 ..y'r rhaid i'r ffosffylio'r ffordd i'r sefydliadau a'r gweithio sydd yn ymddangos eu canol. Felly, mae'r ffosffylio, mae'r fosffylio'r gwahodd ar gyfer y Llywodraeth Meron. yw'r rhaid i'r rhaid i'r ffosffylio. Mae'r rhaid i'r fosffylio. Mae'r pethau ffosffylio'r holl. Mae'r pethau'r holl yn ymddangos. Mae'r rhaid i'r fosffylio. Mae'r Llywodraeth yma yw gwirionedd. Just make sure you couldn't stay away. For those of you who don't know Tracey, she's a writer, sociologist and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She also auth an excellent book which I really recommend to all of you called Lower Ed, The Troubled Nine as a Ffogpuffer College in the New Economy. She also writes for times watching to post and matched to my daughter's incredible admiration she's appeared on The Daily Show. She's a bona fide star. Yn y peth yw'r ffordd yw'r cyfrifod hynny yw hyfforddiad yn gweithio. Ond oedd nid i hynny'n gweld i amddangosol yn y cyfeinio'r llythgrif hon. Mae hynny'n ddod i'r cyfrifod, a'r cyfrifod hynny'n ddod i'r llythgrif, ond fewn i'r mewn gwirionedd gweithio yng ngyfrifod hynny, mae'n llehau i'r ffordd i'r llehau. Mae'n ddod i'r llythgrif o'r cyfrifod hynny'n ddod i'r llythgrif. Ac rwy'n fwyaf'r ychydig yn ddweud y cyfle yw'r cyffredinion bach i'r cyffredinion dda i'w dweud. A oedd o'n gweithio'r cyffredinion iawn. Mae'r ddweud yn cyfyrdd, cyffredinion, ac yn ddweud yn ddweud. Felly mae'r rhaid i'r cyffredinion yw'r cyffredinion i'r Cymru. Fel ydych chi'n dweud. Yn y cwm yn ymlaen nhw, yw'r cyffredinion i'w ddweud'n rhai bach i'r cyffredinion, ddweud. Hello. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having me for a wonderful introduction, Martin. I am short so let's go over a couple logistics of what that means for our conversation this morning. I can move around quite a bit because if I stand here, you actually feel like it cuts off quite a fair bit of me. For some strange reason I think it matters that you see all of me in my outfit. So I'm going to move about as I feel the spirit overcoming. So Ie dweud y maen nhw, iawn'n mynd i'ch cydwyddo i'r diwethaf ag i'n cynhyrchu, sy'n ddinllun i wneud allan o'r newid gyda'u gwahanol, efallai y baen nhw lle fydd yn cael eu pethau. Dw i'n meddwl rydw i'n cael eu flwyddyr maen nhw'n gweithio eu ffaith wedi bod yn rhowu'r gwahanol fel yn cael eu rhywb yn cael eu pethau nhw ar y cael eu pethau, ac mae'n gweld ymlaen i yddech chi'n gwyn Shadow Carendon, I'm keeping angen on both time and on the main points I want to get across today. That's number one. Let's see. Number two, it is truly a pleasure to be here in Balmie Manchester. Thank you very much for that, Martin. This is a wonderful example though of how everything is a construct and everything is about perspective. I'm actually enjoying the weather in Manchester. We're in day like 28 of 95° summer, where I am from. I got off the plane and was like, This is amazing. I got off the plane however there's about two hundred other people who had just left Orlando, Florida, Disney World to come back to Manchester they were very disappointed and depressed. So I think that's a great metaphor for how this will go. Perspective matters here today. Let's see. Opening a conference is not a very easy thing to do. Yn ymddangos, rydyn ni'n gweld eich gweithio ar y ddweud o'r fath, ac mae'n ffordd i'r ddweud o'r ddweud, hefyd ydych chi'n gwybod a'n ddweud a'r holl o'r gofod i'n cael gweithio ar y dyfodol yma, a'r gofod i'n byddwch i'n gweithio ar y gyfer y cyfeisio, yw'n credu'r gwag i'n edrych i'n gweithio. Dyna yr hyn yn ymryd ddweud, dyna'r gofod, The room, I've just been walking around the conference for a couple of days wanting to make sure that we're having the right conversation. When you go first, you do not have that privilege. So, the challenge set out before me today was to set the tone for a multi-day, interdisciplinary cross-sector event on a historically contingent, yet fast-moving target like learning and technology. How could I make it fun, but serious? You pay to be here. You've got to get something. Critical. This is the theme and here's a spoiler I believe in critical, but not a downer. It's the first day. And a call to action. We are in this room, I think, mostly engaged with the application of the theory of learning and technology. So, we tend to be action-oriented at the same time that I wanted to invite people to take a moment to pause and to reflect and to think about things. How could I do all of that at once? Well, being a smart woman, I did what any sensible person would do and I decided not to try to do any of that. So, that's how we're going to do this thing. Instead, I have chosen to try to talk about something that I am ridiculously, embarrassingly passionate about. The title of this talk is about context. Now, I could have just as easily named the talk nuance or something like intersectionality or any other number of takes on the idea that when and where we enter matters. When and where we enter. Now, that subtitle, I'm borrowing that from a classic book by a story in Paula Jane Giddins. It's a book of black feminist philosophy and practice. And what it generally means is that when and where we enter a conversation, or in our case a context, matters a lot to how we are able to operate within our frame of understanding. When and where we enter a moment in time, a moment in history. When and where we enter an organization in its moment of development and or change. When and where we enter a popular conversation or discourse really matters. While we have a ton of agency, the context matters a lot. When and where we enter. Now, the gist of the book's framing is that they're saying that the reduction of any complex social phenomenon, in their case they were talking about classism and race and gender, that if you reduce something complex to a single dimension of that problem, you never really understand the fullness of the phenomenon. That's all it's saying. Now, bracketing a messy or a wicked problem is not a bad thing. Let me start there. It is actually quite useful. We call this in my line of work having an analytical frame, which basically means you look at a really complex problem like, oh, I don't know, why aren't students participating in this activity? You start to pull apart different layers of it and you go listen. There are a million reasons why students may not be participating, but I'm going to focus on one dimension of it, mostly because I'm human. I have limited resources, a limited frame of understanding. To understand the whole thing, I've got to pull apart some layers of the onion to understand we've got to start somewhere, cast our buckets down somewhere. So bracketing a messy problem, pulling apart pieces of it to focus or to specialize, is actually quite useful for our understanding of a problem. However, what is supposed to happen at some point of our bracketing a very messy social phenomenon is that we're supposed to bring the pieces back together. At some point, we should peel apart the parts of the onion, figure out how it works, and then stitch the thing back together again so that it's an onion. What I'd like to put before you today is that after about 25 years, I think that's what you officially said it was, Martin. After 25 years, the professional field of learning technologies and education technology as a field of study and practice in higher education now might be a good time to reassemble some of the parts of what we've learned back into its whole. Now might be a good time for us to reconsider the context of learning communities, learning technologies, and education technologies. The pieces that we have bracketed that onto look a lot like the tracks for this conference. Some of us focus on open, whether it be open learning, open source materials. Some of us have chosen tracks about collaboration, how we build partnerships. Others of us are going to focus on critical perspectives about technologies and learning. Those are the brackets, those are the pieces we've pulled apart. Those are areas where we've decided to specialize. Some of us become bracketed by our roles in an organization. Our organizational chart or the bureaucracy of where we work shapes where we are. You are a consultant, a learning technology specialist. You are an administrator, you are a teacher. Rarely are you considered all of those things at one time. You've been bracketed in some sort of way. These brackets represent dimensions of a multifaceted social phenomenon. Namely, humans and technology and institutions merge to do stuff. It's a very technical term, and I can say that because stuff is my specialty. Because I am a sociologist, we specialize in stuff, context, description, sometimes prediction, although not very good at predicting but don't tell my colleagues, I said that. We're not economists is all I'm saying. More specifically to our time together over the next few days, I want to follow up on what sociologist Neil Selwyn has proposed and something that he calls the sociology of education technology. The PC published in 2016 is reviewing several books on ed tech. Neil himself is a sociologist of education, who is focused mostly on K-12 schools throughout the UK. He's been pushing for quite some time for us to renew as social scientists and researchers and sociologists and interest in how technology is actually working in the context of our organizations and our learning communities and our spaces. He said, in fact, maybe he says in this 2016 piece, we need to move away from just saying sociology of schooling, where technology is being used. He said it more specifically focused on the sociology of education technology. In the piece, Neil says that most writing on education technology is somewhat limited in its scope and ambition. He positions the sociology of education technology as an antidote to that trend. Neil was practicing the lovely British tradition of restraint in that statement and I don't have to do that. I want to be a little bit more pointed and say that almost all of the writing and much of the research on ed tech present company excluded has been limited in its scope and ambition. In fact, much of the work that my colleagues especially have done on education technology is the exact opposite, I think, of ambitious. Now, some of the reasons why I work there has not been particularly ambitious is because there are very real limitations, some of which exist for very good reasons. Data are hard to come by, mostly because we don't just want to en masse turn our students into data points. Those of us who care about the human aspects of learning in this technology tend to resist such things for very good reasons. So data can be hard to come by. Analysis of what data we do get takes a lot of specialized skill sets. There's a reason why many of you choose to come to this community and have participated in such a long time because in many of our home institutions we're the only, right, or one of a handful of people sort of speaking this language and participating in this community. I think that speaks to the fact that there is a relatively small pool of people professionally who think about learning technologies in this sort of holistic way and because of that we don't always have the communities necessary to have a nuanced conversation about ed tech. And then there's just the realities of the context within which ed tech is unfolding, right? There's not always a lot of enthusiastic investment in understanding the complexities of ed tech. We tend to be more interested in selling some of the aspects of what technology can do in an education context and perhaps less interested in exploring the critical aspects of educational technology. And here's where I give away the entire talk in the event that I lose you before the end. After almost three decades of specialization, measured analysis and writing, it is a good time to assess the context of education technology as a messy, multi-dimensional whole. And here's what I think that might look like. I'm going to put three things before you today. First is that after about 25 years of writing and researching and thinking and meeting and debating and throwing eggs at each other about education technologies, I think we have finally come to understand that learning technologies do not exist in a vacuum, right? As Martin actually shows in your magnum opus of blog posts that I think you owe us a book on is that we now have a host of research and lived experiences with what we might call EdTech 2.0, right? Platforms, clickers, blockchains, badges, biometrics, pro-sumption, open, proprietary, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So everything after the paper, the pen, and the projector, EdTech 2.0. We know that a lot of assumptions at this point are built into these EdTech 2.0 tools. There are assumptions about ability, both our students, our faculties, our administrators, our various audiences. There are assumptions about language. We're still overwhelmingly a westernized English-based profession. There are embedded assumptions about new social norms around things like privacy and surveillance, something I think a lot about. There are embedded assumptions in education technology about political regimes around things like consent, identity, and intellectual property. And there are new economic exchanges built into these learning technologies that are centered around the tension between what data we give up in exchange for convenience, in exchange for convenience. Sociologically, we might say that learning technologies have a context. Our sociology then of EdTech might pay attention to what extent that context, what that context is, and call our attention back from our tracks and our centers and our specializations from time to time to reconsider if the context of our work has changed. Learning technologies have certainly in the U.S. and is actually, I think, quite true still here. I put the clause there because as I travel more and try to be more conscientious of the fact that we are, again, still very much a sort of western-oriented field of study that things cannot necessarily be said to be extrapolated from the U.S. context and applied across the global systems of higher education. But it is usually true that if we're talking about the U.S. and the U.K. models as we are in this room, we share these things in common. Learning technologies have then for us mostly emerged as administrative units, right? Now I'm going to talk about this a little bit more in a few minutes when I share some of my experiences of building what I would call a born digital sociology master's program at my home institution. But broadly my point here is that there are lots of ways that learning technologies can be deployed in a university context, right? We could build one of those brand new fancy centers that rivals like a football stadium. We could. We could hire and train and build new academic departments to train an army of people who will then go on and go out to become the senior leaders in learning technologies and build a new discipline. We could. We could have. Instead, what has mostly happened is that we have built these sort of administrative units. Centers, applied learning contexts where learning technology innovation and conversation tends to be kind of siloed, right? And one of my questions for us today is going to be whether or not that is something that we think is sustainable. And is it sustainable if we keep in mind this? That we are increasingly interested in conversations about whether or not our learning technologies are equitable and just, right? And if we are not concerned about that, I'm going to pretend that we all are as of today, right? After we have spent about 25 years of just trying to move people, move the needle on people taking seriously the idea of learning technologies, as we become more sophisticated and nuanced about thinking about those things, we are thinking more critically about whether or not we can say a tool is a just tool, right? And here I'm going to talk broadly about both analogue and digital, whether or not the sage on the stage sort of model works, which I absolutely, you know, hate the term, but I'm using it here. Right, whether or not we need to keep the academic lecture, whether a classroom should be flipped, the more analogue technologies, as well as the digital technologies, can we say that an online or a blended learning model is accessible, right? And what does accessibility mean for different kinds of students in different kinds of context? I'm going to argue that if we aspire to develop more just and equitable learning technologies that embed EdTech 2.0 across the contemporary modern university, that we are going to have to take seriously the idea of whether or not EdTech should just exist as administrative units, and what do we mean for us to build a bridge between EdTech as an academic discipline and as an administrative function? If those are our provocations and I totally just get to set myself up here, because when you write it, that's what you get to do, then the context of how Ed technology is deployed matters. As luck would have it, sociology is pretty good about sessing out the context. And really the devil is not in the details always of how education technology is created or implemented and used. It is more in the context within which it is employed, implemented and used. Sociology is pretty good at disentangling the mess, to the nuance, the context of something like this. It can be really excellent at parsing critical engagement with the social processes that shape our technologies and ourselves, but we generally do this kind of work in our academic units. Now, as a professor of something called digital sociology at my home university, I occupy a really odd space, right, that not many of my colleagues can say they occupy. It is actually part of my academic agenda to think about technology. Because of that, I have one world in the administrative unit of where most of our learning technologies exist. It's been rebranded every year for the last four years, but we have a center of learning technologists at Virginia Commonwealth University. They have a different name every year, but the same people. I'm not exactly sure how that works. But we have worked together for the last three or four years collaborating on building this sort of born digital sociology program. And one of the reasons I'm able to do that is because doing it is part of my academic work, right? Very few faculty are able to have a foot in both worlds, the administrative process of developing and using and thinking about the tools, as well as the sort of academic freedom to think about them critically. And it is because I occupy both of those spaces that I have been able to sort of open up a space to think about the critical engagement of what happens when education technology lives in the administrative unit, but some of the best parts of the education technologies that our students, especially diverse student populations, need for my education technologies are unfolding in our academic disciplines. And how do we bring those two things together? That question has been really important for us as we develop our program at Virginia Commonwealth University, but I would argue that it is not just important for us. Again, this is some of the context that many of us are dealing with. We are dealing with an ecosystem of higher education that is increasingly concerned about profits and revenues. And in many of our academic institutions or affiliated academic spaces, some of the incentive to participate in thinking about learning technologies tends to be driven by someone's interests in finding a way to make that either profitable or to present a cost-saving mechanism. Technology in our academic context often gets the support it needs to be adopted because someone promised that it would save someone money or it would make someone money. And when those are the two promises that really does shape how we are able to think critically about some of the learning technologies we adopt and deal with, I have the freedom as a research faculty member in a tenure-track stream to be very critical of the tools that we adopt in a program that is dedicated to thinking about digitally mediated platforms and social processes in large part because I am in a tenure-track stream position. And so the context of that is we increasingly cannot assume that that is the normal for our research faculty and our faculty partners in thinking about education technology. The liberalization of academic funding and labour really does impact the extent to which we can be critical about digital technologies, but I would point out I think also makes it all the more important that we are critical about those learning technologies. We are faced with the casualization of our professional class at the same time that our administrative leadership incentivizes us to adopt technologies that generate either revenue or cost savings. And then we are just dealing with and continue to deal with and I suspect at this point in the game we will always deal with the storable inequalities at every level of learning, every level in a formal and informal organization. Our students do not come to us with the same capacities and skill sets. Our faculties do not always have the same skill sets or interests or incentives to think about learning technologies. The administrative units where our learning technologies are often embedded do not have access to the same level of resources. And those resources can change over time as the fortunes of your university or your organization changes. A new administration has a new set of priorities and suddenly the learning technology focus of a university has to shift very quickly. There are differences between how our institutions are funded, what kind of status and prestige they have. In the U.S. context the most elite institutions can get away with doing the most with education technology not just because of cost, but because they are given carte blanche to experiment with certain form education technologies. Those kinds of power differences really matter to how we are able to think critically about education technology. And then I'm also going to point out again and like to point this out frequently ours continues to be embedded in the assumptions that what we do in western universities is good for universities everywhere. And so shout out to our universities working in the global south to push back against that sort of embedded idea of western knowledge in a lot of tech conversations these days. So that's the context within which we were building our digital sociology program at VCU. So this is why we end up devising this program about six years ago the university leadership comes out to the academic departments at our university and says given the context of casualization, increased insecurity, diverse student populations who are concerned about their returns to their education here's what we're going to do. We want you the department of sociology to change the entire way you create, deliver, measure higher education with absolutely no money from us. That was the challenge before us. We think that Ntech is a wonderful thing go do it with absolutely no money just reimagine everything you do. So now let me tell you we actually take them up on the software because we're little off our blocker. We think we're one we are a critical social science department if we don't do it who will and if we don't do it and someone else does why would they be doing it would they have the same incentive to think critically about it? It mattered to us that we would not only have debates about the implementation of digital technologies and say our business school who may have a different set of incentives to think about technology in a very limited way. We wanted to be a part of that conversation even if it meant doing so without a single dime of money. So this is what the program looks like it is a two year online masters program. I say that it is sort of born digital but it did not start out that way. Like many places we started out by just putting everything that we've been doing in our face to face learning environments online. You can laugh it's fine. That went exactly as you might expect. Horribly, it went horribly wrong. As it turns out, learning online and through online mediums requires rethinking everything about our academic discipline. It required rethinking everything about theory, everything about methods, everything about data. In imagining a born digital sociology program we had to re-imagine the entire academic discipline of sociology. Which I think speaks to how critically important learning technology is. It's not just a set of tools but a philosophy, a way to think about things. We learned that the hard way. Right now these are our faculty members. We've got four quote unquote research tenure track faculty who are dedicated teachers in the program. We also have two ad hoc faculty members. My learning and technology center, that's my buddy Tom up there, without whom I wouldn't be able to do much of anything. I give Tom crazy ideas and he goes, yeah sure let's do it, let's see what happens. And then my other colleague here in the middle who comes to us from industry where he is, he runs a data management services for the state and federal government. We have one full-time administrator over there in the corner who also teaches full-time in the program. I point all these things out one to make it clear that this is not a program that is just centered on me. This is a collaborative effort. But I also wanted to point out what type of resources it took for us to re-imagine the digital sociology program. We figured out very early on that as academic faculty we were sort of hopeless in doing this alone. So we reached out to sort of our learning technologists to think about delivery and it was with the collaboration of our learning technologies that we realized delivery was not really our problem. That we were going to have to again rethink the context of what we were teaching. For example, and we had to think about it because our students did not always come to us with the same needs. So developing an asynchronous learning environment for diverse students who had very different levels of preparation for various learning technologies challenged and really strained our faculty's ability to respond. We had to collaborate to become sustainable which I think is again another characteristic of what should happen as learning technology maybe moves into its next phase of moving more centrally into the heart of academic units. We had to collaborate to become sustainable. We had to collaborate to become sustainable. Our core curriculum had to be completely redesigned once it became clear that asynchronous learning for diverse students in a tech heavy learning environment required a ton of faculty and staff labor and as you can see, we don't have a ton of faculty and staff. For example, some of our students know what it means to access a database when they start in our program. Other students have only ever used Google and even then have no exposure to something like Boolean search tactics. We were working with students across the spectrum of ability. We collaborated on what I believe is the first born digital sociology curriculum. We are digital sociology not just in our content but in our delivery and ethos and we borrowed a ton of that from the theory of learning technology. We use tools and part of our curriculum is interrogating how we use those tools. We try very hard to get around the sort of black box of the algorithms that are embedded in the tools we use. One example of that is our students co-edit an online digital sociology magazine where they practice writing digitally for different audiences, especially public-facing audiences. The digital sociology magazine, we hosted it deliberately on medium.com for a couple of reasons. We could have kept that project in a closed environment but to us, that undermined again the ethos of openness. However, we were aware of the fact that medium is not a not-for-profit entity. It's a for-profit online publisher. He said, how can we make that work for our students? How can we make the ethos of a semi-open, semi-closed for-profit publishing platform work for our students? One of the ways we did that was by revisiting what it meant for us to be critical sociologists. We said, well, why don't we use this as an opportunity to break open how medium publishes? By giving editorial control to the students on the medium magazine, they can see the back house analytics embedded in medium.com. They can see how data tracking happens in real time. They can see how likes and shares become commodities for advertising. They can look at link backs and engagement and see how sharing works on a publishing platform. We then use the data they've generated through the medium magazine in some of their subsequent research projects. So the fact that the data was proprietary and some might argue has a sort of predatory dimension, we embrace that as part of the learning model for the program and say, well, all right, if we're going to participate in it, let's give our students access to looking under the hood for how the algorithm of an online publishing tool works. Now, doing this kind of work requires a high degree of willingness for us to collaborate and to open up our online and face-to-face learning environments to each other. We cannot, we learned very quickly, become tool experts and our tool experts cannot become sociologists. So we had to figure out how we could collaborate in ways that were meaningful for both of us. And so, for us, that looks like frequent meetings, we meet a lot, we meet a lot. We are also cross-registered in all of each other's online classes, so we are constantly doing real-time virtual teaching evaluations, peer evaluations of each other's online classrooms. Now, for my colleagues who are the learning technologies, technologists, they had the flip side of their own set of incentives. You know how the administration came to us and said, just reimagine everything you're doing, but we won't give you any money. At the same time, the administration goes to our learning technologist and says, hey, what we want you to do is to change everything about the way that academic disciplines work, and we're going to give you a ton of money, but absolutely no authority. Right? We're going to incentivize you to go out and change how everybody across the university is embedding learning technologies in their everyday academic practice, and we're going to give you some money to do that, but we're not going to give you the authority to have any control whatsoever over things like curriculum or faculty or staff, right? So this put us in an interesting position as far as collaboration went. They help us build new tools, modify existing ones, and beta-test it all in sort of this live field of everyday use in the semester, and they're able to do this in part because they have the resources from our academic units, but they do not have faculty governance or authority to shape the context of what we teach, and this actually became really important when we started to realize that this sort of next iteration of sociology of education technology was beginning to ask some deeper questions about learning that become way more complex for faculty instructors to ask of their students. It's things like, how do we make these tools more fair? How do we help students build social capital in digital learning environments? How do we build academic protocols that comply with the new institutional rules and norms? How do we translate things like our students' desire for a good job into an online learning design for diverse students? All of those questions are the real questions, I think, for where ed tech is going, but when the people who are the most deeply knowledgeable about education technologies do not have the authority to influence the curriculum that shapes those education technologies, they can't take on the risk of talking about those really hard things, right? My colleague Tom would love to talk to you about predatory data systems, for example, right? But Tom doesn't have the promise of tenure to do so, right? So part of our collaboration on the ground level was to shape the curriculum for students, but it was also to provide and extend some of the professional courtesies of our respective roles to each other. We do this by co-teaching many of our online courses so that there's both a faculty member and a deep learning expert in the classroom. We try to share the risk or pool the risk of having those really hard ed tech questions. So if we're going to use learning technology as a practice and a theory and an organizational plan in our academic unit, which for our case was sociology, we wanted to do so by keeping a couple of things in mind. Academic units matter because they matter a lot to our students, right? And it matters most to certain kinds of students and this is what I wanted to communicate here today from the sociology of education after about 80 years of this work. Here's what we kind of know and what I think is important for us to keep in mind as we move forward with ed technology and its next iteration. Education matters for some students because of the skills it gives them. And we have become a little better at doing skill development over the past 25 years than we were, I think, in the 25 years prior. But that is not the only thing that education confers to students. Education also has what sociologists call a signaling effect. It can signal to potential gatekeepers that a student has the moral aptitude for work. And that matters. It matters most for students who are not white, male, western, English-speaking, heterosexual and able-bodied. In summary, it matters the most for the non-traditional diverse student who is projected to be the likely traditional college student for the foreseeable future for all of us. If higher education is going to do its work of social transformation, in part educational technology is going to have to shift our understanding of how we can confer both skills and signaling effect to students who need it the most. I think that by grounding learning technology in our academic disciplines we can provide our students more of that signaling to match some of the skill development that has been happening thus far. New research shows that this is just as important to the online environments as it is in face-to-face classrooms. Rachel Baker and her colleagues at the Stanford University Center for Educational Policy Analysis recently did what we call an audit study of some online classrooms at a sample of US higher education institutions. And they found that students who the instructors had identified primarily through their names, had identified as being white and male and were more likely to get more infrequent interactions with the instructor than students with any other race and gender combination. Even in our online environments what we know from academic disciplines like sociology, but also from the humanities, from fields like feminist and gender studies, from fields like black studies and Latinx studies, is that thinking about students in this multi-dimensional way matters not only in our face-to-face learning environments, but also in our online modalities. And sociologically, I can't promise that we can eradicate those realities. But one of the things that happens when we migrate learning technology and ed tech into the disciplines is that the disciplines have some method of checking our biases in this way and how we learn to check our biases should be more embedded in our educational technology. So my provocation for us today is how can those of us who have material investment in ed technology connect to those with the academic legitimacy to transform learning technologies for the students who need it most. Now I've shared a bit about how we approached that at VCU and I'm open to more questions and comments on that, but we have basically grounded our ed technology in our discipline. We have reimagined our disciplinary curriculum and found that doing so improved teaching and learning, especially for our students in our online classes, but I would like to point out it also improved teaching and learning in our face-to-face classes because our students moved between both and so do our faculty. We had to collaborate and continue to have to to innovate new forms of collaboration that are ethical, both for the faculty and for the students. And we do it because we're committed to providing a degree that provides both skill value and signaling value for students from diverse socio-economic statuses and racial and ethnic minority groups need that kind of training and for us not to provide it would be professional malpractice. Now we're still learning, but I do feel confident that a sociology of ed tech and ethos that is more a prescription than a less a prescription or some new field of study is really a healthy thing. It invites us to re-emerge from our areas of specialization to reconsider the context of the work we are doing so that we are never substituting our focus for tools for our focus on serving the public good. I've got a small gift that will only feel like a gift to the nerds in the room but at the end of this I had a long bibliography and reading list of some of the things that I was drawing from and so my research assistant Lauren who is also part of our online digital sociology program has taken it upon herself to put all of those readings into a course pack and has made it available online or she said it would be by the time I was finished with this talk. So there should be a link in my inbox and I'm going to put it in the hashtag on Twitter and share it with the organizers and invite you to read and continue the conversations through some of those readings and discussions and with that I will end and thank you for your time and attention and we're happy to open it up for questions. So thanks very much Tracey. That was an amazing talk and I'm so pleased that I always find it slightly I saw Tracey speak in South Africa once and I was still sort of quoting what she'd done in that presentation then. I always find it slightly chastening to watch Tracey speak because she says all the things that I've been trying to say for her is so much better than I could ever say it. That's what I'm going to say Dan. I'm going to retire now. So thank you very much Tracey. It's so much to dig into there. So we've got some roving mics and we've got some questions. Can I take one? Do you want to do that? I've got one here. I'll just go in order. The first one is and I was also supposed to be doing this. My student would be very mad at me for not telling my contact information and it's also in that we're hiring. I forgot all of that. Has this sort of whole scale reimagining of the curriculum using ed take taken place in other disciplines at your institution? For example, how could it work if you had a question? Yes, a bit. So the uptake of this challenge was mostly taken up by the departments that was sort of the most vulnerable in the institution, which I think should be our takeaway. One of the reasons why you would sort of risk it all to invest all your resources in this sort of endeavor without a blueprint or many resources is precisely because you were trying to sort of invest in the university and the college or place in the college. That was certainly the case for us in the Department of Sociology. We were small. We were a small department and growing and wanted to curry the favor of our administration to show that we were willing to participate in this endeavor. Some departments have less of that incentive. For example, our physics department has absolutely no incentive to play ball with the administration in that way. A lot of that actually in our humanities departments across the university. You see it being taken up by some of our professional disciplines like the Department of Social Work. You see a bit of it in the business schools, but again not so much an engagement with it as a practice. They are much more interested in the tools as a way to sort of augment their students' resumes before they graduate sort of thing and we really did not want to adopt that kind of model. It's a few sub-crossing university. Its adoption has been uneven, but I actually think that has been part of the story of the sort of ed tech role in the modern university for the past 25 years, that it is often taken up unevenly. One, I think it takes a lot of personal interest on the part of those who are participating in it. This is just one of those things. I don't think we're ever going to get to a place where we can convince everyone to participate in adopting education technologies, and I don't even think that should be our goal. I think the last thing I sort of want is somebody who resents the technology being required to use it or teach it. Because then, can you think about what a horrible negative experience that creates for students. So some sort of collaborative buy-in is probably necessary for this thing to work at all, but it would certainly help to have some more material incentives for those who have an interest and don't always have the time to adopt the tools, and that's what we're seeing at the university. So I would say we're out ahead of the curve with about three or four other departments, almost all of them that were in similar situations as we were, the better resource departments lagging tremendously. Hey, Donna. We've been talking to each other for years online. Hey, girl. Through everything you're saying, lots of stuff about power and academia. You shared your power and technology to make this work possible. And what I just heard you say was that is unevenly distributed across. So, what does that mean for students in like the business school who could really benefit from the kind of practices that you all are engaging in in sociology, but who don't have access to it because their faculty have enough power to not engage? Yep. It means a lot of even curriculum development and program development is what it means. I will say that some of this culture does still matter, and I'm a big fan of saying in our program that if we just keep doing a good job at what we're doing, that at some point the sort of culture, the student culture, reputational currency of the program can get to a place that I think students can be incentivized to come over from other departments. And in fact, by the second year of the program access to students and other programs because the demand was so high. Seriously, we had to stop taking students from the education school, from the business school and from the nursing schools where there is an extreme amount of interest in the program because there would not have been enough room left for our sociology students, right? And we would have been running an interdisciplinary program which we just weren't ready to do yet resource-wise. So I think that if we keep doing what we're doing and show the demand for that type of improvement, the culture, the student culture of reputation takes over at some point. Now, whether or not that moves faculty is a whole other question. I do think that it continues to showcase however how important, for example, our learning technologists are as partners in curriculum development and we had not done a good job of that at our university. And many of the universities that I visit and talk about this kind of work with find themselves in the same place where the learning technologists are often followed away from the academic units and there doesn't seem to be a general understanding of their direct value to the academic function either among the administration or the faculty. So a lot of what we're doing is just showcasing the work that people like Tom are able to do when we actually treat them as partners. That's one of the reasons why we sort of highlight that work in my presentations and my research. That's one of the ways that we try to incentivize other faculty to participate in that same sort of collaboration. But it's a lot of soft power, right? There's no direct tool to make people do much of anything in a higher education institution. For good or for bad, it's both. I'm going to try not to be that guy. He says I've got more of a comment than a question. I'm going to try for answers the question. But I thought the point you made about when they gave you no money but the kind of freedom to change stuff. It's that second part that's often really absent. And I think that and I think you touched upon earlier the whole kind of conservative nature of education, particularly as finance comes into it. Is there something we can do to try and make ourselves be more experimental to kind of get, because I think it's that kind of rethinking the curriculum and so we often do the kind of really boring stuff with this kind of quite exciting technology. Is there a way to tackle that? So some of it is, you know, an accident of history, right? So it's being prepared to I think maximize on those moments in the academic institution when it's possible. And that's really all it was. We had a really strong academic leadership at the time that the university was sort of scrambling about to sort of make these decisions about education technology. So we were just able to capitalize on that moment. I do think some of the things that translate to other context are things like as heretical as this might sound, not leading with so much attention and focus to measurement and assessment up front, actually free us to do some of that experimentation, which again, I know, trust me, I'm a social scientist and it also goes against the grain of everything I am as well. That we're supposed to develop systems to count and measure everything up front. And we spend a lot on our analytics and analytics are very important but can sometimes overtake the process of experimentation because analytics, Jeffrey Johnson has this wonderful book about data systems in higher education as translation regimes, he calls them. He says, what can happen is when we adopt a tool to analyze something before we have developed the capacity of what we're analyzing, the tool starts to determine what we'll do, right? When we spend so much time on the analytics up front, before we have developed the context of actually what we're doing, we really just end up building something that will serve the analytical tool. And so because we did not have much of an interest in doing that up front, it did free us up to do more of that experimentation and because we didn't lead in our proposals with something that was going to be very analytical heavy, the college didn't have much expectation of that up front. And so that opened up some space for experimentation but also, I mean, we did a lot of this relying under the radar of the sort of formal administrative. Listen, we do a lot of sort of, you know, p-hacking and underground. I mean, we do. I mean, so I love the ethostill of sort of the original underground open movement not maybe the sort of what it became in some context, but yeah, that idea of just sitting together in a space adopting whatever's possible, breaking it open, seeing what happens, and then we didn't hold each other accountable for the ways those things went awry. I think that is a function of how often we meet as a faculty and a staff to talk about what we're doing, and seeing each other's classroom spaces in real time helps a lot. So when you develop that sort of trust when something doesn't go wrong, we start with what can we do rather than what did the person do. Ah, yes, we've got a few. Okay, so how do you persuade everyone that skills development is crucial to embedded learning design rather than seen as a poor cousin often relegated to non-credit-bearing, parallel activity? Well, if I knew that, would I be here talking to you? I mean, I'd be rich, first of all. You know, no, okay, so how do we persuade? I mean, persuasion. You know, I do think I will come back to the idea of the culture of the thing, and that we can sometimes spend a lot of time, and I get it, the incentives are very strong here. You can spend a lot of time sort of building the apparatus and not quite as much attention to building the culture of the thing that we're doing. I can tell you this. Culture and stories about people's experiences still move money faster than almost anything else in higher education finance. I know analytics is really breathing down our neck, and yes, they can make lots of things happen. But when you have sort of the story of a culture of a place where stories of student impact and sort of faculty impact and experience, those are actually, I think, quite powerful as persuasive tools. So the question here is about persuasion, and persuasion is tough, but I can tell you one of the best tools in our toolkit is telling a really good story about what we're doing and the sort of human dimension of what we're doing. Now, it is always going to be, I think, come secondary to the sort of what we would call in my world the legal legitimacy of the institution, which still cares a ton about things like accreditation and credit bearing activity, because it has to to remain a legal functioning university system. But in most cases, I have found that when we sort of pair our impact on credit bearing that our students do better in their matriculation, cycle through their credit hours more efficiently, learn more when they do so, enjoy their experience more when they do so, that when we show our relationship the culture of what we're doing as and how we impact those sort of credit bearing activities, we tend to tell a pretty good powerful story that I think works for the administration. Again, you know, unevenly so. But stories are still really good for persuasion. And another, unless anyone? All of you have much more comfortable texting questions, by the way. You're like my student, who I now text for everything. Sorry, I have a question sort of bringing us back to some of the logistics of the learning technology, because one of the things that sociology often seems to forget in sort of culture focus is that sometimes you just have to get from point A to point B. And often those sort of journey is going to take you back to sort of reinforcing the existing structure. So Moodle is a great example because it started up as the sort of free conversation center, learner center tool. And ever since for the last 17 years it's always been adding teachers to add more power to the institution. Teachers control what students do, what we know about them, what they can do. But sometimes the students themselves demand, because they want to know, okay, what do I do next, give me a good time. So how does that sort of interaction of those values that you spoke about? I don't have any quarrel with that at all. But how does it interact with just the basic logistics of if you have a VLE, there's only two or three ways of doing it on that many options once you start doing these tools? One of our biggest challenges, it was very surprising to us and we've written about this a bit as a group. There's an article that we did called Vision Among Challenges, right, of talking about the sort of first couple of years we're trying to get the program up and running. One of the things we talk about is how surprised we were by the growing power of the branding and copyright office over our curriculum development, right? This is where we experience this and so I'd like to tell you a little about that. To tell you that we don't have a good answer to that, just that we are constantly struggling with it. So very early on we had adopted again the sort of free-for-all approach, right, like let's throw it all up on the wall, let's see what sticks, let's see what works, right, and this was going to be our approach. So we built this thing and I mean we're picking as many open source tools and materials, some of them I have a whole other conversation about there not being a great depth and breadth of available open tools that were suitable for the type of learning you do in something like social sciences, but we picked as much open stuff as we could, right? One, we again really wanted to embrace the ethics of openness. Two, we wanted to train our students to think about those things in the sort of new digital world to think about what open meant and to have them get skill access to creating open spaces. And we wanted to contribute back to this community where we were borrowing all this stuff from. So we built all this stuff only to have the branding office tell us a couple of weeks after we had gone live with some of the first iterations of our program three fourths of the tools that we had decided to use we couldn't use because they used the wrong shade of blue. Not kidding, right? So they wouldn't be consistent with the university's brand is what they were saying, right? Or that there were things that we couldn't use because they wouldn't give us a waiver for the authentication certificate for our students browsers. Or as they just told us straight up, yes that tool would be better but we've already paid for this one, right? We've got a license for this one so you have to use that. Well, um, well we lie a lot. Well, I wanted to see, I'm trying to say we're still recording. Yeah, so Yeah, I mean this is where collaboration and quite seriously partnerships matter a ton. It's where the depth of knowledge of our learning technologists also mattered a lot for workarounds. But listen, I come from a slightly different institutional background with his actually quite common which is we will build whatever is I now build course shells is what we like to call them and our official learning management system every semester that I will not ever use. Because you want a course shell, we will give it to you and then we are going to go and run the class the best way we think possible for our students. Now some of that is only possible because the program at a certain size continues to fly under the radar but here's what I knew sociologically this is where being a sociologist was actually quite useful. I knew that as long as we were small and under the radar nobody would care then if we become profitable and important enough they might care they can't do anything about it. We just got to live past the tipping point. We just got to live past the tipping point and so that's the space we occupy right now. It totally wouldn't work probably if we were in the business school for example or the medical school where the oversight might be slightly different but also because those departments have way more economic resources they probably wouldn't have gotten nearly as much intrusion about the color blue on their website as we have gotten and in fact we had tons of examples of that very thing that there were larger better resource departments that had been allowed to use all kinds of tools because they were willing to build something on their own service space for example our medical school does that a lot to sort of get around some institutional norms that we couldn't afford to do in the sociology department so the short answer to your question is none of us can get around the fact that we will always end up reifying the existing social hierarchy to a certain extent what we can do and what we do try to do in our discipline is to be honest about that which is not something all departments would do and in at least being honest about that we can develop the capacity for our students to think critically even about ourselves even about what we are teaching them even about the tools we are asking them to adopt so in my classroom that looks a lot like me being very honest with them when we have to do those things I'll say alright you guys are all getting a zoom even though we don't none of us like it the online video conferencing software because the university requires us to do so because they paid for a license and in fact why don't we look at that licensing agreement why don't we make that one of our assignments let's look at what data it gets from us when we use it let's look at what the university paid for for us to use it so it becomes for us part of the learning environment to think very critically about those decisions you're hanging around first the conference there's lots of people big big fans of trustee so she'll be here in the conference I think coffee is waiting for you and I hope coffee is a euphemism at some point for a cocktail so I'm asking trustee another round of applause and next session is at half past thank you trustee I'm John Wilson I'm the CEO at Agenta we're a technology company that focuses on education and learning we build, manage and operate platforms for education for video collaboration externally we prefer to work with what we feel as ethical industries obviously education teaching, learning, healthcare we feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms easy to use platforms secure platforms that people can utilise what we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas by investing in broadband in these local areas we can attract more talent we can attract more companies and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools, within disparate regions, within Scotland