 stopped. And as if by magic the recording started again. That's great. We'll thank you everybody that's been to the previous session and we're now moving on to our next speaker, obviously just to say another thank you there to Vvox who are sponsors for this session. I'm just going to get ready and upload the slides. Bear with me a second. And we'll be moving on to John Traxler and Matt Smith, although I think it's just John that's given the talk today that I'm sure he'll let us know. I'm just going to get his slides ready for you. And there we go. Okay, then John I'm going to pass over to you. Okay, thank you. Am I audible? You are audible. I can hear you. Right, that's all I need. And I can advance my slides, can I? You should be able to, yes. Right, okay. Well, thanks very much for the opportunity to talk to everyone. I'm not sure if the slides are legible, but I've actually annotated them extensively. So if anyone wants a much fuller copy that's legible on whatever side of the screen you've got, then just ask. Okay, it's supposed to start. Essentially, I'm reporting on a project that was commissioned by DFID, but mainly reflecting on the amount of thought and concern that it gave rise to. Ostensibly, it was about the role of learning technology in supporting education through crisis. And clearly the crisis in question is COVID-19. And I'm reporting on behalf of my colleagues Matt Howard and Sarah. And we were working with, well, it was the DFID EdTech Research Hub. Now it's not DFID and now it's not research and all of the politics around that probably tell you something just that I'm not quite sure at the moment what they tell you. So let me move that up. Okay, so some brief background to our project. It was commissioned about three months ago and we've just finished the first report. And they asked us to think about in the context of COVID-19, but also it's aftermath, you know, the so-called new normal we hear so much about and know so little about. Digital responses that would support the continuity of education systems. Sounds easy. And digital responses that would ameliorate the impact of COVID-19 of those responses. And that's where it gets rather more tricky. So clearly we can do a lot using digital technology to support education systems, but we then get concerned about people who already dropped through those education systems. And this was our major concern thinking this through. How the responses to COVID-19 actually further disadvantaged the disadvantaged. And we can kind of unpack what that might mean in terms of different cultures, peoples, communities, constituencies, and so on. The DFID phrase is marginalized. They have a language of their own and they have a style guide to go with it. And the readership was intended to be decision makers, local and national, and with and without good infrastructure. So it's kind of a muddled brief and they also mentioned early on something about South North reverse learning. Originally the idea being that what we would learn from initiatives in the Global South would help schools and systems in the Global North. As that actually isn't DFID's brief, I think that must have got dropped fairly quickly. One of the challenges clearly given that readership, the one about decision makers, was actually thinking about what they could as it were actually here. It's quite easy, well certainly very easy for me to get off on a rant, but I'm very conscious that they wouldn't hear that. And furthermore we needed to talk about what they could actually action rather than what sounded like motherhood and apple pie. We all need more teacher development so well. Okay, so that's some of the background. Ah, the methods. A systematic literature review, which is fairly straightforward. I mean it's, you know, supposedly objective and you work to a cookbook. And then some some Delphi sessions with a range of experts representing different kinds of expertise. So what in this instance I called minorities, which was someone with experience of working with Roma, with working with the San in the Mibia, with Australian Aborigines, with the Cree in Northern Canada and so on. And that was partly because I suppose the literature review, as it were, allowed us to read the papers we discovered to read the lines, but we were hoping the experts would allow us to read between the lines. And I think they did. And then some case studies that might have thrown some light on what we were getting. So that was that was how it was set up. Maybe the practice was slightly more complex. I mean, apart from anything else, I was conscious of if you like structure or difficulties, that the systematic literature review is likely to hit the usual suspects. You know, if you search on mobile learning global south, there's a fair chance you'll get as many hits as everyone else is getting and still have a lot of trouble digesting them. And I guess that resonated with a concern that a bearing in mind that everyone and their uncle is doing this stuff at the moment. You know, let's go DFID, USAID, IDRC, and various other bits of DFID that we could all be fishing in the same pool and not only duplicating our effort, but but enforcing a kind of group think, you know, getting involved in a kind of international development. But a more practical level, it was actually really quite difficult to get what we were looking for from abstracts, you know, depending on the breadth of the search terms, you might have 3000 hits or 300. But if at some point you've still got to read them through for what you really want to know. Certainly in international development, what you hear a lot of is the phrase unexpected consequences, and I happily provide examples of that, and multi causality. So that means if we were looking for successes that might have some relevance and transferability, the literature or even the reasoning behind it wouldn't actually tell you what caused that success. And actually also there's other biases at work, the bias in favor of success. You know, people by and large don't get promoted on the basis of their failures, which is why they don't write about them. And then a bias in favor of academic authors rather than activists, program managers, people on the ground, for example, whose funding is not around academic dissemination, it's around getting the job done. There is also, of course, a global pressure to write in English, because otherwise your university doesn't go up the international rankings. And what you're looking at when you're looking at research findings is what it was that funders chose to fund. So in a sense it's filtered by the research, by the funders' preferences as well as anything else. And then finally, in a more kind of philosophical sense, the marginalized are what is often called the hard to reach. And that's a kind of double whammy in the sense that they're not only hard to research about, but then there's hard to help. So they're kind of doubly disadvantaged by the nature of their hard to reach. Other people, well, myself included, might say that institutions like us are hard to reach, and what international development calls the last mile in terms of communication is actually the first mile if you look at it from the other end. So there's a lot of kind of language at work here that's problematic when you're trying to do something useful and practical. So did we have any findings? Yeah. Well, actually, one of the findings was the extent to which culture and context were overriding, paramount. But also, of course, by their nature, culture and context are incompletely documented. So if you're looking for causes somewhere buried in context and culture, you probably wouldn't find them because probably there had been research recognized or dotted. So in looking at what might work somewhere else, it's very difficult to see in a clear cut way what it was you could transplant, what idea, what technique could be abstracted from one situation and dropped into another. And I suppose actually on that basis, you could argue that the workings of multi-causality might mean actually it's just as useful as someone about failures as it is to tell them about successes. I guess you don't really know what caused either of them. Systematic introduction to reviews are hard work. Oh, sorry, I didn't manage to advance that slide. Right, I have done. Not that there's very much on that one. And finally, I hate to bite the hand that feeds me. Academic writing is really difficult to plod through when you're looking for something specific. Okay, but I suppose more importantly, and what might be more interesting than hearing about report, is what if you like, I'd seen as the emergent dilemma, I've hinted at it earlier, that responses to sustaining education systems risk increasing the disadvantage of those egged by them or oppressed by them or failed by them. And you can unpack that list. It might be nomads and indigenous peoples who national education systems are trying to sedentarize, or they might be people like the sand in Namibia who don't speak the nationally approved language. And that's making me think of, sorry, there was a program, but there was a film about Australian average in this called something like mile long rabbit fence, which makes that point about putting kids into state education systems. And there might be the disabled or people excluded from schools, but actually bearing in mind that most education systems only address primary education. This means that most people are in that category of being marginalized because most of them are not in those school systems, which in most countries in the global south stop at primary. So yeah, we were very concerned about how do you support education systems without actually exacerbating disadvantages of those people outside them. Did we have any answers? Not so easy. I mean, I suppose we'd make the point that actually many people in formal education systems, parents, learners, officials, teachers are actually inside the system and outside the system as well. And so they might on one hand engage with what DFID and the donors and the agents or ed tech, which basically seems to mean those systems like an LMS that are dedicated and sold specifically for working in formal education systems and inhabit that world of informal digital technologies. And so, yeah, one of our first observations was, as I've said here, most people have mobile access mobiles and through them, they're the portal, especially in the global south, to social media web 2.0, which have all sorts of benefits, bearing it of course that there are always people without those technologies. But those technologies are owned, quote unquote, familiar, accessible, controlled by everyone. And the technologies we're talking about, and it varies from culture to group to group, might be WeChat, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and maybe a greater level of sophistication, WordPress or Wikipedia. And maybe they underpin both formal education systems in a semi-permeable way, and the rest of real life where everyone is using them all the time. And our argument is that people are using these technologies to create images, ideas, opinions, information, to create those, to discuss them, to transform them, to consume them, and that actually ought to have some value, especially as it is incredibly robust. I mean, maybe in the literal sense in the global south, many mobile network operators have base stations with a mountain on a truck. So depending on the nature of the emergency, you can suddenly create a mobile network where there wasn't one. So most people do have that experience. And I suppose we make the point that actually in generating their own eyes and images and discussing them, they're generating, well in the words of Star Trek, learning, but not as we know it, Captain. And it may not be good learning. They may all be telling each other the earth is flat. And so our recommendation is actually to try and support that, develop it, coach it, because it is highly resilient and it is universal and it is familiar. And to look at the ways in which many pedagogues, which are maybe very, very familiar to ALT and the community out there in the UK, for example, how those pedagogues could be adapted. And we're thinking about Hurtigog, yourself directed learning badges, e-portfolios, using game mechanics, curating and critiquing online resources, and asking governments to see if they can, in their own local context, and with their own communities, reach out and look at ways those could be blended, integrated, taken over, appropriated in ways that would reach out to work alongside with all of those communities that are marginalised and disadvantaged. That is kind of the last slide, unless there's one that says thank you. No, there isn't one that says thank you. I'll say thank you in that case. And I'll stop and take questions if that's okay. That was really interesting. Thanks, John. And I didn't even need to put up all of my little five minute warning signs or anything so well to time. That's because I gabbled so much. Thank you very much. That was really, really interesting. I'm just having a quick look at the chat now to see whether or not there are any specific questions. There were a few comments that were coming in there, but I think it was a really, really great talk. I just, Sarah's put a comment on there. We've had good experiences using Rachel to support connectivity in rural areas. And she's put a link in there and wondering if anyone's used anything similar. I don't know if you're familiar with that one, John. That's not something I'm familiar with, but thanks for sharing the link. I think my answer would be irrelevant. And my question would be, are the communities in question familiar with it? Are they confident? Do they own it? Have they got control of it? And, admittedly, there is probably some, well, very, very large gray area between, if you like, a kind of polarised account of informal digital learning and what's inside the edtech bubble or the dedicated professional edtech community. So, yeah, I mean, the more we can put out there, the better. But if it's grabbed by the people in question, then fine, that's great. That's what we want. But if not, then forget it. Yeah. Yeah, John, I kind of impose it. And Taskin's made a comment there just to say that she's from edtech hub, and she found her talk very interesting and refreshing. She works a lot on decolonising edtech and online learning. So, that was one of our issues as well about the momentum. Sorry, I mean, what we hear from USAID and UNESCO and DFID just all to a greater or lesser extent, because of the, I guess, the political drive for scale, meaning cost-effectiveness and sustainability, meaning cost-effectiveness, is a kind of default to broadcasting the cheapest content, which turns out to be content in American English. And, you know, so that's not kind of what you could, so you can then put that into the kind of bag of recolonisation. And so, the communities most at risk from that are clearly the ones marginal to corporate global north. And so, yeah, we mentioned decolonisation. And part of our problem is, if you go back to the remarks about the hard to reach, that actually before we start worrying about, are we supporting a decolonised learning, is needing decolonised research methods to engage with these people to find out what it is they need or want. You can't use colonised research methods to find out about decolonising education. It sounds a paradox. It's very true. Well, that's, there's a lot of support in the room for this conversation to continue by the look of it. And if you have a look, their taskings also shared her email address with you, if you would like to get it. I think Taskin, you're doing one of the talks today as well, aren't you? So, oh, there we go. Different, slightly different email address that she shared for you. But, yeah, we can put you in touch afterwards if need be. But, yeah, thanks very much. So, thank you for everybody that's commented in the comments. I don't think that I've missed any specific questions, but we do have a couple of more minutes if there are any. And big thank you to both of our presenters today and to also to Matt as well who was presenting in a supportive way by dealing with all of the questions there for Wendy. So, big thanks to Wendy and thanks to John. And thank you to all of our lovely participants. Great to see so many people here. And really good start to our day, day one of our old scene summits. So, I'll pop the set of slides up there. And if you could all thank in the usual way, I can see lots of some clapping going on and some smiley faces. I always love it. Oh, here we go. Taskin's just coming there quickly. John, if you could do this research exactly how you want, what would you change? Oh, great question there to get in at the last minute there. Did you catch that, John? So, put you on the spot. Not, well, sorry, maybe. Oh, sorry, this is the question about, you know, if you could start all over again. Yeah, how would you get there if you weren't starting from here? We won't ask that question, actually. No, sorry, I don't. Implicitly tasked to say something original. So, maybe we ought to have ignored the literature completely. Excellent. Well, it looks like you and Taskin are going to have a lot of conversations to have later. Excellent. Great stuff. Well, thanks, everybody. There's my timer going off. So, I'm going to stop recording now. And then I think the next session is starting in the next couple of minutes. So, I'll say bye-bye for now. And you will soon. Thanks, John. Thanks, Wendy.