 Yn chi'n mynd i ddim gweld y r�au, mae'n meddwl dod ti'n eu tofod arnyntau i fi gafu Ychhychol? Mae'n pwy, mae'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i chi mor mynd i Ychhychol a'i bod yn ystyried i fynd? Efallai, rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i chi gyntaf, mae'n gweithio y byw i ddych chi'n meddwl. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i chi gweld yn meddwl i chi ychhychol a'r mwy o'r gwaith yn meddwl i chi'ch hynny, a gweithio'n ymddangos o'r rhai ddweud yn ymddi'r fawr, oherwydd, dyna'r pethau o'r adeiladau, i'r adeiladau, nid yw'r adeiladau, a'r ddiddordeb ar gyfer y cwmaint a'r ddysgu'n ddiddordeb. Rydyn ni'n gofyn ar y cwmaint, yn yr adeiladau, wrth gael, byddwn i'n ddiddordeb. Felly, yw'r ydwch yn gyfaddfodol, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ymddangos a'r ffodol cyd-dech. Mae'r cyfnodau yw yn ymwneud o'i rai cywethaf, mae'r cyfnodau geosociolion amser oedd yn cyfnod i'r adegau iawn yn 2013. Maen nhw'n rhaid i'r cyfrifeth amser oedd y cyfrifeth a'r cyfrifeth sy'n meddwl, i'n meddwl i'r cyfrifeth sydd wedi'u droi i'r cyfrifeth, oedden nhw'n llwyffydd yn maen nhw. Mae efallai ymwyllgor, beth mae'r cyfrifeth yn y rhaid o'r mylion o'i mwylo yng ngyrsbeth, i'w ddweud o'r ysgolwch yn ymweld i'w gweithio'r iawn, a'i ddweud o'r 10 miliadau. Mae'r iawn rym ni'n gwneud ymlaen i'ch ddweud i'r gael o'r campus yma yn y Ulygaid, a'r gweithio'r Unedig i'w Gweithio a'r Australia i'w ffioedd. Rydyn ni'n amser i'r gweithio'r studen sy'n gyffredinol i'r campus. Mae'n mynd i'w gweithio i'w gweithio i'r Ulygaid, a'i'r Gweithio i'w gweithio i'w gweithio. ac mae'n cyntaf ar gwaith yn gweithio'r rhywbeth yn y cyfwyr y byddai'r hynny, yn gyfrifio'r cymdeithasu. Mae Cyryg yn ymweld. Felly ydych chi'n meddwl yma. Mae'n meddwl cymoeddol, felly mae'n meddwl â'r rhaid ddweud. Mae ydych chi'n meddwl â'r hynny, ac mae'n meddwl â'r rhaid o'r rhaid o'r rhaid o'r meddwl o'r rhaid o'r meddwl. Mae'n meddwl cymdeithiol, ac mae'n meddwl ydw i'n meddwl i'r meddwl y mod yw'r ffordd mewn gwirwyddu, hiwn cy遊戲 yn fathor,, ac mae Pyougailes, yw meddwl ni would cyffn clubs. It was completely deleted from the feed and from the system. And then this is what's essential to what I want to talk about this morning. It was anonymous initially anyway. It was a completely anonymous app with no persistent identity. I was trying to put a bit of kind of Edinburgh eye candy on talks just to persuade all of you to come up and visit us. So this is what Edinburgh looks like. And this is the kind of thing that Edinburgh University students were yacking about when they were on campus during 2014-15. There was lots of kind of playful stuff. Why would you go out in weather like this? Because, as you know, the weather in Edinburgh is often pretty bad. To go to a lecture that's going to be online anyway. My colleagues implementing lecture capture at Edinburgh are really happy to see that one. People would yack about missing lectures and tutorials because they were depressed and they would genuinely seek advice and guidance from their peer group as to what the implications of missing things like seminars and tutorials might be. They would raise issues around personal support from their tutors and occasionally they'd say something really nice about us. Quite occasionally. So we thought that this Edinburgh University in many kind of, I suppose, Russell group type universities, often we get some quite harsh feedback in our National Student Survey results about the quality of our teaching, the quality of student experience, and that's something that we take really seriously. So we're looking at Yikyak, we're thinking actually this feed can tell us what our students are really feeling about what we give them and what we offer them as a university that it would be good to know more about what's going on in Yikyak. So there was one kind of very pragmatic reason for doing some research in Yikyak. There was also a kind of theoretical reason, which for me was about the way in which Yikyak kind of created campus space. So, you know, whereas most social media applications link, they're kind of building agnostic aren't they? They link the whole campus kind of into a homogenous kind of mass. Whereas Yikyak, because of the hyperlocality of it, it enacted very tight campus communities. So if you know Edinburgh University, you'll know that our vet school is positioned quite far out of town. It's the one right at the bottom of the map there at Easter Bush. And then our medical school is a bit closer written, but still fairly far out. And then we have our science campus, again, a little bit further in. And then we have our central campus, which is mostly humanities and social science. And then our education campus is somewhere else again. So we were seeing that in Yikyak, we were getting really quite disciplined, specific kind of communities emerging. We wanted to ask some kind of theoretical questions really about how the campus was enacted as a code space through the way that students were using Yikyak. So we designed our research project, and this was in partnership with a fantastic research team of colleagues who I want to name check. So I worked with Nicola Rosbourne, our information services group, Louise Connolly in our vet school, and then Claire Grover and Richard Tobin in our School of Informatics. And we designed this killer mixed method research design. We used computational data to gather Yikyak's that happened over a period of about six months within the campus, and we did the topic modelling of that. So we did participant observations. So we hired two fantastic undergraduate research assistants who kind of, they were in Yikyak anyway. So we asked them to become participant observers of the YAK community, gathering, coding YAKs, and then writing reflective reports on them. And then we used data from our annual digital footprint survey, which Louise Connolly runs, and put that alongside some interviews with students who identified as active Yikyak users. So it's a really good research design, if I say so myself. But then this was the problem we had. So from, I don't know if you can see that, yeah you can. In 2014, Yikyak was the third most popular download in the iOS app chart. At the end of 2014, the company got a massive injection of venture capital fund, well quite a massive by venture capital standards injection of funding. Our research project, which we scoped in February 2016, happened about now, about at this point. So you can see that there was a, Yikyak was already on a decline when our research project started. It was losing popularity quite rapidly from its high point in 2014. So in August 2016, there was a redesign of Yikyak which I'll speak about a bit more in a minute, focused on this idea of making your world real small again. So this was about the same time as the Brexit vote. So everything kind of converged into this vortex of depression, Brexit, and then Yikyak was also kind of working to this idea of closing borders. And then towards the end of that year, Yikyak laid off 60% of its employees. Just to kind of track back a bit to August 2016, I think this is the point at which Yikyak got something really wrong. And they kind of sounded the death knell for the app really. So as I said, this was an anonymous app, and it was a hyperlocal app. And we had thought in designing our project that what we were most interested in was the hyperlocality of it. In fact, what was valuable in our students' app was the anonymity. And the app developers made the same mistake. So in August 2016, they removed anonymity from the functioning of the app completely, and they made profiles and haddles obligatory. And this is a little quote from one of the developers of the app. He said, you know, we've always been focused on the hyperlocal. Anonymity was just a way of getting people in to the app. So we've got rid of that, and now we're focused on college campuses and really nailing where these local interactions are taking place. So, you know, there was lots of publicity about how I found my best friend on Yikyak, and it shifted from what it was doing previously, which functions a very sort of lively, kind of quite gritty anonymous space to becoming a place where people could find friends. So when our students got back in September 2016, this is the kind of stuff that they were yacking about. There was a kind of upsurge of kind of despair really among the Yikyak users that a developer had completely removed anonymity from the functioning of the app. The feed dropped dramatically, as I'll show you in a minute. So in November, the developers see how tired they look in this photograph. This is the two developers of Yikyak. They released a video saying, we have done a U-turn, and we've decided that actually we've messed this one up. We're bringing anonymity back to Yikyak. A sweet, delicious anonymity was a yak from one of our local students at this kind of U-turn in developer policy. Then there was all kinds of kind of celebration, I guess among the Yikyak community, about the return of anonymity and all kinds of jokes. It happened around the same time as the Trump election. But the data that we had from our research shows really interestingly what happened when that anonymity was removed from the application. In September, when students returned to university, you could see that the usage dropped massively. Then as soon as they brought the anonymity back in November, it went up again. Having said that, you have to bear in mind that this was in the context of globally quite a severe drop in the Yikyak usage. The growth of the app was slowing off for sure. I'm going to return to this point later on. Students were really happy that anonymity was back. Someone said it was the first non-ship thing to happen in 2016. The one on the right, they were thanking the developers for bringing the anonymity back. This is like a typical kind of yak. Does anyone want a morning cuddle? On 6 May 2017, the app closed completely. It was removed from the app store and ceased functioning. This was an application that was valued at $400 million a couple of years ago and then sold for $1 million earlier this year. You think there would be an upsurge of regret from the Yikyak community, but there wasn't really. One of our project research associates wrote that the students didn't really care. None of the student-focused websites were discussing it. None of the people she spoke to really knew about the closure and didn't really care about it either. In one respect, I think we'd probably all say that Yikyak wasn't a great loss for lots of reasons that I'll talk about in a minute, but I think there are things that we should care about, not about Yikyak closing in particular, it's another startup that failed, but about some of the things that Yikyak did for and with our students. I'm going to focus my analysis of this on these three kinds of constellations of value if you like, the value of evidence, anonymity and resistance. Evidence for what and resistance to what will become clear as I speak, I hope. The first point I want to touch on is the value of evidence. My key point here really is that research suggests that Yikyak chat was more benign than toxic. Most of us know about Yikyak because of the toxicity that happened on the platform that was widely reported in the news media and the blogosphere. There were some really unpleasant stuff happened on Yikyak and no one would deny that. There were bomb threats, there was victimisation, there were arrests, there was harassment of women, there were death threats, there were racist death threats. Some colleges moved to ban Yikyak because they were lobbied by their students to do so. It was disabled in many places. One group at Mary Washington brought a lawsuit against their university for not protecting them from Yikyak victimisation and the app itself was quite heavily criticised for not revealing the identities of some of the people that were perpetuating harassment and hate speech on the app. So there were some really serious stuff that happened around this app, particularly in the US. Just to put into context what I want to go on to say, this stuff was serious, it was devastating for the victims and we know that cyberbullying online is a really big deal. 40% of students in higher education have witnessed online cyberbullying in their social media networks. Having said that, I think it's also helpful to look at what the app developers did to try to deal with these allegations of enabling hate speech to happen and they did a lot more than many of our other social networks do. So when they tagged the app in the app stores for 17silovers which enabled parents to set up the usual safety measures so younger children couldn't download it, so that's something. And then when it became clear that students in high schools were using it as a bullying platform, they set up a facility to geofence schools so that basically if you try to access Yikyak from within a school, it wouldn't allow it. In doing that, they shut out a very substantial proportion of their users from the network which I'm not sure that any other social media app has shown any willingness to do. They had very clear rules about you don't bully or specifically target other yakas which you had to agree to and sign up. And then laterally they set up a system of word filtering so if you yak something like, including a word like bomb or something then you would get a kind of pump the brakes message. So they did really quite a lot and more than most other social media apps did to try and limit the potential for victimisation and hate, obviously none of those techniques would be 100% successful but they tried. Most importantly, the community moderation aspect of Yikyak seemed to function really well in most instances so there was a report led by Seveski nearly 2 million yaks across US campuses and produced these word clouds showing the 100 most characteristic words for upvoted yaks on the left and downvoted yaks on the right and you can see that it's the offensive ones which should be very rapidly downvoted. That data is really hard to get because in our research study offensive yaks were downvoted so quickly it became difficult to gather them so it showed that the community moderation was working pretty well. Another smaller study said that there is some sort of racist and distasteful sexist stuff on Yikyak but it's not so substantial as to call for a demonisation of the entire application and Seveski, this is the study that did the really big 2 million yak analysis kind of said the same thing. There were on general positive social norms emerging through Yikyak. I don't really like word clouds much because they're a bit of a blunt instrument but this one is actually a word cloud showing the most popular words in the whole corpus of yaks that we gathered at Edinburgh the whole lot of them and you can see just from a quick look unless you're queasy about a little bit of everyday swearing you can see that generally what people were talking about was quite socially oriented, quite space and place oriented certainly not notably offensive so when we put together a database of swear words and offensive words using existing corpuses and ran our yak corpus compared it with our yak corpus and we found that less than 2% of the yaks that we had in our data actually related to words in that database of offensive words so just the little green portion of the doughnut so when we did a topic analysis of this work we found that these are the kinds of things that students were mostly yacking about they were talking about student life what club did you go to last night what are you watching, what are you reading they talked a bit about academic issues not as much as we thought they would be they talked a lot about sex and dating they talked quite a lot about politics and gender and they also because this was running during the period when Yikyak was going back and forth with anonymity they talked a lot about anonymity as well so this kind of finding that actually what was going on on Yikyak at Edinburgh at least wasn't really offensive stuff was backed up by our student researchers associates who said there was a general feeling that people read and respond to posts with empathy and understanding these were supportive, they were kind it was generally a kind, funny, empathetic community Amanda Harris who writes for Slate published a couple of really nice articles in defence of Yikyak talking about well if we ban every network where harassment and abuse occurs we'd have to not only ban on social media we'd have to ban homes, college campuses themselves so I think what I took from my research was that we need to have a conversation about cyber bullying and victimisation of course we do in relation to social media but we also need to have a broader discussion about anonymity on campus and the function of it for our students so this is what I'm going to go on to talk about next my second kind of value proposition I suppose is around the value of anonymity itself there's been a kind of upsurging research into anonymity I would say anonymity studies oriented research in the last few years and I think it's clearly in response to the ways in which internet use has kind of designed out or according to some theorist killed the potential and possibility for anonymity so I'd recommend to you if you want more about anonymity, this special issue of ephemera so I tweeted the references to this talk this morning so if someone has retweeted them you can link to them directly from that document but this essay that Bachman and colleagues write talks about how anonymity can help us fight surveillance which is something I'll come on to next but it can also enable particular forms of equality or certain kinds of speaking out to happen online disinhibition doesn't have to be a bad thing it can be toxic but it can also be benign and this was certainly the case at Edinburgh we were finding that students were using Yikak to do really important work in terms of support from their peer networks for example, asking about when exam results were coming out asking about whether it's normal to get a 2-2 and talking a lot in fact about mental health which we know again is an issue for our students this raised a lot on Yikak and in the Edinburgh context the responses to this were almost always supportive so the BBC kind of hooked onto the idea of Yikak being a useful way to reach this demographic this young demographic of young adults quite early and they ran some really interesting chat events using Yikak, one to talk to people about Brexit and they found out as they did that that a lot of young people didn't even know what Brexit was but they also ran some really nice they ran a really nice campaign with, not campaign a kind of discussion forum with Yikak around the Canada election and ran a session specifically on mental health with young people as well so I think the BBC were quite switched on to the benefits of using an anonymous environment for this kind of talk so my feeling here is that we have to move beyond this sense if something is secret, if it's anonymous it's somehow deviant and I think this is where a lot of research into anonymity studies is going at the moment it's starting to question how we define and how we work with anonymity particularly in the context of online though not entirely so I like this phrase from one recent paper from Angus Bancroft he says that we talk about anonymity as though it's a withdrawal from the social but actually it's through a form of social engagement lots of people have tried to redefine what constitutes anonymity and this is my favourite one this idea that it's a constellation of partial partial unknowability, invisibility and untrackability we know that total anonymity is almost impossible online but this is my favourite quote about the potential about what anonymity actually is and it's from an old paper from Helen Nissenbaum where she says the value of anonymity lies not in the capacity to be unnamed but in the possibility of acting or participating while remaining out of reach remaining unreachable so being unreachable means that no one's going to come knocking on your door demanding explanations so I suspect all of us can think about moments when we are wanted to be unreachable or times at which unreachability would be a kind of socially valuable thing and I think by thinking a bit about other social media environments we can get some more insight into this value of unreachability so thinking about Facebook people have written about the compulsory visibility of the branded self in Facebook we all do it, don't want to say that here's my child, here's my job, here's my life isn't it fantastic, we can very carefully craft and curate and brand ourselves for representation on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and so on and we found that this was very much the case with our students as well not only that they did this branding of the self but also that it was more or less compulsory to be on Facebook to function socially at our university one of our interview respondents said well if you didn't have it you were just a bit annoying because you couldn't link into any of our study groups or events or anything almost all the blue bit of the doughnut were people who were engaged with Facebook either actively or as consumers Facebook is a more or less compulsory social media environment for many of us including our students it's also, as an article in the London Review of Books said last week it's the biggest surveillance based enterprise in the history of mankind this John Lancaster asked, I'd really recommend it to you you've got 20 minutes for a long read he talks about how Facebook knows more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens it watches you, it profiles you, it extracts data about you and then it uses that behaviour to sell advertising he describes what Facebook does with its surveillance data as a bathetic which means it's kind of a bit disappointing so I think with Facebook there's what I like to think of as a kind of hideous paradox so on the surface of it, we're all crafting ourselves minutely, we're exercising a massive level of control over how we look online what we talk about, how we talk about our activities on Facebook and we're building this brand itself but behind the scenes, Facebook is gathering extracting, profiling, selling on a data double of us over which we have absolutely no control at all it's disturbing and I think public awareness of this has grown hugely over the last year or so so my point here in relation to Yikyak is that Yikyak, although it was by far not a perfect space it did provide a kind of alternative to this branding that has to go on on Facebook and other mainstream social media platforms I also just want to take a brief aside to recognise how funny Yikyak was and how important humour can be to community building so when we found in our research that most of the upvoted Yaks or the most upvoted Yaks were almost always funny ones particularly the one about the text from the orthodontist I think we'll probably all benefit from understanding how to slide straight out of my ass in Harvard format so Yikyak was funny a little aside before we get into more of the depressing stuff so why should we care point three and the last reason that I'm going to talk about why we should care is the value of resistance and it touches on the point I just made about Facebook's surveillance methods next book on platform capitalism is another strong recommendation he talked about how data is the new oil we've all heard this said many times in the 21st century advanced capitalism depends on the ability of companies to extract and use data, our personal data and I think returning back to Yikyak this was really the problem for Yikyak I've put up here a little shot from the venture beat blog which blogs on business models for social media and technology firms I found this really interesting articles about what we can learn from the death of Yikyak he said what I just said which is that the declining growth should have been a clear warning the developers should have understood that anonymity was a key component of the app by missing and failing to build an understanding of its user base it missed the opportunity to eventually build a viable business model around the app we know that growth before profit has been a standard business model for social media firms Yikyak very much had the growth it never really dealt with the need to monetize and therefore to develop a viable business model through the use and extraction of personal data which is usually how platforms monetize so the backman article the social productivity of anonymity that I talked about earlier made this point that extracting data from our social life transforming it into a commodity is a capture of what was once a common good however online anonymity is a severe obstacle for those who operate in the data extraction data analysis and data trade business so anonymous apps are always going to find it harder to build business models I suspect from their data not that it's impossible but it's harder so one conclusion although it's not one of my stated conclusions is that there's a kind of structural issue going on here if platform capitalism structures out anonymity in that anonymity makes it much harder for them to use and gather and use personal data then the kind of moral panic that we see frequently around anonymous apps is to an extent doing the work of platform capitalism by building a resistance to supporting the development and use of anonymous social media ok so to start to conclude this is my first conclusion I think that in designing our next digital learning environments we need to leave some space for uname ability for ephemerality I think we need to learn and develop new ways of having conversations about anonymity within universities and importantly for those of us working within educational technology and digital education look for ways in which we can actually build unreachability spaces for students and build clever new ways to manage and moderate those spaces so as to reduce some of the negative aspects of online disinhibition build on some of the amazing community humorous and peer support networks that can happen in those spaces I've been really interested to read the recent blogging that Anne-Marie Scott, who's a colleague of mine at Edinburgh, has been doing around this idea thinking about how she's been using hack and base temporary autonomous zones idea to think about how do we build in ephemera by design pop-up tools that gather minimal data and then delete themselves that makes you think of Snapchat you might be interested in that Snapchat has grown we know this because of the work that Louise Connelly does on the digital footprint survey every year we know that Snapchat use at the university has grown as Yikyak has declined this is one of my favourite quotes in this presentation to be ephemeral isn't to disappear it's to preserve communities without turning them into data and I think we need to look at ways in which we do that in the context of learning technology my second conclusion relates to these issues that I've been discussing around platform capitalism surveillance capitalism and so on this is one of my favourite quotes I'll read it out in full so Shoshana Zyboff has written wrote a couple of years ago powerful felt needs for effective life to play against the inclination to resist the surveillance project as with Facebook you kind of effectively need Facebook to live an effective life in many social contexts so she says this conflict produces a kind of psychic numbing that unears people to the realities of being trapped past mind and modified or disposes them to rationalise the situation in resigned cynicism we've all done it haven't we we'll click the terms and conditions allow the act to access our other apps in the interests of living an effective life and saying oh well I'll get on my data anyway I do it all the time myself I think I've rarely read a passage in a paper which has made me feel more clearly that there's an educational project here and I think in this sense as educators we need to think about psychic numbing and working against psychic numbing as an educational project something that we can focus and design our teaching around in this kind of age of surveillance capitalism so this is my second conclusion in designing our teaching can we let it actively educate against the psychic numbing on which surveillance capitalism depends thinking about how we might do that is a whole other lecture hearteningly there's been a lot of very smart people blogging and writing about this very issue over the last summer and I've just put a few of them up here and they're linked to their blog posts and their work is on the document that's hopefully going around on Twitter so reading some of Amy Collier, Chris Giliard Jim Grim, Jeremy Knox, Jen Ross and Ben Williamson's work helps us to understand how we might begin to actually design in resistance to psychic numbing to our teaching so on that note I am going to finish with a summary of my conclusions an image an image attribution and another link to the links and references page if you're not seeing it on Twitter thank you very much for listening I think we have plenty of time for questions so Helen's going to come up and share the questions so yeah thanks very much Helen I see a lot of kind of parallels with Bonnie's talk yesterday for those of us that were here the interesting thing for me is a keynote that finishes ahead of time as well I think that's a rarity in itself so any questions Ben Williamson University of Liverpool I was thinking about identity as you were talking and this sort of tension I think between identity and anonymity there's something very fundamental that happens in higher education or you hope should happen which is that people come through the process and have a clearer sense of who they are and a clearer sense of professing who they are to the outside world and I worry about anonymity in the sense that there's a sense of a student can come out of the process and say yes this is who I am this may be who I'm not this is also who I am but I don't want you to know about it and I think there's a certain need and a responsibility to inspect some of that stuff because some of those people become quite powerful of course yeah no I agree with that and I would certainly agree that the end point of education should be a critical confident citizen who's able to stand up and say here I am and this is what I believe and this is why and that should be should be our educational aim but I think the process of getting to that point is not easy and I think that what anonymity can do is open up spaces where the pressures are less where the declaration of who you are and why you're saying what you're saying are less intense and that that in itself can be a useful learning moment it can be provide a useful learning community so I completely agree with you but I think we need to think about the ways in which we get to that point that was a great talk Sean I'm talking about some similar things tomorrow but you know it's good to give me the poor relation of that talk but you've covered all the good ground for me anyway I think anonymity is really interesting but what I was curious about in listening to what you were saying was the intersection between anonymity and the up-down vote so I'm thinking about I remember reading an article by David Banks about what happens on Reddit and the sort of sexism and racism that happens there and I just wondered if you had any thoughts on how the up-down voting intersected with anonymity um it's an interesting question I'm not sure whether it intersected with anonymity exactly but it did make community moderation of anonymous communications very easy and I think that the way that they designed community moderation into Yykyak was done really quite well I don't think we're still trying to develop mechanisms for proper community moderation on social media aren't we and I think we need all the kind of good examples we can get the easiness and the kind of finality of the way in which anything downvoted four times would be deleted from the system was a good model and I think in terms of relating it to anonymity I suppose that the effectiveness and efficiency of that method of down voting did stop people abusing the power of anonymity at least in the context that I was researching although I accept not in every context well I don't know about Yykyak cos I've never seen it but up down voting isn't universally a good tool it's killed comments on YouTube so no it's pretty tricky really isn't it it is difficult and I think we have to be quite fine grained about how we think about this because different mechanisms will work with different communities I don't think there's any single answer because the social media is about a community as well as being about a technical application development so we have to think about how the technology and the people are designed in together and so it's it's difficult yeah I think this is the question rule thanks again what I'm thinking about just now is some of the things that Vaughan mentioned in her keynote yesterday we were talking about in relation to openness and resistance and this kind of paradox now for me in terms of openness and anonymity and how can we combine them both or do you think they are kind of separate things you know am I more powerful if I'm anonymous but as an open educator I want to share what I'm doing as well so I don't want to be anonymous in that context so this is probably not making much sense but I think that there is something there I'm not quite sure how we take that forward in terms of how we teach and how we live I guess my take on that would be actually I'm not sure that the open movement talks enough about this is the way that power circulates within the open movement so when a powerful person within the open educational movement for example makes a post a lot of people will read it there's a powerful position to be in for people who are new to that community and that mode of practice being open can be very stressful and so I think anonymity gives a certain amount of protection actually to the most vulnerable in some regards in relation to openness that would be my response to that Thanks Sean that was great just to pick up a bit on the point that Sheila made there I think there's something really interesting as well about the interface between anonymity and the digital footprint and for those who are not aware of the digital footprint initiatives initiative that's been running in Edinburgh for a number of years now to educate students in the the profile, the digital footprint that they leave behind and that's an idea that I feel slightly uneasy about sometimes because I think it can kind of edge into self-censorship a little bit and we talk a lot about how we curate our identity and who decides what is appropriate and not appropriate in different environments and I think there's some quite thorny stuff in there about what you choose to reveal and what you choose to hide and I think anonymity's got a really interesting central role there and I think there's quite often a tension between these things Yeah I agree with that it's a difficult one for us in education because like you say we want to educate students to manage their digital footprint but by doing that we're doing some of the work around the critiques of platform capitalism have raised around the branded self, the presentation of self often for employability purposes but I think the other thing that might be a useful kind of thing to think with in this context is the idea about social cooling this idea that we when we know that we're being watched, when we know that everything is globally immediately accessible we tend to self censor and that can mean that heated debates, contentious debates difficult stuff often doesn't get raised so we all know this we all end up in our kind of bland filter bubbles so I agree it's a tension but I think it's one that universities have to have to start to think about how we deal with I agree Did you want to make a follow on? No I think it is, it's a difficult issue and I think it's something that we just continually negotiate rather than say you must always curate what you do because I think sometimes actually if you do let your streams cross is it really the end of the world and who makes these value judgments about what is morally right and wrong in different situations and different professions as well so I think it's just something that does in constant negotiation Agreed Anyone else? From the non-question side maybe At the back Sorry Marron or do you want a little bit of a walk? Go for it As we're waiting for the mic just for a second I'm curious if you had any more comments on the employability aspect that you mentioned at this conference we're talking a lot about assessment and accreditation particularly formative or summative the differences and a lot of the digital footprint can count towards that what are your thoughts on that in terms of the drawbacks of trying to make everything valuable for future employer of having that kind of pressure to brand yourself as you put it I just think students need a bit of space from employability agendas to be honest I mean I think yes employability is important to our students and it's important to our universities as well but that's not all that higher education is about so higher education should be doing other things as well and one of the things it might be doing would be enabling different kinds of data citizenship to emerge and one of the ways in which they might do that might be through anonymous ephemeral spaces so I think my answer would be we can't think about employability as the be all and end all of higher education Question from the back Sean, I wasn't sure because I can't see from this far back but did the YCAC participants have pseudonyms? No, when that first emerged you didn't have to have any kind of handle as they started to sort of tinker with the anonymity they introduced the ability to include handles, pseudonyms to YACs but for most of the time that the app was very popular no I was just thinking once you introduce pseudonymity then there is a kind of a trace between this was the same person who posted this, that and the other thing so that boundary becomes a bit blurry but perhaps pseudonymity is a way to sort of bridge the gap between complete anonymity and identity building or branding Yeah, it could be and I suspect that was part of what the app developers must have thought let's introduce handles and enable people to make persistent connections with each other through the app but in this context it was completely the wrong decision so again it's going to depend on context sometimes pseudonymity will be a really good idea in this case I don't think it was Thanks Rob for our open university thanks for a very interesting presentation I'm just sort of looking at your kind of two conclusions and I think that this is all very timely and I like the angle that you're kind of taking with it but I also think the direction of travel is very much towards surveillance analytics and actually management information and I think that the interventions that you've kind of identified here how to proceed are good ones but the bigger one to me is well how do you convince the managers of educational institutions not to double down on this stuff and go further and further into things like blockchain and stuff like that where you would have this you know effort for immorality at all it's obviously a very sort of concrete sequence of data that's been collected about you in the past so what's your take on kind of institutional strategies for this stuff Well I think the first thing we need to do is have the conversation which I think hopefully this is part of doing that but I agree I mean in terms of the amount of conversations that are happening around learning analytics you know the amount of conversations that are happening about anonymity of miniscule I do think that's changing I have sensed over the last year that there has been a real kind of upsurge not only in academic research in this area but in public awareness and the desire to have the conversation about anonymity and data protection stuff that seemed really boring previously now seems to actually seem to be at the top of people's minds so I do think things are changing in terms of management of universities I think we need events where we talk about student social media ecologies we talk about the value of different kinds of name ability and unname ability and we balance the advantages of learning analytics you know against some of the advantages of other ways of understanding our students as data citizens so at the moment I feel it's about conversations but I agree I think it's a really good point it's not the direction of travel not yet Anyone else? Chancel got 10 minutes to earn a key yet so we're okay for a minute LePink One of the things I've been involved in a number of communities over the years Helen Whitehead from Nottingham and profiles have seen a great way for people to get to know each other and to form communities but you're saying as you're saying there are loads of different problems with that now and even with our VLEs to what extent do we allow people to see each other's information is there any change in that area does it matter whether you see when somebody lost logged on at what point does it become data that's private and personal I think that's a good question I think VLEs have always been surveillance machines haven't they it's always been very easy to click through to data from our VLE about our students 15 years ago we've never expected to have comparable data on campus students so that has always been built in and embedded within the functioning of those VLEs and LMSs so I think again it's just about shifting that conversation I mean most VLEs I'm saying this tentatively because I know the one that we use at Edinburgh does have a function for anonymous discussion but it's barely known about and barely used so there could be some quite easy ways to experiment with anonymity with student groups just using existing VLEs the underlying anonymity would be quite minimal be very easy to identify those students I should imagine but at the social level it would be possible to do some quite light touch work with students on that using what we've got I think we'll finish that I've just got one observation I just wanted to say on that when you had the word clouds up and you're looking at the common stuff that students were talking about the social nature and the fragile nature of the students that they need that anonymity to talk about the serious issues that are affecting them that they don't talk about with anyone else and particularly for students in that transition to higher education they're coming in that they don't want to, but it's the embarrassment isn't it, they don't want that and they need that safe space to do any sorts of things that we not necessarily take for granted but as academics or as tutors and professional service staff we might not necessarily realise the importance of that kind of space for the students it's not necessarily a question but it's just something I've taken from it I think one of the most interesting yaks we had it was during the period where they removed the anonymity someone yaks what's happened I need some anonymous help right now and I think that was a really telling yak that there is a need for this, so yeah, good point Okay, so can we just have one more round of applause for Siar, thank you very much and just to Siarla, thanks we just have a little token appreciation for Siar Thank you very much