 This is going to be, I think, quite an interesting session because the next presenters are also going to be quite challenging and I think that the idea is to get this, hopefully, to get you thinking. You'll have seen from the blurb of the session that was in the booklet, it's an experimental and exploratory session. The idea is to get you thinking about your own ethical position with regard to strike action, business continuity, policy and practice. So that is basically what I'm going to be talking about. And I thought it would be of particular interest to people who are Seamalt holders or writing a Seamalt portfolio, particularly because I know that the policy section of the Seamalt is one of the areas that people find quite difficult to think about what the policies that shape the environment in which we work might be. So I hope you find it useful. I hope you will think, as I'm talking about your own context, I'm going to talk a bit about my context, but it would be great if you could think about yourself in relation to some of these issues. You might also call this session a provocation. I suppose I'm going to say some things that might be controversial. I've tried to think quite carefully about what to say and what not to say about University of Edinburgh. I am reading from a script. I have written it all out. Sorry if that looks like I'm reading from a script, but I have been quite careful about what I want to say. Discussions are ongoing at University of Edinburgh, but we do have a chance to reflect and reflection is always good, and that's what this conference is for. So one of the other reasons why this session is experimental is I'm trying to use it as a way to upgrade myself in my own sea malt from sea malt to senior sea malt, and I'm going to use this session as evidence of reflection, bringing, I hope, an additional chunk of reflection in an advanced area of leadership and looking at the wider impact in the sector. But if you want to read more about my work, I have already blogged about this. I do blog regularly, and that's the link to the blog. The name of the session Sheila mentioned is a slightly odd next-expect locusts. It actually came from a conversation with Amber Thomas earlier this year when we wondered what on earth was going to hit us next. So earlier in the year we had a perfect storm of learning technology, industrial action, the beast from the east, GDPR, best efforts, breakdown in trust, public transport stands still in European data protection law. On top of the strikes came the snow, with the snow came the closures, with the closures came the childcare crisis, after the snow came the floods, after floods came the power outages and the darkness, after the darkness came the student occupations. So next-expect locusts seemed appropriate at the time because unknown forces seemed to be combining against us to test us. So at times of crisis your business continuity plans and policies become key. Every university will have business continuity plans. It's important to know where learning technology fits with those. How do you keep learning and teaching going in the face of disruption? So think about what you might think would be acceptable for business continuity during snow closures. So of course we would try to get as much material as possible online. We would want to help students who couldn't travel into campus. Of course we would make extraordinary efforts to deliver the teaching using the VLE and virtual classrooms and video conferencing and working from home. And we might even bring up materials from previous years to fill the gaps. And of course our academic colleagues would want that because we're all in this together. But how do those same business continuity plans feel during a strike? The snows are an act of God. The strikes are political. Everyone is on the same side during the snow. And there are many sides during a strike. So in March we had both strikes and snows in the same week at Edinburgh. The first three days were strike action and the next three days were snow closures. For university management both of those are covered under business continuity plans. So you might think if you work in educational technology or learning technology that you work in a fairly neutral service. You might think that you're apolitical. You might think that learning technology is mostly harmless. Or you might think that learning technology is disruptive. You may even have presented sessions at conferences where you've explained about how disruptive learning technology can be. And if you're not in a union you might think those strikes didn't really have anything in particular to do with you. But at the time of strike what might have been thought of as a fairly neutral service becomes very political. There are expectations from both sides. And either way the choices you make will be political. The choice of action with regard to your services. And it may come down to your own political or ethical position. Management will expect you to use every tool you have to mitigate the impact of a strike. To keep learning and teaching going. And academic colleagues or those on strike will expect you not to. So you have to pick a side. Do you want to be seen as a management tool or a friend to academics? Are you them or us? And what impact does the decision that you make to keep working during a strike have on the longer term relationship that you have with those colleagues? Those academic colleagues who see you and your services as a management tool. So the better name for the session I think is dealing with relationship breakdown because I think that what happens during the strikes this year has implications for us all. And that's kind of why I've brought this as a reflective session to the conference to see if we can think about some reflection as a community or as a professional group. When you're writing a C-mult portfolio you're asked to think about a reflective framework or how you would reflect on incidents that happen and I quite like to use critical incidents as a framework for reflection. So if you're writing a C-mult portfolio or a SILIP portfolio or your HEA portfolio do look up the theory around reflecting around critical incidents. So a critical incident is something that has a significant impact on the way that you think about something, something that raised questions made you stop and think, something that happened in your practice. And to do critical reflection I think you have to situate yourself against some kind of framework and see yourself in relation to something that happened and see the wider picture. So in early 2018 there was an unprecedented period of industrial action at many UK universities particularly the Russell Group but obviously at other institutions as well and really never before in the 25 years of old have so many colleagues protested for so long against their employers and never before has there been so much technology available to those employers to mitigate the impact of the strike. So in a strike there are workers, there are management, there are academic colleagues, there are support staff, there are union members, there are non-union members, there are students, there are parents and there is social media. So personally I'm a learning technologist, I'm a union member, I'm also senior management, I'm assistant principal in the university and I'm business service owner for all of our teaching technology systems. I think it's actually quite rare for managers to still be in the union. People often expect that senior management will give up their union membership when they become management and actually in some countries it seems very odd and they actually have different management unions. I'm actually a strong believer that if you're in a union you should remain a member of the union even when you become senior management. And the reason for that is I believe that you get better decision making when there's diversity around the board table and union members are part of that diversity of thinking. So having some managers in the room who are union members means you get better management which is more inclusive and considerate of a range of staff views. And the hope with this is that you get better informed thinking and you should get fewer staff management standoffs. And because of this I always ensure that whenever we're doing a policy consultation the campus unions are part of that consultation from the start. And I'm quite lucky and that sometimes people ask me for advice or wisdom and my advice currently is to anyone who works in a role similar to mine to avoid being in an institution-wide consultation about an opt-out lecture recording policy at a time of national industrial action. That would be my takeaway message. So learning technology, VLEs and lecture recording are all very much on the union policy agenda and they will be used as part of negotiations alongside other issues. So we need to think about why this is important. The relationship between professional learning technologists and academic colleagues is finally balanced. Learning technologies offer technology solutions to teaching problems and encourage innovations in pedagogy and learning. We bring technology into classroom spaces on campus and online and we ask colleagues to embrace it. We assure academic colleagues that the technology is there to help and not replace them. We ask for trust and understanding and communication. We ask them to give it a go. We know that academic buy-in is key to all of our success. But as part of the business, our IT services are key in ensuring business continuity, supporting students beyond contact hours and mitigating the impact of disruption to time and place. So what happens when things go wrong? How resilient is the relationship between ed tech and educators? And where should learning technologists' loyalties lie? If we work with technology for teaching and learning, then all of our technology comes into contention during a strike. So I'd like you to think back to March this year. Some learning technologists were on strike because they are members of the UCU. The UCU is not exclusive to lecturers. Learning technologists, some of your colleagues were in dispute with their employers. Your employers. Do you remember why they were in dispute? Where were you? Were you with the management? Were you on the picket? Were you hiding? Were you taking action short of a strike? What did you think at the time? You work in a highly unionized sector. So think about what's your attitude to unions. So the particular incident at Edinburgh, we had the snow and we had the strikes. And at Edinburgh we were also smack in the middle of an institution-wide consultation on an opt-out lecture recording policy. The strikes hit our evaluation focus groups. With so many colleagues out, meetings had to be cancelled. And the questions we had originally prepared took on a whole new meaning. So people's concerns about IP, retention and performance review changed dramatically when they were in dispute. And the responses to our consultation actually had been fairly slow before the strikes. But once the strikes were on their way, they came thick and fast, particularly about the purposes and how recordings could be used. We had had the union rep as part of our policy task groups, but once the strikes happened, they weren't there. And I wasn't there. And our policy officer wasn't there. The whole thing stopped. And in the absence of a clear policy, various statements were being sent around. And in a spectacular example of short-term thinking, someone else in the senior management announced that we would use recordings from last year to mitigate the impact of the strike. And basically the whole thing blew up. So anyone who had been convinced that lecture recording was a good thing, but was now on strike, had their worst fears confirmed. The university would use recordings from last year without your permission. And there was actually a mad scramble to find the policy position from the previous year. And the new proposed policy, which implicitly rules out the use of recordings during industrial action, was of course still draft and so not live on the books. Any trust that we had developed by consultation and engagement and any hopes that we had about academic and union buy-in to the policy looked scuppered, and we feared that academic staff would never trust management or IT or learning technology ever again. So everyone has to pick a side, there's a number of relationships that get strained. We need to reflect on the interplay of technology and learning, and learning technology and business continuity, and the relationships between management and academic staff. And even though the leadership of most universities are senior academics, everyone refers to the university and colleagues are suspicious of anything that seems to be happening at the top. And I've been in many conversations over the years with colleagues who worry that if they record all their lectures or share all their materials as OER, the university won't need to employ them, and we always reassure them that technology will not replace them. But when they withdraw their labor, the first time that the leadership has actually tested, their fears were well-founded. We can just use recorded lectures. Is the knee-jerk go-to response of university management when threatened by an academic walkout? We made assumptions about how that technology would be used, and the first opportunity, the assumption was blown out when the opportunity arose short-term and triumphed. We don't know yet what impact that will have and the time and effort that it will take to get colleagues trusting learning technology again. If you thought you had a tough job before, I think it's going to be worse now. Another relationship that I think is a risk is the relationship between strikers and non-strikers. Inside the union and outside it. I just want to say a bit about what happens when you're on strike. When people are on strike, they withdraw their labor. They're in dispute with their employer. They make a salary sacrifice, and they have to declare the days that they're on strike. They don't get paid for those days. So a long strike hits hard at people's income. And the point of a union is collective bargaining. This is Beatrice Webb who invented collective bargaining. She's one of the founders of the LSE. Collective bargaining is the process through which the union can negotiate with the employers on your behalf because they represent many members of the union. And many is greater than one. Unions are mostly democratic. We vote on issues and we vote on strikes. If the collective bargaining is successful, everyone's terms and conditions improve, whether or not you went on strike. If we get a sector or local pay rise, everyone gets it. The reason it's important to know about how unions work and what other institutions do during a strike is that everyone, what happens at one university quickly spreads to the other. So other people hear about it. Whether there are strikes about paying conditions going on. Any suggestion that we can make digital materials or recordings or whatever will directly impact the security. They will be couched in terms of security of tenure for staff, particularly those on precarious contracts. So when we know that the position that some institutions have taken is that we can just record it like that you can be sure that colleagues in your institutions also knew this was happening at some other institutions. So the relationship between strikers and non-strikers in the union and out. If you're a member of a union and your union calls you to go out on strike, you get called out and it's all out. If you don't strike, you're called a scab. If you're in the union and you don't come out on strike, you are actively working against those who do. The first thing that management will do is try to undermine the strike by announcing that it doesn't have full support of the members. So relationships can become very strained in groups where some union members strike and others do not. Collective action requires cooperation. What's the point of being in a union if you're not prepared to strike? There's also relationships between managers and learning technologists and learning technology managers. So you should think about the advice and discussions which happened in your workplace with regard to business continuity during the strike. Did managers give the impression that you could or should not strike? If you're a manager, what conversation did you have with your staff? Is your manager in the union where you asked to cover for them? There are different kinds of impacts that withdrawal of labor can have and sometimes support staff withdrawing their labor can seem invisible. I have a suspicion that if a large IT system goes down and no one's there to pick it up, the impact actually would be obvious. How many of our university systems have just one person as a single point of failure and what happens should service teams cover for colleagues during a strike? When IT staff are on strike but academic colleagues are not how understanding will academic colleagues be if we're not there to fix the thing that they're using or using to work from home? Would academic colleagues stand with us if we refuse to use learning technology to mitigate the strike? And for those of you who are interested in social justice, many people tell me that they are interested in this. They're interested in what the unions are for. So unions may be the place in which minority voices are being heard. If you care about social justice it's worth paying attention to the reasons for the strike and looking to see who is striking. If it's about conditions or paying conditions or pensions or equal pay or low pay it may well be disproportionately women who are on strike and those who are hardest hit if the strike is not successful. We need to find out because it may be a cause that you want to support. So in our reflective portfolios we're prompted to think about what we would do differently if it happens again. So I've talked about strikes since now at least one of them, the industrial action I think is going to happen again and we need to think about our relationship with the core business of learning and teaching. There's some immediate work needed around lecture recording. You need to keep up to date with the policy around it is coming from the unions. So last year the UCU's stance is quite different from what it is now. Following the strikes there's actually a national position which makes it very difficult for a local union to agree and opt out policy however well written or nuanced it is. That leaves several institutions actually with no policy in place. So no protection for staff IP no clear statement about the recordings or no reassurance that the recordings will not be used if another strike takes place. You should also be thinking about what you do now to sustain a trusting relationship with academic colleagues. Think about the conversations that you have with academic staff about your services. I would encourage my staff to refer to academic colleagues rather than the academics and I would encourage you to try to avoid lazy stereotypes like digital natives and digital immigrants in caves. The more conversations that you have with colleagues, the more conversations you have with your teams about how our roles relate to the strike action the more likely it is that the relationship will survive. Think about how you feel about retention policies and management requests to give access to last year's materials. Think about the facts that the strikes have historically been most effective when they hit exams and marking. Think about how investment and assessment will change the nature of exams and marking. What policies do you want to have about the use of those tools for business continuity? I hope we can have discussions in this community about how we reassure colleagues and how we position ourselves and see ourselves as others see us. Thinking about the role of technology during a strike is very important to our relationship with academic colleagues and with the academy. And in the past with examples like the print workers at Warping, the new technology was in the hands of the management. They used new technology to replace the old ways of working to cut costs and to modernize. So are we the new technology? And the lecturers are the old technology. What happens when the new technology is in the union? If low technologists and IT staff strike, it can have a large impact because it means the new technology is unionized. I do think that actually we will see the emergence of tech worker unions. There isn't really any at the moment, but I think that people will unionize in tech industries not necessarily because of pay and conditions. Tech industry is notoriously well paid, but I think because of ethics and I think that workers will often want to hold their company or their employers and living up to the ethical standards of the workforce. So I would argue that if we're going to make the most impact we need the new technology to be in the union. Learning technologies are in the UCU. We're also in the management. From there we can protect the rights and the users and we can make better management policy. If you don't want to join a union you should at least be talking to them because that leads to better policymaking. I think it's really important to be in universities to have one group of staff write policies and then it's basically done and it's run past the union as an afterthought. My suggestion is that you try to get a union representative into your policy task group and onto your project steering boards. If you're working with technology if you're working with any technology that changes the way people work you need to have the union around the table from the beginning. There's a range of views around the table having the union invited from the start to be part of that group tasked with scoping and producing and consulting on a policy ensures that you get an early indication of what might be contentious and you'll be more likely to be able to write an inclusive policy as a result. You should be in no doubt that we work in an environment in which university policies, union policies and government policies shape what we do to be paying attention. Thank you very much. Thought provoking presentation. We've got a couple of minutes if there's any maybe comments. I think there's questions would anybody like to ask anything or just a general reflection? We've got a mic coming back and then I'll come to you, Mary. Thank you so much for that. That was so interesting. I was interested, I would, but also when you mentioned a tech workers union I'm a learning technologist and a member of UCU but before I came to the university I looked up tech workers unions to see if that was a thing and it wasn't, as you said. I'm wondering how do you know anything about the landscape of whether that is something that is on the horizon and if it isn't how easy is to start one? No, I think that's a great question because actually I did sort of the same search myself because although yes if we work in higher education there's unions around higher education but actually if we identify workers which often we do and that issue about who owns the technology and whether it is unionized and whether it's the new technology that's unionized. I think it's quite important so yes, I was doing some searching and I would encourage people to search for information about tech unions. I think we would be looking at some of the things that are happening in California and certainly in the US but also in some of the internet relationships with the reasons that there might be tech unions emerging might be linked in some way to Trump or something like that going on. I encourage you to search to find information for yourself. Thanks, Melissa, for the brain talk I think because there's a lot of issues that you mentioned that we don't often hear about particularly not on this kind of platform do you feel there was an upside on actually being in the consultation in terms of it actually opening up any avenues to have dialogue? Because I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how any of us can maybe learn from some of what you've talked about to try and open up a dialogue about some of these difficult breakdowns. So maybe not an easy question, I'm sorry, but yeah, just hoping for some inspiration. Yeah, I think it just was bad timing for us actually. The planning of when we were doing institution-wide consultation. We had been a little bit delayed before Christmas and we launched in February and then there was about a month of consultation. It had run for about two weeks before the strikes actually hit. It was just bad timing for us. But I think what was notable is that the policy we were consulting on, because it had been written in a very inclusive way, I think it's a good policy. I'm happy to share it with people. I would recommend writing policy in this way. I think it's a well-written opt-out policy. It says quite specifically about whether the recordings can be used during industrial action. And that was because the union were at the table when we were writing it. Then, of course, when the strike happens, we're consulting on a policy that says your lectures would never be used during strike action. But of course, that wasn't live. We were still consulting on it. So when a position was taken that we would use last year's stuff, that stuff had not been recorded under that policy. So it was just very bad timing. But I think, yes, in terms of liking, if you like a challenge, then yes, these are the kind of things that do cause... So I think one of the conversations that happened that perhaps might not have is a very senior level university discussion in which someone said, oh, really, why don't we just use these lecture recordings? And I said, have you noticed that we're consulting on an institution-wide policy around this at the moment? And is there any connection between that announcement and the likelihood of getting opt-out in this institution? And so there was some thinking had to happen around that topic.