Women in Tech | Open World

Women in Tech | Open World
Open World
Lorna M Campbell
The 16th annual
Open Education Conference
(OER25) is taking place in London next week and the theme “Speaking truth to power: open education and AI in the age of populism” could be more urgent or important.  Chaired by Sheila MacNeil and Dr Louise Drumm, both of whom have a long standing commitment to critical engagement with ed tech, the conference features
keynotes
by Helen Beetham and Joe Wilson.
Helen’s keynote, “When speaking truth is not enough: repurpose, rebuild, refuse”, will explore the links between the AI industry and the politics of populism. Helen’s thoughtful, contextual approach to education technology and AI in particular has already made me step back and question the  foundational concepts of artificial intelligence.  I’m still thinking about her keynote at the 2023 ALT Winter Conference “
Whose Ethics? Whose AI? A relational approach to the challenge of ethical AI
.”
Joe Wilson has been my
Open Scotland
partner in crime for over a decade now and I’m continually inspired by his optimism and his commitment to openness.  Joe’s keynote, “Shaping Open Education ” will focus on the challenges of closing the attainment gap, promoting social mobility, ethical use of AI and keeping open education at the heart of change.
I’m also really pleased to see that Natalie Lafferty and Sharon Flynn will be leading a workshop on reviewing ALT’s
Framework for Ethical Learning Technology
, which is more critically important now than ever.  The workshop will inform an updated version of the framework, which is due to be launched at the end of the year.
I’ve been hugely privileged to attend all fifteen OER Conferences, going right back to
OER10
in Cambridge, but unfortunately I won’t be able to go to London this year.  I’ve had to step back from all work commitments as I was diagnosed with stage two throat cancer earlier in the year. I’ve already completed six weeks of radiotherapy treatment and am now (hopefully!) on the slow and convoluted road to recovery. (The jury is still out as to whether and how this relates to the
autoimmune disease
I was diagnosed with last year.  That remains to be seen.) Over the last six months I’ve been deeply moved by how immensely kind people have been, I really can’t express my gratitude enough.
I haven’t had much energy to focus on anything other than recovery for the last six months, but during occasional bright spots I’ve found myself turning more and more to independent writing and journalism in an attempt to find some respite from endless doomscrolling. Shout out to Audrey Watter’s
Second Breakfast
, Rebecca Solnit’s
Meditations in an Emergency
, Carole Cadwalladr’s
How to survive the Broligarchy
, and Helen Beetham’s
imperfect offerings
for keeping me sane, more or less. All inspiring women with fearless voices speaking truth to power.
I’ve also been enthralled by the
Manchester Mill’s
tenacious investigative journalism that led to the suspension of two member’s of the University of Greater Manchester’s senior leadership team, including the vice chancellor, and the subsequent police enquiry into “
allegations of financial irregularity
“. As a former (brief) employee of the University of Greater Manchester, when it was better known as the University of Bolton, I’ll be watching with interest to see how this investigation develops.
I’ve been making a rather half-hearted attempt at following the progress of the government’s questionable Data (Use and Access) Bill, particularly as it relates to AI and copyright, but I haven’t got the brain or will power to write about that right now.
In the meantime, I’ll hopefully be able to follow some of the OER25 Conference online and I’ll be with everyone in spirit, if not in person, this year.
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.
I’ve already written a post about the joy of reconnecting with colleagues at the ALT Conference last month, but the conference also marked a significant end point for me.  During the AGM, I formally stepped down from the Board of ALT, after my second term as a Trustee came to an end after six inspiring years. Earlier this summer my second term as a Wikimedia UK Trustee also came to close, so in some ways it feels a bit like an end of an era for me.  Both organisations have been a significant part of my professional life for the last six years and it’s been an honour and a privilege to serve on these boards.  I learned a huge amount from my fellow trustees over the years, and benefited enormously from working with a diverse group of people from a wide range of backgrounds, who I might not have had the opportunity to work with otherwise. I also really appreciated having the  opportunity to engage with the wider learning technology and open knowledge communities at a senior level and to contributing to strategic initiatives. And perhaps most importantly, serving as a Trustee gave me an opportunity to give something back to ALT and Wikimedia UK, in return for their ongoing commitment to openness, equity, community engagement and knowledge activism.
If you’re curious about what the role of a Trustee involves, and are interested in finding out more, I wrote a reflection on my experience of serving on the ALT and Wikimedia UK Boards as part of my Senior CMALT portfolio, which you can read here:
Communication and Working with Others
. I also recorded this video for
Trustees Week
last year.
Stepping down from these rolls certainly doesn’t mark the end of my involvement with ALT and Wikimedia UK though.  Far from it!  I’m still involved with the ALT Scotland SIG and the ALT Copyright and Online Learning SIG, and I’m also hoping that I can spend  bit more time editing Wikipedia and getting involved in community events.  I’m also wondering what to do next, so if you’ve got any suggestions, let me know!
It just remains for me to say a huge thank you to Maren Deepwell, CEO of ALT, and Lucy Crompton-Reid, CEO of Wikimedia UK, for their inspiring leadership, and also to the Chairs of Board who guided us with patience and insight; Sheila MacNeil (ALT), Helen O’Sullivan (ALT), Michael Maggs (Wikimedia UK), Josie Fraser (Wikimedia UK), Nick Poole (Wikimedia UK) and Monisha Shah (Wikimedia UK).
Earlier this month the annual
ALT Conference
returned as an in-person event for the first time since the pandemic.  Around 400 participants joined the hybrid conference at the University of Manchester, for both an in-person and online programme.  For many delegates it was their first in-person conference since the Before Times and I think it’s fair to say that everyone appreciated the opportunity to reconnect with friends and colleagues from across the sector.
I had the pleasure of being one of the co-chairs of the conference, as to mark its in-person return, the event was was chaired collaboratively by the Trustees of ALT.  My term on the ALT Board came to an end at the AGM, so I’m proud to say that opening ALTC 2022 with a short reflection, alongside Natalie Lafferty and Puiyin Wong, was one of my last actions as an ALT Trustee.
Attempted to tweet this this afternoon but failed… here is a late is always better than never group selfie with the amazing ladies
@LornaMCampbell
@nlafferty
after our reflections of what’s gone well and looking forward at the
#altc22
opening plenary!
@A_L_T
#altc
pic.twitter.com/tbX1Lz5sZa
— Puiyin Wong 💙🇪🇺🇭🇰 (@Puiyin)
September 6, 2022
Natalie emphasised the need for learning technologists to become a collective voice that shapes the narrative and the future of learning and teaching.  Asking how we can consolidate the relationships we’ve developed with academics during the pandemic, Natalie urged us to be confident in our own role working at the intersection of academic and professional services.
Puiyin reflected on her own journey as a learning technologist over the last few years.  As a result of the pandemic, colleagues finally know who learning technologists are and what we do. We’re not just the people who fix Moodle, we understand pedagogy, we understand learning, we understand how to use technology in education, and how to make  learning engaging, accessible and fun.  Puiyin also urged us to welcome more TEL researchers into the community to share our knowledge and expertise.
I touched on the ebook crisis and the increase in institutions establishing open textbook presses in response.  I hope that our libraries and open presses will draw on the OER expertise that already exists in the learning technology community to build on our knowledge of openness in education. I also emphasised the necessity of ethically informed approaches to how we implement and interact with learning technology and the importance of pedagogies of care, which are increasingly necessary during these uncertain times.
"There is no back to normal"
@LornaMCampbell
#altc22
re significance of pedagogy of care. ALT Ethical Framework as a reference point
— Matt Cornock (@mattcornock)
September 6, 2022
Although openness wasn’t one of the specific themes of the conference, it remains one of ALT’s core values, and openness underpinned many of the sessions.  The Global OER Graduate Network presented an overview of their community values and research activities, and I also really appreciated Fereshte Goshtasbpour and Beck Pitt sharing their experience of re-purposing an existing open course for reuse in a different global context. Reuse and repurposing of existing OERs is something that we’re really interested in at Edinburgh, so it was useful to hear this case study.
Ethics and care were two themes that also ran throughout the conference. Rob Farrow’s keynote presented a short overview of ethics in Western philosophy and highlighted the need for ethical frameworks for technology, such as the
ALT Ethical Framework
, and the space they offer for reflective collaborative thinking  Rob also picked up on the theme of ethics of care, which was explored by Chris Rowell in his talk on
critical digital pedagogy
.  Chris outlined six principles for critical digital pedagogy, all of which really spoke to me:
Knowledge should be co-created between teachers and students.
Digital education should challenge oppression.
Digital education is a human process.
Education and technology is inherently political.
Knowledge should relate to and develop from the lived experience of teachers and students.
Digital education is built on trust and belonging and should cultivate hope and optimism.
One beautiful manifestation of all these principles is the Femedtech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education, a craft activism project led by Frances Bell in collaboration with members of the FemEdTech network in 2019/2020.  You can read the story of the quilt on
femedtech.net
and also engage with the digital quilt at
quilt.femedtech.net
The quilt was originally intended to be displayed at the OER20 conference, but as a result of the pandemic this is the first opportunity we have had to showcase the quilt in all its material glory
I spent most of the second day of the conference quilt sitting along with Frances Bell, Catherine Cronin and Sheila MacNeill. It was a really moving experience seeing people interacting with the quilt.  It was especially lovely to see people finding and reconnecting with squares they had created, pointing out this or that square – “That’s my daughter’s dress!” “That’s my mother’s earing!”  So many women, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, so many personal connections are sewn into the quilt. There was also an opportunity for people to contribute to the quilt by sewing on a button or a few stitches of embroidery and it was wonderful seeing people taking a quiet moment out of the busy conference schedule and becoming absorbed in the shared task of making.
So lovely to see people interacting with the
#femedtechquilt
at
#altc22
pic.twitter.com/h8QKTRHHzY
— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell)
September 7, 2022
Sheila has already written a lovely reflection on the quilt here:
Transcending the digital and physical at #altc22 – the #femedtechquilt
. I particularly love this observation:
In quite a magical way, the presence of the quilt provided a way to bind many of us together by providing a safe, open, space to have long overdue catch ups, to share experiences and allow time for reflection and just “being”.
At the end of the day, those of us who had contributed to the quilt came together to suspend it over the balcony outside the main auditorium so it could be viewed by delegates.  It was an emotional (and slightly nerve wracking!) experience holding all that shared hope and creativity in our hands.
At the end of today’s
#altc22
sessions, a committed
#femedtech
crew gathered the
#FemEdTechQuilt
& held it over a balcony to display it in its full glory. Haven’t seen those photos yet, but here’s what it looked like behind the scenes 🙂
pic.twitter.com/tadlky5j9O
— FemEdTech – shared account for FemEdTech network (@femedtech)
September 7, 2022
Look at all these amazing ladies with the
#FemEdTechQuilt
@femedtech
@A_L_T
#altc22
#altc
pic.twitter.com/tHCI6vpVFY
— Puiyin Wong 💙🇪🇺🇭🇰 (@Puiyin)
September 7, 2022
We’re still living in desperately uncertain and insecure times, and our new normal is a world away from our old normal, however reconnecting with the learning technology community at ALTC 2022 gives me hope that if we can work together, to share our experiences and share the load, we can support and care for both our community and our learners.
This short history of the FemEdTech Quilt formed part of a post on
femedtech.net
The FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education was a craft activism project led by Frances Bell in collaboration with members of the FemEdTech network in 2019/2020. FemEdTech is a reflexive, emergent network of people learning, practising and researching in educational technology, and committed to feminism and social justice. We are an informal organisation with no funding: our resources are our passion, kindness, knowledge, enthusiasm and volunteer time.
Ideas for a FemEdTech Quilt emerged following the 2019 OER Conference (
OER19
) and took further inspiration from the themes of
OER20
: The Care in Openness, particularly around care, criticality and sustainability. An open call was issued along with the OER20 Conference call for proposals, inviting all sewists and non-sewists, artists and dabblers, crafters, makers and writers, to contribute to the quilt by donating fabrics and found objects, creating quilt squares, and/or writing stories and reflections.
The project was originally intended to have three parts:
The preparation and assembly of a quilt linking themes of social justice and open education, making a contribution to activism in these areas.
The creation of a digital archive of the elements, components and finished quilt that becomes a shareable artefact and repository in its own right.
The completion of the quilt at a workshop at the OER20 conference, where it would be displayed in its material and digital forms.
There was an overwhelming response to the invitation to contribute to the quilt, with 67 six-inch and 17 twelve-inch squares being sent in from around the world, along with fabrics and other artefacts. As contributions arrived, the quilt grew in size from a single artefact to four linked quilts, each assembled by Frances Bell, Suzanne Hardy, and a group of volunteer quilters and sewers in Macclesfield, UK.
A corresponding digital quilt was created by Anne-Marie Scott at
. This enabled contributors to reflect on the process of creating their quilt squares and to tell the stories behind them. The digital quilt was also intended to allow those who were unable to attend the OER20 Conference in person to see and explore the quilt and its stories.
In the optimistic days of early 2020, when beautiful creative quilt squares were being sent in from all over the world, we could not have foreseen the advent of the global pandemic and the impact it would have. At the same time, we could not have imagined just how necessary the FemEdTech Quilt would become as a project of hope in those dark days as the threads of our shared labour wove the FemEdTech community together.
With the advent of the pandemic, the theme of OER20,
The Care in Openness
, could not have been more timely or prescient. ALT rapidly moved the conference online and lifted the registration fee, enabling over 1000 participants to come together from all over the globe. Although the pandemic initially deprived us of the opportunity to experience the physical artefact of the quilt, it became a powerful material manifestation of care, compassion and activism. Frances produced and presented a beautiful film about the making of quilt for OER20, which resulted in an upswell of collective emotion that, like the quilt itself, was “beautifully imperfect, imperfectly beautiful.” In the words of Su-Ming Khoo, the quilt became “somewhere to put our connection and our gratitude”.
The FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice continues to stand as a powerful symbol of the strength and solidarity that can be gained from shared labour, the sense of community and belonging that traditionally derives from women’s work, and the power of craft activism.
This is a transcript of a talk I gave for the University of Liverpool School of the Arts “
Making a difference in the real world
” series.
My name is Lorna Campbell, I’m a learning technology service manager at the University of Edinburgh and I’m also a Trustee of Wikimedia UK, and today I’m going to be talking about Wikipedia as a site of knowledge activism, the representation of queer and marginalised histories on the encyclopedia, and particularly the history of HIV and AIDS activism.  And I’ll also be introducing some of the people who have inspired me on my own journey to becoming a knowledge activist.
Slides are available here:
Knowledge Activism
First of all I’d like to start with a few acknowledgements.  I know acknowledgements usually come at the end, but as I’m going to be talking about the work of colleagues whose knowledge activism has been deeply inspirational to me, I want to speak their names up front.  So I’d like to thank
Áine Kavanagh, Reproductive BioMedicine graduate, University of Edinburgh.
Prof Allison Littlejohn, Director, UCL Knowledge Lab & Dr Nina Hood, University of Aukland.
Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, University of Edinburgh.
Tara Robertson, Tara Robertson Consulting.
Tomas Sanders, History graduate, University of Edinburgh.
Sara Thomas, Scotland Projects Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.
Wikimedia UK
is the UK chapter of the
Wikimedia Foundation
, the international not-for-profit organisation that supports the Wikimedia projects, of which Wikipedia is the best known.  Wikimedia’s vision is to imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.  This is not just a statement it’s a promise of inclusivity.
Wikipedia itself needs little introduction, the free encyclopaedia is the fifth most visited site on the internet, with over 6 billion monthly visitors.  English Wikipedia alone has over 6 million articles and there are an estimated 52 million articles in 309 languages supported by the site as a whole.
Wikipedia is not just a repository of knowledge in its own right, it’s also a source of information for others services such as Google, whose 92 billion visits per month dwarfs Wikipedia’s paltry 6 billion. Amazon Alexa also draws much of its information from Wikipedia. Whenever you ask Alexa a question, there’s a good chance that the answer will come from Wikipedia.
In the global knowledge economy, knowledge is power, and Wikipedia is the largest repository of free, open and transparent information in the world.  Consequently, it’s perhaps no surprise that Wikipedia is censored to various degrees by numerous countries and regimes throughout the world, and outright banned by several including Myanmar, China, and Turkey.
Having access to a platform where we can all access reliable, high quality information for free has never been more important in this age of disinformation, fake news, and government sanctioned culture wars.  How information is created and consumed matters like never before, and understanding how knowledge is created on Wikipedia can help people to understand how they consume and reproduce information.
Continue reading
Last week I had the pleasure of running a workshop on open practice with Catherine Cronin as part of City University of London’s online MSc in
Digital Literacies and Open Practice
, run by the fabulous Jane Secker.  Both Catherine and I have run guest webinars for this course for the last two years, so this year we decided collaborate and run a session together.  Catherine has had a huge influence on shaping my own open practice so it was really great to have an opportunity to work together.  We decided from the outset that we wanted to practice what we preach so we designed a session that would give participants plenty of opportunity to interact with us and with each other, and to choose the topics the workshop focused on.
We began with a couple of definitions open practice, emphasising that there is no one hard and fast definition and that open practice is highly contextual and continually negotiated and we then asked participants to suggest what open practice meant to them by writing on a shared slide.  We went on to highlight some examples of open responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the UNESCO
Call for Joint Action
to support learning and knowledge sharing through open educational resources, Creative Commons
Open COVID Pledge
, Helen Beetham and ALT’s
Open COVID Pledge for Education
and the University of Edinburgh’s
COVID-19 Critical Care MOOC
We then gave participants an opportunity to choose what they wanted us to focus on from a list of four topics:
OEP to Build Community – which included the examples of
Femedtech
and
Equity Unbound.
Open Pedagogy –  including
All Aboard
Digital Skills in HE, the
National Forum Open Licensing Toolkit
Open Pedagogy Notebook
, and
University of Windsor Tool Parade
Open Practice for Authentic Assessment – covering
Wikimedia in Education
and
Open Assessment Practices
Open Practice and Policy – with examples of
open policies for learning and teaching
from the University of Edinburgh.
For the last quarter of the workshop we divided participants into small groups and invited them to discuss
What OEP are you developing and learning most about right now?
What OEP would you like to develop further?
Before coming back together to feedback and share their discussions.
Finally, to draw the workshop to a close, Catherine ended with a quote from Rebecca Solnit, which means a lot to both of us, and which was particularly significant for the day we ran the workshop, 3rd November, the day of the US elections.
Slides from the workshop are available under open licence for anyone to reuse and a recording of our session is also available:
Watch recording
View slides.
This year for Ada Lovelace day, I wrote a new Wikipedia page about
Dr Isabel Gal
, a Hungarian paediatrician and Holocaust Survivor who, in 1967,  was responsible for establishing a link between use of the hormonal pregnancy test
Primodos
and severe congenital birth defects.  I came across Gal quite by chance via the @OnThisDayShe twitter account, which aims to “Put women back into history, one day at a time.”
On this day in 1967, Dr Isabel Gal published findings that a drug called Primodos caused serious birth defects. Gal, an Auschwitz survivor, was not taken seriously: this summer, the Cumberlege review vindicated her. Compensation cases are ongoing.
pic.twitter.com/BavOzp5i8g
— On This Day She (@OnThisDayShe)
October 7, 2020
A quick google showed that while there were Wikipedia entries for
Primodos
and for
Baroness Cumberlege
who led a review into the drug, there was no entry for Gal herself.  Which is all the more astonishing given the extraordinary and tenacious life she led.  Gal, a Hungarian Jew, survived the Holocaust after being interred in Auschwitz along with her mother and two sisters, all of whom survived.  Her father however died in Mauthausen concentration camp.  After the war, Gal studied to become a paediatrician at the University of Budapest and married mathematician Endre Gal.  During the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Gal and her family fled to the UK, after being smuggled out of Hungary into Austria.  What I didn’t know when I started writing the article was that Gal re-qualified as a doctor at the University of Edinburgh.  According to her daughter-in-law, who wrote her
obituary
for the Guardian, she found Scottish accents easier to understand than London ones.  I haven’t been able to find any information online about Gal’s time in Edinburgh, but I’ll be contacting the University’s Centre for Research Collections as soon as I get back from leave, to see what they can dig up.
In 1967, while working at St Mary’s Children’s Hospital in Surrey, Gal published a short article in
Nature
magazine highlighting a link between Primodos, a hormonal pregnancy test marketed by the German drug company Shering AG, and serious congenital birth defects.  She also pointed out that the test used the same components as oral contraceptive pills.  Despite taking her findings to the Department of Health,  the Committee on Safety of Medicines, and the government’s Senior Medical Officer, Bill Inman, her warnings were ignored, partially as a result of concerns that they would discourage women from taking oral contraception.  Primodos was banned in several European countries in the early 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1975 that a warning was added to Primodos in UK, and it was only withdrawn from the market in 1978, for commercial reasons.  A long running campaign by the Association for Children Damaged by Hormone Pregnancy Tests, and the discovery of documents revealing that Shering had concealed information relating to the dangers of the drug, eventually resulted in a government review that found that there was no causal association between Primodos and birth defects.  However Theresa May, who was then prime minister, ordered a second review led by Baroness Cumberlege, which published its findings earlier this year and concluded that there was indeed a link and that the drug should have been withdrawn from use in 1967.
Gal believed she was blacklisted as a result of her campaign and after being repeatedly turned down for senior positions, she eventually left the medical profession. She died in London in 2017 at the age of 92, two years before the Cumberlege review vindicated her findings.
Interviewed about the review’s findings,
Theresa May
said she believed that sexism had been partially responsible for the authorities failure to act.
“I almost felt it was sort of women being patted on the head and being told ‘there there dear’, don’t worry. You’re imagining it. You don’t know. We know better than you do….I think this is a very sad example of a situation where people were badly affected, not just by the physical and mental aspect of what Primodos actually did, but by the fact that nobody then listened to them…”
Skye News
investigation in 2017  revealed that Inman, who had originally stonewalled Gal’s efforts to have the drug withdrawn, and whose own research showed an increased risk of birth defects among women who had used hormone pregnancy tests, had destroyed his research data, “to prevent individual claims being based on his material”.
Dr Gal’s story, and her omission from Wikipedia, are sadly typical of many women scientists whose contributions have been stifled, stonewalled, ignored, elided and written out of history.  It’s very telling that while Gal didn’t even have a red link, Inman has an extensive and glowing Wikipedia entry, which makes no mention of his role in the Primodos scandal or the fact that he destroyed evidence relating to the case.  However with the publication of the Cumberlege  Review and a new Sky documentary,
Bitter Pill: Primodos,
there has been increased interest in Gal’s role in highlighting the dangers of hormonal pregnancy tests.  I hope her new Wikipedia entry will help others to discover Dr Isabel Gal’s amazing story, and bring her the recognition she deserves.
“When we think this question “who appears?” we are asked a question about how spaces are occupied by certain bodies who get so used to their occupation that they don’t even notice it… To question who appears is to become the cause of discomfort. It is almost as if we have a duty not to notice who turns up and who doesn’t” –
Making feminist points
, Sara Ahmed.
This week saw the launch of the Rebus Community’s publication of
Open At The Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education
. Open At the Margins is a global collection of diverse critical voices in open education curated by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin de Rosa and Rajiv Jhangiani. The collection aims to centre marginalised voices and ask critical questions of open education relating to community, equity, inclusion, rights, privileges, privacy and academic labour. All the chapters included have already been shared through informal channels, often as conference sessions, keynotes or blog posts, and several of them are pieces that have had a profound influence on my own journey as an open practitioner, including Audrey Watters
From “Open” to Justice
, Catherine Cronin’s
Open Education, Open Questions
, and Chris Bourg’s
Open As In Dangerous
. And there are many, many more chapters by authors who I deeply admire and respect, which I am looking forward to discovering.
I’m humbled to have a piece of my own included in the collection.
The Soul Of Liberty: Openness Equality and Co-Creation
is the transcript of a keynote I gave at the CELT Design for Learning Symposium, NUI Galway in 2018. This was the third in a series of three related keynotes that included
The Long View: Changing Perspectives on OER
(OER18 Conference) and
Exploring the Open Knowledge Landscape
(FLOSS UK Spring Conference). All three pieces explored the different domains, communities and cultures that make up the the open knowledge landscape, and highlighted the problem of systemic bias and structural inequality in a wide range of “open” spaces.
The title, The Soul of Liberty, comes from a quote by 18
th
century Scottish feminist, social reformer and advocate for women’s equality in education,
Frances Wright
“Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.”
The piece questions what we mean when we talk about openness in relation to digital teaching and learning spaces, resources, communities and practices.  How open and equitable are our open online education spaces and who are they open to? And it explores how we can engage with students to co-create open education spaces and communities that are more equitable, inclusive and participatory.
The above quote from Sara Ahmed, which appears in the introduction of Open at the Margins, really resonated with me because it echoes a passage from the Soul of Liberty.
“We all need to be aware of the fact that open does not necessarily mean accessible. Open spaces and communities are not without their hierarchies, their norms, their gatekeepers and their power structures. We need to look around our own open communities and spaces and ask ourselves who is included and who is excluded, who is present and who is absent, and we need to ask ourselves why. Because nine times out of ten, if certain groups of people are absent or excluded from spaces, communities or domains, it is not a result of preference, ability, or aptitude, it is a result of structural inequality, and in many cases it is the result of multiple intersecting inequalities. Far too often our open spaces replicate the power structures and inequalities that permeate our society.”
I think we still have a long way to go until the our open spaces and communities really
are
open to all, however Open at the Margins makes an important contribution to opening up these spaces, dismantling hierarchies, and centering voices that have been marginalized and excluded. I’d like to thank the editors for their commitment to this cause and I am excited to see what kind of conversations are possible as a result.
On Friday 13
th
of March I wrote a blog post called
What Comes Next
, which marked the end of the last round of UCU strikes and looked forward to my return to work the following week. Five days later, in response to the rapidly worsening coronavirus pandemic, my university advised all staff and students to leave campus and work from home, and the following week the whole UK went into lockdown. I think it’s fair to say that at that stage none of us could possibly have imagined
what came next
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, it may be a cliché, but rarely has it been so true. In the fifteen weeks since lock down began, it’s been nothing short of inspiring to see the superhuman efforts of colleagues right across all sectors of education to ensure that teaching and learning could continue, while respecting the unique stresses and anxieties that we’ve all been facing in these Unprecedented Times.
Learning technologists have become the new superhero/ines, putting the technology in place to enable teaching continuity, upskilling academic colleagues to help them transition to online teaching, figuring out the practicalities of hybrid teaching, and working out the logistics of making it a reality at scale, all while dealing with the uncertainty that, for all the planning and modeling, we don’t really know what’s going to happen in September, and beyond that, what will happen in the longer term.
And all this effort has taken place against a back drop of hot takes from ed tech gurus, CEOs and journalists, who persist in comparing “traditional” on-campus face to face education to online learning, despite decades of evidence based research that direct comparisons between the two modes are unhelpful at best and specious at worst. Every day my twitter feed is full of educators and learning techs responding with tired outrage to articles claiming that online programmes require less staff, less skill, less effort, less funding, while providing an inferior learning experience and questionable outcomes.
It’s as exhausting as it’s infuriating. Particularly when colleagues who were striking over precarity, inequality and workloads at the beginning of the year, returned from strike and immediately shouldered increased workloads without question or complaint. Meanwhile the pandemic has only exacerbated the inequalities that already exist in the system. Journal submissions from women scholars have fallen off a cliff, fixed term teaching contracts have been terminated, disproportionately affecting women, BAME colleagues and early career academics, and women are still carrying the invisible emotional burden of a system and a society under profound stress.
We’ve all had to adapt to the new normal and to do what we can to get by. But my concern is that the new normal still isn’t normal, and perhaps more importantly, it’s also not sustainable.  This level of physical, mental and emotional labour can’t be sustained in the long term without it taking a considerable toll.
As lockdown begins to lift, and we all start to breathe a tentative sigh of relief, my fear is that the delayed impact of that burden of labour will make itself felt just at the point when we have to step up a gear. Lifting of lockdown isn’t an opportunity to relax and get back to normal, it’s the start of a long uphill race with no visible finishing line in sight.
Academic colleagues, and the professional services staff who support them, face an astronomical task to prepare their courses for hybrid delivery, and to open the university to new and returning students in September. The online pivot, that all out sprint to ensure teaching continuity at the beginning of lockdown, has turned into a marathon and there are serious concerns whether we have the strength, stamina and resilience for it.
At the beginning of lockdown my own institution placed the emphasis squarely on communication, care and continuity, and by and large it has responded to the unique challenges of the pandemic with compassion and sensitivity. I sincerely hope that we don’t loose sight of that ethic of care as we move out of lockdown towards a new academic year that will be unlike anything we could ever have experienced or predicted, because that’s when we’re really going to need it the most.
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