to compete at the global level? Oh, okay. I mean, I guess I only have half the answer to that, partly because I think we're all still only thinking it through. And once we thought it through, then perhaps we'll have some strategies for addressing it. But I think in the first instance, the problem is awareness, that actually we don't notice it's happening, that we assume that what Microsoft or Apple do is somehow some neutral global norm and actually to draw people's attention to the fact that it isn't, that it comes laden with all sorts of aspects of a specific and powerful culture. And that we need to look more carefully at the technologies and the learning that comes with it in order to at least be critically aware that this is what's happening to us. Okay. John, can you read some of the questions? Yeah, there's an interesting one here. Can I just ask one final one? Just to John, how much of the bait in colonial designs and technology can be overcome by pedagogy? And it says, of course, pedagogy is influenced by the technology as well. Yeah, I think that's an important issue in the sense, well, I think there's this kind of spectrum or a sequence or a continuum that starts with the people that build and design the hardware, the software, the systems, the peripherals and so on and builds in some of their values at the very, very outset. You know, the fact that you have a QWERTY keyboard, you know, for example, and that seems to be taken as the norm. And then you move on to the educational systems and their deployment, you know, VLEs, LMSs and then the ways in which they are deployed within institutions and the way that that reinforces a particular, well, educational model, educational theater and institutional, commercial models as well. And then it gets passed on to the curriculum designers, the curriculum developers. And I think we shouldn't be too ambitious in thinking we can solve the whole of the problem and ask ourselves instead, what exactly are we doing? And I guess that is around the actual digital learning pedagogy and actually the educational awareness of this issue. You know, so on the one hand, can we through our teaching alert people to this problem and on the other hand, can we design, I don't know, materials, interactions that begin to address it and that set examples and also create communities and foster discussion. Thank you so much, John, for the presentation and the response to the questions. And I see there are still many questions, but in the interest of time, we need to move on. And now we have the lightning talks. And this will be given presented by Dr. Mona Younis and Dr. Sonia Strelin and Dr. Tostin Adams. Over to you ladies. And okay, so everybody has got two minutes to present. Then we'll have questions following your presentations. All of you have presented. Thank you. Yes, hi. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me properly? Greetings from California, USA. John, thank you for the slides. What I'm going to do today is it's just a trial to come up with some sort of a framework so that we can get the ball rolling while we are discussing the decolonizing learning technology. It's such a big and huge field or an area where we have really to think deeply, but therefore what do we need? Do we need some kind of a framework? Next John. Okay. Now, where does this framework that I'm proposing coming from a couple of years ago and that was a pre-COVID time? I was engaged with ECCN with the USAID and INE, the Interagency Network for Education Emergencies, because my specialty is actually working with refugees and educating them, especially in the NINA region. I was engaged in a reference group where we were sitting down and thinking about how is it possible that we implement ICT-based interventions in a conflict-sensitive manner. And in order to think about that and to come up with a checklist that is useful for implementers, we needed to have some kind of a framework. But we sat down for maybe a year or a year and a half thinking about, okay, this checklist, how are we going to frame it, what should be included, and so on. We realized that there are actually two perspectives or two layers. The first layer is actually the life cycle of a project or of an intervention. Especially, we are talking here about learning technology and its implementation in emergency and crisis settings. We realized that we need to look into the whole cycle. We need to look at the analysis cycle or the analysis phase, implementation, management, monitoring, evaluation, and even the closeout. Now, the second thing we thought about is, okay, each of those phases is very complex and there are so many aspects to it. Therefore, let's sit down and try to think deeply what are the different aspects that we have to think about. When we think about decolonizing learning technologies, we need also to think broadly because colonization and the colonizing philosophy has actually impacted all the different aspects of the whole learning process. I'm talking here about digital technology and talking about the technologies, about communication, about different aspects. Next slide, John. At the very end, we came up with four concepts or four aspects that we see and really believe are the main ones where we need to think deeply about. And I do think the same framework could be also used when we tackle issues of decolonization. Community context, very important. Content and pedagogy, definitely very much decolonized. And then... Yes, okay. Communication, devices and connection. Next, John. Now, when we are talking about community context, there are very important questions. One of them, are we really ensuring not to exerbate social injustices, inequities or oppression? Are we really doing that? Because sometimes we really do not do. And there are so many samples and examples around us that tell us no, the way we do it is in a very decolonized way. John, the next please. Then we have content and pedagogy. We have also other examples around the world. And if I had time, I would have told you stories and stories about how decolonized we are, how actually in a colonial manner, top-down manner, we can see curriculum being designed and given to the refugees around the world or the internally displaced people. The next. And very important question, are we widening the digital divide? Are we helping through learning technologies and the implementation of learning technologies widening the digital divide? And I can tell you a very recent research that I was engaged in in northern Syria in conflict areas. We could see that only 25 percent of kids had access to one one smartphone during COVID and were able to continue their education. What happened to the rest 75? They were pushed down down into more poverty and child labor actually flourished very much. Why? Because learning technology was used in that context and the kids had to be out of the whole system. Yes, the next. Very quickly. Yes. Very quickly connections. We needed to think about what are we doing? Are we exerbating actually the power and the strength and the colonial situation position of the global corporates? Are we doing that? And is providing the connection one mean of exerbating again inequality and enforce different kind of oppressions. There are so many different stories that I can tell where the increasing of tariffs and the use of learning technology has actually led to more oppression and more and more social justice and digital divide. Would there be three seconds to show the video? Do we have three seconds? I don't think we do actually because we'll have to change the share so can we actually just put that in the link to the in the chat and we'll pick that up in a second. I'm inviting you to look at that video that video was taken in Cox Bazaar in one of the refugee camps Rohingya refugee camps and it is showing how is digital pedagogy being implemented in that camp how the banking model followed in a very what do I say in a very harmful way among the refugees and I am the one who took the video and I witnessed this horrible practice teaching practice happening Yes, please. I'm inviting everyone to have a look at this 17 second video and you will know what I'm talking about. Thank you. That was quick. Thank you and now can we have the next one Sonja. Thank you Agnes and thank you colleagues also for the opportunity just from my side just quickly again from Salamars University in South Africa and maybe the purpose of my very short talk is just maybe to share with you our thoughts and the processes that we propose with in our institution and also broader in terms of starting to interrogate what what we all know is critical digital pedagogies and maybe latching on to the learner's framework that she used and which I think is really powerful and useful and our emphasis is probably then on the pedagogical side the teaching methodologies that we employ with digital technologies and maybe the secondary side of course also the community context and of course the right of students to how they play that role within our engagement with digital technology so in terms of the why you'll see that I have two bullet points I think all of us are very familiar with the fact that the emergency remote teaching and learning and assessment period that we all experienced the past two years that we also experienced that the digital came to the fore much more it's like an ocean of waves and we experienced that in our own tuition but also in our country as well and talking to colleagues as well but what we found was we actually with respect to our colleagues in our division for teaching and learning and enhancement we're actually with collaboratively on an OER we reflected on experiences of Adela and one of the things that came out was that needs to connect with students via the digital so that humanizing pedagogy side came through very strongly so that's one of our motivations for interest and you can have a look at that in the link that I've shared with you but probably in the South African context also colleagues searching public universities out of the 25 in South Africa participated in a joint paper that we wrote on the second bullet point that specifically spoke about equity inequality issues in the COVID-19 period and then also then the issues of key and how we need to embrace that as well so those are two of the main factors that influence our thinking processes in a sense as well the second slide please John and then very briefly the way in which we try or thinking of approaching it is the how and we're looking at the differential approach we're new we're learning as we go along of course in our own work the issues of EDI increasingly automated classrooms are questions that we're asking the whole time and we're thinking about that third space where you bridge the gap between our issues of equity diversity and intercity but then also issues of artificial intelligence, machine learning all these things coming to the form much more how do we address that those are one of the aspects that we're thinking about from institutional perspective we've started to plan what we call a critical digital pedagogies planning group where we try to actually embrace cross institutional awareness campaign in terms of this and starting to engage with academics and students and academic support services in terms of how are we thank you how we actually can start to embed and start to think about critical digital pedagogies and the last but not least is we've also we've also involved in the African Digital University Network you've got the link there and we've got different working groups and one of the working groups actually starting to focus on the aspect of critical digital pedagogies there will be a call going out at the end or only next year and you are very welcome to join that network and also to join that working group if you're interested in that thank you very much for the opportunity colleagues thank you so much Sonya we'll have more time next in the next webinar can we have Taskin Adams hi everyone can you hear me loud and clear yes we can hear you great thank you so much Agnes so you can skip to the next slide so I'm Taskin I'm from South Africa I did my PhD on MOOCs and how they can address injustices in education on to the next slide please Agnes John thanks so yeah so my PhD looked at addressing injustices and it arose from the period where roads must fall and fees must fall were happening on one side and on the other side there was this great development of global online learning platforms that were claiming to be the solution to all educational issues so my research focused on whether MOOCs could address the needs preferences and aspirations of marginalized youth but also focus not only on the material injustices but the cultural systemic and the political and geopolitical injustices they face so you can go on to the next slide thanks basically what I want to do today is just highlight three papers that I've written which is sort of like a clickbait for you to read them and look at some of the issues I've talked about the first one is on digital neocolonialism and MOOCs and this talks about how and a lot of my research focuses on the ideologies and the western centric epistemologies that are embedded in learning technology so moving away from just access issues to seeing how things are embedded with western logic so that research looked at how western centric epistemologies are embedded into MOOCs and how this can be detrimental for when you're trying to educate diverse and complex participants from around the globe it also looked at not only the past in terms of colonial agendas but new techno capitalist agendas that transcend borders the second paper then looked at MOOC designers and the embodiment in epistemic location the fact that many MOOC designers are based in global law institutions and how those knowledges and are for-fronted in what they design and this research highlighted that basically MOOCs represent what MOOC designers who they are how they think what they value and therefore you really need to have an epistemically diverse group of MOOC designers that can bring in different cultures and different value systems and different epistemologies into thinking about how MOOCs are designed just a quick example is MOOCs are designed for one user to interact through a profile whereas there are so many community learnings of models of education just looking at that on the third paper I look at the difference between social justice and decolonization and this came up in the chat as well social justice theories tend to be rooted from a I mean Tusking yes they tend to be rooted from global north literature although recent social justice literature has sort of merged with decolonial literature however decolonial literature rarely came from the south and so there's different understanding of how these are and just going on to the next slide that literature basically builds upon the dimensions of human injustice framework that draws from the social justice theories that look at redistribution and those from material levels to more geopolitical and epistemic levels and then draws into the owniality aspects that rarely look at forefronting different ideas and epistologies and this is the framework that I've used in my research to map and understand to critique and analyze learning technologies so yeah I'll stop then just I think the one last thing I would say what my research sought to do is to design an approach to designing justice orientated and decolonized mobs so hoping that will be an example of being followed. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Taskin for the presentation and thank you to our three presenters now we have questions for the presenters, the three presenters John do you have any questions on the chat? I'm going to check on anything yes I've just been so busy with the slides but if anybody can push forward any questions that there are I'm sorry that we've had to rush through so many of those talks well I'm waiting for somebody to come through I will say that we're hoping to do a couple more webinars and those with lightning talks this time can talk a little bit more in the next session because obviously there's so much of interest in there that we'd love to be able to get more information out to you so we've got a question here so what's the relationship between epistemic location and designers conceptualizations is there anything definite if we can say about this I'll ask that to Taskin first Thank you, so I'll pop the link that will explain that in detail but yes that came out so strongly so to be quite frank when I looked at the handful of black global south move designers they brought such different concepts into the work that they did and it really brought into a different understanding of like they were trying to challenge epistemic injustices in their work and they brought different elements into the design of the move not just at the end like not just a discussion at the end but brought different speakers from around the globe so there was a very significant difference in the design of the moves and how collaborative and engaging they was based on the different designers Great, thank you. I've just seen a question just came up there let me just see if there was another one a question from Miranda maybe this is to Mona is language one of the aspects you considered in the South African context South African context when I did my PhD research it was about the MENA region and specifically about the Syrian refugees in Jordan but language is definitely also part of the whole issue of decolonization because what we can see that we have for instance Arabic although we have so many Arabic speakers I don't I can't recall how many now the exact statistic but we have only 5 to 4.5% of the content that is there out there online is in Arabic for language is a very big issue whenever a child wants to know more about solar system unfortunately unfortunately he would refer mostly to curriculum to resources that have been written in English because there is a scarce of resources and learning material that is in Arabic for language is a very very big issue a very big one yes great thanks very much indeed Marla I could just cross the time we've got 2 more speakers to come we'll be playing time for questions I hope before the end of this hour so perhaps let's move on now and move on to I think Samantha was coming next and then we've got Kate so Samantha are you going to share your screen is that correct yes I'm trying to yes I think I've got the order right yeah now I'm trying to it's just having a bit of a alright there we go okay awesome okay I want to you have got 7 minutes yep I will be brief but understandable hopefully so I'm going to give a quick overview about the anti-racism technology working group which is I'm a part of what it is how we started why should we care about this and what we are doing as I said I will try to keep it brief okay so how things started off so Matt Lingardt who a lot of you may know he attended a talk by Angela Sonny last autumn but I think had him thinking along the way that a lot of us are thinking and that we do think that this critical digital pedagogic way of questioning technologies so he literally put out a mass call to the community going you know is anybody else thinking about this and does anybody else want to do anything about it and that's what kind of brought us to this anti-racism and technology working group and you know we kind of kicked off in I think January of this year actually and we are looking to become an old SIG and we are a community of practice we are people from across the spectrum of learning technology that really want to kind of address this kind of issues with the technologies and what happens with them and the things that are baiting you know and there are three subgroups for this things that we think about this the content developers group which I'm part of I've done a lot of learning design work in the past so that kind of makes more sense there's things around research connected activities and just questions about the equipment and staff development as well within learning technology it is ridiculously white you know there isn't as much diversity in these teams as we would hope in some places and you know and even where there is diversity unfortunately like a lot of higher education it's in the lower levels it doesn't feed all the way through what all the way through I will get that out in a way that makes sense in a minute and so far there's been a series of blog posts that there was one that introduced the group as whole and then each group has had their own posts and John's going to share the slides and there's links to the blog posts actually in the notes for this and then the research group actually did a presentation at the Winter Conference so that's kind of the background so all of this and I'm not going to be apologetic for putting this here because I know that this is an incredibly powerful poem and I picked it on purpose because we have to remind ourselves that you know by being bystanders we can place it in reproducing it and maintaining inbuilt inequalities and systemic racism and other social injustices in these tools and the approaches and I think that's kind of crucial and for me personally a couple of years ago I read two books I read Rene Adele Lodges Why I'm No Longer Talk to White People About Race and for me that was quite profound it made me see things I hadn't seen you know I am very much a you can almost argue I walk around with race into glasses I want to see the good in the world and leave the world a better place I don't always see the underside of things and I don't always question things that I should question so that made me kind of go oh okay that's not cool that's not right and at the same time I was reading Count Boeper's White Privilege as well and about how we we privilege things and people in our education systems and you know there's also a discussion about unacceptable whiteness as well so I totally agree with Laurie's comments in the chat about you know it's not just a thing it is a equitable and a social justice thing and then not always the same thing but we need to be mindful you know I'm very aware that I am first in family, first gen to go to university I remember the first time I walked into UCL and I was like this what it didn't compute I felt very different but I'm also acceptable you know I as they put a code switch there's interesting things said by Rua Benterman saying that we shouldn't have to you know I do it subconsciously the way I'm speaking now is very different to how I would speak at home to the friends that I grew up with and it is completely a subconscious thing because I've learnt to code switch and you know is that something that's truly necessary as well should you have to change to survive and I literally mean survive in a culture so why should we care well I think we care because technology and pedagogies are not apolitical they can't be they're socially constructed and they construct society they're the two things I was actually really quite disappointed by a comment actually someone reported about JISC in this one let's forget about the ethics of AI and let's think about how to roll it out and how it might be useful you can't the two things can't be ignored you have to truly think about both I think that we have to share the load as well you know it is not one person's job to say about this but I'm also very aware of being an ally and truly being an ally I have no desire to be a white saviour and I'm very cautious of knowing that we have this power yeah that's fine you know that we have power and in a way because I am the norm there are things I can say and I can do which won't be taken in the same way that they may be by somebody else so it is a very careful balancing act but it is everybody's job to remember that it is our job and maybe because we are not seen as a threat you know we should be doing a bit more about it so in terms of the content development group we had kind of two questions that we address in the reviewer frameworks blog and these were frameworks for decolonisation and inclusive curricula and thinking a bit about what that kind of meant the point now where based on actually John Traxler's post in the org group the work that we are doing with this and in conversations with Monica that we are in the process of drafting I don't know if framework or a toolkit is the best way to describe it for how as learning designers learning technologists we can think about this we can think about questioning the things presented to us to build in online courses about the technologies that we are asked to review to implement and the implications for that I am personally looking at learning design frameworks and where we can introduce thinking more broadly about what values are we embedding what content is there and what does that represent and what stereotypes are we reproducing that are good and bad we are going to go into conference where we are going to introduce the current version of the toolkit and we are going to be opening up for some community feedback on that so we are currently in the process of building it and a little supporting website so I am going to leave it there because there is so much to say and think and doing this space and we really are just opening up the conversation how do we open the conversation and how do we feel that we can raise this and even within the fact that I am the norm to a certain extent there is still power dynamics in playing our institution and how do we raise that and sometimes in some really quite uncomfortable situations so I hope that wasn't too much for Road Runner thank you that was very interesting we don't have much time so we go straight to the next presenter Ketchy are you there please unmute yourself is Ketchy in the room sorry I am here now I didn't have the option to unmute myself but I have got it now thank you that's alright I am glad it was fixable I was like oh no I don't know how to do this okay so yes thank you so much to everybody for all the things you have been saying I am going to talk briefly I have got slides which have more detail on that is for if you are interested in following any of this up but I just wanted to make a few main points really so I have got a poll to start with if we are able to carry if you are able to drop that into the chat how much influence you feel you have on decolonising in your current situation so there are choices in that poll I am not sure my work has or should have anything to do with decolonising I have no involvement I can occasionally influence decolonising decisions I am actively involved in decolonising or none of the above so if I just give you a minute to do that or not literally a minute I can't see any results on that sorry that is the joining page that is why I can't see results that is fine thank you I will turn the results on in a second Kate when people are so far 40 people just joining now Fab okay thank you I am on purpose being quiet because as a person with a disability I struggle with multiple things so I am giving you a little bit of time just to do that interesting okay so there we go that is showing that I am occasionally I can occasionally influence decolonising decisions and actions is by far and away the one that is getting the most votes at the moment and the others you can see for yourselves so the one at the top I am not sure my work has or should have anything to do with decolonising there are a fair few people thinking that the same with those who have no involvement and then D the fourth one down that is actively involved in decolonising okay thank you very much for sharing that next slide please so I wanted to return to the point we started off with so starting with why is my curriculum white I come to decolonising from an educational developer perspective I am interested very much in inclusive practice and I think that the decolonising agenda which quite rightly began focusing very much on race is something that we need to expand we need to look at the hidden power structures and who is affected by them and maybe broaden this out so there is a quote here whiteness exceeds the individual and is a ubiquitous multifaceted and inconsistent manifestation of power that informs social relations and the recognition of ability potential and the value of certain types of knowledge that thing about the ability potential and the value of certain types of knowledge is at the heart of what is not right with education we will talk about that in a minute next slide please so really this is all about power structures so we are still having a pandemic we have had a pivot to online education and these things have raised the issue of structural inequality for the first time some of these inequalities are now visible they have always been there but suddenly more of us can see them that has affected obviously students in the way that you have heard from other speakers and also the thing that these are typically invisible to people that they don't affect next slide please so historically then the norms in our education system are whiteness that's very clear they are also the people who put the education system together were privileged so they were independently wealthy presumed straight able bodied European male for the most part so all of these things shaped how our education system was set up and this is hidden and this is what we talk about as the hidden curriculum and I've got a lovely guide colleagues have just produced on that which I'll drop into the chat later next slide please but I wanted to look at the effects that the hidden invisible the hidden curriculum has on students so this slide and the one after it these are quotes direct quotes from students in situations they found themselves in I haven't got time to read them all through but I'm just going to highlight the issues that they're raising so the first point is from a student of colour who is being taught medicine and only being taught to diagnose symptoms in white-skinned individuals the second is from a non-binary student who's come across an example of statistics where they're saying this is an example of a binary statistic because all participants are male or female that doesn't represent that student's experience the third one's very concerning for all sorts of ethical reasons but it's a professor of genetics who is discussing removing disease genes from the population in a way that suggests that removing disability is desirable so in each of those instances you have a student sitting in a classroom hearing these kind of views as part of the curriculum unquestioning part of the curriculum for other students and possibly other staff with no understanding of the impact these things are invisible unless they're your particular visibility next slide please the same is true of identity so we have an issue with names a student talking about the inability to pronounce the name which signifies her African origin which meant that she stopped participating she said I found it easier I didn't want to draw attention to myself the impact is huge another one there from a transgender student university systems are only using the previous name their dead name so every single time they participate in a zoom call or whatever the university systems are organising it's their dead name it's not them so next slide please what I wanted to show with this is that these inequalities have always been here we see them in attainment gaps calling it an attainment gap this differentiation in degree attainment puts it on the students it's like saying you haven't achieved enough in our system well that's not right and here we have a nice quote from Advanced HE action needs to focus on institutional barriers and inequalities so it's not the students who are failing to achieve it's all of these hidden structures within their curriculum within the education system in terms of who has access who can participate who is able to achieve and so on so it's really important that you think about this from a designing for everybody perspective and in our field we're used to this idea a minute to go okay thank you that's lovely so next slide please and then the one after that so we'll skip a slide that's it so I wanted to talk about our role in decolonising things that we are doing so we're from lots of different contexts but if we seek EDI training opportunities that will help us to see what isn't obviously visible if we look for these hidden power structures we look for underrepresentation and we try and make these things visible to others through our own actions question practice and change it where we can so things like tools, systems, activities and so on acting inclusively so promoting and modelling things like digital accessibility is a big part of this as well universal design for learning that kind of concept scaffolding decolonising activity, inclusive practice allyship, standing with those who need our support to normalise equality issues like inclusive language and pronouns and working in partnership which I think is huge so this whole day nothing about us without us comes from the disabled community I think it's important for every community otherwise it's simply those of us with good intent changing things not working with others to smash these power structures and promote real equality and lastly push within your spheres of influence so do all the good you can whenever you can and I've got one more poll which perhaps we'll run in the background where I'm inviting you to list your spheres of influence so any areas where you can influence practice which might be conversations, it might be that you attend certain meetings, it might be that you're involved in sorting out what tools we had a question in the chat about how to make sure tools that we're looking at purchasing are going to not have an impact on equality and so on that's it, yes as I said there's more detail in the slides and there's a link to lots of really useful resources in the slides as well thank you very much thank you so much KT that was interesting okay so now we are running out of time I think we can just go into the question and answer session yes John, John are you there John see I'm sorry, okay sorry I have to be sure myself yeah I think we'll let people continue with this word cloud activity we'll run over the hour and obviously people need to get away that's absolutely fine, this will be recorded but we'll do this we'll take a couple of questions after this activity and then we'll wrap up so if you do have the time please stick around and participate in this activity Kerry if you could share the screen of VBOX again we'll jump into that and I want to take a couple of questions that have come up for Samantha and Kate to respond to it's just a warning the word cloud will move around so if you're not keen on moving things on the screen just look away for a moment so once this is completed can we fix it can we lock it in place Kerry so it's not changing yeah great okay should we do that now Kerry so Kate did you want to just maybe comment on this word cloud it's now paused thank you so much for putting that in interesting so you can see that we've got all kinds of different concepts all kinds of different areas where we can try and ask questions and push development particularly here digital technology meetings, conversations, policy design work guidelines, practice recruitment that's very important assessment, learning accessibility criticality, working groups yeah thank you so if we all do as much as we can wherever we can hopefully we make a little difference in the way things move forward indeed I think we need to write that down Kate that's a great quick quote okay so just a couple of questions that have come up and maybe Samantha and Kate in particular you could respond to these since one from Ryker saying how can we promote democratising learning with technology with the awareness of critical technology enhanced learning Samantha would you like to take that and then Kate that's an interesting one I think it comes down to right at the beginning when people conceptualise their courses so I did a bit of thinking out loud last week about kind of what I thought education could and should be and part of me was this about people finding themselves and their voice we've got to create a culture and a structure that allows that for students for me I've got a fundamental issue with our education system everything is about competition between institutions and between students and that becomes very difficult and when you've set up that false competition in many ways between things it doesn't leave the space or the freedom to do those things to take that risk to open that up and it's a hard task I think on an individual level we can think about our lessons we can think about the scheme of work for our module we can think about our programme but we are fighting something that is systemic all the way through and it's not even just in high rate it literally starts in primary school that a child is assessed in nursery with a prediction for how they're going to perform in primary and secondary school and it's all leagues and streamed and blah and I guess I have no easy answer apart from we do what we can in the space that we can but we question and we feedback and when there are consultations on things we make our voices heard and I think that's the we don't sit back where we have a voice we use it Wonderful thank you Kate would you like to comment on that would you like me to repeat the question Yes please sorry OK so how can we promote democratising learning with technology and raise awareness of critical tell I think it feeds into stuff we do already in terms of staff development around tell so criticality we are already there's a lot of work being done thinking about criticality in terms of our students so I think a lot of that is transferable into looking at tech I forgot the first half of the question again I'm sorry How do we promote democratising learning with technology Right that's something I think some of this comes down to we can take some of it to the digital accessibility agenda because that's gaining a lot of traction at the minute as it should but there are cultural implications for use of tech obviously as well so it's not just to do with disability so I think where you are writing guidance if you are in a situation where you can give guidance or somewhere you can raise questions because we're all from such different context I can't give more specific advice than that I'm sorry I hope that's not too unhelpful That's fine that's great Wonderful thank you we've got this from Kerry I think that's great Sorry I was just trying to share the tiles That's okay Really good question from Theodora as well and I'll ask it to both of you well if you want to take it and then maybe we can ask some of the other speakers to respond as well How do we keep the balance between opening the table to marginalise groups and not dumping on them all the emotional labour for training the rest of the world to respect us Kate would you like to take that first and then Samantha and then we'll open it out to the other speakers I think this is such a key question and thank you very much for asking it So what I would really like to see and it's a pipe dream wish but I would really like to see it is for the proper acknowledgement to be given to people in marginalised group who are engaged in this kind of work so time in your working contract or if you're a student paid time as a possible opportunity while also bearing in mind that it may be time is very scarce for people in marginalised situations because of their personal characteristics so the emotional point is very important I think it's really important that we keep saying there shouldn't be any expectation I have a disability I don't necessarily want to be the stand up person for disability in the room quite often I am just because but yeah I think it is about giving appropriate partnership opportunities and making it clear that this isn't equal thing this isn't here's a little seat as a token at the table we really need to change things so let's make it more meaningful Thank you and that comment about opening the table I think is coming to illustrates who owns the table it's a really good comment there as well It might as well be Shirley Chisholm's thing about if they don't give you a chair bring your own when she was talking about race and gender politics in 70s US which they still do not have a nationwide gender equality law which is just insane but there we go yeah I can't say anything other than what Kate said I think for someone who I'm not a marginalised group so for me it's listening and working in partnership with people and having their voice it may be that I can take some of that labour and I want to but not speaking for them you know and not again it's that being that saviour which is not what we want it's not that I am not going to speak for you I'm not going to pretend that I know but I want to talk to you and I want to understand and I want to help give your voice and I think there was a whole other thing it may have been a cedar event a student commented that there was nothing African about African studies and so on that all the resources in Africa were written by white Europeans which is just kind of a lot yeah yeah thank you maybe I can ask Tasti and then Sonya and Mona and John to just have a quick final comment about this particular question and then we'll close the session yes why we were talking here and I am listening to you I remembered a very interesting comment once a European North American group was providing professional development for teachers in one of the developing countries and then one of the teachers stood out and said why is it that always we are thrown with on top of our heads with curriculum and with guidance and tools and resources why isn't it that you listen to us we need to be heard and this was very powerful we need to be heard there is nothing in what you are offering that relates to us and he just left the room and he was so furious and I realized there was something wrong with how the programs are designed always top down which is actually which needs to change thank you very much Mona Tasti thanks I think I'll just conclude with saying that we really need to work with global south researchers and also just people on the ground so part of that is global north institutes sharing resources with them to help them mobilize and it's not just giving voice but actually having them being heard and owning the conversation often the narrative is shaped and then we ask as researchers we would ask them to input on a certain point but I think really the conversation needs to be led from those researchers those people that have a lived experience of these situations so I think we need to look at it more and more you see that the literature that's coming out from decolonization is actually from global north institutes or wider European academics and so we really need to think about who is leading the narrative on this topic and I think one of the comments said that does decolonization need to be decolonized thank you Sonya are you still here would you like to speak if she's there John are you still around yeah for sure yeah I'm just incredibly grateful to be exposed to all of this I mean conscious of my own kind of inadequacies in reading and thinking it through but very grateful for the provocation to think it through further and I'm quite conscious that people have made remarks about social justice on the one hand and anti-racism on the other and I can see this topic just being a kind of reflection or an aspect in many respects of just the power structures within our society and kind of intimidated by the enormity of it all and I think the shape of my head is probably such that I'm better at thinking what can I do now what can I do here but very grateful for other people making the connections and kind of taking me through to tomorrow I'm not a learning technologist in the sense it's normally portrayed and so I don't have much to contribute in that respect but I think actually that again that's only one corner and one contribution and it's very good to see the amount of interaction between the Association of Learning Technology which is essentially a UK based professional organisation and so many many many people from so many different time zones actually of whom are kind of staying up late and some of whom are getting up early and many of whom are missing lunch I imagine so yeah all I can say is you know I want to do this more and I want to do this better and keep in touch with everyone and it's going to take me quite some time to kind of assimilate all of the chat and all of the remarks and all of the input and I will definitely be doing that and hope that well thank you for your forbearance actually I mean this was this felt rather like I don't know some mixture of being the sorcerer's apprentice trying to keep hold of the tiger's tail you know catching up with the interest and the demand and the offers and hopefully we can do kind of slightly better in that respect in January and in February so thank you thank you ever so much everyone thank you John and Agnes would you like to any comments as well to this I think I've learned a lot you know even though it was so short I've learned a lot from the presenters but yeah of course this this topic of you know the colonizing learning technology we need to you know to keep on talking about this because I feel if we are not careful this technology especially this learning technology can perpetuate what we are trying to you know we are trying to decolonize the curriculum and if we are not careful the way we are using the technology for teaching and learning we are going to perpetuate what exactly that what we are trying to decolonize so yeah I think we need to keep on having these compositions we certainly do and on that note myself and John and Agnes have been talking about these and there are other opportunities and I think in the sense that actually I'm going to be handed over the baton to other people to be leading some of these other sessions with Agnes, with John and with whoever else wants to step forward and offer a chance to host another chance to present as well in these other sessions that we are looking to run and tweet chat hopefully in the next few weeks but also a couple of follow-up webinars so another one to sort of have sessions like these to talks outlining some of the key issues but then what we would like to do is have a third webinar that looks at trying to sort of bring some of these ideas together and start to sort of arrange some ideas and have some actions from them rather than just talking about it, how can we collaborate together, what can we take forward as individuals, as groups as alt and other organizations so you know hopefully this is just the start of a longer conversation. John would you like to just comment on that? I've just seen Mike has said about the strike action, good point there we'll keep that in mind as well John would you like to make any final closing comments? No, no, like I say I am incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to be part of this and to be exposed to everyone's ideas and reactions and thoughts and for the chance to build on it as well. Thanks, I wanted to say one final thing which was, which I haven't forgotten about which was mentioned in the chat I believe earlier about the alt winter conference which is happening soon and there is a particular sort of discussion around this ethical framework for learning technology which I'm sure will embrace a lot of the things we've talked about today so if you haven't already registered please do and of course there will be lots of other presentations as well on many similar topics and lots of other ones as well, it's a wonderful event so please look out for that as well as these other events that we've just mentioned today. Just to absolutely conclude now, thank you very much everybody for joining today, thank you for all of our speakers, thank you Agnes for chairing the session so well and we're really grateful for all of the interest that we've had like I've mentioned there are other webinars ahead so if you do have an interest in speaking, in hosting in doing anything please let myself for John or Agnes know and we'd love to include you in future sessions. Well thank you very much indeed everyone and have a good day.