 Can we all know who this is? So it's Amory Scott, and I think we need plenty more than 30 minutes to talk about buying from EdTech, but she says she's going to be able to do this in 20 and then leave time for questions or at least an early exit to get ready for the gala dinner tonight. Thank you, John. Thank you. Hopefully I'll get through this in about 20 minutes. This is a talk I've done a couple of times before at varying lengths in other places, so hopefully I can do this in 20. First of all, I want to acknowledge that a lot of the thinking and work I'm going to talk about here was done while I was in Canada. It was done in a place coated with Kamloops to Shquetwick, the unceded in traditional lands of the Shquetwick Nation, also known as Kamloops British Columbia for those of you who were in my keynote yesterday. Learning has taken place since time immemorial and I think it's important just with the session we just heard to recognise that learning and thinking takes place in a physical location. So, five things you need to know before you buy ed tech. Well, five things I think you need to know before you buy ed tech. This is not going to be a vendor management talk. I'm sorry if that's what you came for and if you work for a vendor, I'm very sorry. You may not like some of the things I'm going to say. But I'm going to talk through five points that I think are important when we think about buying ed tech. And the reason I think they're important is because I hear a lot in the institutions I've worked with and in the work I do for the Government of British Columbia about how does this stuff end up in our institutions? How, you know, suddenly I'm expected to use this digital technology that's just sort of appeared and I don't really know how it appeared and where it came from and what was the process of bringing it into the institution. And when I hear things like that, I start because I'm a senior administrator in institutions. I start to think about, well, you know, what's the, what are the processes by which this stuff comes into our institution and where may be the issues in those processes. So that's really where I started with this, starting to think about why do people have these questions about where stuff comes from and who made the decision. And then as I started to dig into that, I started to think about procurement practice and the extent to which it slightly lives outside our sphere as learning technologists. Some of us might get involved in procurements, but, but it's sort of, you know, it's driven maybe from somewhere else. And I've done quite a lot of work on this with a Canadian colleague, Dr Brandon Clark Gray, who's at Thomson Rivers University, and we have a book chapter coming out on this in HE for good, edited by Laura Chenewich and Catherine Cronan, which I also name checked yesterday. And please look for that when it's out. And it's something we continue to talk about. So what I'm going to talk about today is a kind of work in progress. So this is why I want to have space at the end for a bit of discussion because I've got questions and not all the answers at the moment. OK, so five, five areas that I think are kind of interconnected and fundamental when we think about how ed tech comes to be in our institution. And I'm going to talk a little bit about possible solutions. But this is where I want you also to jump in. So my first proposition, if you like, is that ed tech is big business. And I don't think this should come as any surprise to us. There are a variety of economic influences, economic interests influencing the technologies that we use. You can find updated versions of this slide from Holonica IQ, but it really shows you the investment in venture capital that's been pushed into the ed tech market. Now it's dropping off at the moment, but I would suggest that actually that shift of venture capital into AI and away from ed tech is still in the ed tech space. There are some questions about whether there's a kind of ed tech crash coming. But I think we have to accept that our field has been a space of venture capital speculation. And as the quote I've put on the screen there shows, the people who are speculating in this space are not necessarily aligned in values terms to the same things that we are aligned to. The other thing that influences ed tech markets is our own internal thinking around digital transformation. And I'm glad I'm able to follow on from the previous session for those who were in here. And maybe some of you saw the just session earlier on digital transformation. We as institutions are pursuing digital transformation often as a way to grow our institutions to cope with scale or to think about new groups of learners that might join our institutions and that could be international students, that could be people at a distance, but it could be micro-credentials, it could be degree apprenticeships, it could be whole new products if I can use that phrase. So, I want to talk about supporting growth. So ed tech companies have got a vested interest in influencing us and making markets for their stuff and institutions have got a vested interest in ed tech to support some of these bigger visions about growth and digitisation. My second proposition is ed tech is not a tool. I fundamentally believe that the technologies that we use are a quality assurance matter and that really draws on the concept of entanglement when we think about technology and pedagogy. I cannot abide that diagram on the side. It is complete fabrication. You cannot separate technology and pedagogy from each other. This quote from my colleague, Shan Bain extends on that a little bit. So yes, we need to acknowledge that the two are co-constitutive of each other entangled in cultural, material, political and economic assemblages of great complexity. You can't pick the two things apart. More recent work from another colleague, Tim Fawns, where he has this neat diagram around entangled pedagogies. He again makes the same point that the reality, you know, you've got these two illusions of tech driving or pedagogy driving, but the reality is that they act upon each other all the time. And they're also mixed up with other complex ideas about the purpose of education, the context in which education takes place and the values that we have as educators. So if you believe that technology and pedagogy aren't separate and then you start to think about quality assurance frameworks, we're very good at assessing, very good, sometimes we're very good at assessing the quality of education, but when you look at a lot of quality assurance frameworks, they're looking at the learning and teaching activities and not looking at the technology piece. You look at who does the teaching, you look at what qualifications they have to do the teaching, but you don't look at what technology is used and you don't look at how the technology came into being. So we have this mismatch in our quality assurance practices and if technology can act upon the quality of education and these kind of framing suggests it can, then I think we have a gap. So good use of technology is not as simple as picking the right tool and training people on how to use it and quality assurance processes are not broad enough to really accommodate a proper evaluation of the technologies and that entangled impact. Edtech is not neutral. It is absolutely driven by political ideologies of what education is for and about and it's not an ethics-free zone and I suspect I don't need to tell this community about that, but I'm going to because I've got some slides on it. Edtech is often pushed at us as part of this bigger narrative that we're broken and that we need to be disrupted. I do like to point out proctoring companies who tell us that the value of our degrees will be suspect without their tools that I come from a 400-year-old university that has survived two world wars and that was just the 20th century bit of that university. We are not broken and do not need to be disrupted in the way that we are told, but there is a series of political agendas here about what education is. I mean I think just again in the last session we were talking about the push from the UK government at the moment to present tourism on campus again. There are absolutely political narratives in this space and we see this in the edtech space as well. I'm going to lovely quote from again American and Canadian colleagues about this, financially driven about privatisation of public structures, prepackaged deliverables and technology in a solution in and of itself, this kind of technical solutionism. I think that takes us into kind of interesting spaces when we think about risk. We are now starting to see class action lawsuits in the US, successful class action lawsuits from students who are, yes, this one says, clearly making the case that large-scale use of exam proctoring was a violation of their privacy and indeed the judge in this case found that it was. So students are pushing back on some of our use of edtech and this is my colleague, a link letter who was at the University of British Columbia now BCIT who is being sued by proctorial. He has been in and out of court for the last three years. So not only are our students pushing back on some of the edtech we choose if we don't choose it carefully, use it carefully. If we are critical of it, some companies are coming for us as well. I think there's a whole new market and liability insurance for learning technologists unfortunately. This quote from Neil Selwyn is really interesting because he wanted to do some work on proctoring technologies and it was around the time that proctorial took the action against Ian and various journals wouldn't publish the research that he wanted to education journals wouldn't touch it and it was published in a media journal instead. So there was a chilling effect from that case on research as well. And I think at the point that we are not able to critically examine our own practice in our institution through our own applied research because we are scared of legal action from vendors. It's not a good place to be. So edtech is complicit in these narratives of disruption. It's presented as a solution to all of our problems and ethics, I say, are a structural consideration in one ear of our education. We do a lot of ethics clearance in our research but actually can be a really risky business to engage with in other parts of our organisations. We don't think about ethical approval in our operations in the way that we do in our research and I think the proctoring cases really show us that there is a big gap there. Edtech is killing us. I talked yesterday in my keynote about climate change. You cannot avoid it and technology excess of which edtech is one small part is fueling increasing disadvantage in a climate crisis. We don't talk enough about the intersection between technology and climate and that doesn't just apply to our field. That applies to technology in general, but I think as educators we really do have a responsibility in here for every single one of us whose universities have signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals. I find it quite difficult to think about how you're going to deliver environmentally conscious education and really think about underpinning those goals without thinking critically about the extent to which we need less edtech. So this is again work from Neil Selwyn. This is a screenshot from a presentation he gave to colleagues at Edinburgh, but I really love this question he asks. Is digital education part of a realistic, livable future or even just a survivable planet and if so in what form? Since we've all entered a period of collective madness around AI, if any of you haven't read Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI, I would absolutely recommend it or even just go and find the graphic that was designed in anatomy of an AI, which really shows you the material processes involved in developing an artificial intelligence, the mining of rare minerals to create the data centres and the e-waste that exists at the other end of that process. So yes, how much edtech is too much edtech? I also like to think about where does OER fit when we're trying to be climate conscious? Should we be continually reinventing the wheel or is there a climate conscious argument around OER? I really think there are. In my Canadian context when I think about the relationship of First Nations people to the land and the way they conceptualise that relationship are commitments to decolonisation, which has to include responsible use of natural resources. And then how do we reach some of the most marginalised learners? Particularly again in my Canadian context, in areas that are very poorly served by internet access. But you can apply that to other rural areas in Europe as well. Though I think in Scotland Tyree, the small island of Tyree has the best internet access in the whole of Scotland. There's a couple of other papers which have come out in the last year really starting to push on this that I feel has been pretty slow to really engage with the environmental arguments. So this is a paper that talks about talking about, if you're going to talk about social justice and education you can't really escape the use of minerals and the e-waste and what that means at a global level that our use of digital education is actually impoverishing people or pushing people into dangerous work. And again, if you've read the time article about how Jack GBT was trained on the kind of labour, horrific labour that went into training Jack GBT, and the trauma that that's left behind it, I think that's just another example. And digital literacy is again coming back to, you know, we talk about digital skills. We talk about being able to make critical judgements about our use of technology, but we never go quite as far as that critical judgement about not using technology. It's always a choice between certain types of technology. We don't talk about not using it. And again, we don't talk about, you know, the lives of our phones and the lives of our computers and what they mean in material terms. So should we, when talking about quality assurance area, should we be assessing the environmental footprint of our courses as a design quality assurance like we do with accessibility? And fundamentally, do we need more ed tech? Should we be using more trailing edge technology rather than bleeding edge technology? Which leads me to my final point when I think about the processes and the mechanisms by which this stuff comes into our institution. And I think about all the ways in which ed tech can be problematised. I think our procurement practices are fundamentally broken because we don't have any frameworks to help us navigate this territory. So what's missing? The kinds of things I think you're missing. You know, what's driving procurement? Where did it come from? Was it? Is the market making happening? Did somebody come in and show us something shiny and now we want it? Are we being told all of our peers have it and now we have to have it? Who benefits and what are the costs and let's get real about what the costs are. Can any claims of efficacy that are made actually be validated as the research that underpins the use of these tools? What are the risks of harm to staff and students? Are we going to get sued? Are our students going to sue us and then what about that sustainability piece? What are our obligations to the sustainable development goals and are they real and are they more about more than reducing our turning the lights off at night and reducing our server consumption? And this is a quote I've used in a blog. I finally got it in print fairly recently. I have walked into God knows how many university rooms and seen fair trade tea and fair trade coffee and fair trade sugar. And we think more about the ethics of how we buy teabags on our campus than we do about technology. We assume it's this neutral free zone. But that also gives me hope because that says that there are frameworks that we can use. Frameworks do exist. And if we could create those kinds of frameworks then I think we could start to solve some of this problem. However, I also think there's a bigger problem. That public procurement, public sector procurement is driven by two things, transparency around use of public money. You've got to demonstrate good fiscal practices and also you've got to be fairly competitive. So you're really looking, those are the risks that public sector procurement is trying to manage, that you've spent money wisely, that you've made a good choice, you haven't wasted public money and that you haven't prevented any company from coming forward with a product. But I wonder whether there, well as I've said I think there are other risks we're not managing in here. And it's a huge amount of money that goes into public sector procurement. And I don't know that we're meeting these standards. So I think that we are often measuring what's easy to measure and that we're not assessing risk appropriately. And if I can, I'm going to scoot back actually to Tim's model when I think about, when I think about this piece here, this purposes context values piece. And I think about my experience of procurement and I think about writing requirements specifications and those functional requirements. What's become really clear to me is that those functional requirements are a very, very poor proxy for a set of very complex ideas about what we think education is. And I think about how I used to write some of those RFPs. It was often a case of getting somebody else's who'd done a similar procurement recently and having a look at that and running some workshops and getting whoever was prepared to come forward and tell us what they wanted. But the conversation was often all about features, all about functionality and not about these more complex ideas, purpose, context and values. And I think we have a big gap here in that translation piece from those complex ideas about what we think teaching is and why we do it and what are, what do you think good education is? And then how does that manifest inside ed tech? And I think that is a big problem. I don't have an answer for it though. Let me scoot forward. I need to put that in my slides again. Okay, I do think we have some places that we can go though. I see some things that are giving me some hope. The framework for ethical learning technology that all has worked on I think is a great tool that gives us a place to start that reflective process. I think we need to expand our scope of reflection and I hope that the points of propositions I put in front of you will do that a little bit. But I think if we go through some of this reflective process and just really think about what is driving, what we're doing, why we're doing it, do we need to do it, do we need as much of it, can we embrace something we already have and use it differently? I think we could do more of that kind of thinking. It's also a really fascinating report, I think really fascinating report from London School of Economics which really looks at ed tech procurement, a beyond higher education that looks at the school sector as well. It makes a number of recommendations and a number of final points, but I think there's some really interesting pieces in there about standards. Education stakeholders need standards to understand and choose ed tech products with ease. Not every institution has learning technologists, not every institution is equally provisioned with learning technologists, so there are issues of equity in here I think without some of those standards. I really like some of this stuff around ed tech companies adhering to more frameworks that we put in front of them, policies, terms and conditions within national contexts. We do this a bit in public sector procurement with shared procurement, negotiating terms and conditions, but we could be stronger and this one I found really interesting, ed tech products should be licensed to operate in educational institutions. This I find interesting, there are a few moves towards it in the US, but in the EU and I mentioned this a little bit Machino yesterday this, we're starting to see the beginning of the regulations of the software industry full stop, so some of the work I do in open source I'm looking at the impact of the EU Cyber Resilience Act on open source communities, but that act is going to apply the CE mark to software into digital products, so this is starting to put a safety stamp on software and it's a digital security safety stamp, but it is the star of a regulation for software industry. So I think about models like fair trade, which are to some extent a regulation of labour and working practices in other areas and I think we are going to start to see some of this regulation and licensing coming in and I think we need to be thinking about this and maybe trying to influence it. I'm very worried that educational institutions are not at all interested in the impact of the EU act, they don't seem to understand that it might have big impacts for open science and open research. So I think there are some things on the horizon that are interesting in this space, but there aren't solutions in front of us today, but I think there is when we think about that, do we need more tech? I think we can and we think about our post pandemic cost of living space as well. I think we can also start to maybe shift our own thinking from a culture of excess, which we've had to date, to starting to think about constraints and I really like that this book, it's kind of marketing speak that it's written in, but it says really good things. I like, you know, the tone irritates me, but the content is good. But I really love this quote that don't see constraints as negative things, they're not punishment. They can force us to question, surface and challenge our assumptions and things that might have been reasonable for us to do in the past may not be useful strategic foundations for us anymore. So can we start to think about using less ed tech or using maybe trailing edge technologies in more creative ways by taking that kind of constraints thinking and taking as a design challenge rather than let's just buy a new shiny thing because there's another new shiny thing out there. I think we have a culture of excess and abundance and it's in some people's interests that we do and I don't know but it's always in our interest. So I'm going to stop there, how are we doing for time John? Did I rattle through that? We got seven minutes. Okay that was not too bad, that was rather fast. That really is things that keep me up at night about educational technology but I would be really interested in any questions, comments, thoughts people have. This is a space of evolving thinking for me. I see gaps, I see problems, I see a need for frameworks. I think, am I wrong? Am I right? I would really appreciate people's reactions but I also understand that it's 20 past five so I'm not going to lock you in the room. Any questions? Sure there are. Thank you, that was really really interesting, well wind. Interesting. So my institution is currently in the process of doubling the number of institutional digital education tools that we have and one of the things I found quite frustrating is not knowing what other institutions are using and what their experiences are and I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on that and how we can kind of share our experiences I suppose and the kind of questions that we're asking and the kinds of answers that we're getting so that we're not all just doing the same thing. I think that's a really great question and I'm going to scoot back to a slide with the one with the teabags. So I cannot remember the detail so taken out of this URL. Okay because that article that I managed to get the quote into does talk about a couple of services that exist in the US that do exactly that. It is a kind of place to pool information about what has worked. So I think there would be, whether it's an alt thing, whether it's a GISC thing, whether it's a sector level procurement agency thing, I think it could be in any and all of those spaces but I absolutely agree. I think there could be a place to have a kind of what worked for us database kind of thing where you could capture beyond use cases, something that's tighter and again I think we'd have to have a conversation about what the format of that would need to look like, what would be useful but yes, what worked, what didn't. We bought this and it made this promise and it didn't deliver in this way or it made this promise and it did or we bought it for this reason and then it actually turned out to be really good for that. I think we talk about it, we do lots of presentations that places like alt, we publish stuff out on our own websites but I think yes, a searchable kind of database managed source of that information would be really valuable and there are a couple of models in the US to point to. Kind of falling on from that question, I remember it came up when we were looking like the felt framework was being developed and there was a mention of approved vendors or approved tools and things and that was kind of very quickly not back as no, that's not a kind of valid thing to do at this point and you're right like a database would be great but how can you do something like that and still protect learning technologists and make them feel safe to criticise without being worried about the fallback of that criticism like we've seen, you know, how do we create a database that's sort of being anonymous but still respecting, you know it's not just a Google review with no name on it but you know that you're getting good advice on people without them putting their careers or other things at risk. I think that's where I think that's you make a really great point. I think that's where sector level agencies are important because that's how you can have some anonymity, it's published by an organisation but you're right that behind that is always the threat of a legal action I think and that for me highlights a bigger issue about who's in control of our education system when we are scared to talk about whether something works for us or doesn't work for us because we're scared of legal action. Who's running the university at that point and if you don't know, I'm a colleague Ben Williamson from Edinburgh and some of some of his colleagues who research in this particular space, they're digital sociologists who research in the extent which fat-formatisation of at the education system is really starting to exert a governing control and a behavioural control on education systems so we're definitely going to look at his work but I think you highlight a really interesting tension, our freedom to speak on this stuff but at a basic level I think this is where sector level organisation can provide some of that anonymity and can do some of that quality assurance piece of you know weave check so that somebody bona fide from within the education system you know but we're not going to put their name on it but this hasn't come in from left field from somewhere else as well so there's a sort of gate keeping effect there but yes the extent to which somebody is prepared to do that and take the potential legal risk is also I think a question. Final question perhaps. I'm full of doom. Yesterday and today I'm full of doom. It's cheery kind of doom I think. I just want to say thank you first of all it was really eye-opening to a certain extent the information that was discussed there so in the institution I work for the Open University UK I'm a learning designer in the STEM faculty so when we do certain design sessions that involve tools for example and we're thinking about third party tools that aren't owned or kind of developed in-house then we often go through a set of questions with module teams so for example does the tool share user information with others you know has the tool been tested for accessibility what are the values of the company that make the tool etc but it kind of inspired me to think about do we do that for the tools that are currently being used I'm not sure if we do or not and I think that's a useful kind of point of reflection for me to take back in terms of how I initiate that conversation with my seniors and so on so yeah I just wanted to thank you for that. No thank you I think that's a really that's a really great point we have and I say this is somebody who is a bona fide advocate for open source we tend to use open as a shortcut for goods and I don't think that a bill was as either and it certainly falls down again in a decolonial context and my Canadian context but yes I think we have to recheck our assumptions in all cases and you know what you've explained there in terms of the kinds of questions you use you have a standard rubric for this stuff I think about my training in data protection and the kind of legitimate interest balancing tests that you use so it's not a black or white answer it's what is the common good versus the impact on individual privacy and you weigh that up to determine if you've got a legitimate interest to use that data we could use those sorts of frameworks and thinking for AI and the potential harms versus potential benefits massive environmental and IP and horrible harms over here massive potential for accessibility over here when do we use AI and when do we not use AI or generative AI in particular I think there are things we've already got which if we could just tweak them a little bit we'd service quite well in that space I do think these frameworks are within our grasp if we choose to knuckle down and do the work we've got we've got more things to follow so I think that's a really great point thank you I'm afraid we're probably out of time oh yes go and have a gala dinner and don't listen to me do anything anymore thank you so much