Blockchain: designing the future of value and credit

This session was delivered by Chris Speed and Kate Symons from the Centre for Design Informatics.

Chris and Kate have made a fine art of the blockchain workshop they’ve developed to get people thinking creatively, and critically, about the implications of distributed ledger technology.

Opening up the prospect of significant changes to the ways in which we record, share and exchange value, Blockchain has some potentially profound implications for the ways in which universities might organise and assign credit, and their function as trusted gatekeepers of academic value. For a quick overview of what these might look like, see this piece on the Times Higher Education blog:

Chris started us off with some bitcoin and blockchain background, foregrounding its significant, scary, energising and generative implications for the ways in which we conceive of value. We were a mixed group with colleagues and students attending from Geosciences, Engineering, the Usher Institute, Biology, Education, Psychology, and Science, Technology and Innovation Studies

We then conducted as a group three rounds of peer-to-peer trading using lego to build and materialise our ledger of exchange: each transaction made between peers was given provenance (hence the initials on the stickers in the images below) and added to the ledger (the blockchain). Each stage involved different events: simple peer to peer trade, resource scarcity, and value-driven and openly negotiated transactions. Each stage produced a blockchain, which was then closed, only to build the next chain in the subsequent stages.

Which eventually culminated in this, the Near Future Teaching blockchain:

We then split into groups to discuss and ideate around how blockchain could be used in (higher) education. Themes emerged ranging from the dull to the radical, the full-of-possibility to the deeply troubling:

peer to peer or decentralised accreditation

the dissolution of the university as gatekeeper of academic value

boring blockchains to rethink student records management

the need to maintain the ability to lie, or to amend error

the risk of reducing every aspect of learning to a form of (economic) capital

the possibility that students might assign each other social and academic credit, that assignment of credit might move away from the university, and away from individual lecturers

the possibility that students might craft their own learning pathways, accredited by peers and bypassing the university entirely

The emphasis of the Near Future Teaching project on how values should drive future planning for digital education was brought into very stark focus here: distributed ledger technology has potential to allow us to radically open up the university (a promise we’ve heard frequently in the digital education space) or to radically to lock it down. How should we respond?

by Michael Gallagher

Digital and material design, the uCreate Studio, and Near Future Teaching

Get hands-on with 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality and more, discussing what technologies might be used in future classrooms at the University of Edinburgh, and discuss how our values can influence the decisions we make about technology for teaching.

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The Near Future Teaching project held a recent event with the uCreate Studioin the University of Edinburgh’s Main Library.

uCreate Studio is the community’s makerspace with a host of facilities and technologies for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 3D Printing, CNC Milling, 3D Scanning, and more. Run by Mike Boyd, who led the session with us, it is a great facility and a very open, encouraging environment to turn ideas into virtual or material reality.

We were interested in using the uCreate Studio as an environment to stimulate thinking around the future of teaching at the University. By getting hands-on with kit, we wanted participants to think creatively about the future of the university and how teaching might change in years to come through access to material and maker technologies, spaces and pedagogies.

Mike introduced the space, discussing ideas that the makerspace has put into play: putting museums on display, new research in the analytics around the material elements of creation and product design, virtual educational tools, and product manufacturing. With that little bit of explanation, away we went.

Academic colleagues and PhD students from Medicine, Geosciences, Science and Technology Studies, Informatics and Psychology came along and spent the time playing with the kit, discussing how they might use them in teaching and recording a few vox pop interviews.

We toyed with Skanect to make 3D scans of humans; Sketchfab for exporting 3D scans to VR; Autodesk RECAP for reality capture. We learned about Thingiverse, a database of digital design; Cura, the printing software needed to make it all go. Easel: Inventables for 3D carving.

Ideas emerged for a range of potential applications in teaching: medical simulations with VR, actual surgery with AR, using 3D models and printing to explore law and intellectual property, creating bespoke research instruments for particular projects. Using 3D models to explore intricate anatomical structures and haptic systems to explore treatment and surgery in these high risk environments. VR and AR for exploring sympathy and empathy in psychology.

Ultimately, the question that we keep circling back on is how do these technologies create new teaching practices? How do they expand on our vision of what is possible at the University, in our disciplines, and across disciplines? Some spoke to new teaching practices, some to new research practices, some to new event and field learning activities. All spoke, at some level, to the value of curiosity in this process, to dig deeper, to learn more.

A few key takeaways were:

VR clearly has many applications in the classroom and for distance learning, but we need to be able to scale it up in an affordable way (Google cardboards for classes of 20+)

Kit is only a fairly small part of the issue: another one is simply time. How do we make time for academics and postgraduate teachers to use, adapt and develop curriculum which enagages some of these technologies for teaching?

Problem-based curricula and teaching methods are likely to really engage students by using 3D printing, scanning and milling to craft and materially express products and artefacts, so we might want to look at creative exploration of problem-based learning across disciplines for aspects of our future teaching.

VR and immersive methods for the teaching of, for example, psychology have clear uses but future teaching would need to carefully design for immersion and its potential emotional stresses and ethical nuances: again, kit is far from being the only issue to address here.

Maker spaces imply presence on campus, so what about distance learners? We can draw on projects like the OU’s Re:Form to understand how remotemanufacturing can help us educate by making at a distance.

by Michael Gallagher

What the future of teaching should look like: discussions with the BME Liberation Group at Edinburgh University

“You are kind of left in the wilderness to scurry around and find yourself.”

Earlier this year, Anouk Lang, Near Futures Teaching project task group member and Lecturer in Digital Humanities, ran a discussion session with members of the Edinburgh University Students’ Association Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Liberation Group.

This group, convened by Esme Allman, offers “a safe space within EUSA where self-identifying BME students (including those of African, Asian, Arab and Afro-Caribbean descent) can come together, discuss the issues affecting them, and campaign to improve their student experience.” In addition, members of other EUSA liberation groups – the Disabled Students’ Campaign, the Women’s Campaign and the LGBT+ Campaign – also attended.

The discussion was around what teaching should look like at the university in the coming decades and what that might entail for BME students. The discussion started from the premise that what university teachers and administrators might see and what students might see is very different, with this disparity likely to be particularly pronounced for those identifying as minorities. Some of the issues raised are summarised here.

Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Campaign

https://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/representation/liberation/bme/

The role of space: Students appreciated having a range of learning and study spaces – individual and social spaces, common rooms, graduate spaces, undergraduate spaces – and being able to move between them, for instance to avoid the silence that causes anxiety for some but focuses others.

Technology and the role of social media emerged in discussion as a means of forming, and finding, welcoming communities, and making for a more holistic experience of everything university has to offer. There was a sense that social media could be used as a way to help fellow students be more inclusive – for instance to help them to understand how particular ways of speaking about minority students are racist and distressing – but also are cognition that it is valuable to keep some ‘safe spaces’ – ie. private spaces for particular communities – insulated.

Whatever the future of the university might be, these space considerations will not disappear: we need to engage them and the technologies used to support their creation and regulation.

Discussing the importance of student support and induction, many expressed the desire for a better induction structure, particularly the need to raise awareness of the specific kinds of support that are available, and for practical and technological concerns: How do I get help? How do I do this? Where do I go? There is a need for induction that helps students to familiarise themselves with the university’s various online systems, and for digital literacy more broadly, as well as training about consent and unconscious bias. Staff, too, needed to undertake training in unconscious bias as well.

There was discussion around the role of the library, the role of resource lists and recorded lectures in facilitating learning and support, and potentially mitigating some of the confusion that might result from navigating such a multitude of technological systems and idiosyncratic teaching and administrative practices. Navigating such systems, particularly complex and distributed ones, is something that requires explicit guidance.

The session concluded with the students creating a manifesto to help guide the NearFuture Teaching project going forward:

Teachers should be educated better to better educate us. The future must be as inclusive as possible. No one should feel othered or alone. The university should be a space for learning and unlearning.

“Inherent”biases and prejudice should be challenged through critical engagement with literature which is diverse in race, gender, sexuality, ability. The university experience should constantly aim to decolonise and deconstruct systems of oppression so people feel included and represented. University should be inclusive, representative, and caring.

An institution that cares for its most marginalised members. Co-curricular and students as partners. Place the student’s wellbeing at the forefront of everything. Thou shalt not condone racism, sexism, homophobia etc through thy silence or ignorance, especially if thou art a lecturer. Education should be diverse, accessible and human. The university must be representative and intersectional. Making education accessible for everyone.

Fresher’s Week shouldn’t be the best week of a university experience. That level of support needs to continue. The university should be inclusive: intellectually, pastorally, physically and otherwise. It should be better structured to support all students’ education and experience.

With thanks to all the participants and to Rianna Walcott (Project Myopia and LiberatEd) for help in organising the session.

by Michael Gallagher

DIY Filmmaking at the University of Edinburgh: Imagining future teaching through a smartphone

Notes from a recent Near Future Teaching event at the University of Edinburgh

I had been looking forward to the Near Future Teaching DIY Film School event since I first saw Stephen Donnelly give a demonstration of some of the very cool mo-jo (aka mobile journalism) kit that Media Services at the University of Edinburgh have invested in for staff and students to make use of in their work and study, and play.

The equipment generally allows a mobile phone to magically morph into a pimped-up fully functional hand-held video camera. Items such as the BEASTGRIP give you a more stable base and allow you, if you wish, to attach to a tripod, and then you can pop on a RODEVideoMic and a portable Commlightand you’re ready to go.

I had been looking forward to the Near Future Teaching DIY Film School event since I first saw Stephen Donnelly give a demonstration of some of the very cool mo-jo (aka mobile journalism) kit that Media Services at the University of Edinburgh have invested in for staff and students to make use of in their work and study, and play.

The equipment generally allows a mobile phone to magically morph into a pimped-up fully functional hand-held video camera. Items such as the BEASTGRIP give you a more stable base and allow you, if you wish, to attach to a tripod, and then you can pop on a RODEVideoMic and a portable Commlightand you’re ready to go.

Stephen talked us through all the equipment, some top tips for how to get started on your first videos, and showed us some examples of really stunning short films made with iPhones such as this beautiful film commissioned by Bentley Motors.

Then the teams were sent out with the equipment and they each had about an hour to make their first film. To our surprise one group even managed to do some editing of their interview, and you can take a look at it here.

We were so impressed by the participants who jumped right into the process and not only explored this remarkable, empowering and accessible high/lo-tech equipment, but who also managed to incorporate Near Future Teaching-inspired questions about the future into their vox pop interview.

If you work or study at the University of Edinburgh and are interested to learn more about and use this equipment and to get involved in the Near Future Teaching vox pop conversation, get in touch!

by Michael Gallagher

Near Future Teaching Collider

The first Near Future Teaching event of the year happened in partnership with Design Informatics.

Led by Chris Speed, the event brought together three speakers to deliver provocations loosely aligned to the theme of near future teaching, and finished with a series of collaboratively produced design approaches to our teaching futures.

To get us going, Michael Rovatsos, who researches AI in the School of Informatics, asked us to think more about not ‘stand alone’ AI but about hybrids of artificial and human intelligence and how we might work with them. He ended with the definitely-provocative provocation: let’s get rid of universities. After all, teaching and learning requires people, knowledge and resources all of which can be sourced globally, matched and managed digitally. Michael asked, ‘can we imagine global, digital universities that are completely co-created? And what would those look like?

Jo Holtan from the Edinburgh Mastercard Scholars Programme then completely re-focused us by moving away from our tendency to ‘think big’, to think ‘small’: to consider the individual humans who join the community of scholarship represented by the university, how they benefit, and what our duty as an institution is to them. In discussing the Edinburgh programme, she emphasised the value of students co-creating and co-designing their programmes of study.

Finally, Fionn Tynan-O’Mahoney from the Open Experience Centre at the Royal Bank of Scotland came at us from the industry perspective, talking about how user engagement is designed for RBS services. To finish, he sparked a lively discussion on the benefits and threats of Open Banking and increased data-sharing between individuals and the banking services they use.

Sian Bayne then spoke as ‘problem owner’ and set the design challenge for the workshop: how do we design university teaching for a creative, risk-taking, values-led digital future?

Around 30 participants then worked in groups to address this question, designing speculative interventions in teaching for digital futures. These focused for the most part on the structural, curricular dimensions of university teaching rather than on teaching methods, and many of the ideas were genuinely inspired.

The first group designed a Random Curriculum Generator which would force students and academics out of their disciplinary silos. What if part of the first year of every university experience was a randomly selected pairing of subjects designed to shake students into new ways of thinking? Architecture with Sanskrit? Chemistry with Sociology? Public Health with History? We would place the decision with the Random Curriculum Generator and benefit from a post-disciplinary understanding of the world to take forward into our future studies.

The second group played with the idea of personalisation and intimacy of the university experience, by developing an idea based on Intimate Apparel. Buy your special VR glasses, jacket, hat and be immersed in your own, unique version of the university journey. Lectures delivered in a forest, an urban learning experience driven by music and sound, an essay built through dance….

Next, we had group three presenting a speculative mobile device called the Edinburgh Wayfinder. Designed to push students into understanding that university isn’t just about eventual employment, but about forming and building identity, the Wayfinder works as a device for connecting each individual student to a vast network of support from peers, alumni, communities within the city, and academics. Feeling lost and isolated? Ask the Edinburgh Wayfinder for help and its geosocial functionality will link you to a passing alumnus who can take you for coffee and a chat. Feeling stuck on a particular topic? Ask the Wayfinder which will link you to just-in-time support from a friendly academic. Shake the device and all the personal data associated with your exchange is erased: the Wayfinder is built upon an architecture of forgetting…

Finally, group four presented an innovative, banking-informed approach to research-led learning and micro-credit, in which all individuals – students and academics – bring their expertise to bear on pressing global, curricular, community challenges in a loosely-linked system of flow. Expertise ‘assets’ can be re-used to get funding, pay, or recognition in the form of credit.

Bringing it all together were a few themes (thanks to Michael Sean Gallagher) for these!

The first was an implicit or explicit values-centred design. Many of the groups emphasised values overtly. Second was the emphasis, for the most part, on intimacy or development of relationships towards, presumably, resilience and identity formation. Many of the groups chose interactions at the beginnings of the student lifecycle (matriculating, adapting to different social environments, preparation). Third was the repeated emphasis on identity formation. Most of the groups seemed to favour approaches that allowed for the formation of an identity through personalisation and exposure to an evolving set of inputs (curriculum, for example). Technologically, many favoured personalisation, such as AI assistants to help broker relationships, make students aware of opportunity, or provide a kit they choose to create a sense of ownership and engagement.

by Michael Gallagher

Near Future Teaching Autumn Events

Online and In-person, so many ways to connect!

Thought provoking…

We are delighted that our programme of events for Autumn 2017 is coming into focus. We will have many ways for you to engage with the project and share your thoughts about the future of digital education at the University of Edinburgh. Keep an eye on our Events page for ways that you can take part in person, and add your thoughts, links, images, videos and ideas to our Near Future Teaching Community Padlet page. Come along to our Near Future Teaching Collider event:

And you can always find us on Facebook @NearFutureTeach and Twitter @NearFutureTeach, and use our hashtag #UoE_NFT to get in touch. If you missed it, you might also enjoy this round up of the brilliant Playful Learning Conference that took place in July, where we captured a number of vox pops which will be going up on our Video page soon:

by Michael Gallagher

Near Future Teaching Pilot Workshop 2

Festival of Creative Learning 2017

For our second Near Future Teaching Pilot Workshop, we hooked up with the Festival of Creative Learning.

The model was similar to our first, though we decided to skip the intros to digital technologies at the beginning and instead to have prompt cards on each table that the participants could read and react to at various points in the workshop if they needed inspiration.

Some responses that came out of our final discussions included the following:

  • The University of Edinburgh is very research-focused, maybe a broad educational model isn’t useful for Edinburgh?
  • How do we address discussion across disciplines in a university like Edinburgh?
  • If computers are doing the marking, feedback could be quite challenging.+
  • Global collaboration with other universities to fund the implementation of expensive technologies?
  • Always being online and available, students have less separation between university and home.
  • The University should be teaching students how to separate work and non-work time, and time management skills.
  • Design space, technology and curriculum to support learning.
  • Green screen and hologram teacher, students have massaging seats and sofas.
  • Lecturer using visualisations, material can move around in 3 dimensions, physical interaction with things is still important.

So, quite a lot was raised that was provocative and fascinating, and will help us going forward with the project as we try to get a sense of what staff and students might want from digital learning technologies in the future. Here are some of the conclusions that we discussed at the close of the session:

  • What are the values and what is the purpose of the University?
  • What sort of education do we want to provide?
  • What should a University be?
  • Focus on the individual student and consider mental health.
  • How do you create an environment that supports students throughout their entire journey?
  • How can technology help students to be more comfortable and visualise concepts?
  • How can technology be helpful and personalise the learning experience?

Overall, it was a stimulating and intriguing workshop, where we learned a lot about not only what students think about technology but also about how we might develop our Near Future Teaching sessions as we continue with the project.

Join the Near Future Teaching conversation by responding to any of these topics here and/or on Twitter by using our hashtag: #UoE_NFT and our Twitter handle @NearFutureTeach.

by Michael Gallagher

Near Future Teaching Pilot Workshop 1

Digital Education Futures

On Tuesday evening, 24 January, 2017, I arrived at St Leonard’s Hall at the University of Edinburgh’s Pollock Halls buzzing with anticipation.

I was delighted to encounter Professor Sian Bayne, Assistant Principal Digital Education, Institute for Education, Community and Society, as I was descending from the taxi with my ‘box of fun’. In the box was a set of materials including glitter, Play-doh, glue sticks, coloured paper, pens and markers, finger paint, tape, robot bugs and much more.

Apart from the robot bugs, it might not sound like the right box of fun for a workshop all about envisioning what digital technology might be in use at the University of Edinburgh in the year 2030, but it turns out that a little glitter and finger paint is just what is required for getting into a time-travelling frame of mind. We also decorated the room with some provocative posters, as well as some of the design ideas by Dave McNaughton for the Envisioning Edinburgh: Digital Education Futures project (now called Near Future Teaching) which will take place over the next year and a half.

Here is a recording of the workshop introduction, which was delivered by Dr Jon Turner, Director of the Institute for Academic Development and also by Sian, who gave us a run down of some of the technologies being tested today for use in future university classrooms. Keep your ears peeled for the technological interruption that tickled us during the intro!

JENNIFER LYNN WILLIAMS >

Here is a video of Sian talking about face recognition software and its uses in the classroom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NllFzBCdj8&feature=youtu.be

Insights

We had fascinating conversations with the student workshop participants, who didn’t always answer our questions in the ways we would have expected. This is exactly what we are hoping for in this series of pilot workshops. We want our assumptions to be challenged, so that we get a sense of what students and staff really think about technology. Ultimately we aim to propose a vision of Edinburgh’s digital future that is person-led rather than technology-led.

Here are some of the insights we came away with after talking to our student workshop participants:

  • Use a range of technologies to make the individual learning experience more flexible and tailored.
  • With lecturers being recorded make it possible to place a digital bookmark or post it in your personal digital record of the lecture to go back to later.
  • To have the potential to explore topics or ideas in more detail on the fly (accessing extra explanations or further information on specific topics as they come up in a lecture).
  • To be able to use technology to make it possible to explore connections between different courses and course content, and to be able to switch back and forth between digging into a topic in more detail and zooming out to see its broader context.
  • Very interesting discussion about the potential benefits of robot personal tutors. Efficient in being able to answer common questions, also less intimidating for students and may reduce inhibition linked to concern about appearing stupid.
  • Some discussion about use of advanced visualisation (eg to explore topics in 3D, to see how things have changed through time, to explore the impact of changing parameters in experiments, equations etc)
  • Continuing desire for personal contact with academics and teachers – but perhaps more as guides and mentors – than as didactic lecturers
  • We want to go to lectures, we want real teachers! Still lecture capture is good for reviewing, but don’t make it accessible until after the live lecture. You build a relationship with your lecturer – there is an exchange, this is important.
  • The facial expression technology could be dangerous, sometimes I look tired or bored even when I’m concentrating! And it could make the lecturer’s job really difficult, if they are looking at live negative feedback.
  • We love the idea of knowing how busy the library is before we even get there, saves us a wasted journey.
  • We come to university to have our first taste of independence, and if we’re always watched and tracked we’ll never know what it is to be free.
  • Before first year, it would be great to have an AI who could answer our ‘frequently asked questions’, so we don’t feel stupid, and also to have chat rooms where we can learn from current students.
  • Everything feels so modern nowadays, I just want everything to be normal and to get on with it. (1st year student)
  • I hope the University doesn’t look too different in 2030 because this is Edinburgh and it is beautiful!
  • Some future ideas: option to Skype tutors, online classes, greater eBook resources, individual eBook tablets in the library, giant plasma screens around the University like Times Square

Thanks for thinking about the future with us!

Jennifer Williams, Institute for Academic Development

by Michael Gallagher