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welcome to liquid margins this is building hospitable learning communities online i'd like to introduce today's guests we have mahabali she's associate professor of practice at the center for
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learning and teaching at the american university in cairo and autumn keynes she's an instructional designer at the university of michigan dearborn and mia zamora associate professor and
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m.a in writing studies program director and then our moderator today is jeremy dean and he's the vp of education and at this point i would love to just
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turn it over to our panelists to let them introduce themselves aside from what's on the screen um i am also other than my faculty
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developer job i also teach of course on digital literacy than intercultural learning um and i am the co-founder of two things one with mia and one with autumn that we co-direct together with mia we
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co-facilitate equity unbound which is an open uh inter-cultural learning connected learning curriculum that is equity focused we're going to talk about this a little bit more today i'll put the link in the chat in a
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minute and i'm also the co-founder of virtually connecting and autumn is a co-director with me uh in virtually connecting i don't know how many people i know a lot of people who are in the room uh with us but if you don't know about virtually connecting the main idea of
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virtually connecting is to enhance access to conferences conversations for people who can't attend conferences on a regular basis people who are in the global south like me or moms of young children like me but
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also adjuncts um graduate students people who don't have the funding to go to conferences so i'm going to stop there and put the links to those two things in the chat while mia introduces herself hi everyone so i'm mia zamora
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i'm an associate professor of english at kane university which is in union new jersey just about 20 minutes outside of new york city where i direct a master's in writing studies program
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and teach both literature and writing as maha already said she and i co-founded along with another wonderful colleague catherine cronin from ireland the three of us together
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founded equity unbound which is um essentially a global network that is committed to both intercultural learning and equity in education and
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um yeah that's just a little bit about me i'm going to pass the baton over to wonderful autumn and uh you know she maybe she can talk a little bit about the things we've done together
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in one he global the resources okay i will take the baton from mia uh yes i want to be unmuted hi everybody my
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name is autumn keynes i am an instructional designer at the university of michigan dearborn i do have two m's in my name mostly important if you want to like look me up on twitter so i'm at autumn
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with the two m's um and yes i have worked with mia and meher together to um build these community
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building resources with our partner 1he and basically what these are um is that you know we we're far away from each other meh is in
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cairo mia's in new jersey i'm in the detroit area um and we work together on a lot of different projects with virtually connecting as well as
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um equity unbound and so we do a lot of video conferencing um so the question came up you know when especially when covet hit and there was so many
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people moving to an online environment how do you build um and sustain that um uh community in in an online classroom
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so not all of the resources in our 1he library have to do with synchronous video conversations but a lot of them do and basically
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they are a library of different techniques that you can use to help to build community in your classroom for the ones that are synchronous video
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um we actually did a video so we actually did it so there's an example in there as well as um resources that you might need to do that
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particular technique as well as there's no such thing as a stable context when you're speaking with a big voice like this right there's so much going on so um you know there's also alternatives
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for different contexts um and it's also something that's open so we're hoping that other people will um um you know help us by contributing to it as well so
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uh jeremy should you jump in a little bit here i know you're moderating with us so maybe i should pass things over to you sure thanks autumn and good to see you all uh it's pretty exciting uh
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to be sitting down with you this afternoon uh i'll i've just collaborated with all three of you over the years it's it's been a long collaboration it's good that it's exciting that we're still working together and i know you guys have done a lot of work with each other so
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it's great to have the group of you on today for liquid margins um i wanted to start out by just asking you guys to talk a little bit about i know some of you are still teaching in the classroom some of you are teaching and assisting others
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on your campuses but i just i think it'd be interesting for our viewers listeners uh to hear more about your specific teaching contexts um where you're coming from the schools you're at the types of students you're working with
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many specific challenges can we start with you autumn sure um so i'm at the university of michigan dearborn not university of michigan ann arbor something interesting about our campus
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our campus is mostly a commuter campus we also have a large portion of first generation college students i was hoping that you'd have me go second so that i could go
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we have a whole website about all of our stats so that way i'd have all the percentages and everything um but yeah we have a large number of first generation college students and
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um we are uh you know we're we're an urban campus in that we are not like out in rural we're very close to detroit um but our campus is kind of set back so
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it's not like we're in the middle of the city either not that any of that matters because we've been completely online for many many months now um but yeah our students many of our
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students are working class many of our students are you know coming in they're holding down a job as well as they are going to school
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and um you know they're commuting in to get to us as well i also do teach a little bit as well i forgot to say this during my um during my intro but i do teach a small section
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of integrated studies and my experience has been that you know that is those are the students that i get so uh maybe i'll turn things over to meh so that she can uh she can talk a little bit about her
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students okay so my institution the american university in cairo is a private liberal arts institution in egypt um so it's a relatively privileged group
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of students but there are still scholarship students there and so what happens is that people sometimes forget that there's a mix and they assume everyone is privileged and has everything that they need and so when the pandemic happened you started to realize like no not everyone
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has everything they need not everyone is in a great part of cairo where they have good internet connection and things like that our faculty are a mix of faculty so we have some egyptians some americans some
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egyptian americans and some variety of nationalities and i think in my faculty development role i think one of the biggest challenges has been convincing faculty that you can build
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community online even when you meet people online for the first time it's something everyone who's been working in online learning knows and has known for like 20 years but for them doing it for the first time they you know they kind of think oh i'm
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getting what this online learning is but yeah this community building thing that's not going to work it's okay that's what online learning is and we're like no you can and so for me what's um what's been a struggle is sort of trying to model
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for them different ways of building community online whenever we do workshops and and things like that um and and at the same time understanding how difficult it is to do things like modify their assessments for
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example uh last minute with my own students i teach a course which is a liberal arts option it's about digital literacies and intercultural learning and i'm someone who believes that you
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don't force students to turn their cameras on and so i've been working on how do i get to know them really well without having their cameras on and they're happy not to have their cameras on for
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connectivity reasons for comfort reasons for privacy issues they have all these different reasons i've asked them about that um and so what i've actually been doing is those community building resources that we've developed i've been trying a
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lot of them in my class one of them that i was just talking to someone about in another conference like five ten minutes ago the annotating the syllabus one since we're you know with you guys uh it
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was a remy killer that did that resource for us and um the students loved it because first of all they actually read the syllabus which was cool uh and we did it on google docs we didn't use hypothesis because that's
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where my syllabus is but the idea they got the idea of annotation so that first of all they were able to ask me questions they needed and then once we got started with the course to reduce the workload on students i think
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this is another challenge is that because of the trauma of the pandemic and students are not used to managing their time online learning takes a lot of time management um the i've been doing more annotation than written work so that they don't
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feel like it's a lot of work and it's also less work for me to grade takes me less time to grade it because i don't actually read on the quality i just want to make sure that they've read the article and they have questions on it or comments on it so that's just like one
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comment to go there before mia goes and then i'm sure jeremy has other questions for us as well so hi everyone um yes i'm at kane university in union new jersey
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and i mentioned already that it's just about 20 minutes or so outside of new york city so we're kind of like an urban suburban university um and in many ways it mirrors the profile that
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autumn described many of our students are working class or first-generation college students who come from every race tribe creed age
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it's a wonderful place to teach because every classroom every classroom you enter into is a rich resource in and of itself due to the life experiences and perspectives of the students
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so there's so much there to work with in terms of understanding different perspectives i also mentioned earlier that i'm a director of a master's program so in that program all of my graduate
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students are either aspiring writers or emerging writers who have worked in the professions in one way or another or many of them the majority of them are teachers
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or will become faculty members teaching writing etc so i kind of work with two different student populations the undergraduates and then my graduate students who have
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that special lens in education because many of them are already professionals that are bringing back what they're using in their master's program to high school students middle school
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students sometimes elementary students so there's a kind of real embrace of education overall in my program and the thing i wanted to share with you just in this kind of introductory moment
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is simply that i run my program and i also do uh teach my classes my math i'm talking about the master's program but also my undergraduate classes that i teach less frequently than the graduate
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classes but i will say i run them all as connected learning experiences in a very open and networked learning context
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and so i've done some um experimenting um both with equity unbound which is the network that maha catherine and i um formed in regards to sort of opening up the classroom to the rest of the world um that's a
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kind of thread that's pretty explicit in in my graduate courses and then also i've paired up um pretty consistently with alan levine um another wonderful um
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colleague and partner who has embraced connected learning and has been a really important voice i think in educational technology overall so you know i can speak i can drill down
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when we get into a particular focus on on what we do but i i do think that that's a good way of talking about the the students that i work with and also the kinds of moves i make as a
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as a teacher thanks mia um i wanted to uh start i guess we already started but i wanted to ask next um i've learned a lot in when i as a
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teacher by my own failure uh making mistakes realizing that something i was doing was not working uh including around issues of hospitality and equity um and
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and maybe especially so right um because i know everything about english literature so i never made a mistake there but certainly about making my class equitable um and i'm just wondering if you guys could share it doesn't have to be a personal anecdote though that'd be
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fine of a sort of a time when you realize it's your classroom um that or some kind of assignment that you were doing or that you were observing you know call names or some that you saw in a sort of a moment of in-house
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hospitality or some kind of inequity um that was structured into what was going on and just sort of share that as a story and i see maha is ready to start with that this is a really good recent one and it's one to learn from for something me
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and autumn and i are doing next week so let's plug the workshop that autumn is giving next week it's a techno ethics primer so last week this is just last week we had an equity unbound event where uh anne-marie scott who a lot of
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people probably already know was giving a workshop on you know the difficult balancing act of ethics and technology in edtech all right and so it was an open event but students in my class about
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half of my students were attending as a way to make up for a class that was on a vacation day that had to get cancelled so there was like 10 students from auc possibly students from mia's class and then a lot of people who are people
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here on this call or just educators in general are in this space and we send people into breakout rooms to do an activity and what ended up happening in some of those breakout rooms is some of the educators in the breakout rooms know
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each other and so being friendly they end up chatting with each other and obviously they talk at a different level than students will talk and because of the limited time a lot of the students didn't get a
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chance to participate there were a few people who were very intentional about this and they tried to make sure that the students spoke there were a few people who tried to do it but couldn't and came back and told us that maybe we should have had a note
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about intentionally equitable hospitality earlier and one of the things that in virtually connecting this is where the notion of intentionally equitable hospitality we started to name it that uh rebecca autumn christiane helena the
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five co-directors is that one of the things we notice is like if you start a conversation and remind people that people who are generally less powerful are the people you need to center when you're having these
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conversations um in a regular virtually connecting conversation before the pandemic we were using google hangouts on air so we had a limit of 10 people so you never had a huge number of people right now to get that kind of intimacy you need to put people in breakout rooms so
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but in the breakout room they're no facilitator to make sure that there's intentionally equitable hospitality so you need to sort of give them that directive or like give them that suggestion at least before they go into the breakout rooms or
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make sure that there's someone in the room who knows how to do this because online you need to be really careful especially because students have their cameras off some people have the hide non-video
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participants on and they may not even realize there's someone in the room this has happened to me before that i've been in a breakout room and people completely ignored me and i was trying to talk and i don't know if i was having technical difficulties or
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if they had that thing on so this is a situation where you have people of different power in a room and you can't be facilitating it you need to say something before they go
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to remind them of who has more privilege in that conversation so that they center the people with less privilege to have their voices heard so we're going to do this in your session on inshallah
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i also just i just wanted to say that in the chat i dropped a link to autumn's um workshop which is on monday in which we will be uh more in intentionally
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equitably hospitable based on what maha said um in regards to my own experience um i didn't in the quick time i was thinking and listening um i didn't come up with a specific issue like a specific instance but i do have
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an issue that i think i want to just talk about a little bit which is the question of camera on camera off and the kinds of things we struggle with when we're um autumn's saying yes and actually autumn
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has a lot to say about this too so maybe she can pick up on some of the things i open up but basically i wanted to say there are many reasons why students as maha already alluded to there are many
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reasons why students wouldn't turn on their camera um and um for the most part that list continues to be gen it like will be generative and will go on and on um so i'm not going to just throw out a
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few and then because it seems as if those things then would be comprehensive and there's always something you don't know that's there too and i think that's part of how we care and
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and and reach for equity in a way is realizing that is that there's always something you don't know that's there and you you have to sort of keep room for that like unawareness as well but what do we do um you know for me i
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do what maha says and say right in the uh like she had already um suggested that she tells her students um that they it's their option whether or not they want to be on camera or not but then there's like this kind of kind
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of trace of what occurs when cameras aren't used because oftentimes as um has been already articulated there's a sort of you don't see the student as much you don't know what kinds of
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levels of engagement occur um intellectually or otherwise you know you're doing your thing and there's conversations being had and there's the possibility of that student sort of fading into the background so to speak and one of the things i'm really
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interested in is helping my students develop advocacy skills how do they come to understand how to build relationships um that uh you know
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help their learning flourish and um oftentimes there's hesitancy or there are as i said many reasons why the camera might not be on but then there is less of a a chance to
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work with that student in um drawing out their ability to empower themselves in that context so this is not necessarily something that i have an answer for as much as i'm always
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thinking about um and i think um autumn has also talked a little bit about visibility in terms of the camera like in terms of um you know those who are more um consistently visible
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out of choice and a level of comfort and those who are kind of fading into the distance um so i think i'll stop with that provocation but then um i have a feeling autumn might further
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it a little bit or just add something sure thank you so much mia um i have a lot of thoughts about visibility in these spaces and um
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i wrote a blog post called the zoom gaze a couple of months ago and now i've actually turned that into a longer article that's under review right now it's popular article it's not an academic article but it's thinking about
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the gays gays theory if anybody has a background in either philosophy psychoanalysis or media studies like it's a fascinating theory there's a lot of things that kind of um
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kind of intersect with it um but you know after sitting down and giving it some analysis and thinking about um especially teleconferencing spaces
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especially zoom you know we get a lot of power we get a lot of control in these spaces as viewers so we're using zoom webinar right now which is a little bit different than zoom meeting but in zoom
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meeting is a viewer i can change between a gallery view or a speaker view i can zoom in on a particular participant and look at their backgrounds
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i can um change my own background so i can do a lot as a viewer um but it's as far as like controlling the way that i'm viewed i guess changing my background would be
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one thing that i could do to change you know like project myself in a certain way and of course there's the um you know just the way that i present myself but outside of that like once the
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technology starts getting involved like there's lots of power dynamics in there between like hosts and co-hosts and spotlights and what order things get presented in and
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who's biggest on the screen at any particular point and you really don't have very much control as the viewed as an object of perception as a uh something
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a person who is being perceived you have more control as a viewer to control and to navigate those things and i think students feel that and i think when you ask them to turn on their cameras that's
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what you're asking them to do you're asking them to be an object of perception and give up all of this control over the ways that they will be perceived right maybe they can um change their
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background if they have something going on but maybe there's other people in the room who talk quite a bit and um you know maybe it's it's hard for them
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to turn that camera on and show who they are and show their environment and show where they're at for all kinds of different reasons um i i do want to say though there are
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lots of ways to be engaged in these spaces if you don't want to turn your camera on um invite students to use the chat some people say oh i'm too confused by the chat i don't want that i want them
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to ignore the chat i want to turn the chat off but i think that that can be an opportunity we have um one of our techniques from our community building resources
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um if you do i think this is the tea party one you can do it with breakout groups but you can also do it in the chat where you invite everybody to come together and um respond in the chat
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right so you can ask a question and then say all right i want everybody to use the chat to respond to this and i'm going to read the responses as they're coming in um some people like to wait and say all
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right i want you to type it in but then i want you to wait because i want you to hit the the enter button all at the same time so that way you know it's kind of exciting all of the all of the responses kind of come in at once
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um but i think if you if you structure activities and you get students comfortable using their microphone or using the chat or doing an annotation activity if you're using something i know zoom does
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have like an ability to annotate inside of it there are other ways that you can get students to be engaged rather than just the camera um the camera is a little creepy to tell you the truth if you're judging
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engagement based on somebody looking at a at a camera um maybe they have a second monitor right have you ever had this experience where you're working with somebody who's got a second monitor and they're like this
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the whole meeting and it feels so weird right some people think of that as like an uh a sign a signal that the person isn't engaged if they're looking over here the whole time but the truth is the thing
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they actually have the meeting over there it's just their cameras over here so um these spaces really do create situations where sometimes misconceptions right they create these
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misconceptions um and it's really hard because we are it feels like we're all together this illusion of us being together is happening right now but we're not really together
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i could empathize with the fact that you weren't looking at me if i could see that you have a second monitor but i can't do that right the technology is even though it's enabling us to be together there's also still these separations and
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you're not going to ask everybody what's your computing environment look like like that's not really rational either so um i think we have to be flexible and forgiving
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i sometimes we have to remind ourselves like what's really telling me that a student is learning is what they say back to me whether that's in the chat or with their voice and what they do in their assignment it's not the expression on their face
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like and it's so hard we know this it's very hard when there's more than six or seven people to see them all it's not like in a classroom where you can see everyone with one like you have to really like it's actually probably
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more exhausting for us to keep like looking at every person like for me when it's more than 20 people i'm happy that some people have their cameras off when that's happening um but i think it's also interesting i was saying in the chat that
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a lot of presentations and conferences these days use zoom webinar and you can't see the audience and people are not complaining about that like why are they complaining about students having their cameras off when they're presenting all the time to audiences without
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seeing them and sometimes even disabling the chat like that annoys me like you don't even want to hear what the audience is saying or i mean let the audience talk to each other even if you're not gonna look at it so anyway sorry side points that has
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nothing to do with uh building community but just this disconnect between those two things uh i love all that that's that's amazing i can't wait to read that article um and i i just thought it was so interesting how you're sort of talking
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about a sort of inherent inhospitality of a platform in this case zoom um and then introducing some mediating factors that a practitioner can introduce to um make the space more
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equitable and i'm wondering if if me if you have any similar anecdotes around a sort of you know built-in uh aspect of in inequity or hospitality that you've found to sort of
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hack or work around for um and you can maybe look at you know think about some of the resources you guys have pulled but um how many thoughts um i'm i'm trying to think about
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you know the hack angle um but one thing i think that's been pretty powerful is using the camera in reverse like having everybody's camera turned off and just having the the kind of voice
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engagement but then um uh introducing each other through a camera and a shared quality of some sort so to give an example um in building communities sometimes we
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do this kind of camera on camera off um exposure thing in order to connect with people so um we'll uh in the beginning when you're introducing yourselves in in
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the start of a new class it's it's a kind of challenge to get to know each other and the typical thing is to go around the room and say i'm this kind of major and you know this is what i'm studying etc and people just sort of observe and maybe
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get a few names in there and just settle in right but if you try to do that in a zoom environment or in a ca an online environment like the one we're in now that can get pretty stale pretty fast and also
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there's a certain amount of anxiety that rises in students even in person when you do this kind of thing you know you feel that it's going to come to me soon clear my throat you know there's anxiety in in this kind of
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introduction so we tried to come up with some playful ways to introduce ourselves so um in that one um he uh global um equity unbound resources
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around community uh one of the exercises shows um you can say something like i have a dog and everybody's camera is off and then those with a dog turn their cameras on and then there are
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smiles and a little bit of giggling and then people start to talk about what kind of dog they have and then you turn all the cameras off again and then you say something like i'm i'm a mother
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and i'm also um uh i'm a mother and i have a daughter or something like this and then again those who have that shared quality come on to the screen and so by the time
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the everyone takes a turn with basically um saying one thing and then um then you see who else might have a shared com you know a common experience in that way
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and by the end of that process in the introductory days there's a sense of the humans in the room the people in the room and not just you know this is my major and you know you forgot everything
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after you hear it pretty quickly so that's an example of using the camera in a dynamic wave it's a little bit of a hack to like sort of warm up the um sense around the tool so that it isn't just a
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feeling of exposure the whole time um there are many others actually that uh you know you can play with the camera in different kinds of ways like that uh so that you sort of undermine that
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feeling of of being viewed or the gaze etc and you start to use it in in dynamic ways but um maybe maha and autumn have other angles
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on hacks that um you know help in building community and furthering equity i think i want to point out a couple of things building resource
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very good ways of building and getting to know each other and some of them like about the enormous ones is going back to it so when you do um any kind of activity zoom if you record it you're probably
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not going to go back and watch it to find out which student is the one who liked football right but if you have students do some kind of asynchronous uh like affiliate something like what we call the alt cv and all these options where they create
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some kind of introduction to themselves on their own terms and they post it somewhere for others to look at you as the other students can go back and look at it later they will fit what may be in synchronous
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session but then they can go back and find each other and then you can spend more time getting to think about who that person is and respond to them there the other thing which i think is really important is the section that we have in our site that was written by kate
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bowles on safety considerations a lot of really cool activities that will work for maybe 80 percent of students like there's a there's one that uh patrice or silvia prescott which is called the name have students
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share the story of their name any part of their i was like what about trans students what about someone who just changed their name what about someone who's who's got a story behind their name that they don't want to share um and how would you the teacher frame
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the question to make it possible for that person to not do that to say something different or something different to not participate in the activity and she gives a little cool um suggestions of things just how you think about how do you think through the
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process how do you introduce it and what kind of things can you give the semester what kind of things you should maybe wait a little bit um to do so i'm just i just wanted that particular response
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i want to turn our gaze before i open it up to uh q a to social annotation and not to video conferencing and hear from you guys the ways in which social annotation
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with hypothesis or with other platforms um perpetuates inequities in some ways um and ways in which it maybe uh creates hospital environments for teaching and
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learning uh or ways that you have used it um specifically in your own practices to you know create a more equitable uh context for uh your students and then
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we're going to open it up to q a i just want to warn folks in the chat that i'm going to i'm going to happily unmute folks if you choose i don't i need to go look at the resources to betsy at best management for zoom and equity so feel free to ask a
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question in the chat i think there may look like there's a q a or unmute but i'd first just like to hear about your thoughts uh from the panel on social annotation and uh hospitality and equity um mia you
00:35:28
look most ready to start okay again i don't want to judge based on gays i just did it i got a lot to learn here no that's just fine it's it's vibing we're vibing thank you um
00:35:41
yeah so one of the things i think is a cornerstone of our equity unbound origins is a beautiful article by lena munzer who's a journalist who wrote about the
00:35:53
the women in syria during wartime and she's essentially working through translation um you know interviewing women of their ex about their experiences and then bringing that from the arabic
00:36:06
into the into english and to sort of share those stories with the world and that so that particular article is profoundly beautiful very meaningful um and it it really talks about boundaries and
00:36:18
borders and you know trying to move meaning across a boundary um we all those in equity and bound who are co-teaching um and co-learning together um actually read this article
00:36:33
in a social environment so in essence we have our students read that article from different locales literal locales like new jersey and cairo and anyone else who wants to jump in from whatever varying locales
00:36:46
they find themselves in but i think what's interesting and what happens there is they take the students take their particular lens to the reading and they see different kinds of things so in the annotation
00:36:59
the commentary that comes out opens students eyes to other angles in understanding these challenges um and so that's an example of a way in which
00:37:11
we're reading a call across boundaries um and we're reading an article that is about crossing boundaries the only way in some ways to break down borders is to constantly cross them on some
00:37:26
level there so and that's actually a quote from the article as well um but there are um constraints or there are things that we feel have worked better than other
00:37:36
things in that specific act as well meaning reading that particular article with different groups of people sometimes there is less interactivity in the annotations and much more just
00:37:50
sort of like reading and lurking around people's perspectives um when we know for those who know hypothesis it can be a richly interactive space as well as one in
00:38:01
which it's almost like a posting like a board post but i think that for the most part we've seen more of the board post kind of engagement with this particular article sometimes it crosses the line
00:38:13
into back and forth replying but i think there's also a kind of sensitivity that comes up in understanding that students from different places and different perspectives are reading together and so there is
00:38:26
this kind of i don't know if it might be a hyper politeness or a concern over crossing over or being misunderstood but i think there's a lot going on in this whole environment so it's an
00:38:38
example of the ways in which we read socially that afford a new understanding or a new lens on intercultural context um
00:38:50
equity is different than intercultural context i'm you know saying that you know asserting that very clearly um but it's a step that kind of learning process is a step
00:39:04
um in a certain direction so anyway that's just an anecdote of something we do with hypothesis that moves in this direction there are there are other things i can think about that have to do with uh more
00:39:16
creative ways in using hypothesis but i think first i'd like to hear from either other omaha about what they think did we lose her she was breaking up a little bit there and now i don't see her
00:39:31
i think we may have unfortunately so you're on the spot yeah i'm on the spot look at that but you don't have to it can also change i have no what i have is actually when i think
00:39:42
about hospitality and i think about um social annotation um especially when i think about hypothesis the one
00:39:53
um i guess a little muddy point or point of caution i guess something that i've kind of run into a little bit is um it's such a unique experience right um we're taking a layer and
00:40:08
putting a layer over the internet a new layer that we can go into and i think that that can sometimes be confusing for some folks as far as ownership am i
00:40:21
writing on somebody else's website or like kind of who owns these these annotations um and i have had situations where folks i mean their comments too
00:40:33
right and so especially comments on the internet can sometimes be a little punchy right and so i've been in situations where somebody was surprised that the author of the thing that they were annotating
00:40:46
jumped in and started doing comments with them it was like well these are public annotations right but it's different than leaving comments on a blog where you know that that's public so that would be one
00:40:58
little word of caution if you're doing thinking of hospitality using um social annotation be sure that if folks are new to the process if they're new to social annotation and especially if they're new
00:41:11
to open kind of work that they understand those different layers and um you know who can see the annotations and who they're really talking to right so i had some
00:41:23
situations where we were working in the public with hypothesis and folks somehow or another i thought it was very clear that we were in the public but yeah they they didn't know that so don't take that for granted meh is
00:41:36
back yeah i'm back and someone was asking something that i was going to talk about which is that sometimes your private group is your class and so that's not something that would appear to the author or to anyone else
00:41:50
but your class and sometimes that's even a safer space for your class themselves um and the other thing is that if if a site has a lot of public annotations in it it slows down a lot but then if you create a group for your
00:42:03
class a fewer annotations um what tim clark who's actually in the audience did with me once um when this whole thing about authors and their articles started is that
00:42:14
took my he invited some people to annotate a blog post of mine it had a private group invited me to it and i thought that was a really lovely thing to do that i had not happened to me before and i think a lot
00:42:27
of people just go ahead and annotate things um without checking with autolina monzer for example uh for warren translation she we always tell her or i always tell her anyway uh we're about to annotate your article so that she knows what's going on now
00:42:40
in the same way that like sometimes a video i'll let i let people know that this is happening uh i know you don't always know the person and i don't know her you know her because i tell her like
00:42:52
once it's a mess yeah you know i think that's it's i'm someone who is supposedly in power or privilege the author is still in this case like a woman from
00:43:04
lebanon and one that you want that you're not harming in any way by doing this kind of thing i'm all suddenly very aware of the power dynamics of
00:43:16
zoom as i turn and offer the floor to any of the attendees but i have to allow you to speak i have to you know you have to raise your hand or something like that and then i have a
00:43:29
button that says allow to talk you also have the chat to voice a question but i do want to open it up at this point to my colleagues at hypothesis included but questions for the panel about
00:43:42
building uh equitable and hospitable online communities and teaching in more equitable teaching online and more equitable and hospitable ways
00:43:54
it can also lower all hands which seems another sort of too powerful thing to be able to do you have so much power you're right you're recognizing but the techniques you guys have video tools
00:44:06
have this kind of thing all the videos these weird what's really uh when people could mute all iphones like so i've got
00:44:18
an attendee that would like to talk and i'm going to teach say that like especially sorry maha i'm gonna allow is it a samara yes your name is also cut off in the
00:44:37
interface so oh no please speak thank you so my thesis right now is actually about the community building because of the pandemic through video
00:44:50
calling such as zoom and i'm curious about what you think of you know there's lots of articles and studies done on you know
00:45:01
for not forcing but like having students you know turn on their cameras keep themselves unmuted you know to kind of keep an eye on the professor and so that the professor or teacher can like look at the mouth shape look at how
00:45:13
they're speaking um and i was wondering if you had any opinion on like whether or not this should be you know enforced because they're also it does create that kind of like fear i think of like all eyes on student on a certain
00:45:26
student um so i wanted to know what you thought about like this kind of thing for a language class well i know that a lot of people in this color probably history or literature or some sort of class
00:45:39
where it's about learning about history or or information but in a language course you know you're you're there to kind of learn speech and i feel like it's a very different environment
00:45:50
from you know literature or history or such and like math etc it's a great scenario yeah um i can
00:46:03
definitely see where it would um have more of a benefit um and and i'm not saying like you know never ever tell students that they can't
00:46:15
do it i guess i try to give the student as much flexibility as possible right and make it clear up front that there's value in um
00:46:29
in in that i as an instructor feel like there is value in seeing you pronounce these words and seeing your body language as you're speaking another language those kind of things and um
00:46:43
give them other opportunities so if you're not going to do it in a video call maybe they could you know do a recording that could be viewed later um but i also feel like if you're
00:46:55
if you're doing something of value and you're making it clear to the student why it's of value that's going to feel a lot better than you just got to do it because
00:47:07
that's the rules right that's gonna that's not gonna feel very good um and and tell the students that you're open to doing other types of alternatives if they do have barriers that you want to talk to them about the barriers that
00:47:21
they're experiencing and that you're willing to be creative about finding solutions i think it's about being um flexible with students but i think that we need to recognize that there is
00:47:34
there's a lot of power in being seen and that when we force students to be seen we're taking that we're taking that away from them and we're forcing them into something that is um just doesn't feel very good and if you really want to build community in
00:47:47
your class that's not how you want to start you don't want to start with you know that kind of bad feeling you don't want to start with that kind of ugliness that's just that's going to that's going to kill your community
00:47:59
building right off the bat i think it just reasserts a very clear power dynamic in in which the um idea of surveillance is quite explicit you know they're being surveilled
00:48:12
they're being watched um and when that comes first then you're not learning together you're not building community you're not making moves that signal care towards your student
00:48:24
so students so i think that those are really important questions to ask when designing for instruction especially language instruction so it's it's a challenging question
00:48:36
samara um in the sense that that's a particular um need but maha made a very important point that you know disappeared in the chat very a while ago that if you were instructing
00:48:48
in person the mask would be on and the lips wouldn't be able to be perceived you know and i think that's something to consider as well is you know there are there are ways in which
00:49:01
um this time you know uh sort of obscures the um that part of language acquisition um consistently and therefore we should rethink our pedagogy so
00:49:13
um that's just my way in anyway um i'm sure there's many other questions so i actually need to keep my camera off because my connectivity is bad right now so this is exactly what happens to my students is that
00:49:25
every single thing we say encourage students to turn the camera on will work if you're doing something meaningful with them not if they have a that's not going to be reason to turn the camera but i have titled student before so even
00:49:40
before there were masks i taught a student and i worried about interaction and how she would communicate with me and it worked so we could not see and now the face is
00:49:56
when there communicating not they can't but they're communicating just fine so i think i don't even think for language learning unless you want to make sure that their phonetics are
00:50:10
coming out right i'm not sure why you necessarily need it on intelligence this semester is as a life skill when you graduate just have to present in person
00:50:23
in the future you may have to present virtually in the future you may have to have media multi-multinational context you may need to eventually become comfortable with turning your camera on
00:50:35
so i will you be willing to try it for a small child that you know and so you can prepare to be sitting in a neat place and a private place and if that's possible and if it's not the video autumn was said a lot of my students
00:50:50
turn the camera on secretly but they record videos for me all the time just in their own time when they're up for it you know so it's not that they don't want me to see their face it's just like not this constant surveillance like me i was saying and i understand that a lot
00:51:03
of teachers are not coming from a place of a lot of teachers are coming from a place of care but a lot of care is or a lot of you know unintended uh
00:51:15
bad consequences compromise of care and think about uh you know think about what it might someone else malicious uh is thinking you know and how this
00:51:29
even the male students in the like franny was saying a male female thing as well they don't want to be watched all that time maha you were you were breaking up a little in there but i definitely got
00:51:42
some very powerful points and uh the one of the latter ones really resonates with me just the um that a lot of and to combine with what uh something mia mentioned was that you know surveillance on some level some
00:51:56
kind of surveillance might come from a place of care but it's important to recognize the power dynamics that that are still inherent in surveillance that's something i think about a lot as we're building hypothesis
00:52:09
and the different ways that we're creating visibility and we've talked about this throughout the afternoon my afternoon the ways in which visibility is sort of uh you know has two sides to it right it's an empowering it can be an empowering thing but it can
00:52:22
also uh take power away i wanna um just voice one question from the chat as a kind of final question um from uh let me scroll back up and get it and it's
00:52:33
uh if it's tg sorry to interrupt jeremy if it's tg um they would like to be unmuted and oh great excellent i'm gonna not ask it i'm gonna ask to unmute okay i'm asking to unmute
00:52:50
talking no that's that's samara um i'm sorry i'm just i guess hello thank you for unmuting me so um my question is really about the digital divide that actually
00:53:05
um happens because of technology and how that divide has increased between the have and they have not especially during the pandemic so i think the use of technology in itself is inequitable and if nothing else the
00:53:20
pandemic has taught us how access to technology is such a privilege so as a community we probably need to encourage the use of more low-tech tools and activities that can facilitate everyone's participation
00:53:32
and that's what i wanted to get your thoughts on thank you maha do you want to take this or autumn
00:53:45
or i responded a clear about [Music] like what black so the
00:53:56
face your audio is actually going in and out a little bit part time this is not only their low bandwidth uh i'm gonna stop
00:54:11
i heard that here it is here it is right here here's the perfect situation where technology is getting in the way and um tj you're absolutely right it is um an amazing privilege to be able
00:54:25
to use technology and not everybody has it um is is the simple truth of it just just the simple act of using technology is inequitable it will be inequitable
00:54:37
because we don't have um you know coverage not everybody has access um i'm all for doing the low tech stuff when uh you know the pandemic first hit i was
00:54:49
one of the first people out there saying hey we got to do the low um the load bandwidth stuff i remember tanis morgan had a great blog post about teaching online with
00:55:02
email and telephones and going old school with some of this kind of stuff i think that that's great where i've found tension is then
00:55:16
with um you know folks who are more privileged who want the richer experience they want the video they want the um the real-time interactions they want that kind of thing and so how do you balance
00:55:29
how do you balance the folks who are more privileged um and crave the um the higher bandwidth um interactions with the folks who
00:55:41
uh the folks who just can't participate that way i do think it's possible i do think you can um even things out but it is a balancing act it's a little bit of a dance that you got to do to make it happen
00:56:00
i am just going to jump in because we're actually over time here we can continue the discussion and continue to record but i know that some people i just want to be cognizant of the fact that some of our panelists might need to
00:56:13
leave or some of my colleagues and some of the um participants i mean the attendees might need to leave so um but anyone who wants to hang around we could
00:56:24
definitely continue this really rich discussion so it's just up to you i think maha has to go it's her weekend time so i think she might be departing or has
00:56:43
departed already but um yeah i just wanted to say that because i saw that in the chat oh here there she is okay she's back um but i also like to say uh if the panelists if you'd like to now
00:57:02
just you know say a few um parting words and whatever you'd like to say just or just goodbye or whatever you want to do well i'll just say thank you so much for the opportunity to share
00:57:15
some of the insight here i think um you know if you open up the um the community building resources you'll see um coming that we're coming at this from a variety of different angles and there's a lot of
00:57:28
useful things there just protocols activities strategies things to be concerned about just to sort of open up the conversation and the thinking around it
00:57:41
further um some of the things that i think are really special in that collection include engaging with students in in terms of reflection
00:57:52
there's an activity called the spiral journal which is actually one of my favorite ones there but i think also some of the activities highlight engaging with students in very creative ways and
00:58:04
really kind of opening up learning to not just a kind of analysis and content orientation but something um quite freeing and creative an example of
00:58:17
it would be something like the surrealist portraits in that um activity um people are using their left hand to do a self-portrait and then generate conversation
00:58:29
conversation around that um as a as a mode of introduction and also you know being a slightly unmoored and something uncomfortable left hand if you're right-handed and right-handed if you're left-handed of course
00:58:41
the um the the non-dominant hand but those are just like little glimpses into the resources and of course maha is saying that we should mention
00:58:56
liberating structures these are of course ways of making sure that the interactions the community interactions as we build community
00:59:09
are um places that liberate open up so that we can listen to each other in ways that we haven't before and invite everyone to the table to sort of participate and to share insight and there are a
00:59:23
variety of different liberating structures that sort of um drive the activities that we're suggesting so um yeah i just wanted to sort of close with that like little bit of a lens on
00:59:35
the resource itself because it really furthers the kinds of things we touched upon today a lot more effectively like we just touched the the tip of the iceberg in terms of the things that are there and the kinds of activities that could open
00:59:47
up your own practice or your own research around online learning and teaching so um yeah and and so thank you for for inviting us and um and having the moment
01:00:00
to share some of this work so um yeah i'll i'll let my colleagues say goodbye or or add something hey i'll just thank everybody as well this has been great it's always
01:00:14
wonderful um to hang out with you folks and uh got to meet some new friends they see a lot of a very familiar faces or familiar names not food like this is familiar names in the
01:00:25
chat and that's always really fun um so thank you so much for the opportunity uh to think about it check out the equity unbound 1he resource library if you're looking for
01:00:40
practical techniques and tips of things that you can do that help to build community in your classes i think it's a great resource for that the other thing that i'll end with is um
01:00:52
remember to check in frequently when you're working in community or if you're building a class um check in frequently ask for that feedback ask how you're doing and uh you know get feedback from the students or from the
01:01:05
participants about the ways that they're feeling if you're not thinking about those kind of things if you're not asking for it sometimes people aren't going to take the initiative to come and give it to you so
01:01:17
take the initiative a couple times throughout the experience right if it's a class maybe you know around the middle or something like that like stop everything and say hey let's let's do a little bit of feedback here
01:01:30
how are things going and be willing to be flexible and change things that you can you won't be able to change everything of course but for the things that you can change you know show that you're willing and
01:01:42
open to be able to do that as a community organizer or as a teacher you're in a place of power and shaping that experience for the participant and for the students and so giving them
01:01:54
some voice and giving them an opportunity to give some feedback and showing that you're vulnerable and that you're flexible to to meet those needs where you can uh can be huge for building community in your in your
01:02:05
spaces so again thank you so much for having us thank you and is is maha still here she'd drop off i think she did drop off
01:02:18
okay she did say uh goodbye and thanks in the chat and yeah okay great well i i want to thank you both so much for being here and everybody for being here today um
01:02:31
this is such a great rich conversation
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