 Welcome to Liquid Margins. This is Building Hospitable Learning Communities Online. I'd like to introduce today's guests. We have Mahabali. She's Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. Autumn Keynes, she's an instructional designer at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. And Mia Zamora, Associate Professor in MA and Writing Studies Program Director. And then our moderator today is Jeremy Dean, and he's the VP of Education. And at this point, I would love to just turn it over to our panelists to let them introduce themselves. I'm Mahabali, aside from what's on the screen. I am also, other than my faculty developer job, I also teach a course on Digital Literacy and Intercultural Learning. And I am the co-founder of two things, one with Mia and one with Autumn that we co-direct together. With Mia, we co-facilitate Equity Unbound, which is an open intercultural learning, connected learning curriculum that is equity focused. We're gonna talk about this a little bit more today. I'll put the link in the chat in a minute. And I'm also the co-founder of Virtually Connecting and Autumn is a co-director with me in Virtually Connecting. I don't know how many people, I know a lot of people who are in the room with us, but if you don't know about Virtually Connecting, the main idea of Virtually Connecting is to enhance access to conferences, to conversations for people who can't attend conferences on a regular basis, people who are in the global South like me or I'm on the young children like me, but also adjuncts, graduate students, people who don't have the funding to go to conferences. So I'm gonna stop there and put the links to those two things in the chat while Mia introduces herself. Hi everyone. So I'm Mia Zamora. I'm an associate professor of English at Cain University, which is in Union, New Jersey, just about 20 minutes outside of New York City, where I direct masters in writing studies program and teach both literature and writing. As Maha already said, she and I co-founded along with another wonderful colleague, Catherine Cronin from Ireland. The three of us together founded Equity Unbound, which is essentially a global network that is committed to both intercultural learning and equity in education. And yeah, that's just a little bit about me. I'm gonna pass the baton over to Wonderful Autumn and maybe she can talk a little bit about the things we've done together in One HE Global, the resources. Okay, I will take the baton from Mia. Yes, I wanna be unmuted. Hi everybody, my name is Autumn Keynes. I am an instructional designer at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. I do have two M's in my name, mostly important. If you wanna like, look me up on Twitter, so I'm at Autumn with the two M's. And yes, I have worked with Mia and Maha together to build these community, building resources with our partner, One HE. And basically what these are, is that we're far away from each other. Maha's in Cairo, Mia's in New Jersey, I'm in the Detroit area. And we work together on a lot of different projects with virtually connecting as well as equity unbound. And so we do a lot of video conferencing. So the question came up, especially when COVID hit, and there was so many people moving to an online environment. How do you build and sustain that community in an online classroom? So not all of the resources in our One HE library have to do with synchronous video conversations, but a lot of them do. And basically they are a library of different techniques that you can use to help to build community in your classroom. For the ones that are synchronous video, we actually did a video, so we actually did it. So there's an example in there, as well as resources that you might need to do that particular technique, as well as there's no such thing as a stable context. When you're speaking with a big voice like this, right, there's so much going on. So there's also alternatives for different contexts. And it's also something that's open. So we're hoping that other people will help us by contributing to it as well. So Jeremy, should you jump in a little bit here? I know you're moderating with us, so maybe I should pass things over to you. Sure, thanks, Autumn, and good to see you all. It's pretty exciting to be sitting down with you this afternoon. I just collaborated with all three of you over the years. It's been a long collaboration. It's good that it's exciting that we're still working together. And I know you guys have done a lot of work with each other, so it's great to have the group that you are on today for Liquid Margins. I wanted to start out by just asking you guys to talk a little bit about. I know some of you are still teaching in the classroom. Some of you are teaching and assisting others on your campuses, but I just, I think it'd be interesting for our viewers, listeners, to hear more about your specific teaching contexts, where you're coming from, the schools you're at, the types of students you're working with, many specific challenges. Can we start with you, Autumn? Sure, so I'm at the University of Michigan Dearborn, not University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Something interesting about our campus, our campus is mostly a commuter campus. We also have a large portion of first generation college students. I was hoping that you'd have me go second so that I could go, we have a whole website about all of our stats so that way I'd have all the percentages and everything. But yeah, we have a large number of first generation college students. And we are, you know, we're an urban campus in that we're not like out in rural, we're very close to Detroit, but our campus is kind of set back. So it's not like we're in the middle of a city either. Not that any of that matters because we've been completely online for many, many months now. But yeah, our students, many of our students are working class, many of our students are, you know, coming in, they're holding down a job as well as they are going to school. And, you know, they're commuting in to get to us as well. I also do teach a little bit as well, I forgot to say this during my intro, but I do teach a small section of integrated studies. And my experience has been that, you know, that is, those are the students that I get. So maybe I'll turn things over to Meha so that she can talk a little bit about her students. Okay. So my institution, the American University in Cairo is a private liberal arts institution in Egypt. So it's a relatively privileged group of students, but there are still scholarship students there. And so what happens is that people sometimes forget that there's a mix and they assume everyone is privileged and has everything that they need. And so when the pandemic happened, you started to realize like, no, not everyone has everything they need. Not everyone is in a great part of Cairo where they have good internet connection and things like that. Our faculty are a mix of faculty. So we have some Egyptians, some Americans, some Egyptian Americans and some variety of nationalities. And I think in my faculty development role, I think one of the biggest challenges has been convincing faculty that you can build community online even when you meet people online for the first time. It's something everyone who's been working in online learning knows and has known for like 20 years. But for them doing it for the first time, they, you know, they kind of think, oh, I'm getting what this online learning is. But yeah, this community building thing, that's not gonna work. Okay, that's what online learning is. And we're like, no, you can. And so for me, what's been a struggle is sort of trying to model for them different ways of building community online whenever we do workshops and things like that. And at the same time, understanding how difficult it is to do things like modify their assessments, for example, last minute. With my own students, I teach a course which is a liberal arts option. It's about digital literacy and intercultural learning. And I'm someone who believes that you don't force students to turn their cameras on. And so I've been working on how do I get to know them really well without having their cameras on. And they're happy not to have their cameras on for connectivity reasons, for comfort reasons, for privacy issues. They have all these different reasons. I've asked them about that. And so what I've actually been doing is those community building resources that we've developed. I've been trying a lot of them in my class. One of them that I was just talking to someone about in another conference, like five, 10 minutes ago, the annotating the syllabus one, since we're with you guys. It was a Ramey Killear that did that resource for us. And the students loved it because first of all, they actually read the syllabus, which was cool. And we did it on Google Docs. We didn't use Hypoxys because that's where my syllabus is. But the idea, they got the idea of annotation so that first of all, they were able to ask me questions they needed. And then once we got started with the course, to reduce the workload on students, I think this is another challenge is that because of the trauma of the pandemic, students are not used to managing their time. Online learning takes a lot of time management. I've been doing more annotation than written work so that they don't feel like it's a lot of work. And it's also less work for me to grade. Takes me less time to grade it because I don't actually grade on the quality. I just wanna make sure that they've read the article and they have questions on it or comments on it. So that's just like one comment to go there before Mia goes and then I'm sure Jeremy has other questions for us as well. So hi everyone. Yes, I'm at Cain University in Union, New Jersey. And I mentioned already that it's just about 20 minutes or so outside of New York City. So we're kind of like an urban suburban university. And in many ways, it mirrors the profile that Autumn described. Many of our students are working class or first generation college students who come from every race, tribe, creed, age. It's a wonderful place to teach because every classroom you enter into is a rich resource in and of itself due to the life experiences and perspectives of the students. So there's so much there to work with in terms of understanding different perspectives. I also mentioned earlier that I'm a director of a master's program. So in that program, all of my graduate students are either aspiring writers or emerging writers who have worked in the professions in one way or another or many of them, the majority of them are teachers or will become faculty members, teaching, writing, et cetera. So I kind of work with two different student populations, the undergraduates and then my graduate students who have that special lens in education because many of them are already professionals that are bringing back what they're using in their master's program to high school students, middle school students, sometimes elementary students. So there's a kind of real embrace of education overall in my program. And the thing I wanted to share with you just in this kind of introductory moment is simply that I run my program and I also teach my classes. I'm talking about the master's program, but also my undergraduate classes that I teach less frequently than the graduate classes. But I will say I run them all as connected learning experiences in a very open and networked learning context. And so I've done some experimenting both with equity unbound, which is the network that Mahathrin and I formed in regards to sort of opening up the classroom to the rest of the world. That's a kind of thread that's pretty explicit in my graduate courses. And then also I've paired up pretty consistently with Alan Levine, another wonderful colleague and partner who has embraced connected learning and has been a really important voice I think in educational technology overall. So I can drill down when we get into a particular focus on what we do, but I do think that that's a good way of talking about the students that I work with and also the kinds of moves I make as a teacher. Thanks, Mia. I wanted to start, I guess we already started but I wanted to ask next. I've learned a lot as a teacher by my own failure making mistakes, realizing that something I was doing was not working, including around issues of hospitality and equity and maybe especially so, right? Cause I know everything about English literature so I never made a mistake there but certainly about making my class an equitable. And I'm just wondering if you guys could share it. It doesn't have to be a personal anecdote though that'd be fine of a sort of a time when you realize it's your classroom or some kind of assignment that you were doing or that you were observing, call names or some that you saw a sort of moment of in-hospitality or some kind of inequity that was structured into what was going on. And just sort of share that as a story and I see how I was ready to start with that. This is a really good recent one and it's one to learn from for something Mia and Autumn and I are doing next week. So let's plug the workshop that Autumn is giving next week. It's a techno ethics primer. So last week, this is just last week we had an equity unbound event where Ann Marie Scott who a lot of people probably already know was giving a workshop on the difficult balancing act of ethics and technology at Tech, right? And so it was an open event but students in my class about half of my students were attending as a way to make up for a class that was on a vacation day that had to get cancer. So there was like 10 students from AUC possibly students from Mia's class and then a lot of people who are people here on this call or just educators in general are in this space and we sent people into breakout rooms to do an activity and what ended up happening in some of those breakout rooms is some of the educators in the breakout rooms know each other and so being friendly they end up chatting with each other and obviously they talk at a different level than students will talk. And because of the limited time a lot of the students didn't get a chance to participate. There were a few people who are very intentional about this and they tried to make sure that the students spoke. There were a few people who tried to do it but couldn't and came back and told us that maybe we should have had a note about intentionally equitable hospitality earlier. And one of the things that in virtually connecting this is where the notion of intentionally equitable hospitality we started to name it that Rebecca Autumn, Christianne Hell and I, the five co-directors is that one of the things we notice is like if you start a conversation and remind people that people who are generally less powerful are the people you need to center when you're having these conversations. In a regular virtually connecting conversation before the pandemic we were using Google Hangouts on Air so we had a limit of 10 people. So you never had a huge number of people. Right now to get that kind of intimacy you need to put people in breakout rooms. But in the breakout room there are no facilitator to make sure that there's intentionally equitable hospitality. So you need to sort of give them that directive or like give them that suggestion at least before they go into the breakout rooms or make sure that there's someone in the room who knows how to do this because online you need to be really careful especially because students have their cameras off some people have the high non-video participants on and they may not even realize there's someone in the room. This has happened to me before that I've been in a breakout room and people completely ignored me and I was trying to talk and I don't know if I was having technical difficulties or if they had that thing on. So this is a situation where you have people of different power in a room and you can't be facilitating it you need to say something before they go to remind them of who has more privilege in that conversation so that they center the people with less privilege to have their voices heard. So we're going to do this in your session, Adam and Shalma. I also just, I just wanted to say that in the chat I dropped a link to Adam's workshop which is on Monday in which we will be more in intentionally equitably hospitable based on what Maha said. In regards to my own experience I didn't in the quick time I was thinking and listening I didn't come up with a specific issue like a specific instance but I do have an issue that I think I want to just talk about a little bit which is the question of camera on, camera off and the kinds of things we struggle with when we're, Adam's saying yes and actually Adam has a lot to say about this too so maybe she can pick up on some of the things I open up but basically I wanted to say there are many reasons why students as Maha already alluded to there are many reasons why students wouldn't turn on their camera and for the most part that list continues to be like will be generative and will go on and on so I'm not gonna just throw out a few and then because it seems as if those things then would be comprehensive and there's always something you don't know that's there too and I think that's part of how we care and reach for equity in a way is realizing that is that there's always something you don't know that's there and you have to sort of keep room for that like unawareness as well but what do we do? For me I do what Maha says and say right in the like she had already suggested that she tells her students that it's their option whether or not they wanna be on camera or not but then there's this kind of trace of what occurs when cameras aren't used because oftentimes as has been already articulated there's a sort of you don't see the student as much you don't know what kinds of levels of engagement occur intellectually or otherwise you know you're doing your thing and there's conversations being had and there's the possibility of that student sort of fading into the background so to speak and one of the things I'm really interested in is helping my students develop advocacy skills how do they come to understand how to build relationships that help their learning flourish oftentimes there's hesitancy or there are as I said many reasons why the camera might not be on but then there is less of a chance to work with that student in drawing out their ability to empower themselves in that context. So this is not necessarily something that I have an answer for as much as I'm always thinking about and I think Autumn has also talked a little bit about visibility in terms of the camera like in terms of those who are more consistently visible out of choice and level of comfort and those who are kind of fading into the distance. So I think I'll stop with that provocation but then I have a feeling Autumn might further it a little bit or just add something. Sure, thank you so much Mia. I have a lot of thoughts about visibility in these spaces and I wrote a blog post called The Zoom Gaze a couple of months ago and now I've actually turned that into a longer article that's under review right now. It's popular article, it's not an academic article but it's thinking about the Gaze theory if anybody has a background in either philosophy, psychoanalysis or media studies like it's a fascinating theory there's a lot of things like kind of kind of intersect with it but after sitting down and giving it some analysis and thinking about especially teleconferencing spaces and especially Zoom, we get a lot of power, we get a lot of control in these spaces as viewers. So we're using Zoom webinar right now which is a little bit different than Zoom meeting but in Zoom meeting as a viewer I can change between a gallery view or a speaker view. I can zoom in on a particular participant and look at their backgrounds. I can change my own background. So I can do a lot as a viewer but as far as like controlling the way that I'm viewed I guess changing my background would be one thing that I could do to change like project myself in a certain way and of course there's just the way that I present myself but outside of that like once the technology starts getting involved like there's lots of power dynamics in there between like host and co-host and spotlights and what order things get presented in and who's biggest on the screen at any particular point and you really don't have very much control as the viewed as an object of perception as a person who is being perceived you have more control as a viewer to control and to navigate those things. And I think students feel that and I think when you ask them to turn on their cameras that's what you're asking them to do you're asking them to be an object of perception and give up all of this control over the ways that they will be perceived, right? Maybe they can change their background if they have something going on but maybe there's other people in the room who talk quite a bit and maybe it's hard for them to turn that camera on and show who they are and show their environment and show where they're at for all kinds of different reasons. I do wanna say though there are lots of ways to be engaged in these spaces if you don't wanna turn your camera on invite students to use the chat. Some people say, oh, I'm too confused by the chat I don't want that I want them to ignore the chat I wanna turn the chat off but I think that that can be an opportunity we have one of our techniques from our community building resources. If you do, I think this is the Tea Party one you can do it with breakout groups but you can also do it in the chat where you invite everybody to come together and respond in the chat, right? So you can ask a question and then say, all right I want everybody to use the chat to respond to this and I'm gonna read the responses as they're coming in. Some people like to wait and say, all right I want you to type it in but then I want you to wait because I want you to hit the enter button all at the same time. So that way, it's kind of exciting all of the responses kind of come in at once but I think if you structure activities and you get students comfortable using their microphone or using the chat or doing an annotation activity if you're using something I know Zoom does have like an ability to annotate inside of it. There are other ways that you can get students to be engaged rather than just the camera. The camera is a little creepy to tell you the truth if you're judging engagement based on somebody looking at a camera maybe they have a second monitor, right? Have you ever had this experience where you're working with somebody who's got a second monitor and they're like this the whole meeting and it feels so weird, right? Some people think of that as like a sign, a signal that the person isn't engaged if they're looking over here the whole time but the truth is the thing they actually have the meeting over there it's just their camera is over here. So these spaces really do create situations where sometimes misconceptions, right? They create these misconceptions and it's really hard because we are it feels like we're all together this illusion of us being together is happening right now but we're not really together. I could empathize with the fact that you weren't looking at me if I could see that you have a second monitor but I can't do that, right? The technology is even though it's enabling us to be together there's also still these separations and you're not gonna ask everybody what's your computing environment look like? Like that's not really rational either. So I think we have to be flexible and forgiving sometimes. I mean we have to remind ourselves like what's really telling you that a student is learning is what they say back to me whether that's in the chat or with their voice and what they do in their assignment it's not the expression on their face. And it's so hard, we know this it's very hard when there's more than six or seven people to see them all. It's not like in a classroom where you can see everyone with one like you have to really it's actually probably more exhausting for us to keep like looking at every person like for me when it's more than 20 people I'm happy that some people have their cameras off when that's happening. But I think it's also interesting I was saying in the chat that a lot of presentations and conferences these days use Zoom webinar and you can't see the audience and people are not complaining about that like why are they complaining about students having their cameras off when they're presenting all the time to audiences without seeing them. And sometimes even disabling the chat like that annoys me. Like you don't even want to hear what the audience is saying or I mean let the audience talk to each other even if you're not going to look at it. So anyway, sorry, side points that has nothing to do with building community but just this disconnect between those two things. I love all that. That's amazing and I can't wait to read that article. And I just thought it was so interesting how you're sort of talking about a sort of inherent inhospitality of a platform in this case Zoom and then introducing some mediating factors that a practitioner can introduce to make the space more equitable. And I'm wondering if Mia if you have any similar anecdotes around this sort of built-in aspect of inequity or inhospitality that you found to sort of hack or work around for? And you can maybe look at, you know think about some of the resources you guys have pulled but how many thoughts there? I'm trying to think about, you know the hack angle but one thing I think that's been pretty powerful is using the camera in reverse. Like having everybody's camera turned off and just having the kind of voice engagement but then introducing each other through a camera and a shared quality of some sort. So to give an example in building community sometimes we do this kind of camera on, camera off exposure thing in order to connect with people. So we'll in the beginning when you're introducing yourselves in the start of a new class it's a kind of challenge to get to know each other. And the typical thing is to go around the room and say, I'm this kind of major and this is what I'm studying, et cetera. And people just sort of observe and maybe get a few names in there and just settle in, right? But if you try to do that in a Zoom environment or in an online environment like the one we're in now that can get pretty stale pretty fast. And also there's a certain amount of anxiety that rises in students even in person when you do this kind of thing. You feel that it's gonna come to me soon clear my throat. There's anxiety in this kind of introduction. So we tried to come up with some playful ways to introduce ourselves. So in that one HE global equity on bound resources around community one of the exercises shows you can say something like, I have a dog and everybody's camera is off and then those with a dog turn their cameras on and then their smiles and a little bit of giggling and then people start to talk about what kind of dog they have and then you turn all the cameras off again and then you say something like, I'm a mother and I'm also I'm a mother and I have a daughter or something like this. And then again, those who have that shared quality come on to the screen. And so by the time everyone takes a turn with basically saying one thing and then you see who else might have a shared a common experience in that way. And by the end of that process in the introductory days there's a sense of the humans in the room and not just, this is my major and you forgot everything after you hear it pretty quickly. So that's an example of using the camera in a dynamic way that's a little bit of a hack to sort of warm up the sense around the tool so that it isn't just a feeling of exposure the whole time. There are many others actually that you can play with the camera in different kinds of ways like that so that you sort of undermine that feeling of being viewed or the gaze, et cetera. And you start to use it in dynamic ways, but maybe Mahan and Autumn have other angles on hacks that help in building community and furthering equity. I wanna point out a couple of things, building resource. Very good ways of building and getting to know each other and some of the like about the enormous ones is going back to it. So when you do any kind of activity in Zoom, if you're recorded, you're probably not gonna go back and watch it to find out which student is the one who liked football, right? But if you have students do some kind of asynchronous like a video, something like what we call the alt-CV and all these options where they create some kind of introduction to themselves on their own terms and they post it somewhere for others to look at, use it, other students can go back and look at it later. They will fit what maybe in the synchronous session but then they can go back and find each other and then you can spend more time getting to think about who that person is and respond to them there. The other thing which I think is really important is the section that we have in our site that was written by Kate Bowles on safety considerations. A lot of really cool activities that will work for maybe 80% of students. Like there's one that Patrice Torcivia Prosko which is called the name. Have students share the story of their name, any part of their, it was like, what about trans students? What about someone who just changed their name? What about someone who's got a story behind their name that they don't wanna share? And how would the teacher frame the question to make it possible for that person to not do that, to say something different or something different and not participate in the activity? And she gives a lot of cool suggestions of things. Just how do you think about, how do you think through the process and how do you introduce it? And what kind of things can you do in the semester? What kind of things you should maybe wait a little bit to do? So I just wanted to take that particular response. I wanna turn our gaze before I open it up to Q&A to social annotation and not to video conferencing and hear from you guys the ways in which social annotation with hypothesis or with other platforms perpetuates inequities in some ways and ways in which it maybe creates hospital environments for teaching and learning or ways that you have used it specifically in your own practices to create a more equitable context for your students. And then we're gonna open it up to Q&A. I just wanna warn folks in the chat that I'm gonna happily unmute folks if you choose. I need to go look at the resources to see at best management for Zoom and equity. So feel free to ask a question in the chat. I think there may look like there's a Q&A or unmute but I'd first just like to hear about your thoughts from the panel on social annotation and hospitality and equity. Mia, you look most ready to start. Okay. Again, I don't wanna judge based on gaze. I just did, I got a lot to learn here. No, that's just fine. It's vibing, we're vibing. Thank you. Yeah, so one of the things I think is a cornerstone of our equity and bound origins is a beautiful article by Lena Moonser, who's a journalist who wrote about the women in Syria during wartime and she's essentially working through translation, interviewing women about their experiences and then bringing that from the Arabic into English and to sort of share those stories with the world. And so that particular article is profoundly beautiful, very meaningful and it really talks about boundaries and borders and trying to move meaning across a boundary. We, all those in equity and bound to our co-teaching and co-learning together actually read this article in a social environment. So in essence, we have our students read that article from different locales, literal locales, like New Jersey and Cairo and anyone else who wants to jump in from whatever varying locales they find themselves in. But I think what's interesting and what happens there is they take, the students take their particular lens to the reading and they see different kinds of things. So in the annotation, the commentary that comes out opens students' eyes to other angles in understanding these challenges. And so that's an example of a way in which we're reading across boundaries and we're reading an article that is about crossing boundaries. The only way in some ways to break down borders is to constantly cross them on some level. So, and that's actually a quote from the article as well. But there are constraints or there are things that we feel have worked better than other things in that specific act as well, meaning reading that particular article with different groups of people. Sometimes there is less interactivity in the annotations and much more just sort of like reading and lurking around people's perspectives. When we know, for those who know hypothesis, it can be a richly interactive space as well as one in which it's almost like a posting, like a board post. But I think that for the most part, we've seen more of the board post kind of engagement with this particular article. Sometimes it crosses the line into back and forth replying. But I think there's also a kind of sensitivity that comes up in understanding that students from different places and different perspectives are reading together. And so there is this kind of, I don't know if it might be a hyperpoliteness or a concern over crossing over or being misunderstood. But I think there's a lot going on in this whole environment. So it's an example of the ways in which we read socially that afford a new understanding or a new lens on intercultural context. Equity is different than intercultural context. I'm, you know, asserting that very clearly. But it's a step, that kind of learning process is a step in a certain direction. So anyway, that's just an anecdote of something we do with hypothesis that moves in this direction. There are other things I can think about that have to do with more creative ways in using hypothesis. But I think first I'd like to hear from other Audemars Maha about what they think. Do we lose Maha? She was breaking up a little bit there and now I don't see her. I think we may have, unfortunately. So you're on the spot. I'm on the spot. Look at that. Oh my God. But you don't have to. It could also change the perspective. No, what I have is actually, when I think about hospitality and I think about social annotation and especially when I think about hypothesis, the one, I guess, a little muddy point or point of caution, I guess, something that I've kind of run into a little bit is it's such a unique experience, right? We're taking a layer and putting a layer over the internet, a new layer that we can go into. And I think that that can sometimes be confusing for some folks as far as ownership. Am I writing on somebody else's website or like kind of who owns these annotations? And I have had situations where folks, I mean, they're comments too, right? And so especially comments on the internet can sometimes be a little punchy, right? And so I've been in situations where somebody was surprised that the author of the thing that they were annotating jumped in and started doing comments with them. And I was like, well, these are public annotations, right? But it's different than leaving comments on a blog where you know that that's public. So that would be one little word of caution if you're doing thinking of hospitality, using social annotation, be sure that if folks are new to the process, if they're new to social annotation and especially if they're new to open kind of work, but they understand those different layers and who can see the annotations and who they're really talking to, right? So I had some situations where we were working in the public with hypothesis and folks somehow or another, I thought it was very clear that we were in the public, but yeah, they didn't know that. So don't take that for granted. Mehta's back. Yeah, I'm back. And someone was asking something that I was gonna talk about, which is that sometimes private group is your class. And so that's not something that would appear to the author or to anyone else but your class. And sometimes that's even a safer space for your class themselves. And the other thing is that if a site has a lot of public annotations in it, it slows down a lot. But then if you create a group for your class, a fewer annotations. What Tim Clark, who's actually in the audience, did with me once, when this whole thing about authors and their article started is that, took my permission, he invited some people to annotate a blog post of mine, it had a private group invited me to it. And I thought that was a really lovely thing to do that I had not happened to me before. And I think a lot of people just hadn't annotate things without checking with author Nina Munzer, for example, for a war in translation, we always tell her, or I always tell her anyway, we're about to annotate your article so that she knows what's been on. In the same way that like sometimes in a video, a lot of people know that this is happening. I know, you don't always know the person and I didn't know her because I tell her. Like once a semester, you know, I think that's, I'm someone who is supposedly in power or privileged, the author is still in this case, like a woman from Lebanon and the one that you're not harming in any way by doing this kind of thing. I'm all suddenly very aware of the power dynamics of Zoom as I turn and offer the floor to any of the attendees, but I have to allow you to speak. I have to, you know, you have to raise your hand or something like that. And then I have a button that says allow to talk. You also have the chat to voice a question, but I do wanna open it up at this point to my colleagues at Hypothesis Included, but questions for the panel about building equitable and hospitable online communities and teaching in more equitable, teaching online in more equitable and hospitable ways. I can also lower all hands, which seems another sort of too powerful thing to be able to do. You have so much power. You're right. You're right. You're right. Amazing. But the techniques you guys have. All the video tools have this kind of thing. All the video tools is weird. What's really when people could mute all my phones like. So I've got an attendee that would like to talk and I'm going to- A teacher say that, like especially for K-12. Sorry, Ma. Allow, is it a Samara? Yes. Your name is also cut off in the interface, so. Oh no. Please speak. Thank you. So my thesis right now is actually about the community building because of the pandemic through video calling, such as Zoom. And I'm curious about what you think of, there's lots of articles and studies done on force, not forcing, but like having students turn on their cameras, keep themselves unmuted, to kind of keep an eye on the professor. And so that the professor or teacher can like look at the mouth shape, look at how they're speaking. And I was wondering if you had any opinion on like whether or not this should be enforced because there also, it does create that kind of like fear, I think, of like all eyes on a certain student. So I wanted to know what you thought about like this kind of thing for a language class. Well, I know that a lot of people in this call are probably history or literature or some sort of class where it's about learning about history or information. But in a language course, you're there to kind of learn speech. And I feel like it's a very different environment from literature or history or such in like math, et cetera. It's a great scenario. Yeah. I can definitely see where it would have more of a benefit. And I'm not saying like, never ever tell students that they can't do it. I guess I try to give the student as much flexibility as possible, right? And make it clear upfront that there's value in, that I as an instructor feel like there is value in seeing you pronounce these words and seeing your body language as you're speaking another language, those kind of things. And give them other opportunities. So if you're not going to do it in a video call, maybe they could do a recording that could be viewed later. But I also feel like if you're doing something of value and you're making it clear to the student why it's a value, that's going to feel a lot better than you just got to do it because that's the rules, right? That's not going to feel very good. And tell the students that you're open to doing other types of alternatives if they do have barriers that you want to talk to them about the barriers that they're experiencing and that you're willing to be creative about finding solutions. I think it's about being flexible with students. But I think that we need to recognize that there's a lot of power in being seen and that when we force students to be seen, we're taking that away from them and we're forcing them into something that just doesn't feel very good. And if you really want to build a community in your classroom, that's not how you want to start. You don't want to start with that kind of bad feeling. You don't want to start with that kind of ugliness. That's going to kill your community building right off the bat. I think it just reasserts a very clear power dynamic in which the idea of surveillance is quite explicit. They're being surveilled, they're being watched. And when that comes first, then you're not learning together, you're not building community, you're not making moves that signal care towards your students. So I think that those are really important questions to ask when designing for instruction, especially language instruction. So it's a challenging question, Samara, in the sense that that's a particular need, but Moha made a very important point that disappeared in the chat a while ago that if you were instructing in person, the mask would be on and the lips wouldn't be able to be perceived. And I think that's something to consider as well as there are ways in which this time sort of obscures that part of language acquisition consistently. And therefore we should rethink our pedagogy. So that's just my way in. Anyway, I'm sure there's many other questions, so. I actually need to keep my camera off because my connectivity is bad right now. So this is exactly what happens to my students is that every single thing we say, encourage students to turn the camera on will work if you're doing something meaningful with them, not if they haven't, that's not gonna be the reason to turn the camera on. But I have taught a student before. So even before there were masks, I taught a student and I read about interaction and how she would communicate with me. And it worked, but we could not see. And now the face is when they're communicating, not they can't, but they're communicating just fine. So I think, I don't even think for language learning unless you want to make sure that their phonetics are coming out right. I'm not sure why they necessarily need it on. The talent this semester is as a life skill, when you graduate, just have to present in person. In the future, you may have to present virtually. In the future, you may have to have meeting in a multinational context. You may need to eventually become comfortable with turning your camera on. So will you be willing to try it for a small child that you know at times, so that you can prepare to be sitting in a neat place and a private place, and if that's possible. And if it's not the video, autumn was set. A lot of my students wanna turn the camera on secretly, but they record videos for me all the time, just in their own time when they're up for it, you know? So it's not that they don't want me to see their face, it's just like not this constant surveillance like Mia was saying. And I understand that a lot of teachers are not coming from place of, a lot of teachers are coming from place of care, but a lot of care is, or a lot of, you know, unintended bad consequences, kind of eyes of care. Think about, you know, think about what it might, someone else's malicious is thinking, you know? And how this, even the male students in the class, like Fran, you were saying a male, female thing as well. They don't wanna be watched all that time. Maaha, you were breaking up a little in there, but I definitely got some very powerful points and one of the letter ones really resonates with me, just that a lot of, and to combine with what, something Mia mentioned was, you know, surveillance on some level, some kind of surveillance might come from a place of care, but it's important to recognize the power dynamics that are still inherent in surveillance. That's something I think about a lot as we're building hypothesis and the different ways that we're creating visibility. And we've talked about this throughout the afternoon, from my afternoon, the ways in which visibility is sort of, you know, has two sides to it, right? It's an empowering, it can be an empowering thing, but it can also take power away. I wanna just voice one question from the chat as a kind of final question from, let me scroll back up and get it. And it's a- If it's TG, sorry to interrupt Jeremy, if it's TG, they would like to be unmuted and- Oh, great. Ask it. Excellent, I'm gonna not ask it, I'm gonna ask to unmute. Okay, I'm asking to unmute. Talking, no, that's Samara. I'm sorry, I'm just- TG, talking for a minute, go for it. Hello, thank you for unmuting me. So my question is really about the digital divide that actually happens because of technology and how that divide has increased between the have and the have, not especially during the pandemic. So I think the use of technology in itself is inequitable. And if nothing else, the pandemic has taught us how access to technology is such a privilege. So as a community, we probably need to encourage the use of more low-tech tools and activities that can facilitate everyone's participation. And that's what I wanted to get your thoughts on. Thank you. Mahade, you wanna take this or Anna or? I responded to your about, like what's black, so that's based. Your audio is actually going in and out a little bit so we got part time. This is not only the low bandwidth, I'm gonna stop. I heard the- Here it is, here it is, right? Here's the perfect situation where technology is getting in the way and TG are absolutely right. It is an amazing privilege to be able to use technology and not everybody has it is the simple truth of it. Just the simple act of using technology is inequitable. It will be inequitable because we don't have coverage, not everybody has access. I'm all for doing the low tech stuff when the pandemic first hit. I was one of the first people out there saying, hey, we gotta do the low bandwidth stuff. I remember Tannis Morgan had a great blog post about teaching online with email and telephones and going old school with some of this kind of stuff. I think that that's great. Where I've found tension is then with folks who are more privileged to want the richer experience. They want the video. They want the real time interactions. They want that kind of thing. And so how do you balance? How do you balance the folks who are more privileged and crave the higher bandwidth interactions with the folks who just can't participate that way? I do think it's possible. I do think you can even things out, but it is a balancing act. It's a little bit of a dance that you gotta do to make it happen. I am just gonna jump in because we're actually over time here. We can continue the discussion and continue to record, but I know that some people, I just wanna be cognizant of the fact that some of our panelists might need to leave or some of my colleagues and some of the participants, I mean, the attendees might need to leave. So, but anyone who wants to hang around, we could definitely continue this really rich discussion. So it's just up to you. I think Maha has to go. It's her weekend time. So I think she might be departing or has departed already. But yeah, I just wanted to say that because I saw that in the chat. Oh, here, there she is. Okay. She's back. But I also like to say, if the panelists, if you'd like to now just, say a few parting words and whatever you'd like to say, just or just goodbye or whatever you wanna do. Well, I'll just say thank you so much for the opportunity to share some of the insight here. I think, if you open up the community building resources, you'll see that we're coming at this from a variety of different angles. And there's a lot of useful things there. Just protocols, activities, strategies, things to be concerned about just to sort of open up the conversation and the thinking around it further. Some of the things that I think are really special in that collection include engaging with students in terms of reflection. There's an activity called the Spiral Journal, which is actually one of my favorite ones there. But I think also some of the activities highlight engaging with students in very creative ways and really kind of opening up, learning to not just a kind of analysis and content orientation, but something quite freeing and creative. An example of it would be something like the surrealist portraits. In that activity, people are using their left hand to do a self-portrait and then generate conversation around that as a mode of introduction. And also being slightly unmoored in something uncomfortable. Left hand if you're right-handed and right-handed if you're left-handed, of course, the non-dominant hand. But those are just like little glimpses into the resources. And of course, Maha is saying that we should mention liberating structures. These are of course ways of making sure that the interactions, the community interactions as we build community are places that liberate, open up so that we can listen to each other in ways that we haven't before and invite everyone to the table to sort of participate and to share insight. And there are a variety of different liberating structures that sort of drive the activities that we're suggesting. So yeah, I just wanted to sort of close with that like little bit of a lens on the resource itself because it really furthers the kinds of things we touched upon today a lot more effectively. Like we just touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of the things that are there and the kinds of activities that could open up your own practice or your own research around online learning and teaching. So yeah, and so thank you for inviting us and having a moment to share some of this work. So yeah, I'll let my colleagues say goodbye or add something. Hey, I'll just thank everybody as well. This has been great. It's always wonderful to hang out with you folks and got to meet some new friends. I see a lot of very familiar faces or familiar names, not familiar faces, familiar names in the chat and that's always really fun. So thank you so much for the opportunity to think about it. Check out the Equity Unbound 1-H-E Resource Library if you're looking for practical techniques and tips of things that you can do that help to build community in your classes. I think it's a great resource for that. The other thing that I'll end with is remember to check in frequently when you're working in community or if you're building a class, check in frequently, ask for that feedback, ask how you're doing and get feedback from the students or from the participants about the ways that they're feeling. If you're not thinking about those kind of things, if you're not asking for it, sometimes people aren't gonna take the initiative to come and give it to you. So take the initiative a couple of times throughout the experience, right? If it's a class, maybe around the middle or something like that, stop everything and say, hey, let's do a little bit of feedback here. How are things going? And be willing to be flexible and change things that you can. You won't be able to change everything, of course, but for the things that you can change, show that you're willing and open to be able to do that as a community organizer or as a teacher, you're in a place of power in shaping that experience for the participant and for the students. And so giving them some voice and giving them an opportunity to give some feedback and showing that you're vulnerable and that you're flexible to meet those needs where you can can be huge for building community in your spaces. So again, thank you so much for having us. Thank you. And is Maha still here or did she drop off? I think she did drop off. Okay. She did. Yeah. Goodbye and thanks in the chat and yeah. Okay, great. Well, I want to thank you both so much for being here and everybody for being here today. This is such a great, rich conversation.