social media | Open World

social media | Open World
Open World
Lorna M Campbell
It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to share an end of year reflection in January, I always intend to do this in December, but it never happens, so January it is. I’ve been in two minds whether to write one this year though because 2024 did
not
go as expected.
View from the ward
At the beginning of the year I woke up one morning and couldn’t feel my hands properly. That was the start of the rapid onset of a bewildering and debilitating range of symptoms. After numerous scans, tests, and two hospital admissions, I was eventually diagnosed with a
rare autoimmune disease
. It’s not curable, but it is treatable, with a lot of medication and mixed success.  I’ve been lucky to be more or less fit and healthy for most of my life, so to suddenly lose the ability to do so many things that I previously took for granted has been challenging to say the least.  I can no longer dance, sew, or wear my fancy shoes, writing is a challenge, walking is slooooow some days, and traveling any distance without assistance is difficult. Having to slow down has forced me to recenter and I’m still trying to figure out what life will be like from this point on, who I’ll be when I can no longer do so many of the things that make me who I am.  There’s very little data about how this condition is likely to progress, hopefully things will improve once we get the medication right, but who knows?  I’m just trying to take it as it comes.
Despite all of the above, I’m still working with the
OER Service
at the University of Edinburgh. I’m immensely grateful to my colleagues for their support, and to my managers who have put adjustments in place to enable me to keep working from home. I really miss going over to the office in Edinburgh, but the four hour round trip is beyond me for the time being. I never thought I’d miss that Scotrail commute but here we are.
OER24 Conference
MTU Cork
At the beginning of the year, before things took a turn for the worse, I went to the OER24 Conference in Cork with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto, to present a paper on
Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education
.  It was great to be there with Mayu and there was a lot of interest in her experience as a student working with the OER Service. The highlight of the conference for me was undoubtedly Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz’s inspiring keynote,
The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at the crossroads
, which explored their own lives and experiences as open educators and the possibilities generated by their profound and timely
Higher Education for Good
.  You can read my reflection on the the conference here
OER24: Gathering Courage
. Also! MTU has some really interesting architecture.
Their Finest Hour
Their Finest Hour
project came to an end in June with the launch of the University of Oxford’s
online archive
of 25,000 new stories and artefacts from the Second World War, all of which have been shared under open licence.  I’m very proud that our
Edinburgh collection day
gathered and contributed 50 stories and many hundreds of photographs, thanks to the incredible work of project intern Eden Swimer.  You can read Eden’s thoughtful reflection on his internship here
Reflections on ‘Their Finest Hour’
.  I nominated Eden for an ISG Recognition Award in September and was delighted that he won the award for
Student Staff Member of the Year
Learning Analytics
A fair chunk of my time last year was taken up with setting up and acting as business lead for a new learning analytics project. As part of the university’s
VLE Excellence
programme, the project aims to identify the learning analytics data available in Learn and other centrally supported learning technology applications, and enable staff and students to access and use it to support their teaching and learning.  It’s a long time since I’ve been involved in anything related to learning analytics so it’s been interesting to get my head back into this space again, particularly as the project is focused on empowering staff and students to access their own learning analytics data..
EDE to DSDT
In October we had a small restructuring at work and my team moved from Educational Design and Engagement (EDE) into a new section, Digital Skills, Design and Training (DSDT). I’ve really enjoyed working in EDE over the last 5 years, and we’ll continue working closely with many of the services there, but I’m also excited about the opportunities the new section will bring.  I’m particularly looking forward to working with our Wikimedian in Residence again and exploring new open textbook projects with our Graphic Design Team.
AI and the Commons
I’ve been dipping my toes back into the murky waters of ethics, AI and the commons and have written a couple of blog posts on the ethics of AI in relation to
OER
and
contested museum collections
All the other stuff…
Because my health has been so ropey, I’ve had to step back, hopefully temporarily, from most of the additional voluntary work I do, including assessing CMALT, sitting on award panels, contributing to City University of London’s MSc in Digital Literacies and Open Practice, and attending policy events.  I really miss the connections these activities used to bring so I’ve been trying to focus more on reconnecting through social media networks….
…which has been “interesting” given the hellscape of most social media platforms these days. I’ve barely used facebook for over a decade, though I still have an account there, primarily for finding last cats (long story). Twitter was always my main social media channel, I’ve had an account there since 2007, and it’s where I found my open education community. Seeing twitter degenerate into a fascist quagmire has made me so angry, however it was still a wrench to leave.  In March we mothballed the femedtech account, I stepped back from my own account later in the year, before finally deleting it. This was one of my last retweets. It seems fitting.
I’ve been slowly migrating to
Bluesky
and
Mastodon
over the course of the year and it’s been great to start building new and old communities there. I like the different pace of the two platforms.  Bluesky feels like the place to keep up to date with news and events, while Mastodon provides space for slower, quieter, thoughtful conversations.
This enforced slowing down, together with the changing social media landscape, has also prompted me to start blogging again. I hadn’t abandoned this blog completely but I’d definitely got out of the habit of writing here regularly. It’s been good to take the time to think and reflect again, and to try and express some of that reflection in words. At the end of the year I wrote a post about
Slowing Down
which really seemed to strike a chord with people. Across all these different spaces, it feels like little dormant shoots of community are reemerging. We need these human connections now more than ever.
Beginnings and Endings
On a personal level September was a month of beginnings and endings. My daughter went off to university and it’s been great to see her stretch her wings and find her people. It’s also been illuminating to see the university’s systems from the student side.
In September we had to say goodbye to our beloved cat Josh.  He was magnificent, and he was my best boy, despite his habit of going round the neighbourhood scrounging for food and pretending to be a stray. He turned up twice on a local lost cats facebook group.  The shame.  I miss him terribly.
Josh 2014 – 2024
I also had to say goodbye to our family home in Carriegreich on the Isle of Harris. This was my grandparents and then my father’s home and I spent a lot of time here during my childhood.  This is where I learned how to cast a line, set an (illegal) net and row a boat, collect the eggs and feed the sheep, tell a guillemot from a razorbill, pick up Russian klondykers on the ancient shortwave radio, and keep an eye out for the grey fishery protection vessels sliding out of the mist.  It’s where I spent hours wandering over the croft and the shore lost in other worlds. I very rarely remember dreams, but I still dream about this house and this shore.  We had hoped to visit the house one last time, but sadly that wasn’t possible because Josh was so unwell.  We said goodbye to Josh and to Carriegreich within the week.
Carriegreich
To try and make some sense of where I am now, I’ve been re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s
Tehanu
.  It’s always been one of my favourite Le Guin books, I love the writing and the pacing and the fact that it centres the experiences of an older woman finding her place and her power in a changing world through the different phases of her life.
“Tenar sighed. There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.”
I’m not sure what I’ll be doing next, but I am sure there will always be something to be done.
I’ve been thinking a lot about slowness and refusal; in technology, in practice, in life more generally.
Slowness and refusal was the focus of an Edinburgh Futures Institute Contested Computing event earlier this month on
Imagining Feminist Technofutures
, with Sharon Webb, Usha Raman, Mar Hicks, and Aisha Sobey. In a wide ranging discussion that questioned the dominance of techno-solutionism, the biases and inequalities that are encoded in technology, and the role of education in countering these historical structures of dominance, the panel touched on feminist refusal and the importance of “slowing down” development cycles in order to hold tech companies to account and give corrective measures and ways of refusal a chance to thrive. Slowing down can be seen as a form of progressive innovation, a way to offer resistance, and academia is a space where this can be brought to life.
(I couldn’t help thinking about my own domain of open education where there has always been a tendency to privilege techno-solutionism as the height of innovation. Going right back to the early days of learning objects, there has been a tension between those who take a programmatic, content-centric view of open education, and those who focus more on the affordances of open practice.  Proselytising about the transformative potential of
generative AI education
is just the latest incarnation of this dichotomy.)
Recognising the value of refusal brought to mind a point Helen Beetham made in her
ALT Winter Summit
keynote last December, which I’m still thinking about, slowly.
Helen called for universities to share their research and experience of AI openly, rather than building their own walled gardens, as this is just another source of inequity.  As educators we hold a key ethical space.  We have the ingenuity to build better relationships with this new technology, to create ecosystems of agency and care, and empower and support each other as colleagues.
Helen ended by calling for spaces of principled refusal within education. In the learning of any discipline there may need to be spaces of principled refusal, this is a privilege that education institutions can offer.
During the Technofutures event, Sharon Webb asked “where is the feminist joy we can take from these things? How can we share our feminist practice and make community accessible?”
This is a question that Frances Bell, Guilia Forsythe, Lou Mycroft, Anne-Marie Scott and I tried to address in the chapter we contributed to Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin’s generative book
Higher Education for Good
“HE4Good assemblages: FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education”
explores the creation of the FemEdTech quilt assemblage through a “slow ontology of feminist praxis”. Quilting, and other forms of communal making, have always provided a space for women to share their skill, labour and practice on their own terms outwith the strictures of capitalist society and institutions that seek to exploit and appropriate their labour.  These are also a space that necessarily invite us to slow down.  Contributors to the FemEdTech quilt were
“compelled by the process to decelerate, helping them to curate, to stitch, to draw, to write, and to think. We acknowledge the pressures of the time: being creative in neoliberal times is itself a form of resistance.
Resistance requires radical rest (rest for health, rest for hope). The slow ontology of the assemblage required waves and pauses which allowed space to think. This may be the most crucial resistance of all in an industrialised HE which fills every potential pause with compliance activity. Feminists create, feminists resist, and feminists celebrate difference.”
This is how we can share our feminist joy; by decelerating, by sharing our feminist practices and making our communities accessible, through networks like
FemEdTech
Of course it’s difficult to disentangle the process of sharing practice and building community from the technology, and particularly the social media, that mediates so much of our lives. The exodus of users from X to Bluesky at the end of the year promoted some interesting conversations on Mastodon about the role of different social media platforms.  I particularly appreciated this
conversation
with Robin de Rosa and Kate Bowles about the ability of Mastodon to provide a space for “big thinking” and slowing down.
I’ve been forced to embrace slowness on a more personal level this year as a result of serious ongoing health issues.  Its been a salutary reminder that although our practice is mediated by technology, it is still
embodied
and that ultimately it’s that embodiment that governs our ability to work, create, and contribute to our communities.  I’m still trying to figure out what all this means on both a personal and professional level; how to make slowing down and refusal a conscious progressive act, and to find the joy in embracing radical rest for health and hope.  Like the FemEdTech quilt and network, it’s a slow process of becoming.
Social Media Dream Team, CC BY Lorna M. Campbell
Last week the
ALT Conference
took place in the magnificent McEwan Hall at the University of Edinburgh.  Chaired by Melissa Highton, Keith Smyth and Louise Jones, the conference was a huge success, thanks in no small part to the ALT Team, and a large number of volunteers from across the ALT community.   As Martin Weller pointed out in his blog post,
The Meticulous Informality of ALTC
, it takes a lot of hard work and expertise to make running such a big conference appear so effortless.  And as always, it was a real pleasure to be able to contribute to the conference as part of the ALTC Social Media Dream Team.  I even got a badge this year!
I’ve written before about my experience of livetweeting the ALTC keynotes, and how it differs from tweeting from my own personal account.  When I’m providing formal social media coverage I also have a different experience of actually participating in the conference, and listening to the keynotes in particular.  I tend to be so focused on listening, summarising and typing, that I often get to the end of the keynote and realise that I can barely remember even half of what the speaker has said! So it’s really useful to me to be able to look back over the livestreams and the tweets and to read all the post-conference blog posts to fill in the gaps.
One of the things that really struck me this year was how closely all three keynotes focused on the key conference themes of Data, Dialogue and Doing.
Revisiting the affordances and implications of interconnectedness and socially mediated publicness
– Sue Beckingham, Sheffield Hallam University
Sue set the scene with a wide ranging opening keynote covering the long history of the myriad technologies that collect and process our data in various ways, shapes and forms; from the panopticon to the Echo Dot, via keystroke tracking, store cards, VLEs, facebook and the invisible algorithms of the web.  Sue asked how many of us read the terms of service of the websites and apps we sign up to? How many of us know how our data is being used?
Sue also highlighted the pros and cons of engaging with social media. Twitter can be toxic, filled with disinformation, misinformation and fake news, but it can also be invaluable for promoting research, disseminating crisis communications, highlighting achievements, and building community.  Sue stressed that it’s no good banning social media, we need to have meaningful conversations with students about how their data is being used. And we also need to ensure that those who are marginalised from our education communities are accepted, wanted and drawn in.  Sue quoted
Fosslien and West Duffy
who define “diversity as having a seat at the table, inclusion as having a voice, and belonging as having that voice be heard”. Social media can enable diverse voices to be included and heard but we need to be cognisant of how our data is being used by these platforms.
Sue Beckingham, CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology
Watch Sue’s keynote
Critcal Pedagaogy, Civil Disobedience and Edtech
– Jessie Stommel, University of Mary Washington
Jessie picked up on many of the themes Sue introduced.  Within a framework of critical pedagogy and digital agency he explored the interfaces between agency, data and technology, and how the tools we use as educators influence our relationship with our students.  Jessie urged us to ask hard questions of vendors and to engage students in this critical evaluation.  What assumptions about learning and teaching does a tool make? What data does it collect? Who has access to it? Is it accessible? To visually impaired, to introverts, to extroverts?
Jessie argued that while some tools can be hacked to good use, others have bad pedagogy baked in and are problematic to the core.  It was no surprise that the tool he chose to shine the spotlight of critical evaluation on was Turnitin.  It’s easy to critique Turnitin from many different perspectives, not least of which is that it effectively has a monopoly on student writing, with a staggering 98% of UK HE institutions subscribing to its services.  Jessie highlighted Turnitin’s problematic Terms of Reference but, perhaps more importantly, he also argued that Turnitin has suspicion of students baked into it and entrenches the belief that students are not to be trusted.
“We are opting in to a culture of suspicion of our students and Turnitin enables this.”
Jessie reminded us that our students are human beings not data assets.  We need to trust our students, to learn from and with them, and we need to believe what they tell us about how they learn.  Throughout his keynote Jessie returned again and again to Paulo Friere and bell hooks with their focus on learning as a space of wonder and marvel and the importance of generating excitement, joy and pleasure in education. Quoting bell hooks Jessie reminded us that
“If we’re not talking about joy we’re doing something wrong.”
Jessie Stommel, CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology
Watch Jessie’s keynote:
Learning, Teaching and Technology
– Ollie Bray, The Lego Foundation
Ollie certainly brought excitement and joy to his keynote when he handed out packets of Lego to the entire audience and challenged everyone to make a duck in 40 seconds! We ended up with as many different ducks as delegates, but Ollie pointed out that every duck was meaningful to the person who made it. Furthermore, the activity itself was meaningful because it was actively engaging, socially interactive, iterative and joyful. These are typical characteristics of a playful experience and they are also characteristics of an excellent learning experience.
Ollie challenged us to think about how we could reimagine learning as it could be, while still working within the distinct boundaries of our education systems and social contexts.  Creative skills are highly contextual and it’s important to develop personalised skills that suit specific needs.
Picking up on another of Jessie’s themes, Ollie noted that we hear a lot about learning
from
our students, but less about learning
with
them. If we want young learners to be creative, we need children and adults working together in co-creative learning teams.   Despite the rhetoric that AI will “solve” education, solving complex problems comes down to people, pedagogy and leadership.
40 second Lego duck challenge, CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology
Watch Ollie’s keynote:
One of the things I loved about Ollie’s keynote was that it rippled out beyond the bounds of the conference.  Lots of delegates took the Lego duck challenge home and posted pictures of ducks made by their families.  These are the ducks my family made.  I’m sure they’re meaningful to them somehow :}
Meaningful ducks? CC BY Lorna M. Campbell
[This post was previously posted on the
ALTC
website.]
What to expect from the ALT Conference’s social media channels and how to get involved.
The ALT Conference is almost upon as and we’re looking forward to welcoming delegates to the city and University of Edinburgh.  Edinburgh is a wonderful city to visit at any time of the year, but we appreciate that traveling to attend conferences is not always practical or possible, so in order to ensure that the conference is as accessible and inclusive as possible, ALT provides a range of online channels to enable you to participate in the conference remotely.  Frances Bell has already written a really helpful
post
on how to participate in the conference online.
In addition to watching the ALT conference
livestream
, and signing up for
VConnecting
sessions, you can engage with the conference through ALT’s social media channels and the
#altc
hashtag, which is already hotting up as delegates prepare for the conference.
The ALT Conference has always had a really lively and engaging social media presence, which draws in participants from all over the world. I’m delighted to help facilitate this as part of ALT’s social media team, along with partners in crime Rich Goodman (
@bulgenen
), from the University of Loughborough, and photographer Chris Bull (
@chrisbull1980
).  My role is to livetweet the conference keynotes from ALT’s official twitter account
@A_L_T
, while Rich will be tweeting Chris’ photographs, which really capture the buzz and energy of the conference.  You can see Chris’ pictures from last year’s ALT Conference on ALT’s
flickr
channel, and in keeping with ALT’s strategic commitment to openness, they’re all Creative Commons licensed.
CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for the Association for Learning Technology on
flickr
I’ve written several
blog posts
over the years about my experience of live tweeting the ALT conference, and in my
CMALT portfolio
I reflected on the difference between tweeting for ALT in an official capacity,  and tweeting from my own personal account:
Live tweeting in an official capacity for events such as the ALT Conference requires a different approach to live tweeting from my own personal account.  When I live tweet on behalf of an event organiser I try to keep my tweets as factual, neutral and representative as possible. It’s important not to misrepresent the speaker or inadvertently tweet anything that might bring the organisation into disrepute.  If I’m tweeting personally, I tend to tweet the points that interest me, adding my own thoughts and comments along the way.
The ALT Conference has a justifiable reputation for the quality of its keynotes, and this year is no exception.  Although it can be a little daunting, it’s a real privilege to livetweet such inspirational speakers.
It’s hard to overestimate the influence Sue Beckingham (
@suebecks
) has had on the learning technology community in the UK, through her blog Social Media for Learning, the weekly
#LTHEchat
twitter chat, and the open online course
Bring Your Own Device for Learning
. Sue brings a nuanced and critical approach to the use of social media in teaching and learning and is generous in sharing her practice and experience with the community.
I heard Ollie Bray (
@olliebray
) speaking many years ago when he was Head Teacher at Kingussie High School and I remember being really intrigued by his inspirational approaches to teaching and learning and innovative use of technology and social media, so I’m really looking forward to hearing about and livetweeting his recent work connecting play and education at the LEGO Foundation.
I’m particularly thrilled to hear Jesse Stommel (
@Jessifer
), as I’ve followed him on twitter for some time and I’m a huge admirer of his work.  Just a few weeks ago I was following the
Digital Pedagogy Lab
, co-founded by Jesse, on twitter and though I only dipped my toe into the incredibly rich stream of tweets it was a really rewarding and thought provoking experience.
Whether you’ll be with us in Edinburgh or joining us remotely, we’d encourage you to get involved with the ALT Conference online. You can do this by:
Following the official ALT twitter account @A_L_T /
Following the conference hashtag
#altc
Tweeting your own comments, reflections and pictures on the #altc conference hashtag.
Sharing your photographs online, remember to use the #altc hashtag and add an open licence!
You don’t need a twitter account to read @A_L_T’s tweets and to follow the #altc tag, but you do need an account if you want to retweet and comment.
And of course no ALT event would be complete without the occasional
#shoetweet
#altc #shoetweet, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell
So put our best foot forward and join us in Edinburgh and online for #altc
ALTC 2015, CC BY, Chris Bull
It’s that time of year again!  The
ALT Conference
is taking place at the University of Warwick next week. The theme of this years conference, which has a distinctly playful feel, is
Connect, Collaborate and Create
, and the conference is being co-chaired by Nicola Whitton and Alex Moseley.  I’ll be joining the ALTC social media team again with my partner in crime Richard Goodman from Loughborough University and we’ll be live tweeting all five (count ’em!) of the conference keynotes.
Chris Bull
will be on hand again to photograph the conference and this year we’re also being joined by Kenji Lamb from the College Development Network and Sandra Huskinson, Loughborough University, who’ll be helping Martin Hawksey to livestream and broadcast the event.
I’ll also be presenting a paper,
Into the Open – a critical overview of open education policy and practice in Scotland
on Thursday afternoon, and on Wednesday at 12.15 I’ll be joining
Virtually Connecting
to talk about open education.  Feel free to join us!
Oh and the
Open Education Team
that I work with at the University of Edinburgh is up for the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year
Community Choice Awards
.  If you’d like to vote for us, which would be super nice of you, you can send an email to
LTAwards-vote@alt.ac.uk
with the
subject line #LTA6
or tweet a message with the hashtags
#altc #LTA6.
Look forward to seeing you in Warwick!
Richard Goodman at ALTC 2015, CC BY, Chris Bull
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