 Great. Welcome to the 535 session on the first day of this conference and I'm here with Chris Raoul and Matt Acevedo who are going to be talking about a book, Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education, Broadening Horizons, Bridging Theory and Practice. So thank you very much both of you for coming along and I'll hand over to you now to start your presentation. Thank you very much Fiona and welcome everyone. Greetings from a very sunny South London today. I'll just do some introductions first of all. My name is Chris Raoul and I work at University of the Arts London as a Senior Digital Learning Coordinator. Matt do you want to say a few words about yourself? Sure so my name is Matt Acevedo. I'm the Director of Learning, Innovation and Faculty Engagement at the University of Miami. I do instructional design and faculty development there. I also teach as an adjunct in the Teaching and Learning Department at the University of Miami as well as the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Florida International University right down the road. Well sounds like you did a lot more than I do. All right thanks Matt. Right this session really is about a forthcoming book and along with a couple of colleagues of mine Susan Koscioglu and George Veletianus. We've over the last two years we've been editing a book as Fiona said called Critical Digital Pedagogies in HE Broadening Horizons Bridging Theory and Practice and it's going to be published hopefully in the next couple of months on Athabasca University Press and it will be an open education publication so obviously there'll be a hard copy but there'll be three versions of it as well that you'll be able to access. So this is really just an introduction and I've invited Matt along to talk about his chapter and it's probably one of the favorite chapters there was definitely one of my favorite chapters in the book so he'll talk about that for 10 minutes. Just to give it a little bit of context why this book and why now? Well really I mean first of all there's just been some massive changes in HE over the last 20 30 years especially to do with funding. Just to give you a little anecdote about that I was just talking to my daughter Rosa Lee who's off to Leeds University next week and we were talking about the funding and she asked me how much I paid for my university education and the answer was zero and not only that I got a grant and her jaw literally dropped when I started talking about these things and it's really changed that whole thing of how education's funding, how cuts have happened in education and the whole language of neoliberalism, how the market is in education, how you know we even talk about students as customers, all of those things has really changed you know changed the environment in HE and it's no surprise that really universities have looked for technological solutions to fund some of these courses or these developments and the ed tech companies have certainly learned the language of neoliberalism so when they sell their products it's about things you know they say that they can cut costs or they can you know deliver efficiencies, all of these different things and I think these trends have been exacerbated during the Covid situation. The call for this book actually went out two years ago so pre-covid but actually most of the chapters were written during the Covid situation and as I say I think all those trends have just sort of come to a head over the last 18 months so what we wanted to do with this book was to give some examples of the types of things we mean by critical digital pedagogy and actually talk about not just the critique of these things but actually talk about some of the practical examples that can be done as well so this that's a sort of nice segue into really just sort of setting up Matt who's going to talk about his chapter so I'll move the slide on so Matt I'll let you take it from here and then just give me a shout when you want me to move on the slides. Sure thing thanks so much Chris so my chapter in the volume is called the Panoptic Gaze and the Discourse of Academic Integrity and as you might imagine it's about the discourse of academic integrity how we talk about academic integrity in our institutions. Let's jump to my first slide. So academic integrity is generally used as a shorthand for responsibleizing students to act in ways that are expected by the institution so essentially to exhibit obedience to authority particularly in matters relating to assessment of learning. If we think of the word integrity as quote doing the right thing academic integrity is code for students doing the right thing but as narrowly defined by the institution so cheating and plagiarism are sort of the two main rallying cries of academic integrity and academic integrity signals the officially sanctioned role of students under the under these headings. This is almost always associated with things like high stakes assessments such as exams. So the role of faculty members and of institutions in within this discourse of academic integrity is pretty superficial you know despite the fact that we like to call professors academics we don't really expect much of them in relation to academic integrity other than putting measures in place for students to abide by the expectations whether those measures are pedagogical or technological. One of these technological methods to enforce academic integrity is virtual proctoring which is a form of test proctoring that uses students webcams and microphones to surveil them while they take exams in their own homes. So some forms of virtual proctoring use artificial intelligence to analyze students eye movements and other behaviors to calculate and quantify possible instances of cheating and other forms of life human proctor will watch a number of students simultaneously. So one of these companies is called Proctor U Chris can I have my next slide. So here's a photo of the Proctor U office as the proctoring staff surveils test takers. In the chapter I compare this to the Panopticon which is an architectural model of a prison proposed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in which the cells are arranged on the edges of a circular or semi circular structure facing inward toward a central guard tower. So next slide. So this is a photo of an actual Panopticon. So in the guard tower in the middle the overseer can watch any particular cell at any given moment but the inmates can't tell when they're being watched. So the inmate is compelled at all times to act as though the guard is watching whether the guard is actually watching or not. So the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish very famously extended the logic of the Panopticon to the power relations in contemporary society and I think that very closely mirrors the relations between students and faculty members in this context. So the issue here and one of the main takeaways of my chapter is that the means that institutions and institutional agents like faculty members use to enforce academic integrity whether it's virtual proctoring or plagiarism detection tools these create the high stakes environments that drive students to feel the need to cheat. Next slide please. So it's it's worth discussing how the discourse of academic integrity frames students. So pulling from some scholarly sources over the years going as far back as the 80s we see cheating in college referred to as quote one of the major problems in education today not not issues of funding not issues of inequity but cheating. We see it called an epidemic with the underlying factors that prompt cheating including student immaturity lack of student commitment to their academics and a quote neutralizing attitude that justifies their immoral actions to themselves and others. We see that quote college faculty members face a continual battle to maintain integrity in their classrooms which employs the language of violence and war in relation to their interactions with students. So essentially this discourse positions academic positions academic integrity in relation and opposition to students moral failings and if you look at the college and university websites for academic integrity their phrasing isn't really much better. So in the institutional and scholarly frames students are considered the moral equivalent of criminals. There's a sociological term for this fundamental attribution error which is the tendency for people to overemphasize dispositional or personality based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under emphasizing situational or environmental factors. So these these statements that we see in the literature in in relation to to students cheating I just I don't really think they're they're true I feel funny even saying this but I think students by and large go to college because they want to learn and they want to apply themselves. So back to Foucault when Discipline and Punish for a second he argued that prisons themselves create the conditions that lead to the formation of criminal organizations and they release inmates under conditions that leave them unable to find legitimate employment thus recreating and perpetuating the the criminal element. So in the chapter I argue that the use of high stakes assessments and these invasive technologies in service of quote academic integrity are doing more to create environments that cause cheating than they do to address them. So you can add to this the precarious nature of paying for tuition like Chris just mentioned maintaining scholarships building up student debt. I just don't think the underlying factors that cause students to cheat deserve a much substantive investigation and one that doesn't necessarily start with pointing the fingers at students themselves. Next slide please Chris. So ultimately I propose a framing of how we discuss academic integrity. So again if we think of the word integrity as meaning doing the right thing then I propose that we invert the responsible the responsibility for the creation of integrity and maintenance from students to us as teachers administrators faculty developers and other institutional agents. So teaching faculty as the primary conduits of power and bears of authority in academic environments should imagine how they might uphold academic integrity should do the right thing in academic contexts by designing learning environments that do not cause the creation of cheaters. So if we're thinking in the context of critical digital pedagogy I think we can consider a spectrum of uses of digital technologies. On one end we have these panoptic technologies that surveil students and are designed intentionally to limit their behavior and on the other hand we have technologies that can expand what students do there's so much more that our students can do with technology that allows them to be creators and collaborators and to express themselves and I think these are the things that we should be leaning on more. Next slide please. So I closed the chapter by discussing some techniques and technologies that I personally rely on as an educator and a practitioner to uphold how I consider academic integrity which is trying to create positive and productive meaningful learning environments for my students. One of these strategies is ungrading so a couple years ago I stopped issuing grades on assignments instead I provide detailed narrative feedback on all assignments noting areas of improvement I invite resubmission on all work based on that feedback but that's actually pretty rare I think we know that grades themselves don't provide great feedback they have a role in causing anxiety and feelings of competition so instead I provide input and constructive critique I ask follow-up questions I share my own experiences and perspectives and really try to start a conversation at the end of every semester that I teach the feedback about ungrading is really amazing lots of comments about how students felt they had a safe place to express themselves without fear of being wrong or getting a bad grade and that's exactly exactly what I want. Honoring a plurality of experience to me is acknowledging that students come to our classes with different backgrounds different levels of expertise different interests different goals so accordingly we can't expect our students to get the same thing out of our classes to me honoring a plurality of experience means making space for students to choose their own paths that might mean providing different options for students to demonstrate their learning it might mean allowing opportunities for students to engage creatively like multimedia production or fiction writing and those who prefer to engage in more traditionally academic ways like book reviews and position papers all these are things that I try to incorporate my courses as options so there's no particular way in my classes that I expect the topics and themes that we cover to resonate with my students so there's no way I can expect them to demonstrate their no single way I can expect them to demonstrate their engagement with these ideas and within this I include putting my rubrics in the trash so that students create their own expectations and express themselves in ways that they want to as opposed to a sort of inhuman table of criteria embracing open-endedness life rarely has clear-cut answers in the way that a high stakes multiple choice exam makes it seem like it does so in one of my classes I assign an article called race crime in the pool of surplus criminality or why the war on drugs was a war on blacks which extends Marxist theory of surplus labor to argue that black americans have been disproportionately in the war on drugs in the united states and in a reflect reflective writing prompt I ask students to evaluate this argument and this sort of evaluative thinking in relation to potentially divisive and controversial topics is a noble notable example of embracing open-endedness and finally enabling students as creators with a grounding in critical digital pedagogy there are seemingly innumerable ways innumerable ways that digital technologies can facilitate creation whether it's podcast style audio projects documentaries narrative videos interactive presentations and websites and so on I feel that creative opportunities are also collaborative opportunities and we can create meaningful opportunities for students to work together so I go more detail into these sort of anti-academic integrity positions in the in the chapter that's a sneak peek I hope it's picked your interest in the book and I will turn it back over to Chris to share some more info about the volume thanks Matt that was excellent especially like that slide and especially like those discussions of the strategies and technologies and I just want to end by just sort of giving you a quick overview of what else is in the book so I've just sort of very grouped I can't in just a couple of minutes I can't go through every single chapter so I've just grouped it around four themes and one of those themes is shared learning and trust and that's where Matt I put Matt's chapter and I think the whole thing is based around you know trusting the student really but along with that we've got a chapter on how Maori culture has been transferred into the online environment we've got another chapter from a lecturer at Goldsmith's who teaches music theory and used Grime the genre of Grime to explode some myths about masculinity in music and music education. The second major theme that sort of come out the book is that of what I've called critical consciousness which is a key thing and critical pedagogy so again in that section we've got a chapter on minimal computing and then something that was new to me which I don't know Matt you might have come across in the States something to do with digital redlining and then finally there's a chapter on how the language of sort of neoliberalism and how online courses are promoted and the disjunction between that and maybe actually delivering those courses as well so that was the second theme the third theme is about change and the third and fourth theme has sort of come together really so the fourth theme is on hope but change is obviously key to digital pedagogy so again here we've got chapters on how technology can change the attainment gap we have another chapter on how Black Twitter would in the context of the Black Lives Matter how that can be used in a classroom situation and then a chapter from some academics in Zimbabwe using Indigenous knowledge systems in Africa and as I said the final chapter is about hope and really that's what the book is trying to give you know hope that we can actually improve education we can give a bright and better future so there are chapters there on an international partnership between a UK university and one in Palestine there's a chapter on the use of mobile technologies to explore the Anthropocene which again a new concept to me but the whole concept about global warming and how we can use technologies in that sort of environment and then finally a chapter on learning spaces so that's it in terms of my slides thanks thanks for listening and hopefully it's given you a good overview of some of the issues that we've developed in this book as I say it's been a very long process from the core which was about two years ago when I think Matt got involved wrote the chapter to where we are now and I think I was kind of hoping that the book would be out by the time we came to do this session but we're very very close to it now and it'll probably be out in the next couple of months so maybe if you want to follow up on this my final couple of slides obviously I've got to thank you to anybody who's listening in or listening later I put some useful Twitter handles up there so there's mine there's Matt and then my two fellow editors Susan and George and obviously when the book's released we'll be putting it out there and that would be definitely one of the channels that we put it out there but if you've had any further questions or things that come to mind while watching this even in the recording of it then you can contact us through that okay that's it so Fiona I don't know if is anything else that's come in into the chat and the only question question that's come through has been to ask um I think it's the picture of the prison that you showed Matt um wanting to know where that was actually because nobody quite believes that actually that really did exist I'll be totally honest and say I I don't know where that is I know that some panopticons have been built I know there were some trials in South America and some other places so I can't say exactly where that particular photo was I was just looking for illustrative photos to help my point there but they have been constructed that's a that's a photograph and not an illustration not the only photograph I found so I know that they've they've been built in some places that's great I mean it's I might do a bit of a reverse image search on it to find where it's come from but I think we as quite a few of us might want to use those kind of images in our presentations and I've got a question well for both of you really around you talked about the sort of you know the role of the academic in being able to you know kind of set up pedagogic situations which would reduce the need for proctoring software for example where do you see the role of the learning technologist in that and you know given that Matt I don't know if you know but we um um altered just to kind of released our um ethics framework for learning technologies so you know we're we're definitely moving into that area so what are your thoughts on that how a learning technologist would deal with that situation so I think the way at least in the states I can't speak too much to the context in the UK but in in the United States the sort of the role of learning technologist and associated roles like instructional designer and faculty developer work closely with with faculty in the states to determine an assessment strategy for for a given course and I understand that teaching professors in the United States may have a wider degree of latitude in some cases than in the UK so there's quite a bit of autonomy that that faculty have so I think it's about determining what the the learning goals are both from a sort of learning objective learning outcome point the the skills and knowledge that you want students to leave with but also sort of the effective domains what how do you want students to feel about their experience in in the class uh do you want them to feel motivated and empowered or do you want them to feel marginalized and criminalized and I think that conversation can lead to um discussing areas of potential regarding authentic assessment I think someone in the in the comments mentioned something about authentic authentic assessment all that has a real overlaps with what I'm talking about a high stakes multiple choice exam is not an authentic assessment no one goes out in the quote unquote real world and takes multiple choice high stakes exams for living um but we do engage in in a particular kind of thinking in a post collegiate environment and trying to mirror that thinking as closely as possible in authentic contexts is much more meaningful and powerful both from a a learning and assessment perspective but also an affective perspective and I think there's also another question that actually I didn't spot but um I think there was a question about academic literature relating to ungrading because I I mean I I really liked your comment about putting rubrics in the trash I mean I think that's sort of um um as an academic developer at first and foremost I I couldn't authorize that but I would a whole sentiment behind that which is basically you know students should be able to construct their own learning experience and that's where the the value comes is um is really key so um so any pointers in terms of academic literature relating to that kind of that work and what you what was called ungrading there yeah so first I'll discuss the the rubrics issue the caliber of work that my students produce has been so much better ever since I got rid of my rubrics um you know as a traditional sort of academic developer instructional designer you know you're you're trained that rubrics are are of critical importance and um and some students like them for guidance but if you can get rid of your rubrics if you're in a context where that's um an option and give students some degree of latitude and how they choose to express themselves um really the there are some real benefits to that regarding uh any scholarly literature in relation to ungrading I don't know of anything I know there is a book published called ungrading um there's been lots of sort of philosophical and theoretical work about it if you do a twitter search for hashtag ungrading you'll find lots of stuff um but I think it's more anecdotal than um than empirical um but the anecdotal stuff matters too that's sort of what uh convinced me to try it was reading about all of the good and positive experiences that came from teachers trying ungrading and when I realized that that had a lot of overlap with my own educational philosophies I decided to give it a go too um yeah I see in the comments Jesse Jesse Stommel does a lot on ungrading um yeah so if you do that twitter search for hashtag ungrading he'll come up for sure um yeah so it's more anecdotal than than empirical but there might be stuff out there that I don't know about yeah I think it's also just you know the kind of branding is ungrading you know there's lots of work in um I'm thinking people like grain groups who look at assessment from different perspectives who coming from a more traditional academic development background to question a lot of this all of this work in this area but I think we have now pretty much um run out of time is that right so I think probably what's left to me is to say um thank you very much to both of the presenters um and I'm sure you're open to kind of more follow-up questions um and we're going to be all really looking forward to the book coming out some good lots of good literature mentioned in the text and we're looking forward to this joining that um that that body of work so that's fantastic and so it's just left me to say um the traditional it'll be give us a good round of applause but if we can um show our appreciation in the in the chat that will be fantastic thank you all very much thank you everyone thanks for having us it's been a blast thanks man