Category Archives: Women in Tech

OER16: Open Culture – that was the conference that was.

Posted on by

So, the OER16 Open Culture Conference has been and gone and what an experience it was!  Co-chairing OER16 with my inspiring colleague Melissa Highton has been an enormously rewarding experience and I owe a huge debt of thanks to everyone who volunteered their time, effort and creativity to make the conference such a success. In particular I’d like to thank our keynotes, Catherine Cronin, Emma Smith, John Scally, Jim Groom and Melissa Highton for their inspiring and thought provoking talks and, of course, the ALT team for supporting the conference and ensuring everything ran like clockwork.  I can highly recommend charing an ALT conference if you’re ever thinking about it!

oer16_jim_penny

It’s too soon after the event for me to gather my thoughts and attempt to provide any kind of coherent overview so here’s a round up of the conference outputs and some of my personal highlights in lieu of something more considered.

ada_me_oer16

Me & Ada LEGO Lovelace by Stuart Cromar

And of course, my personal twitter highlight of the conference…

oer16_me_josie

 

Taxi Chic OER16 Co-Chairs Melissa Highton & Lorna Campbell by Catherine Cronin, CC BY SA

Taxi Chic
OER16 Co-Chairs Melissa Highton & Lorna Campbell
by Catherine Cronin, CC BY SA

So now it’s time to pass the torch over to the fabulous Josie Fraser and Alek Tarkowski, two of my favourite people working in open education today, who’ll be co-chairing OER17: The Politics of Open.  It’ll be awesome!

 

 

International Women’s Day – Acknowledging the role of Women in OER

Posted on by

IWD-logo-portaitjpgI was surprised and delighted to be included in a blog post from the Open Educational Practices in Scotland project today marking International Women’s Day – Women in OER.  The post celebrates some of the women the project has worked with and I’m honoured to be named alongside such influential open education practitioners as Laura Czerniewicz, Josie Fraser and my old colleague Allison Littlejohn.

The post acknowledges the potential of open education to

“…widen access to education for women and girls, enabling them to access global thought leaders and subjects that might not be available to them locally. It also provides a platform by which women and girls can share their own knowledge and experiences.

There is a role for open education to contribute to closing the gender gap now, to ensure that all genders are treated equally, to facilitate women and girls achieving their ambitions, to challenge discrimination and bias in all forms, to promote gender balanced leadership, to value contributions equally, and to create inclusive and flexible cultures.”

If I can make even a small contribution towards furthering these aims I will be very proud indeed.

OER16 Open Culture Conference – Open as in Open

Posted on by

In keeping with the ethos of open education, the OER conferences have always made an effort to be as diverse, inclusive and, well, open as possible and OER16 Open Culture is no exception.

The draft conference programme has recently been announced and we’re delighted to have accepted 101 papers and panels from 29 different countries.

oer16_diversity

OER16 presenters will come from 29 countries around the world

Bearing the recent #allmalepanels meme in mind, we’re also aware of issues relating to gender balance and diversity and we’re very pleased to have almost 50/50 representation. Of over a hundred lead authors who recorded their gender along with their submission, 49% are female and 51 % male, and our keynotes are similarly balanced.

Although the University of Edinburgh is clearly a popular destination for delegates, not all of our presenters and participants are able to travel to Scotland for a wide range of reasons, so we are happy to facilitate remote presentation. One OER16 presenter Maha Bali, associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, has previously written in the Chronicle of Higher Education about her own experiences as a remote conference presenter

“I am finding more and more conferences willing to accommodate me as a virtual presenter. This is probably happening more to me than other people because of my travel restrictions (mom of a young child living halfway across the world from most conferences I want to attend and where most of my collaborators reside), coupled with my refusal to ignore the potential social capital I can gain from presenting internationally, that is different from everyday online interactions. There are many reasons why a conference might want to welcome virtual presenters (diversity and equity being two)”

Hospitality for Virtual Presenters by Maha Bali
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2016

In relation to OER16, Maha also commented:

“Presenting virtually at conferences allows me to have a voice in the field. How often do people in ed tech get to hear the perspective of Arab Muslim women who live in the Arab World? Presenting coupled with virtually connecting conversations allows me to feel more of an equal to my Western peers with whom I collaborate year-round.”

In order to ensure that OER16 is inclusive and accessible, we have aimed to keep the conference fee as low as possible for full delegates. However if cost is a genuine barrier, ALT have a small amount of limited funding available to subsidise registrations for presenters who are students, school teachers, who work in small FE institutions, adult or community education or are members of the public with a special interest in OER. Subsidised places have already been offered to fourteen presenters and applications of funding close on the 6th March.

OER16 also offers many opportunities for remote participation, the majority of which are completely open and free of charge. All five keynotes by Catherine Cronin, Jim Groom, Melissa Highton, John Scally and Emma Smith will be streamed live on ALT’s dedicated youtube channel, and will also be available to view after the conference. There will be a wide range of social media channels including twitter feeds, blogs, hang outs and internet radio broadcasts, facilitated by the ALT Open Education SIG, Radio EDUtalk, Virtually Connecting and others, which will enable remote participants to engage with and contribute to the conference. Remote participants will only be required to register their details if they wish to comment on the main conference platform hosted by ALT, although registration will be required, this facility is still free of charge, all other remote participation channels are both free and open, and yes, that really is open as in open.

Wikimedia opportunities and events at the University of Edinburgh

Posted on by

[Cross posted from Open Scotland]

edinburghThe University of Edinburgh recently became the first Higher Education institution in Scotland to advertise for a Wikimedian in Residence.  The post will be based within Information Services where the successful candidate will work alongside learning technologists, archivists, librarians and information literacy teams to help establish a network of Wikimedians on campus and to embed digital skills and open knowledge activities in learning and teaching across the University.  Applications for the post, which is part-time and fixed term, are open until the 29th October 2015.

The University of Edinburgh already has a strong tradition of engaging with the Wikimedia Foundation through Wikimedians in Residence at the National Library of Scotland and National Museums Scotland.  A number of editathons have already taken place at the University focused on raising the profile of women in science and Scottish history.  The hugely successful Edinburgh Seven editathon, focused on the first women to be admitted on a degree programme at any British university. The achievements of the Edinburgh Seven were also recognised when a commemorative plaque was unveiled by Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Europe and External Affairs, at a ceremony in the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum in September.

ADA_Blog

Another Women, Science and Scottish History editathon will be taking place at the University on Tuesday 13th October to coincide with Ada Lovelace Day, the international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).  In addition to the editathon, the event will feature speakers on Lovelace, research using LEGO, programming and games, and sessions on composing music with algorithms, and building Raspberry Pi enclosures with LEGO.

Links

Interesting Times

Posted on by

May you live in interesting times is a well known, but seemingly fictitious, “Chinese curse”, and boy was 2013 an interesting time!

I’m not much given to end of year reflections as I tend to see this as a time to look forward rather than back, however I can’t let this year pass without comment.  My former Cetis colleague Sheila MacNeil has already written a lovely reflective post over at her blog called That Was The Year That Was; my equivalent post is rather more That Was The Year That Wasn’t.  Unsurprisingly the year was dominated by the University of Strathclyde’s decision to terminate the Cetis Memorandum of Understanding and make all Cetis staff at the university redundant at the end of July.  However this was just the end of a long, drawn out and bitter process that started with the controversial closure of the department that housed Cetis, the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement, in early 2012.  Over the previous eighteen months most of my time had been devoted to increasingly hostile wrangling with HR and university senior management.  University College Union representatives at Strathclyde were helpful and supportive but ultimately neither they, not I, were able to prevent the university serving us with compulsory redundancy notices, or to negotiate better terms than statutory redundancy.   I would be lying if I said I wasn’t bitter about loosing sixteen years tenure and a considerable amount of funding, left behind in various project budgets.  Unfortunately, as I had spent most of the previous year and a half embroiled in HR negotiations,  I had no alternative employment lined up when our redundancies finally came into force, and I found myself unemployed for the first time since graduating in 1990.  To add insult to injury, due to lack of funding, I was unable to attend the ALT Conference in September, and the paper Phil Barker and I had had accepted was dropped from the programme. I was also gutted not to be there to see Sheila accept her immensely well-deserved Learning Technologist of the Year Award, which Cetis’ Christina Smart and I had sneakily nominated her for.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though.  Determined to leave Strathclyde on a high, we organised the highly successful Open Scotland Summit, which brought together representatives of Scotland’s education authorities, agencies and institutions to discuss the potential of open education policy and practice to benefit Scottish education across the sector, and which featured a keynote from Creative Commons’ Director of Global Learning, Dr Cable Green.

I spent the three months after my redundancy working on variety of project proposals and consultancy bids and it was great to reconnect with several colleagues who I had lost touch with including Lou McGill, Allison Littlejohn and all the great people at Jisc RSC Scotland. I made some great new contacts through the Open Knowledge Foundation too, and got involved with helping to organise the OKFN Glasgow meetups. I also migrated my professional blog from Lorna’s Cetis Blog to Open World, I set up the Open Scotland blog and continued working with colleagues to further the goals discussed at the Open Scotland Summit.

In October I was very much relieved to be back in the saddle as Cetis Assistant Director, this time at the University of Bolton.  Working from home on a regular basis has required a bit of adjustment, but there are worse things to have to put up with!   Shortly after re-joining Cetis I was delighted to see some of the proposals I’d been working on over the summer come to fruition and I’m looking forward to starting the new year with some new projects that I hope to be able to start blogging about soon.

2013 might have been difficult career wise, but in terms of our history research it was a huge success.  My research colleague Heather Noel-Smith and I were delighted to have two papers accepted for peer reviewed conferences run by the University of Portsmouth (Port Towns and Urban Cultures) and the National Museum of the Royal Navy (Press Gangs, Conscripts and Professionals) and to have a research seminar scheduled as part of the National Museum of the Royal Navy Seminar Series in the new year.  Our research was also featured at the National Archives Explore Your Archives event in November.  I also really enjoyed connecting with a diverse and lively group of #twitterstorians on twitter, not least the irrepressible Port Towns crew.  It was through these twitter connections that I had the opportunity to contribute to a blog post written by Joanna Bailey of Oxford Brooks University, and co-authored by Isaac Land, Indiana State University, Steven Gray, Warwick University and myself. “The six best conference questions: Or, how not to paper-bomb at a conference” turned out to be the most popular post on this blog in 2013 with over 2,300 views!

So that was 2013.  There was plenty to say “good bye and good riddance to”, but there were also many real high points among all the doom and gloom, not least of which was the support of colleagues, family and friends.  It’s also been hugely encouraging to see so many of my former Strathclyde colleagues from both CAPLE and Cetis move on to new posts where their talents are very much appreciated.  It’s great to be able to keep in touch and I hope we can look forward to working together again in the future.   So here’s looking forward to 2014, and here’s hoping that it’s a slightly less “interesting” time than 2013.  Onwards and upwards and all that!

White Horses for Ada Lovelace Day

Posted on by

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, the annual celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. I try to write something for Ada Lovelace Day every year, but I don’t always manage it.  Four years ago, pressed for time, I just blogged a list of all the unique and inspiring women who I’d worked with in the domain of educational technology since 1997.  Looking back on the list now, it’s sobering to reflect how many of these women have now left the field, moved into other domains, or sadly passed away.

Julie Allinson, Helen Beetham, Kerry Blinco, Rachel Bruce, Joanna Bull, Gayle Calverley, Jackie Carter, Lisa Corley, Sarah Currier, Jenny Delasalle, Susan Eales, Suzanne Hardy, Rachel Harris, Rachel Heery, Nancy Hobelheinrich, Sarah Hollyfield, Allison Littlejohn, Sheila MacNeill, Sue Manuel, Moira Masey, Lisa Mattson, Mhairi McApline, Sarah McConnell, Lou McGill, Celeste McLaughlan, Liddy Neville, Solvig Norman, Chris Pegler, Sharon Perry, Sarah Porter, Jean Ritchie, Tish Roberts, Laura Shaw, Christina Smart, Amber Thomas, Li Yuan, Su White, Lara Whitelaw, Heather Williamson, Vashti Zarach, Linn van der Zanden.

White Horses. Haiku Print by Lou McGilll

White Horses.
Haiku Print by Lou McGilll

Many of us are still hanging in there, and of course I’ve been lucky enough  to work with many more inspiring women since creating this original list, but there’s no denying that the last four years have been tough for everyone working not just in educational technology, but in academia more widely. However if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s just how resilient, creative and adaptable my female colleagues* can be when it comes to facing the continued uncertainty that is afflicting the sector.

To my mind, nothing illustrates this adaptability and creativity better than this picture.  This lovely art work is by Lou McGill, who I first met many moons ago working on a Jisc funded Digital Libraries in the Classroom project at the University of Strathclyde.  Lou worked on a number of Jisc funded projects before taking up a post as Programme Manager with Jisc itself.  Some years later Lou left Jisc and she now works as an education technology consultant and runs her own art gallery, Life’s Little Ironies, in Whithorn.  I had the pleasure of catching up with Lou recently at a pop-up gallery she ran at the Wigtown Book Festival, we talked about everything from education technology, to art, to local history and I came away with with this lovely art work and, perhaps more importantly, lots of good ideas.

Many of the women listed above have gone on to achieve wonderful things both in and beyond the domain of education technology and that is certainly something to celebrate.

*To be fair, my male colleagues have had it just as tough, and have had to be equally creative and resilient to survive. Respect to them too.