 Thank you Emma J. Are you going to put up my presentation or shall I have a go? Yep, I'm just doing it right this second. Brilliant, thank you. Hello everyone. Some great heartening talks we've experienced over the last couple of days on open source approaches, accessibility, wellbeing, feminism to name a few. Maybe to help out our, to Emma J. If you've got any questions, maybe prefix them with a Q in the chat. Makes it easier to spot them. Anyway, so I'm Tim Franson, a technical tutor in web publishing and design at London South Bank University, involved in teaching and research activities focused on software, hardware and systems associated with web and print based design and production. In this session I'll touch upon some of the initial thinking behind establishing an online social learning space, highlight the assemblage of mainly open source communication tools employed, quickly run through some examples of how I use the space to deliver sessions on web and graphic design to a range of undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as examples of variants of the platform which enabled cancelled educational events and research activities to take place online. I've also set up a demo for you to have an explore as well as there'll be an opportunity to have a personalised version to use over the next academic year. And if we have time we'll do a sort of collective mapping exercise using the demo to list the teaching tools and platforms we've used since lockdown. So in the weeks preceding lockdown, in the well in the week preceding lockdown, in response to the shift from mainly in-person instruction to exclusively distant learning, I rapidly established a low cost, almost no cost, licence free online social learning space to maintain formal and informal student-centred collaborative learning. So what is a social learning space? So following Ray Oldenburg's idea of third places in the excellent book The Great Good Place from the late 80s, one general definition for social learning spaces might be a virtual area that is not predominantly identified with either home or study perspectives but transcends both and facilitates formal and informal student-centred collaborative learning. An open space that combines opportunities for social activities as well as learning enabled by technology. The initial aim was to facilitate connectedness and provide continuity for my students in a time of isolation and uncertainty by bringing together several communication technologies into one coherent online platform. Attempting to approximate previous synchronous bricks and mortar interactions and experiences as well as encourage asynchronous and cross-course learning opportunities. So what I did was just create one classroom and invited my students from varying courses to join me for periods of synchronous teaching and then I would let the room be open and the students from different courses could use it as they felt fit. Additionally, I was aiming to provide an alternative to the tech giants and commercial platforms such as Blackboard that have colonised the university's communications infrastructure which has been further entrenched during the COVID-19 crisis. As a preliminary introduction to this issue and what is at stake, I recommend watching Rectangles RS, a brilliant presentation in which Dr Seder Gussis highlights the main issues that have emerged in the current sort of turn to didactics at a distance. I'll provide a YouTube link at the end later. Notably, the social learning space was developed on an autonomous server on a green web hosting service which I manage for learning and teaching purposes and requires only intermediate skills to set up a short-course idea, I think, for the future on how to actually do this. The main open-source communication technologies initially used were Jitsi Meet, Etherpad, Mural and WordPress which enabled video conferencing as well as textural and visual collaborations. Jitsi Meet, if you don't know, is an open-source video conferencing solution including a screen-sharing, recording, streaming, hand-raising and integrated chat features. Etherpad is an open-source collaborative text tool allowing people to simultaneously edit a text document in real time. There was also a chat box in the sidebar to allow sort of meta communication. Mural is a flexible and free for students and lecturers. Has been for, since it was a start-up in 2012, digital workspace for visual collaboration, brainstorming, cosign, problem-solving, storytelling, et cetera. WordPress is an open-source web publishing platform used to integrate the above tools into one coherent location. So here's a screenshot of an early iteration of the social learning space used to host an online learning and teaching exchange at London South Bank University. This example is built like they all are on WordPress with two separate tabs to access Jitsi Meet. So here are some of my colleagues on the left-hand side and on the right-hand side a sort of access to a neural digital workspace. What you might notice, the devil's in the detail. One side says that these were two different sites. One was on the left was the sort of demo and on the on the right was one for a colleague. So I create personalised versions for several colleagues to trial in their respective teaching contexts. So here's another example. So along with Jitsi Meet and Mural, I introduced Etherpad as a third tool and following the user sort of feedback stacked the tools accordingly. So I'm going to just use the chunky hand here. So we've got Jitsi Meet here. We've got Etherpad here and we've got Mural here. And on the right-hand side, just the screenshot of the sharing the screen to the students. So Jitsi Meet was used for screen sharing to show software features and processes for students to share their and students share their screens for advice from myself and or the group. Everyone has the same privileges and house rules decided collectively, i.e. Microsoft were not speaking, video off or quality set to low definition for environmental reasons, i.e. more data, more carbon pollution. I'll share an infographic on that at the end also. Everyone can stop and start recordings. So the Etherpad on this example was used just for the register and for sharing hyperlinks and Mural for students to share their work and enable a subsequent crit. So another example, so the layout similar and this was with creative writing students who were producing an online literary magazine called the South Bank Review. What we see here is that this is the home page and this and what we've got again, Jitsi Meet for video audio conversations, Etherpad users for sharing links, creating a website site map and working out the spine which ended up being one class, one mission, one enemy, the graduates of 2020 versus COVID-19. Mural for students was used to design sort of layouts in a rough way which were collectively and was then produced using HTML and CSS on the main site. So this is the workings out and this is the end result with all the students stacked up. Okay, so let's just move on. So this is the Centre for the Study of Networked Image Conversations Patch Plan, so another iteration for this particular research centre based in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at South Bank. It brings together researchers from cultural studies, contemporary arts and media practice and computing who seek knowledge and understanding of how network cultures transform the production and circulation of images. The research centre had three events planned for May, June and July, so a version was built following the visual style of CSNI's main site. So the participant feedback throughout has been integral to shaping the user interface and experience for example. So we've got here two buttons which enable you to open up the etherpad which is also here and the mural if you want. So what was identified, some users had dual screens so this allows them to arrange the set however they may like as and then also for other users the stacking solution was the most suitable. So and also embedded was a feedback survey at the end of each event similar to how blackboard has it at the end of these events for this particular conference. So the questions are straightforward. Please rate your experience using the conversations platform today ranging from very poor to excellent and please explain why you selected the above rating and share any other information about your experience today. So just move on. So some of the results of the feedback say here that particular this hot-back one this particular tool is something called Crowd Signal and it's a sister company to WordPress and we have a simple results here. The user experience was never poor or very poor which was heartening to know and we even had one excellent. Also feedback via just conversations in the jitsi meet chat so these two provide sort of two extremes one was thanks to him it was a great assemblage of tools whereas at a conference this was a using Zoom all the different tools makes me feel very anxious and that was from a colleague at a learning and teaching conference that we had in arts and creative industries. So it was to be sort of reassuring to people who don't you don't have to use everything on offer and we can work out what best suits and provide support it could be simply jitsi meet might be perfect for the job. I'm also mindful that the project was born from my own needs and so teaching needs in the platform folds directly back into my teaching practice i.e. a student might want to know how to integrate video conferencing in a web project it was discussions about open source and proprietary software green hosting etc etc I'll also be applying Charlotte Webbs from her talk Feminist Design Tool to the development mix as well which is a great takeaway for me from this conference So here's a fourth example so I'm a board member and web designer for the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies IGMS for short an online scholarly publication dedicated to the study and discussion of motorcycle culture in all its forms from the experience of riding and racing to the history of the machine the riders and design to the images of motorcycling and motorcyclists in film advertising and literature a decision to cancel the annual conference was made and in May we announced a call for memories as part of a celebration of 15 years of the journal and 20 years of motorcycle studies we've been using mural for the timeline wall and here is a little video that explains to a visitor how to use the mural tool to add some content a couple of minutes long and also a more conventional submission form for submitting files or memories and on the right hand side so the time wall became a catalyst for conversations at an online cocktail party at the newly created IGMS CAF which was held on the 26th of July so jitzy meat is used here we had an ether pad here for typing stuff up and we introduced some breakout rooms where we had lots of people and so just here's a screenshot and detail of the call for memories timeline wall taken about a month ago and is still open and growing and we'll hop along one more some additional tools I'll just sort of flag up which I'm introducing to the space one is called xceli draw which sort of emerged in early 2020 is an open source collaborative whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch co-sketch diagrams with a hand drawn feel this one was flagged by one of my students and it's a rather nice drawing tool padlet which I've seen used during the conference is another versatile digital pin board supporting almost every file types the free version allows you to make three padlets before you need to upgrade to a monthly or yearly subscription and your world of text is an open source infinite grid of text editable by any visitor the changes made by other people appear on screen in real time so hopefully we've got time to have a little go at that this was highlighted at a day of discussion and hands on thinking on the politics of infrastructure and tools the digital aesthetic research centre at Arhus University in Denmark just on Monday gone it's quite a great tool I'm doing a similar presentation to this actually fun enough at the British University in Egypt next week about teaching creative writing online so I think I'll be introducing this tool for a session on collaborative concrete poetry so that sort of idea of the arrangement of text and typographical effects conveying meaning as well as the words so final example another platform developed for crowds a research project exploring networked and social distanced crowds as a rapidly evolving new public condition the visual style evocative of the crowds movement using this at the top here in the mast head of the site using a particles javascript library an embedded padlet uses a repository for resources on the homepage and principal investigator Simon and myself having a chat and a laugh about developing the platforms that's jitsi meter again so just going to pop in the chat a link to access this particular because I believe you can't click on to the hyperlink so I'm going to pop that in and the password hold your horses a second what you'll see when you type in the password which is sls2020 to make it easy you'll see a demo for the alts summer summits we're not going to be using the jitsi meat or the etherpad or the scaladrol or the two pin boards we're just going to go for the middle one and so people could log in and click on this your world of text I'm going to do the same with my screen so you should be experiencing something like this and going to click on the second writing one and with any luck it's taking a few moments my internet connection is a little bit rubbish but I'm seeing some people you could list some of the key communication tools and platforms you've used for learning and teaching since lockdown we can do that for maybe just a minute or so and then I'll wrap things up if the moderator could tell me roughly how much time I've got before we've got around 5 minutes for just a minute I'm just going to stop sharing my screen so I'll leave you to that and just bring up my slides again and so this was a similar exercise we did on Monday at the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre on the slide so if everyone pops back forward and I'll just flag up a couple more things what you'll also see at the space I've popped a link to Dr Cedig because his presentation on Rectangles of Rest what happened when the university went online so you can have a look at that at your leisure and also there's a contact form so please submit your contact details if you're interested in having a personalised version and joining this ongoing exploration and if I I think we've got about 30 people here it takes me about maybe 20 minutes, half an hour to recycle one of these spaces so it's quite a manual process it will be hopefully automated using wordpress multi-site in due course so if I get more than 10 I'll have to pop names in a hat, I'm afraid otherwise I won't be able to manage it all at the current state and that's about it so any questions really and hopefully I can come up with some answers I think Anne raised a point and would you like your microphone enabled if so please raise your hand if not I will read it out for you okay so if my colleague Martin could just activate the microphone for me that would be great hi yes I think there's some hi yes I think there's some really brilliant tools there but I find that the biggest problem for some of the tools is the institutional processes and policies around being able to actually introduce any of the new tools and particularly with the Covid crisis the people who are responsible for the implementation of the policies and approving the new tools they're already flat out with trying to get the ones that they have now covered and so introducing new ones even if they might in the long term be more supportive is very difficult sure I absolutely appreciate that and don't really have any answers I think regarding this particular tool so I'm part of that institute so I'm part of that process part of our team was asked to help the institute find its feet part of my teaching practice is to look at experimental solutions I'm steeped in privacy policies cookie declarations all the legal stuff that's required for web development as well so I come with particular skills and a very focused at what is happening on the coal face and speaking with tutors on what is needed rather than it coming down from policy makers if you see what I mean so I sort of push it up as much as I can so I don't know if that answers the question it's those kind of cultures that we have to develop within the institutions that's really really valuable insight and I think it's the difference between how the different institutions are able to respond or have the staff that have enough training to respond and if there's enough staff in those roles sure sorry to interrupt him I was going to say I think Scott posted in the chat that your institution are very fortunate to have you and with less than a minute to go I would say that if it's okay with you would be okay to wrap up the session yeah perfect thank you everyone for listening and enjoy the next session and I hope I get some sort of volunteers who might find it useful even if it's to show policy makers and senior management here