[Julia Feerrar] And now it is my pleasure to introduce Bonnie Stewart, our keynote speaker today.
Bonnie is a well-recognized educator and scholar of
digital literacies, digital pedagogy, and social media networks.
She is assistant professor of online
pedagogy and workplace learning at the University of Windsor in Ontario.
She is also on the advisory board and a faculty member of the Digital Pedagogy Lab.
Bonnie is fascinated by who we are when
we're online, and her work investigates the
intersections of knowledge, technology, and identity with educational
programming and policy. We are very excited to have her speaking
at that intersection this morning with us, so please join me in welcoming Bonnie.
[Applause]
[Bonnie Stewart] Thank you so much. Good morning, how are you?
very good good um there are a couple of people yeah
I can't see you and I want to be able to see you, so as long as as you're good
I'm good. Perfect. It's a real honor to be here. I know that
your day is focused on online identities and
digital literacies and I want to talk about those three
things through the lens of what do we do
about the web at this point. So the first question that
I wanted to raise was who here uses the web?
Okay, I think that's just about most of the hands.
Who here uses it for scholarship in some way?
Okay what about just for research when you're looking for stuff?
great socialization okay so different kinds of uses
but most of us we're here we're on the web
yay this is the water that we are swimming in and I want to tell
a little digital identity story to talk about the shifting structures of the web
because I think sometimes we don't notice
the water that we're swimming in and there are
reasons in our society why sometimes the color of the water is changing
and maybe we're not talking about those things.
But I'm going to start from an identity perspective
and give you a little bloody blah blah blah
about my own experiences on the web because I didn't start on the web as a scholar.
I actually started as a mommy blogger.
In 2006 I opened a little blog on a corner of the
internet called, and I thought it was the tweest name when I was stuck with it
afterwards for years, Crib Chronicles. I didn't start a
mommy blog because I was reading mommy blogs, I started a
mommy blog because I was on two months of hospitalized bed rest
in another province and I was losing my mind
and i needed some place to articulate sort of my reality and i i couldn't
leave a bed um and so i began to write
and something interesting happened because at first i wrote and
you know i sent out an email to a variety of family and friends just
saying rather than send everybody mass email
updates because i don't know if you even want to hear these
i've started this blog and if you want to check in and see
how things are going or you know where my
sanity is at this point 14 days into not having left to bed etc etc
feel free what happened was people started to find me and
i got comments and so the top comment here you can't read these but
is the first comment that i got from someone that i didn't know
who was like hey bonnie i found your blog and i was reading it and la la
i was like whoa someone out there is reading this
on the bottom someone who actually became a very good friend
of mine through blogging for years um the top one is a blog that says i
tagged you for the real mom's meme and these are
all 2006 2007 types of engagement that was
existing in the blogging world right at that cusp
before facebook and twitter shifted everything right
and that tag i tagged you for the real moms me
was a way of saying hey come on over to my site
and you will see the thing that i have here for you
and so it was an interconnected web it was participatory in the sense that
everybody was engaging in some way showing who they
were but also where they were most of us who were
commenting on blogs had skin in the game we had real estate
on the web a space that was ours and they were
connected through rss does anybody remember rss right
really syndicate yeah um and it was cool it was basically peak
web 2.0 right that promise of the participatory web
where we went from sites that were meant to be read in the same way that
books were read that were gatekept to a web that was user driven and made
by the people who were using it
there truly was a world of happy cat videos
and it was out there and for me over the six years that i kept that blog
and most of it was kind of me just writing about my
identity and emergence into parenthood etc
i had 13 530 non-spam comments or links
over that six years i went back and counted last weekend and i was like whoa
by academic citation rates that's pretty good engagement right
but during that period i closed the blog as my kids got a little older i didn't
want to write about them i also had opened a new blog about two
years before i went back to do a phd a lot of the commenting engagement had
already transitioned onto by the time i closed that blog onto
twitter onto facebook i was working more in the
education space in the ed tech space i was blogging more
in that space and so i thought it was time to close the personal blog
and there were a lot of other changes that were shaping
what was happening there by 2012 on the blog um i was using my
edtech blog which i still sometimes occasionally
pay attention to um not as much as i'd like
but you had things like clout that were basically quantifying come on in have a
seat people's participation on the web and saying this person has so much
influence in this way and this person has so much influence
in this way and i think justin bieber had the top cloud so it wasn't
necessarily a scale that you wanted to climb but nonetheless
that was becoming something that we were seeing more of is
i can read how important you are outside of just follower counts and that type of
thing the other thing that i was doing in 2012
on the web this is from the change 11 mooc which
was a 36-week canadian style participatory mooc that
ran on digital identities funny story you've
all heard the term mook it was actually coined in my living room
by my partner in 2008 when we were doing that kind of
vlog style hey everybody comment on everybody's stuff
let's make the community the curriculum kind of shared
underground small geeky world that was really what got me back into
education and led to me wanting to start my phd
and then suddenly in 2012 thanks to sebastian throne and the stanford ai
course the term got applied by the new york times
to the elite american university model of mooc which
at the time i thought of mostly as a glorified correspondence course
and basically sometimes you put things into the world and then they change
completely and become not your thing but at the time that was
what i was doing was a digital identity mooc in
more of the canadian style and i was talking in that mooc
about two key phenomenon that i'd observed
while i was vlogging and one was the rise of monetization
right the attention economy the big eye that's always watching
the fighting for attention the fact that gatekeeping was no longer
you can't you have to go through a publisher to get your words out there
but rather you have to hustle and fight to make you
actually want to read what i write and so your titles and headlines become
seo optimized and much more scandalous or
whatever kind of hey look at me that you can attach to
the thing that you're putting out in the world and
i started talking about that as the branded self right what does it
mean to have to hustle in the world and where i was thinking
about it was particularly in terms of scholarship
the other thing that i was thinking about was
things like cloud how many of you remember clout at all anybody so
clout initially took everyone on twitter and just basically gave them a score and
then eventually some people were like hey clout get out of my business i don't
want to be quantified and algorithmically judged
and so clout made it an opt-in thing for a while and then clout went away
but clout also tried the recommender piece that linkedin did for many years
as well where it can let people know what you're good
at right and it was really interesting
because around the time that clout did that
the thing that popped up for me i had academics adult education
coding and this one i don't know if you can see it but it's
um being a dad and you know i i i i'm not the most
traditionally femme person all the time but i don't identify
as a dad um and so i thought you know sometimes
the algorithm doesn't quite get it right but that's
where we kind of were in this slightly messy space in 2012
this is my facebook profile for 2019 if we fast forward a few more years and
now i'm actually a bird on the web um and i have my little david bowie
necklace but yeah basically i'm a bird because i'm not all that
interested any longer given the space that we're in
in having my face out there all the time
on social media now we have the seven deadly sins we have
lust as tinder yelp is gluttony linkedin is greed netflix is sloth i
think that's my my terrible sin twitter as wrath
facebook is envy and instagram is pride right and all of those pieces
are basically just a way of saying this environment
has become quite a polluted environment right what do we do about
the web we have misinformation i actually got
this off of facebook it says mark zuckerberg dead at 32.
denies facebook has a problem with facebook fake news
um some people put this up about a year ago to try to to show
how fake news circulates james bridle talks about this he says
something is rotten in democracy when huge numbers of those
participating in its debates are unaccountable
un unaccountable and untraceable when we cannot know who
or even what they are the bots are everywhere now
right and the reason that a lot of things can circulate on fake news is
partly due to the creation of a whole bunch of
users who are not people who then can spam people's feeds and the
algorithmic recommender edge and goes oh this is
really popular so i'll show more of it and so we polarize our perspectives
right um it was just recently found that in
the israeli election there were there was a network of
hundreds of social media accounts many of them fake that were attacking
opponents of netanyahu this happens all the time in all
elections we have it in ontario canada it is not unique to any particular
political entity most of them come out of the internet research
agency which is a russian corporation from about 2014.
it actually does both sides of the polarization but it does
do significant eight to one in terms of kind of right-wing accounts
apparently according to the most recent research that i've seen
but anytime you see something that is far extreme
from accounts that have just popped up chances are good they're not people
behind them and yet they have this huge impact on any kind
of democratic engagement right so already you're seeing that
the web problems have leaked out well beyond the web
we have sensationalism deborah talked about this in the 60s but now
that attention economy has gone to sort of its
logical gong show extreme of basically the more dramatic and scary
you can make something the more likely it is to get seen and if you try to keep
within the bounds of reasonable civil discourse it can be hard to put
things out there sophia noble does really great work on
this and she talks about how this type
of algorithmic engagement also does not treat identities
equally that it looks at women people of color women of color
and opens them up to a great deal of attack
often from people but also from these bot accounts um and andrew lilly's tweet
there says the ability to live free from surveillance and algorithmic control
is increasingly becoming class stratified
look at education poor kids get tablet time in increasing
lieu of direct instruction rich kids get small class sizes
as usual technology entrenches power imbalances so none of these particular
problems that noble's work or that lilly brinker is talking about
are created by the web or by technology but as the
web has become pervasive in our society it has amplified the structural problems
that we have and it is not necessarily helping us to deal with them
surveillance how many of you have a roomba anybody have a roomba
um this site suggests that you should toss it in c
because it's collecting your data how many of you have an alexa or a google
home
now the truth is again a lot of us are like well there's
nothing that interesting going on in my home actually so
feel free um but it's it's a trade-off right we are
increasingly being sold the internet of things these smart home
devices but we aren't a hundred percent sure
what the logical end game of all the data that is collectible
is i don't have a problem with the roomba i have a roomba
i wasn't really aware that it actually was doing the things that it was doing
when i put this together i thought hmm but i spent a lot of money on it i don't
know what to do um this is part of a phenomenon
this is uh zainab chupetsky who is a originally turkish academic
who's based in north carolina and her work is on extraction capitalism
and this area of what happens to all of
the things that are out there now that are being collected
about us and this is the heading of her ted talk we're building a dystopia
just to make people click on ads and again i've got little
citations under all of these because i think you should go read these people
sophia noble zainab but um really just kind of wanted
to point out there is a lot of research emerging just in the last few years in
these things and we still don't fully know
none of us who are working in this area have a full handle on
oh well this is exactly what it means and this is what
you should do about it ben williamson also talks about how this works in
education what is the lms here at virginia tech
what do you use canvas okay so canvas is actually i
think one of the better lms platforms in terms of
um extraction but all platforms have had the analytics and
learning analytics capacity to collect a great deal of data
on students right and what they create is these enclosure systems where an
institution gets sold the idea that here
these are the things that you can do this is the problem that you have
here is the one corporate package that will answer a great many
of your problems it's even worse at the k-12 level
where there are many many totalizing platforms
that are being pitched increasingly to k-12 systems
including by pearson etc because they've lost their monopoly on textbooks
and so they're pitching whole learning and testing
ecosystems to educational institutions and educational systems
right it's kind of a messy space the web these days and
sometimes i feel like picking up myself as the
tiny kitten and running myself away we have literally handed over
in the period that i have been online paying attention control of our data
our identities and our shared public infrastructures
including democracy in many pockets and ways and we are outsourcing our
knowledge making in governance increasingly to ai and it is actually
the last one that particularly concerns me from a
higher ed perspective because when we give over to silicon
valley the power to determine what counts
as knowledge right and that is what we are doing with a great many ai
systems even in education we are giving over the role
of higher ed in society
so okay thanks so much for coming really nice to meet you no i don't
think that the answer to this is to run and hide
um this at the bottom and again i wasn't sure if we would have one big screen or
small ones but this says academic social media we need to rethink
our strategy of hoping the internet will just go away
and i think we in higher ed particularly need to rethink this strategy because it
is not just our civic society
etc but also our very real work lives which sometimes
many of us have managed to imagine are separate and will continue on forever
in the familiar way we know them they will not
we need to bring back the web and bring into being perhaps a new
old new version of it that is pro-social and pro-societal and i think those of us
who work in higher ed have an extraordinary power
and capacity to do some of this work because many of us teach many of us work
with a whole other generation who may use
the web but not for learning and not necessarily for the purposes that we
could be turning it towards so i think we can
do better how many you've heard of the luddites
how many of you have said oh i'm a luddite
many of us do it's interesting to go back
and look at the story of the lettuce initially sometimes my response to the
way that things are shifting with the web is to go i think
i think i'd like to be a luddite now um they were not actually anti-technology
per se okay they were a group of people who emerged
as a visible force in society in europe and particularly the uk
in sort of peak industrial social change times
late 1700s early 1800s this is vague because i am not a
historian so if there are any historians in the room
you are welcome to take the mic and probably do a better job of this
but they are known for smashing the machines
right but they were basically threatened by the effects
of the encroaching industrial systems they were changing
their way of life they were in many cases
skilled laborers who simply could not compete
with the capital forces and the industrial forces that were taking over
their society and they had no vote to change the
systems that were surrounding them right they had no suffrage
they were not enfranchised in the society that they lived in
so they did organize these friendly societies based on the work of guilds to
try to protect each other and when that
began to fail they went out and broke the machines
because that was their way of speaking back
14 of them were executed in 1813 i'm not holding this up as you know hey let's go
be luddites
but they have become known as the people who hate technology because they mostly
did not have the power in their society
to tell their own story after the fact and when you don't tell your story it
becomes another story
we don't get to be them there are two reasons
one we have the capacity to tell our own story
and to we are in higher ed enfranchised in many ways metaphorically and
literally in this society right and just going out
this is my phone
if i just take this and toss it into the sea with my roomba
does that change the fact that everybody who lives on my
block and votes in the sector that i vote in
is still getting 90 of their information from facebook
it does not change that so my feeling is that we need to work on
the web rather than give up on the web or try to
smash the web
we need hope and it needs to be a subversive hope
because to use the web right now is to use a polluted environment
but the feeling is that we can use it towards some of the ends that it affords
that are not part of the systems that are causing so many problems
but we need to understand those systems and we need to understand what counts as
power in the systems that we work in today
so i want to call us i'm going to suggest that we take
a critical pedagogy approach um how many of you have heard of miles
horton or the highlander center in tennessee
it burnt on friday it burnt and they announced yesterday that they
found white power symbols on the site of the highlander center now if you're
not familiar with the highlander center it was
an appalachian based civil rights and participatory pedagogy
center that's been in operation since the 30s
through a variety of different incarnations miles horton was one of the
people who started it and his position
was nothing will change until we change until we throw off our dependence and
act for ourselves and his work
is part of from i i was an adult educator um sort of the critical
pedagogy canon within the adult education sphere
another similar center i'm from the maritimes of canada
and the antigonish movement was a adult education movement from around the
same period the 1920s and 30s in eastern canada and like the
highlander center it took a very disenfranchised
population and said look we need to figure out
because the maritimes i don't know if you're familiar with
with the history of canada but we were confederated in a very different
use of that term than gets used in the u.s
as a country in 1867 when that happened the center of the
country when canada became a country the center moved to quebec and ontario
until then the maritime provinces because shipping was
still big etc um which are on the east coast kind of
north of maine very small provinces had been fairly big centers in british
north america on their own when they chose to join confederation
they were suddenly part of something where they were marginalized and sort of
set on the side and they became the equivalent of what you would now
call flyover state so i grew up there that is where i'm from those are my
people there have never been jobs in my lifetime in my family's lifetime
um and what you had by the 1920s was most
of this would be 50 years after confederation most of the young people
who could and most of the people who wanted an education had left they
actually at that time went to boston later it was
toronto as different kinds of centers that drew people
but what you had left behind were a largely non-literate population
who had who had a vote if they were male and were getting a vote if they were
female but did not necessarily have the
tools or social standing to engage as full citizens
in the society in which they were a part of and
out of a universe small university called saint effects
two priests who worked at the university started doing
um an adult literacy movement because their perspective was
look we all share this problem but until we get together and figure out
how we can work together to put our elbow into the reason behind
the problem the systems that are actually keeping
people down nothing is going to change and so they had this 20 30 year fairly
active movement which drastically increased not just literacy
but engagement involvement sense of belonging to a
society in that space okay and so those are the
critical pedagogy models that i would like to propose that higher
ed look at at this point because to some extent
few of us are as literate as we would like to be
in the digital space right we are socially in many ways many of us quite
enfranchised or privileged but in terms of changing the systems
that are keeping us down or causing us problems
we don't we need each other so i'm going to propose three key
digital literacies for building a better web
the first is complexity
have any of you ever heard of or seen the kinevin model
before
it comes out of wales this is a fellow named dave snowden
and mary boone and it is actually a leadership framework model
and it's based on the idea that to solve a problem you've got to know what kind
of problem it is and they talk about four key kinds of
problems the first one is the obvious problem we
have an obvious problem here how many small animals do we have
two how many carrots do we have one so in order to possibly solve this
problem we might divide the carrot into two an obvious
problem is clear including to the small animals to
everyone with the problem what it is and probably the easiest way
to solve it with an obvious problem there is only
one answer needed that answer works you don't need to be
an expert and you could google it if you needed to
a light switch is an obvious or simple machine
then you have complicated problems a complicated problem is more like how
do i put together this jet airliner i have to fly home
tomorrow i would like my jet airliner to all be put together properly right
it's not so much kind of like well whatever works for you um but
there are many many many steps to that problem it's not as simple as snapping
the carrot into you need some experts i should not be
working on the jet airliner other people have trained to be that person
right sometimes there may be more than one solution possible
with it with a complicated problem but there is a solution there's a right
place for all the pieces in the machine and you need to be an
expert and it's usually a lot of work sometimes a different example would be
obvious two plus two complicated long algebraic equation
complex is the domain that i'm particularly interested in
if you'll remember just go back for one second
we have obvious complicated complex and chaotic
chaotic is when your house is on fire if your problem is in the chaotic domain
you have to ask act first you've just got to do and so
that is not so much a problem that's always valuable
at the analytic kind of level but with the complex problem you've got
something like weather many factors involved not quite sure
which way it's going to go it can emerge in multiple forms
there's no solution that's important you can only work on
part of the problem at once and you've got to iterate you've got to
do it and go okay that part worked but that
part didn't let's try again and fix the part that didn't work
and you have to look for patterns okay a complex problem has a probe
and respond kind of thing kind of engagement now broadly speaking
the two that are interesting to me the reason i think of
understanding complexity as a key literacy for our time
is because we live in a time of many complex problems but we are
often encouraged and many of our senior strata leadership tend
to think and be sold by harvard business magazine and forbes
the idea that there are solutions to everything
or that complicated is the lens to use that
experts can fix things so i just want to test you just kind of to see
if we're getting the hang of the idea landing on the moon
would that be complicated or complex and there's there's gray area
but complicated right did any of you see hidden figures all the math
that went into that there you know when you've gotten to the moon
you know did they land were their feet there did they get home safely
that is a complicated problem because you could tell when you solved it
climate change
what do you think it's pretty complex in the sense that i'm not sure that we
can should we solve it i'm not sure we'll
know that we've solved it um we do need there are pieces of it
that are complicated right as a big problem however it is
complex raising kids
actually thank you fair enough at least with mine
coding
complicated coding is step by step you need some expertise um
for the most part you're going to see it following that domain
personalized learning through predictive analytics
you familiar with that idea of predictive analytics
right so how many of you read the choose your own adventure novels as a kid
yeah right where you decide okay so i want to go into the cave or i want to go
this way oh look i died um the way that this idea of personalized
learning works is it says okay bonnie i'm going to try to
teach you actually how to do an algebraic equation
and i noticed that you seems to have steps one and two correct
and then started to go wrong on step three
and 87 of other students who started to go wrong on step three
benefited from this remedial piece next so very best we're gonna do that right
that is a complicated process it is a very very granularly
um multi-step complicated process right machine learning can have
many many many tiny little pieces of information involved
but it is still a complicated problem
don't forget this says personalized learning for student success
student success what leads this young woman to
this point of graduation is that complicated
or complex
she's a human being it is complex right we don't know how she grew up
what her learning styles are what her friends studied and chose
to do um what kinds of things she is bringing
as a human to her learning experience she may benefit from passing
courses due to personalized learning particularly if
her subject is something like algebra right but i teach courses on things like
privilege there are not granular steps where a student can get it right or
wrong it is always situated in a given body
that has class and race and gender and all of those pieces
factoring in a student's experience of the world
complicated systems of thought can't solve
complex problems complicated systems of thought are super valuable
but they actually are not a totalizing view of the world or of learning
and this again is from bridal's book new dark age well machine intelligence is
rapidly outstripping human performance in many disciplines
and that's great it is not the only way of thinking and in many fields
is catastrophically destructive
so cambridge analytica hijacked democracy
complicated or complex problem
cambridge analytica's process may be complicated
for you is is the democratic problem created by cambridge analytica
a societal problem or a technical problem
it's a societal problem right sometimes the technical complicated
capacity of the systems that we've put in place
have created complex problems that those tools cannot solve
and this was me on twitter the other day our society is handing predictive
analytics systems the keys to everything but linkedin's job recommender keeps
sending me ads like project manager transit systems winnipeg
i can barely drive um i don't live anywhere near winnipeg
i have some concerns right the places in our average everyday lives where we see
a lot of these predictive systems operating
are sucky so we need literacies and digital practices
that foreground complexity when you are looking at a
societal problem don't accept or look for a technical
solution the strategy for complexity is probe the
problem sense patterns and then respond
there's no single right answer the system's in flux
and patterns emerge over time there are not
simple solutionist answers to a lot of the things that we need to do with the
web to make things better okay
but cooperation is an important way of beginning to get there
how might technoscience be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory
ends how in short can we design our techno
socio-technical systems differently this is rudolph benjamin
i know this probably isn't a real proverb it gets quoted a lot in
inspirational leadership literature but i do think it
is important to think about the things that
the complicate the complex problems that we have with
the web cannot be solved by any single one of us
no matter what a genius we might be the web is actually a complex system
of collaboration and cooperation it works very much like scholarship
right scholarship had its origins with kind of the
the royal society publishing papers and getting them out to the people who were
likewise interested building both awareness of
each other and awareness of the knowledge that they were creating
collaboration and cooperation are not the same thing
collaboration is a coordinated synchronous activity
that is the result of an ongoing effort to construct and maintain
a shared idea of a problem collaboration is world building it means that we've
come to use the same concepts and language
to understand something in broadly the same
way if we don't eat each other in tiny factions on the way
cooperation divides that labor to solve the problem among participants
so each unit has their own piece or portion
of the problem our problem is we've kind of made
ourselves as humans extras in some of the systems that operate
around us in scholarship and in society
and we can't fix the web without the machines
right a lot of my work um in addition to adulthood comes out of donna haraway's
1985-1991 cyborg manifesto around the idea that we are hybrid
and illegitimate and messy but that we need to work within those
boundaries that we can't look for purity but for cooperation across messy
boundaries if we are going to subvert the
totalizing systems that are trying to take us over and that's 30
40 years old um
and yeah so i see resistance to the web as it is
as part of both presence and participation
on the web in little network structures which you are
probably already doing right this as a representation of
a network is overly tidy but each entity is a little dot or a
node and the relationship between entities is
that line and that could be your relationship if this is you this
could be the new york times if you like to read them and how you
feel about the information that comes at you from them
but that would be a one-way relationship probably unless you're writing for them
whereas this could be your relationship with your mother
right and that's probably perhaps a two-way relationship
all of us have a concept of family and families are the original
network structure and within a family how many of you have
or grew up with a sibling okay do you have the identical
relationship with your mother for instance that your
sibling does no i'm sure your mother loved you more
but each line each connection is based on
particular histories and trust and understanding of the other entity and we
make sense of the world through networks
our webs are fragile right like spider webs but they are also
actually very strong how many of you have
connections with scholars in another place via the web
whom you value or or benefit from learning from and learning with
okay foster those if you don't have them they are out there to be made and i
encourage you to build those webs because i truly believe only in using
the capacity of the web for the kinds of learning focused
society-focused connections that we we as higher ed can do
will we have the chance to make the case for this system being more than just
kind of a totalizing corporate system the way we do that
is through contribution right and this is from
um yesterday's olc innovate uh keynote by tricyclic phd who you
should also be reading and her point was change never trickles
down change trickles up and so if we want change we need to
actually go out and build that change by using the web
for good you're doing it here today okay you have great sessions building
and managing your scholarly identity and that's not just
how nice you look on the web but who can find you and what if they
are out there looking for people too and actually want to
maybe collaborate or at least share your work or get a sense of you as a person
right employers will google you building a marketable professional online
presence with e-portfolios if we have the web as
a place where there is genuine participatory sharing happening
then we have some capacity to sway the decision makers
on platforms about what the future of those platforms might be
right but you need to be there and present to have an enfranchised voice
in those conversations the unwind online workshop off
unwind offline workshop is also super important
because it's a polluted space and you can't spend all your time there
right um the online identity photo booth is fun get a good picture go get a good
picture put it out there start the sharing now it's scary
how many of you did your little name tag yeah i don't have mine on right now but
i actually found it was probably more nerve-wracking for me
to do my name tag this morning because i had to make all of these choices but how
i'm going to represent myself did anybody else have that
slight feeling of anxiety and i feel the same about my my digital
identity that feeling is okay all right i want to encourage you
to sit with that feeling to get comfortable with it to see it as part
of really the price of admission for being
an enfranchised person in the world today
good or bad if we want to be able to make the web and the
society that it impacts better we do need to have a presence there and
an understanding of it and so that which little sticker you
know is that bow tie is it me i don't know those are things
that for the most part particularly those of
us who are my age or older most of us left behind
somewhere after about grade seven and may not have had to consider
since and so it can feel really weird to have to think about yourself and your
self presentation and hustle that but it's a literacy that you can build
and i love that you had the name tags with the decoration piece
as part of it because i think you're actually seeding the beginnings of that
identity presentation conversation that you're on about
so basically contribution the web is made of people
and a whole bunch of other entities that are about actors
but there are also people okay digital citizenship is connecting
with other people around the things that you care about
and becoming part of a networked conversation on whatever it is
workwise personal that you
love but making sure that you are building that pro-social
capacity okay for work so i have
uh an online portfolio that i share about myself and it's there if
people want to find me and it shows my work for play
i love this cosplay might be our best defense against surveillance maybe we
should all start going around in harry potter costumes
you know and then they can't tell which hermione is actually the one
who who did that thing that started to fight that system
for art this is the work of saba sahili singh who's at queen's university in
canada and she's done three short films just
released last week on smart homes and surveillance
and all of those things i encourage you to go look at them i encourage you
if art is a way that you want to share your scholarship to consider putting
things out that people who aren't necessarily
in higher ed can also access and understand
so that they too can begin to go oh maybe i should be thinking about this
stuff for scholarship google scholar
for sharing of resources and recommendations
right i am always putting out things that
i've read that somebody else might want to read
and this is just a phd chat as an example how many of you are grad
students here there's a hashtag called phdchat
on twitter even if you're not a huge twitter fan it can be a reasonably
welcoming and safe environment to get started on and meet other people
in other places doing the things that you're doing i was a mid-career phd
student when i went back in 2010 i was getting close to 40. um i had been
teaching for years and i joined a faculty and i i was i wanted
to study digital identity but my i also was from
a tiny island and had small children so i couldn't pick up
and move at that point so i studied where i was
my faculty were not perhaps as deeply embedded in that
online world as i was and they valued sort of the prestige economy of the
traditional academy whereas i was trying to explore how this
other prestige economy of the digital was emerging
and so i got a lot of pushback sometimes around the things
that i understood but couldn't make legible
within the terms of traditional scholarship and that's really common
for a lot of phd students particularly in areas like this
i think sometimes i was seen as too big for my britches
phd chat and the network of people around the world who were really my
cohort and my peers got me through that program because it
made me feel like no the work i was doing
did make sense and was valuable to people out there just not necessarily
the people where i was sharing support for each other right
sometimes you can get
understanding from people who aren't sitting next to you sometimes it's
easier to share things in a space that is
online for publishing the web was initially
about academic publishing in part and now of course as an ecosystem it's
mostly owned by elsevier and they're making
an absolute fortune so really this problem should say open
publishing but share your stuff you know consider who funds you this is
particularly tempting for people like me who do the work that i do
i could potentially compete for grants from google or from facebook
they have deep pockets
that's fraud right um not that my institution
or shirk which is the canadian funding body is pure
in any way but they are less invested in certain types of
answers coming out of the work that i'm interested in doing
so i'm beginning to look at educators data literacies
and i'm intentionally not applying for corporate
internet funding for it because i'm afraid of the shape
that it could take um collaboration and cooperation this is
something that happened at barner just yesterday it's an ethical pedagogy
directory editathon there are all kinds of things that if
you kind of spread your wings out into a world of
scholars doing stuff you will find people doing stuff that you care about
professional learning you know if you're more interested in
sort of the pd end of things and less the scholarship
this is a guy named harold jerky who lives in a tiny town sackville new
brunswick and runs a really interesting uh
perpetual dick that perpetual beta is his his framework but for living
and working in an increasingly networked age
so there are all kinds of connections out there to be made and for teaching
and so i left us sort of with bell hooks here at the end the classroom with all
of its limitations remains a location of possibility right
we have the opportunity to labor for freedom even as we collectively imagine
ways to move beyond boundaries to transgress this is education as the
practice of freedom and
this model for authentic change is just one that i think can be used
in any kind of powerful shift that needs to happen but
it maps against the concepts we've been talking about
because it starts with kind of the appreciative assessment of what your
values are what do you care about what is how do we see
this this time that we're in putting together that shared language
for how we see this time we're in and then
building collective awareness through networks
co-designing small localized things that can be different right
capability building in communities we
do have the capacity to make change even at this time and higher ed is one of the
key engines in society that has not fully
grappled with the internet yet and i believe that
if it did that a we would strategically enter
ourselves in many more of the conversations that matter
in our society right now but two be we would have the capacity to change
more of those conversations that matter we need to work towards better systems
we get to do it we work in systems anyway
and to close us off howard's in if we remain obedient to the systems
and the directions that we are going the picture
of data surveillance etc is not a pretty one
but the web itself is just a large collection
of networks and if we use our networks i believe that we can still make changes
in that so i encourage you to do it today with
your digital identities thank you
and we've got 10 minutes for questions does anybody have any thoughts questions
tomatoes to throw i'm ready please
um a question about the notion of compromise
in here where that fits because i you started with this idea of polarization
and i what i worry about is that the nature
of everything in our society now is to push everything to the extremes and
complexity seems to be compromised as part of that
right yeah and i think in a sense for me
this whole conversation right this talk is a talk about
compromise the compromise that i think we need to make is with the polluted
platforms of the web um i think it may be donna
haraway again talks about polluted inheritance and in
her case she was talking about the polluted inheritance of the
enlightenment right the um the conceptual inheritance of the
ways that we think particularly in academia
but i think we have a particular localized polluted inheritance right now
that has emerged within the last five six seven years
that i don't have a way to connect with my community
without twitter and i recognize what twitter is
and i recognize how it contributes to the larger part of the problem but i
also recognize that there are fairly huge
pockets of twitter academic twitter edge and twitter
where you have real people in real places in real schools
doing having real conversations that change
things at the local level because those people go back into their staff meetings
and go whoa blah blah i've learned this i've learned
that
and for me in my career that has been like just life-changing um
absolutely life-changing and so that compromise
is fraught um and i'm mindful of the fact that twitter could
disappear tomorrow and i'm really not sure what i would do
with that um but at the same time while it is there
i think it is far better to try to use it build capacity
steer it to what extent we can speak back
rather than just abandon it to the trolls and the white supremacists
and what and the president
so i don't know if that gets at some of your question yeah it's just i
kind of think we need to retrieve the idea of
compromise that it's not it's not we think of it as giving
you're not getting everything you want yeah and so it's a bad
thing and i think actually compromised can be a solution
and it's it's a good thing i think if if many of us
are going to live together there will always be
compromises i think in the public sphere today
we see less focus on it um and i agree with you that possibly it is
an idea that we may need to bring back so that we don't i again see it in those
harroway terms of purity being
a goal that ends up tanking your whole project
you may not get the the perfect person to lead you for instance
uh but sometimes you have to weigh your options and practicality and yeah
there's there's a lot there for sure anybody else
thanks so in terms of um
um
i mean it depends on i think to some extent
one of the big internet slogan terms is why mmv your mileage may vary
and there's a lot of ymmv in that kind of how do i research on the internet
piece because depending on what you're
researching there are pockets of internet engagement that are
absolutely still 95 100 good faith engagement
right um where you can be reasonably sure that
most of what you are kind of scraping is uh probably real people
probably engaging in real ways there are whole
other pockets of the internet where what you're scraping
may be you know 80 percent garbage or garbage from a certain perspective if
you are taking it as the speech acts of good faith people
living in real single individual bodies in different locations right so it
depends on the assumptions you make about your data
as well um i haven't used mechanical turk for research
um but i know i'm sitting on my research ethics board which is like an irb
in canada and we have been talking a little bit about
some of the the ethics guiding mturk research and how we
what kinds of expectations we have and that question
of how do we also protect not just participants but the researchers
from an increasingly bad faith environment is it
is not one that at least at my school we've solved um
so i'm not sure but a lot of it would depend i think
on what you're studying and if i if i were looking at that just from a
30 000 feet point of view what i would do would be look
at the field itself and what maybe look for background research
on what proportion of the field is actually kind of good faith
at this point and then that would give you some guidelines around
how how many grains of salt to add to to your data when you put it in the mix
i don't know if that helps but yeah it's really important to
recognize that many of the spaces that we may be engaging with for any
kind of reason may not all be actual people
at this point and that's a weird that's weird
like you know i i'm just i i'm i'm still grappling with that because
it's it's only a couple of the phenomenon is relatively new
um yeah
it's one of the main things that i think higher ed
should get it's it's hands-on quickly um because
and i think actually particularly in the us because you
have such a large higher ed sector like even per capita the us is a much larger
country than canada anyhow but you also have a lot more higher ed institutions
even per capita and you have many super influential
institutions who have the capacity to leverage the media and certain
types of conversations can be gotten out there
through the engine of higher ed and so any place where higher ed has some seat
at the table however fraught the table is higher ed
in my mind should be using that scene not just
to advocate and the problem is that i think as a as a whole as a sector we've
been put back on our heels a little bit on
the defensive where we are kind of looking to
oh hey we're we're still here we're good we'd like some funding
um and and when you're in that position you're not as likely to take the risk of
an advocacy role but i think it's important for higher ed
to recognize that unless we would like to continue to be pushed back on our
heels to the point that we are not at the table
then these are the conversations that govern our ethos and that
essentially higher ed exists to protect in this society um so to me it's super
important that we in the small ways
that each of us can right because most of us in this room are probably not
sitting at all of the national tables or can't
change the conversation for a sector but when you see the opportunity to
change it at a table that you are at i would
encourage you because i genuinely do have some anxiety
around where we are but i do also truly believe in that subversive hope
and i'm kind of excited um about some of the opportunities
that are there for us to play that role should we choose to
um i don't see lunch
but maybe they can bring it in if i'm holding it back
please let them bring it in thank you very much for the chance to talk to you
um and i will make sure that um julia has the slides if anybody would
like them um i'm gonna be adapting this i'm
actually going to anaganesh nova scotia on monday to do a
slightly different more anaganish focused
talk but on similar topics so that one at least i will be putting on slideshare
and i may put both on slideshare if people are interested so
let me know okay thanks