Friday 1st July 2022 is the in person part of the APT (Academic Practice and Technology) conference. In its 12th year, this conference, co-hosted by UCL, LSE and Imperial, re-emerges from online only with some interesting modalities of its own. The conference includes a mix of synchronous online, asynchronous content pre-recorded by colleagues from across the sector and synchronous in-person roundtables, workshops and hackathons. The opening event from Professor Cate Denial, ‘Pedagogy of kindness in action’ generated a huge amount of interest and ongoing discussion. The recording and information on all three keynoters is available on the APT site.
I will be chairing a discussion session that brings together three related papers and a panel of colleagues from City, UoL, Edinburgh Napier and Kingston, the outline of which can be seen below:
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I will also be co-hosting a roundtable on hybrid/ hyflex inclusivity tensions with UCL’s head of Digital Accessibility, Ben Watson, and my Arena colleague, Alex Standen, who will be doing a ‘sorry I can’t be with you tonight recorded performance! The slides including pre-recorded videos from Ben and Alex are here:
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Finally, recordings of speakers from the Hybrid symposium event at UCL in June ’22 are included below for convenience and quick reference. The videos below comprise recordings of Ruth Puhr, Fiona Strawbridge (with me chipping in) and Nataša Perović Profiles page of speakers.
Really interesting. Some barely-organised responses: teachers my age (50+) often learned to teach with paper handout as the sole technology, maybe some slides and a never-entirely-trustworthy slide projector etc. Now it’s multi-screens with mentimeter running alongside slides. Having any ‘items’ in the room with the teacher/students changes the dynamics fundamentally – everything focuses on ‘the thing’. Even when you feel it’s letting you down (mic not working etc), attention is going there. Nick Grindle made me realise some years ago that a lot of teaching is precisely ‘managing people’s attention’. This has a lot of (temporary) benefits for teachers especially if they don’t feel confident or are nervous; the relationship with students is mediated by the ‘tech’ – less confronting. One aim for me of educational development is helping teachers move to a state of mind where the tech serves rather than dominates them as they feel less confronted. They can go off-piste, or compress material after a digression and so on. The more structured it gets (and hybrid probably has to be more structured than any other format, even if ‘basic hybrid’), the harder it is to respond to the room and adapt the session on the fly. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, I’m opening what may be a can of worms that is often abbreviated to ‘cognitive overload’ (and good to have that mentioned explicitly); I’m just thinking aloud about how we continue to have that confidence-and-dexterity-building process as teachers get the hang of their role.