Welcome everybody. My name is Sally Stockwell and I'm a wildlife ecologist with Maine Audubon. I'm here today with several colleagues to walk you through how to fill out the detailed habitat assessment form for forestry for Maine birds. This is a form that's designed for professional foresters to use and we also have a some forestry students that are interested in using it. As a way to augment other information you're collecting about the forest from the bird's perspective. And so first I'd like to introduce my colleagues Amanda Mahaffey from the Forest Stewards Guild and Andy Schultz from the Maine Forest Service. And then we have our budding forester Maddie who is also with us today. So the first thing that I'm gonna walk through the different components of the habitat assessment form and Amanda and Andy are going to tell us what we see and what we should be marking down on the form. So the first thing Amanda and Andy that we need to figure out is what the forest habitat association is and our major choices are northern hardwoods, northern mixedwoods, northern softwoods and oak pine. When we're filling out this form what we try to think of is kind of in a big circle of a stand that is more or less homogeneous than look around what a visual acre is and what do we see within that visual acre that's what we're going to be recording. So you can't just look in one direction you have to spin around and look in 360 degrees to get a really good representation of what we're seeing and the idea behind these habitat assessments is that you do different habitat assessments in different stands to get an idea of the variability across a property and to get an idea of what different kinds of birds might be seen in those different kinds of stands. So when we start our stand assessment there are a few important items at the top. First of all is the landowner. Who's a landowner here Andy? I believe it's the town of Famba. Nice good to know and what is today's date? October 23rd. Exactly 2020. 2020. We're still here. A year that just won't quit. Yeah. Who's the forester here Andy? That's a really good question. It's neither you nor I. Or it's both of us. Or it's both of us. All right. Now I should mention that the town of Falmouth has worked with Paul Aravie and to manage other parts. This particular area has not been harvested recently but they do do some active management and of course they're very very concerned or you know wildlife has a big piece for the town on land. That is significant and then the weather today. Overcast, fifties, light, breeze. Yeah. Perfect weather. Perfect for taking some stand data and it's important to record this information because when you come back to your notebook later and you wonder where was I? What was I doing? Who was I with? Then you'll have that information written down so it's always important to start your stand assessment with some basic information. Now, more location info. We have a stand ID so we don't actually have a stand map for this particular parcel so we might you know we might call this stand one. Works for me. And within that stand we need to identify what plot we're doing. I would call it plot one. Sounds good. Agreed. So how many plots might we want to do in a stand? Well it depends. Now really as I mentioned a lot of times you might be doing this as part of a timber inventory where you either you're looking for a certain percentage of coverage and you might take a plot on a grid of say 10 chains every 10 chains and then set over 10 chains. I could throw chains and I don't know if anybody still uses chains. Is that still a thing? Good. But actually a lot depends on how much information the landowner wants. The landowner is actually requesting this or interested in it so a lot also depends on the variability of the stand. If you find that really you're coming up with the same answers in a lot of spots there's no need to keep adding data. You can make your sort of draw your conclusions. Better to look at the overall stand map and say well we have maybe two or three very different areas. Make sure you get a couple or three in each one so you have some averaging. So however you decide to do your forestry inventory when you're doing a forester's for the birds inventory or forestry for main birds inventory it's probably good to do at least one plot per stand and be prepared so that you get a good picture again when you kind of average your data and average what you're seeing then you have a good picture overall of what is going on in that forest. Of course when you start to draw stand lines this becomes the the art and science of forestry and it gets back to that lump or splutter thing. So back to our habitat association what do you think we've got here. We definitely have oak trees we definitely have pine trees and those seem to be our dominant species here would you agree. I concur. So at least from a forest habitat association I think we're probably looking at oak pine rather than one of the other forest habitat association types which is a fairly common type in this part of the state also it's the southern part of the state and then you can break that down into four subcategories and those four subcategories would be northern red oak red oak mixed hardwood red oak white pine red maple white pine hemlock and hemlock oak pine which of those would you say this is and why. So having walked around the the acre and being a little bit numerically inclined I know that's roughly 209 by 209 square you know the radius right offhand no doesn't matter and it's the visual acre you don't actually have to go out and step it off but the point is I did just walking around and I think that we are looking at a lot of I think we're looking at the red oak white pine red maple as the sub association. I agree I think especially as we're looking at our over story species that kind of define the stand we are looking at a lot of red oak and we have white pine up there and some red maple yeah it's a different story in the under story but we'll get there we'll get to that all right so the great thing about this form is that it makes it really easy just to circle the answer which I've done so now we're gonna move on to stand structure class and this we have three major categories young intermediate and older and different birds cue into these different age stands so we want to try to get a good sense of what we have here and so from just the young intermediate and older what would you say we're looking at the intermediate yeah no question and then under intermediate there are two choices there's the intermediate single-aged and there's the intermediate two-aged so in other words are we just seeing one layer all of the trees more or less the same size and height or are we seeing two different layers and we look at you want to look around again spin around look in all different directions and what would you say is the dominant I'm gonna say that there's really two distinct age classes here I think we will find that we we're gonna have some canopy cover in different layers but basically there's an overstory and there's an understory here and that's fairly typical also of a lot of the stands in this part of the state and really across the whole state where you know something started from old field succession probably or agricultural abandonment and that's become you know 50 60 70 80 years ago maybe a little bit more and that's our overstory still not really old forest yet and in the meantime a regeneration layer has started and we see that around this year so that's the kind of second general age class and even though there's some small trees they're not really probably a different age I mean smaller saplings they're not a different age they're probably as old as the overstory they're just suppressed and and so from a technical standpoint our description of the intermediate two-aged is at least five to ten inch diameter breast height 30 to 70 percent overstory cover and then this also suggests that there is a mid-story cover over 30 percent which we don't really have here but we have the understory that's over 30 percent so I get a little technical I think part of that distinction that we had I think when we were putting the form together had to do with softwood stands that have been harvested in a certain way so that was intended to capture it but from the general description this is definitely an intermediate aged forest and it definitely we're feeling confident we see two age classes here so even if our exact numbers don't match it to a tee I feel that from a forest from the forest perspective that's what we have going on here would the birds agree the birds would agree right and part of this is trying to see the forest as bird would see it not necessarily as the way I was trained as a forester to see it in terms of timber product timber value and to sort of translate between those two things so just to point out that like every form and every sort of attempt to put everything into a box it's not the real world isn't going to fit it exactly we definitely agree that we're in an intermediate age and yet we've got we do have some trees well above 10 inch dbh and this is indicating a 5 to 10 inch dbh in fact most of the overstory trees I'm going to say are greater than 10 inches at dbh few fives and then our other age class that reach the understory which you know we'll get to measuring that in a different way but nothing there is five inches yet so it's a little little different than what's on here but nonetheless I think we'd all agree it's an intermediate age and even in an intermediate age forest you might have a few remnant trees that are fit into that older category or a number that fit into the younger category so it there can be variation but what we're looking at is overall what's the the age and the class and the stand structure so now this second page of the form we're going to be looking at the overstory which is everything that is over 30 feet high the mid story which is everything that is between 6 feet and 30 feet high the understory which is from one feet one foot to six feet high and then also the ground cover which is under one foot strictly looking at woody vegetation in this case so we're going to start with the overstory which is over 30 feet and we're going to look at what are the dominant species in that overstory looking above 30 feet I see a lot of red oak so those are two species we could write down Sally all right red oak and white pine Andy are you seeing any other dominant species we should take note of there is a little bit of red maple that is dominant or co-dominant co-dominant in the overstory above 30 feet okay and for that layer would you say the cover is very low less than 5% cover low at 5 to 30% cover medium at 30 to 70% cover or high over 70% cover and that by cover we mean as you're looking up through the trees how much of the sky is blocked out by the the vegetation the vast majority of it is 70% or greater so I would give it very high we did discover one gap though which we'll get to in a minute I think it's important to remember that right now we're in late October and so some of the leaves have fallen off of the trees here so we have to use our imaginations and imagine the leaves on the living trees as being leafed out when we're thinking about that overstory canopy cover I might disagree a little bit with Andy I could go with with medium but Andy is saying hi I'm not going to argue with him there I could I think as we look around and look up and look down in the overstory in particular I could agree with hi that's the tricky thing about doing this assessment luckily well we won't maybe do it today but we could take we could do several more of these and come up with an average yes that's that is the ideal thing to do is to do the same habitat assessment at multiple sites and then kind of come to some consensus of what you have okay and then in terms of composition we're going to look at we're looking at what's the proportion of hardwood species to softwood species and we are that's dominant hardwood is it mixed hardwood softwood or mixed softwood hardwood or dominant softwood so Andy I would approach that is to get out my prism and take a prism plot I'm gonna make this little pine tree my plot center and I'm gonna around and basically boy it's close it's about 170 square feet and it's 90 in the hardwood and 70 in the softwood so it's very close to an evenly mixed stand but with that slight edge to a hardwood so it would be an HS as far as that goes that might be another thing that taking a few other plots it may push the balance one way or the other but and at the overstory level these are all trees almost every tree that I tally is in the overstory at 30 greater than 30 feet so for that right for that piece and what would you say the canopy height is we need to look up for that yeah so our choices are 30 to 60 feet or greater than 60 feet in terms of canopy height for the overstory yeah I'll go with over 60 plenty of pine to pull that average up and even a lot of the oak I think is greater than 60 no that's not I agree okay just want to say that's not sometimes when we're doing these assessments people disagree a little bit and that's okay we we talked through it and we come to an agreement okay so over 60 for canopy height now we need to look around in this visual acre again and determine whether or not we see any canopy gaps because these canopy gaps are places where birds like eastern wood pee weas or other fly catchers will perch on the side of the canopy and then fly out into the open and feed on insects that are flying around in that canopy all right now we're moving on to the midstory layer which is six to 30 feet high and the first thing we need to record which is just the same for the overstory are the dominant species so Andy Amanda what do we have here hemlock fur beach talking that midstories that's six feet a little taller than I am up to 30 which is a 30 sorry a three-story building you're looking in that sort of range and it is a little different than those overstory species right we definitely didn't have beach and we didn't have balsam fur in that overstory before really hemlock and right here but they are present and it's both a combination of really understory trees that have grown above six feet so they're into the midstory and some of the beach is actually in the overstory but the lower branches which persist with leaves so from a bird standpoint that's cover in that six to 30 range I guess I would add that red maple which doesn't have its leaves on right now is not contributing to the midstory significantly whereas the the beach is so I wouldn't count red maple in our midstory as a dominant species and then in terms of cover are we looking at very low less than 5% low 5 to 30% medium 30 to 70% or high over 70% yeah having walked around the acre the spot we're in now probably has the most of anywhere and even here I would I would call it low less than 30% right yes right and from what I've seen in the rest of it's even lower I wouldn't say it's less than five so I would put it in that 5 to 30 therefore low well it's just interesting when we look at our next box of canopy cover what we're gonna do is combine that overstory with that midstory so what we're averaging is basically high with low to very low but from a bird's perspective that still averages out to high so in other words between six feet and the sky essentially we have a lot of potential habitat branches leaves twigs that birds can use so I'm gonna go ahead and circle high for that and then we have to back track a little bit and go back to the question of what's the composition of the dominant composition of that midstory so are we looking at hardwood hardwood softwood softwood hardwood or softwood it's very close to an even mix but I would give a little more to the hardwood excuse me remember it's October we got to put some leaves back on a few trees to really get the the full picture the softwood understory that's growing up into that zone isn't really as much as the hardwood that is already there so we got two more layers to go the understory between one and six feet we might as well do that while we're here what are the dominant species we see so right here we have an eastern hemlock and interestingly that's not the only softwood species that we've been seeing in this understory zero to six feet yeah got the hemlock got balsam fur I think hemlock fur and yeah a bit of beach because there are some beach probably stump sprouts from old not from harvesting in this spot but didn't see any red maple down low but there is red spruce there is some red spruce in the stand okay now we're talking dominant dominant species would you include the red spruce in the dominant species I thought in one of the other plots we looked at it was there was a fair bit of it we might not have included it in the overall species count in the overstory it is here but it's certainly not dominant present but not dominant I agree in terms of the layer cover very low low medium or high I would go maybe medium it's patchy but where where the patches are it's pretty heavy so overall I would go with medium well the great thing about the medium category is it's really big it goes from 30 to 70 percent so Amanda you have anything to add to that medium okay and our final layer is the ground cover layer which is less than one foot high oh Andy's got his tape out there's a foot less than a foot it's very sparse I would say very low low amount of cover the species over there would be baltem fur a few white pine a little bit of hemlock is in that range or has a lower branch and undoubtedly there's a spruce out here there is some beach and a couple of seedlings yes in fact white oak which is not present really in the overstory here we've not yet so do we call it very low less than 5% or do we call it low 5 to 30% and there is this on the form there is that handy key that might help us visualize looking at that I'm tempted to say over the visible acre which includes a couple of recreational trails I'm tempted to say very low for ground cover would it be on the high side of very low it might be I could accept that well if it were on the high side of very low you might actually get to the low side of low I think you know very low is really almost nothing so I think we have more than more than nothing I'd go for the low so you know clearly this is a highly scientific endeavor I'm being very precise Sally speaks to the birds I'm gonna go with what she says she says low so just as a recap so just as a recap what we have now is dominant overstory species of red oak white pine red maple with a high canopy closure with hardwood strong hardwood component but mixed hardwood softwood over 60 feet high and some very small gaps for the mid-story the dominant species are hemlock balsam for beach so that's different than the overstory low which is also quite different from the overstory similarly dominant hardwood softwood and relatively high overall canopy cover understory different again hemlock balsam for beach actually that's similar to the mid-story but very patchy in some cases we have some pretty good patches of growth and others it's very sparse so we went with a medium cover which is 30 to 70 percent pretty wide range and then for the ground cover we've got a lot of seedlings coming up in some places balsam for white pine hemlock and white oak and relatively low coverage on the low side of the 5 to 30 percent so as Amanda mentioned at the bottom of this first page there is this great little visual representation of what that different cover looks like and that can be really helpful when you're trying to determine this and and although you know there's some back and forth about which category certain things should fall under I wouldn't worry too much about getting it exactly right for each time you fill out the form because really we want to fill out the form in multiple stands and then get an average overall so Maddie do you have any questions or comments that you want to add at this point I guess my biggest question is like what does this all mean for the birds then like what are they going to prefer and like what what do the like the dense areas of like the mid-story or the understory mean for the birds compared to these open spaces so typically the short answer and if you want a longer answer I encourage you to go see our other forestry for main bird videos the short answer is that the more vegetation there is in all layers the more places you have for different species of birds to nest find food and hide from predators and that's what they're looking for they're looking they're looking for eight different species uses a different part of the forest and a different feature within the forest so the more vegetation you have the more places there are for different species and then multiple individuals of those species all right now we get to move on we've finished with our live components in the forest and now we're going to move on to the dead components of the forest which are actually really important let's go find some snags so now we're moving on to the dead components of the forest wood that once was live but now is dead and the first thing we're going to be looking at are snakes or decaying trees and the goal here is to have lots of dead standing snakes because that's where woodpeckers and flying squirrels and raccoons and all kinds of animals will nest and are done and so we want to look at the number of small snags less than nine inches the number of medium snags nine to twelve inch diameter large snags 12 to 18 inch diameter or very large snags over 18 inch diameter I just hear chickadee chickadees are cavity nesting birds so they will use smaller snakes but something like a piliated woodpecker that's a much larger bird needs really big snakes so Andy and Amanda looking around we've got this great example of this birch snake right here but what else do we see in our visual acre walking around the acre there are not many snags of any size one of the few is right here and what are what your size of categories on whether it's less than nine inches nine to 12 12 to 18 or over 18 so he's got to go pull out his tape measure it up for us when you say less than nine inches you're talking about diameter breast how this one is roughly an 11 okay so that would be a medium size was there a height component to that has to be over six feet high okay clearly over six yeah so just the one you think in that cat in that size category now there's a few fur that might also be 9 to 12 no less than nine so we've got one from nine nine to 12 and two or three in the smaller category so that's not very many typically typically like to have at least a minimum of six and preferably including one that's that's large or very large so it can be tricky to spot snags when you're used to counting live trees in a typical inventory right you're looking for the live trees and you're looking for their timber value and then to you know sort of switch gears like said that bird brain thing and once you do it though for a while they'll start to pop out at you but that's another reason why it's so important to either walk through the stand or at least spin in a circle and really look carefully so you can try to find those dead trees because you're right they don't always pop out this could be a good time to mention that a lot of times you could be doing this habitat assessment along with a standard timber inventory so you've laid out a grid and you're going plot to plot and you may do this habitat assessment at the plot center where you're measuring everything else or you may be taking general impressions in between plots or you might have a whole separate series of plots that are strictly for habitat so that you can make that mental switch and not be so you know focused on the on the live trees and when you say that you want a lot of snags that's a relative term a lot usually that just means a few more than you have right because the more the more the better the bigger the better as they take home messages okay so this is the ecologist versus the forester who says for a lot of wood lot owners they would like a fairly large proportion of live trees but learning to appreciate the not live anymore is part of the whole forestry for main birds point of view yes and speaking of appreciating not live trees the other thing that is important are down woody material so we have two categories of down woody material we need to take inventory of the first is coarse woody material and these are logs or branches that are over six inches in diameter and over four feet in length or tiny snags that are less than six feet high so Andy you just measured that what have we got there right and it's only about five inches diameter at the big end so it's not going to count as the large or the course however it does have some length to it so it is almost 17 feet long so that's a that's a plus plus side yeah but it's it's a little bit on the small side so let's get a better example of what might fit that category of a large woody debris we were just looking at a small example of woody material that was down on the ground but now we have a much better example of what would qualify as coarse woody material so Andy's over here he's going to take a measurement of this one remember it needs to be over six inch diameter and over four feet long so I'm not going to be able to actually wrap a detaper on it so I use the other side of the detape and estimate at about 16 or 17 inch there we go now we're definitely qualifies yeah and but our threshold on length was only four feet so we definitely got more than nearly more than four feet no need to even measure that and if we look around behind Andy on the forest floor we'll also see some other examples of this coarse woody material and the goal here is to determine whether we have a high number over 20 pieces a medium number from six to 20 pieces or a low number less than six pieces so just looking behind us what what would you say we have here I think it's low so it's helpful if you actually really identify and count each piece that you see and the in order to determine the number the low would be less than six pieces which I'm having walked around I didn't see six okay I don't think I don't think we have it so we've got a low number and Andy you want to say a little something about that that this is that that's another way of noting that we don't have a really old forest here can you say more about that right I mean a forest a truly old forest would have had trees that grew up fell over and died much more than what we're seeing here so even though we have some fairly large diameter stems certainly over 16 inches so that bodes well for the future ecological structure as some of those do break off die or become cavity trees in fact this piece clearly came from was a one branch of a larger pine when this when this one came down and broke off it created a column of rot in that tree so this tree this overstory pine here is actually got a much higher habitat value than timber value and we'll continue to contribute towards that you know at some point in the future you'll come out here and there will be a lot of stuff in your way if you try to walk around which is one indication of a mature forest and a lot of those down would he would he material that's the reasons it's important for birds is because something like a roughed grouse uses that for drumming and attracting a mate but also you might find food mixed in on that dead decaying area and also things like fishers or squirrels will use those to move through the forest and they can find food underneath that woody material like small mammals or amphibians salamanders and frogs and whatnot so we also want to look at how much fine woody material we have on the forest floor and what we really like to see our piles of this sort of fine woody material I'm not seeing great examples here but we because what you really want are this fine woody material that's piled to the point where a bird could fly in there and hide from a predator and find insects that collect in that area so looking around our options are do we have a high number of piles over five a medium number one to four or a low number I think Amanda I think we have a low number of fine woody material piles I would agree again it just hasn't been enough material come down yet and then our our last category is the hardwood leaf litter and this is important particularly for oven birds that nest on the ground and so we need to know whether we have an adequate layer which is over one and a half inches or an inadequate layer which is less than one and a half inches I would say that right here it's barely adequate this red maple certainly is given a lot of leaves but I don't think it's quite enough for a oven bird to really be at home however there are other parts to the stand where the leaf litter did appear adequate so I might say adequate patchy would that be acceptable Sally that's good no yep and then we have just three other things we want to try to fill in that is have we seen any signs of invasive plants in here and if so what are they and how prevalent are they what's the percent cover luckily I have not know which is kind of remarkable for something yes yeah we are to developed areas yeah in this stand however if we when we go back over by the wetland I believe we saw some invasives the last time we were here but for this particular stand luckily there is not a noticeable population of invasive plants and how about insects and disease any signs of that nothing major going on right here over there definitely some diseases to be aware of that are in the in the general area but nothing I don't know what do you see anything else Andy the one beach tree I saw did look like it had the beach spark disease pretty pretty common doesn't necessarily kill a tree right off so you can still get get a lot of bird habitat value out of it even though it has that disease where there's hemlock in this stand and we're definitely in the hemlock woolly adelgid zone it's something to look out for didn't notice any on this particular spot but it would be it would be logical to find some around here not a lot of ash in the stand so not a lot of concerns about emerald ash borer right here gypsy moth hasn't made its way here yet I haven't had an outbreak for a while and with the oak component though that could be a concern in the future okay and the final thing is whether or not there are any riparian or forest and wetlands in the forest and I don't think we had any in this particular plot but nearby us there are some nice little small wetlands and little swampy areas and the great thing about having those in your forest is that it brings in a whole different component of trees plants and then birds that key into that so we're doing our typical inventories of standing timber and we tend to not want to go into the wetlands you know because that's not what we're focused on but yet how would you capture that in a habitat assessment would you actually make a separate go there and and do a stand assessment in a wetland area or a forested wetland it's it's more just noting it on the form so right here what we say our note if it's present in the area okay and riparian habitat which is that forested area right along a water body is particularly important because you often have some larger trees in that area you also those trees fall into the water and create structure within the water but also a lot of birds will queue into that habitat something like a Canada warbler likes that shrubby thick shrubby area that's right next to a wetland for example so it's more you don't necessarily need to do the habitat assessment in the wetland but noting its presence is really important as to the diversity right and that's kind of that that whole landscape piece of looking at things not only on the track but on the neighboring parcels and in the area you know is there a lot of prevalence of wetlands or riparian type habitats having determined that this is an intermediate stand with maybe a few larger trees is that what's next door is there a lot of the young forest around is there even older forest you know what's it what's in that you take it out really to 2,500 acre blocks if you can find a way to determine either using Google Earth or other methodology yes and that is something that you can do you can look at back in your office after you've collected these habitat assessments in a number of different stands and you can you and we have some other forms as part of our guidebook for foresters for forcing for main birds that will guide you through that process well it may appear from from this video that it takes quite a while to do this of course it takes longer when you're trying to make a video like many things if you do one or two of these you get used to it you can pretty well zip through those the stand assessment form in fact there is a short form version of that that is included in the forestry for main birds guidebook it's on the main Audubon website under the resources for foresters under forestry for main birds and you can get to the point of probably doing it in just adding five or ten minutes to a to a regular inventory plot


I'm delighted that so many of you are able to join us today. With me are two other experts in this area. I am the Chair of ALT, but I'm joined by some real experts in this particular topic area, John Traxler and Agnes Chagona. So I'm delighted that they're able to lead this session for us today. What we have is a number of really good speakers as well who are joining us, and there are going to be plenty of opportunities for discussion as we proceed through this hour. But first, I just want to highlight a couple of housekeeping pointers. And those are that we have a chat function available for us today in Collaborate. Hopefully many of you have used this solution before, but if you haven't, just click at the bottom of the screen. There's a little sort of purple Chevron icon. And then within there, you can then see a chat button that you can then click and see the chat. So please use that for any questions or any comments that you have through the session. And we'll pick up those when we have our chat and our panel discussion. Also, there will be some polling activities towards the end of the presentation. So please look out for those links, and we'd love for you to join in on those. We'll also be recording this session, as Maryn said, and hopefully try to share that with you within a day or so. And also, I've just included here just an applied message that if you do have video, maybe it's best to disable that, because we have people joining from all over the world who just want to save bandwidth and not sort of have any impairments to the experience today. And also just a mention of the hashtag of this session today. It is hashtag alt WM underscore decolonize. So please feel free to use that to post your comments, your experiences of today, and anything else that you want to share with the rest of the world. OK, so I just want to hand over now to Agnes. And Agnes is going to introduce the sessions that we have today. Agnes. Thank you, John. So OK, hi all. Thank you for joining this webinar. My name is Agnes Tugona. I'm a professor in the faculty of education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town in South Africa. And my research interests are in ICTs in education. I am very much passionate in digital pedagogies in teacher education. So I'll be chairing this session today. And as you know, the session is about decolonizing learning technology. Yes. So I was looking at the meaning of decolonization. And the Oxford Llanars Dictionary defines decolonization as the process of a colony or a colony is becoming independent. So in the session, I am interested in getting answers to questions about the extent to which our digital pedagogies technologies we use for teaching and learning are perpetuating the colonization or assisting with decolonization in education. So I think I shouldn't take much of the time. But we are privileged to have experts presenting their research within the field, helping us understand what decolonizing learning technology is and how we can go about it. And our first presenter is Professor John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton. He is presenting about decolonizing technology. So Professor Traxler, you have seven minutes for the presentation. And that will be followed by questions for three minutes. So over to you, John. OK, thank you. And John, you're driving the slides. Yeah, that's correct. So you should see the first slide on the screen now, John. Just say whatever you want me to change the slide for you. Well, no, sadly not. I'll have to guess. I don't know why. Probably better to press on. I mean, yeah, and I hope to say, well, thanks for that introduction. And I think Agnes poses the right question or at least half of the right question, because I think decolonization certainly has many different aspects and appears in several different guises. And so there is an experience of colonization in the X colonies of the European colonizing powers, of which obviously South Africa is one, but there are plenty more, and of which other members of the European community have also got their legacy. And that's one half of the picture, or maybe only one third. Another portion, another third of that picture, is the extent to which migrant communities from the X colonies of those empires now live as migrants in the host communities of the X colonial powers. So we have all manner of communities in the UK, but there are similar parallel communities in France and probably, I guess, Spain and a variety of other countries as well, all of which experience colonization, colonization of educational technology and the learning in their different ways. And as someone pointed out to me recently, the de-russification of, for example, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, or perhaps the Baltic states, Latvia, for example, might also have a parallel agenda in that they're attempting to reassert or develop some national identity, and clearly education and the technologies that must be a part of that. So, yeah, thank you for the introduction, Agnes. I was hoping to keep my remarks as short as possible, and to that end, I posted a couple of blogs on the alt website, which maybe say nothing new. They reflect thinking of a year or two, three years ago and attempt to pull them together. And one of those bits of thinking relates to the technology itself and the extent to which it is permeated by colonial thinking values, concepts, and so on. And I'll come back to that in the course of the slides. We are also running two more webinars where we hope to do justice to more of the contributions and more of the ideas that come up. And in some senses, we're... Well, I am certainly apologizing for us being taken by surprise with this webinar and the extent to which there's been so much interest in it, and we're running to catch up. So hopefully we'll do some of that catching up in the subsequent webinars. Okay, John, next slide, the one entitled definitions also, please. I hope this isn't kind of a sterile academic exercise looking for a definition. But nevertheless, it does point out some aspects of it. I mean, the first one is actually from an African newspaper and sees it in African terms. I mean, in the way perhaps Agnes was portraying it. The other one comes from the University of Kiel. Rather ironically, or perhaps rather sadly, I noticed they've used the American Spelling, which kind of tells us something. And as I was saying, there are a variety of definitions, depending on whether one's coming at it as it were from a domestic point of view or overseas, points of view. And also I suppose the extent to which it's on the one hand an issue of historical injustice, I mean, in our relationships to other people in other countries and their experience of learning technology, but also if you like a current threat, when we look at the global dominance of digital corporations and where they come from and the values that are embedded in them. Yeah, so really I'm just drawing attention to the many different facets of this issue. I suppose needing to place us in some respects within a wider context of decolonization. I mean, on the broader extent, I suppose you can align it with Black Lives Matter and Roads Must Fall in different countries in different ways, but also actually the appropriation of indigenous knowledge, the attempts to preserve or appropriate cultural heritage, and also recent attempts within the last few days to discuss the repatriation of Benin bronzes to Nigeria or to repatriate the... Sorry, and I have to say Elgin models, which is clearly the wrong name because they're the Parthenon freezes back to Greece. So yes, it's part of that wider context within the sphere of education. We're seeing quite a lot of work around decolonizing the curriculum and decolonizing research. And the work of decolonizing the curriculum can sometimes be presented as opening up opportunities to those communities that are underrepresented or disempowered, but I think actually, whilst that might be true, it's also worth thinking about the extent to which decolonizing the curriculum represents a much, much richer, wider curriculum for everyone involved in the education system and not just for minority and migrant communities. So that's a kind of attempt to provide some sort of definition. If we move on to the next slide, John, it just points out that certainly from my personal history, I realize I must have been thinking about this issue over the last maybe decade and have made several different attempts to think about it. And this represents three of those attempts, the technology itself of learning technology, the theorizing of it, and the digital literacy which underpins it. So if we move on to the slide that says some questions, these were just the kind of things I think we ought to be asking ourselves in relation to, well, our students' experience, but also our lecturers and staff and researchers' experience of the day-to-day use of learning technology and asking ourselves what white European influences do we spot when we're using those technologies? And I suppose white European might be a term we can extend to white settler influences if we're looking at the scope and prestige of the USI. And maybe there's also a phrase that would embrace other colonializing powers and their influences, Arabic ones across North Africa, for example. And below that, I just enumerated some more specific questions in the hope they'd provoke you to spotting it in your work, really. The issue of icons, gestures, emojis on your phones, on your tablets, on your laptops, on your desktops. And certainly in the blog I'd identified some of those, but even so, I keep spotting more. And I think back with a certain amount of embarrassment 20 years ago running a European project that included Italy and we thought with English developers what we needed to do was scrape off the teacups and the red buses and put on some coffee cups and some green bendy buses. But you can start at that level scraping away, I don't know, white paper bins and files and egg timers and clocks. And then you find another layer and another layer and another layer. So John, you've got just 30 seconds to go. Oh, dear, sorry, that's really hard, isn't it? Okay. Yeah, so you can work through those questions and hopefully everyone will contribute their own examples. And there's one more question on the following slide, just to draw your attention to the various people who might be affected or afflicted by these experiences. So not just African communities, but also, as I say, Burba or Cree or Urdu or Kikuyu people. Okay, two more slides. One more, next one, John, the one about digital literacy. So we've got one about learning theory here, John. What do you want on the next slide? Okay, sorry, the question there is actually just spot the theorist who isn't the white European. And the last one about digital literacy. It's slightly random because I'm sure there's a whole bunch of issues but it is the foundation of our digital learning. But I worry about the extent to which the way the world is thinking about it is modeled upon European expectations, experiences, values and technology and pedagogy as well. And so I think we need to be very, very cautious in other countries importing what we have done that has built on a European context that is completely irrelevant in other countries. It is, as I say, the foundation of digital learning and we have to be careful that we're not building other people's digital learning on our conceptions in Europe of digital literacy. Okay, I hope I kept to time. Thank you very much for the opportunity for that high speed. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, John, for the presentation. Yes. And now we have questions for you. The first question I see, thinking of the practices that technology enables inclusive, exclusive, etc. What do, what we do with the technology and the structures it supports perpetuates or perpetuates? So, John, are you there? Sorry, I said, I was muted. I'm sorry. Can you repeat that, please? I think the question is about these, what these technologies are perpetuating. I also had that similar question that, you know, so if I take our example, South Africa, most of the technologies we use for teaching and learning are coming from the Western countries. And now how can we decolonize that same technology and be able to compete at the global level? Oh, okay. I mean, I guess I only have half the answer to that, partly because I think we're all still only thinking it through. And once we thought it through, then perhaps we'll have some strategies for addressing it. But I think in the first instance, the problem is awareness, that actually we don't notice it's happening, that we assume that what Microsoft or Apple do is somehow some neutral global norm and actually to draw people's attention to the fact that it isn't, that it comes laden with all sorts of aspects of a specific and powerful culture. And that we need to look more carefully at the technologies and the learning that comes with it in order to at least be critically aware that this is what's happening to us. Okay. John, can you read some of the questions? Yeah, there's an interesting one here. Can I just ask one final one? Just to John, how much of the bait in colonial designs and technology can be overcome by pedagogy? And it says, of course, pedagogy is influenced by the technology as well. Yeah, I think that's an important issue in the sense, well, I think there's this kind of spectrum or a sequence or a continuum that starts with the people that build and design the hardware, the software, the systems, the peripherals and so on and builds in some of their values at the very, very outset.  And then you move on to the educational systems and their deployment, you know, VLEs, LMSs and then the ways in which they are deployed within institutions and the way that that reinforces a particular, well, educational model, educational theater and institutional, commercial models as well. And then it gets passed on to the curriculum designers, the curriculum developers. And I think we shouldn't be too ambitious in thinking we can solve the whole of the problem and ask ourselves instead, what exactly are we doing? And I guess that is around the actual digital learning pedagogy and actually the educational awareness of this issue. You know, so on the one hand, can we through our teaching alert people to this problem and on the other hand, can we design, I don't know, materials, interactions that begin to address it and that set examples and also create communities and foster discussion. Thank you so much, John, for the presentation and the response to the questions. And I see there are still many questions, but in the interest of time, we need to move on. And now we have the lightning talks. And this will be given presented by Dr. Mona Younis and Dr. Sonia Strelin and Dr. Tostin Adams. Over to you ladies. And okay, so everybody has got two minutes to present. Then we'll have questions following your presentations. All of you have presented. Thank you. Yes, hi. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me properly? Greetings from California, USA. John, thank you for the slides. What I'm going to do today is it's just a trial to come up with some sort of a framework so that we can get the ball rolling while we are discussing the decolonizing learning technology. It's such a big and huge field or an area where we have really to think deeply, but therefore what do we need? Do we need some kind of a framework? Next John. Okay. Now, where does this framework that I'm proposing coming from a couple of years ago and that was a pre-COVID time? I was engaged with ECCN with the USAID and INE, the Interagency Network for Education Emergencies, because my specialty is actually working with refugees and educating them, especially in the NINA region. I was engaged in a reference group where we were sitting down and thinking about how is it possible that we implement ICT-based interventions in a conflict-sensitive manner. And in order to think about that and to come up with a checklist that is useful for implementers, we needed to have some kind of a framework. But we sat down for maybe a year or a year and a half thinking about, okay, this checklist, how are we going to frame it, what should be included, and so on. We realized that there are actually two perspectives or two layers. The first layer is actually the life cycle of a project or of an intervention. Especially, we are talking here about learning technology and its implementation in emergency and crisis settings. We realized that we need to look into the whole cycle. We need to look at the analysis cycle or the analysis phase, implementation, management, monitoring, evaluation, and even the closeout. Now, the second thing we thought about is, okay, each of those phases is very complex and there are so many aspects to it. Therefore, let's sit down and try to think deeply what are the different aspects that we have to think about. When we think about decolonizing learning technologies, we need also to think broadly because colonization and the colonizing philosophy has actually impacted all the different aspects of the whole learning process. I'm talking here about digital technology and talking about the technologies, about communication, about different aspects. Next slide, John. At the very end, we came up with four concepts or four aspects that we see and really believe are the main ones where we need to think deeply about. And I do think the same framework could be also used when we tackle issues of decolonization. Community context, very important. Content and pedagogy, definitely very much decolonized. And then... Yes, okay. Communication, devices and connection. Next, John. Now, when we are talking about community context, there are very important questions. One of them, are we really ensuring not to exerbate social injustices, inequities or oppression? Are we really doing that? Because sometimes we really do not do. And there are so many samples and examples around us that tell us no, the way we do it is in a very decolonized way. John, the next please. Then we have content and pedagogy. We have also other examples around the world. And if I had time, I would have told you stories and stories about how decolonized we are, how actually in a colonial manner, top-down manner, we can see curriculum being designed and given to the refugees around the world or the internally displaced people. The next. And very important question, are we widening the digital divide? Are we helping through learning technologies and the implementation of learning technologies widening the digital divide? And I can tell you a very recent research that I was engaged in in northern Syria in conflict areas. We could see that only 25 percent of kids had access to one one smartphone during COVID and were able to continue their education. What happened to the rest 75? They were pushed down down into more poverty and child labor actually flourished very much. Why? Because learning technology was used in that context and the kids had to be out of the whole system. Yes, the next. Very quickly. Yes. Very quickly connections. We needed to think about what are we doing? Are we exerbating actually the power and the strength and the colonial situation position of the global corporates? Are we doing that? And is providing the connection one mean of exerbating again inequality and enforce different kind of oppressions. There are so many different stories that I can tell where the increasing of tariffs and the use of learning technology has actually led to more oppression and more and more social justice and digital divide. Would there be three seconds to show the video? Do we have three seconds? I don't think we do actually because we'll have to change the share so can we actually just put that in the link to the in the chat and we'll pick that up in a second. I'm inviting you to look at that video that video was taken in Cox Bazaar in one of the refugee camps Rohingya refugee camps and it is showing how is digital pedagogy being implemented in that camp how the banking model followed in a very what do I say in a very harmful way among the refugees and I am the one who took the video and I witnessed this horrible practice teaching practice happening Yes, please. I'm inviting everyone to have a look at this 17 second video and you will know what I'm talking about. Thank you. That was quick. Thank you and now can we have the next one Sonja. Thank you Agnes and thank you colleagues also for the opportunity just from my side just quickly again from Salamars University in South Africa and maybe the purpose of my very short talk is just maybe to share with you our thoughts and the processes that we propose with in our institution and also broader in terms of starting to interrogate what what we all know is critical digital pedagogies and maybe latching on to the learner's framework that she used and which I think is really powerful and useful and our emphasis is probably then on the pedagogical side the teaching methodologies that we employ with digital technologies and maybe the secondary side of course also the community context and of course the right of students to how they play that role within our engagement with digital technology so in terms of the why you'll see that I have two bullet points I think all of us are very familiar with the fact that the emergency remote teaching and learning and assessment period that we all experienced the past two years that we also experienced that the digital came to the fore much more it's like an ocean of waves and we experienced that in our own tuition but also in our country as well and talking to colleagues as well but what we found was we actually with respect to our colleagues in our division for teaching and learning and enhancement we're actually with collaboratively on an OER we reflected on experiences of Adela and one of the things that came out was that needs to connect with students via the digital so that humanizing pedagogy side came through very strongly so that's one of our motivations for interest and you can have a look at that in the link that I've shared with you but probably in the South African context also colleagues searching public universities out of the 25 in South Africa participated in a joint paper that we wrote on the second bullet point that specifically spoke about equity inequality issues in the COVID-19 period and then also then the issues of key and how we need to embrace that as well so those are two of the main factors that influence our thinking processes in a sense as well the second slide please John and then very briefly the way in which we try or thinking of approaching it is the how and we're looking at the differential approach we're new we're learning as we go along of course in our own work the issues of EDI increasingly automated classrooms are questions that we're asking the whole time and we're thinking about that third space where you bridge the gap between our issues of equity diversity and intercity but then also issues of artificial intelligence, machine learning all these things coming to the form much more how do we address that those are one of the aspects that we're thinking about from institutional perspective we've started to plan what we call a critical digital pedagogies planning group where we try to actually embrace cross institutional awareness campaign in terms of this and starting to engage with academics and students and academic support services in terms of how are we thank you how we actually can start to embed and start to think about critical digital pedagogies and the last but not least is we've also we've also involved in the African Digital University Network you've got the link there and we've got different working groups and one of the working groups actually starting to focus on the aspect of critical digital pedagogies there will be a call going out at the end or only next year and you are very welcome to join that network and also to join that working group if you're interested in that thank you very much for the opportunity colleagues thank you so much Sonya we'll have more time next in the next webinar can we have Taskin Adams hi everyone can you hear me loud and clear yes we can hear you great thank you so much Agnes so you can skip to the next slide so I'm Taskin I'm from South Africa I did my PhD on MOOCs and how they can address injustices in education on to the next slide please Agnes John thanks so yeah so my PhD looked at addressing injustices and it arose from the period where roads must fall and fees must fall were happening on one side and on the other side there was this great development of global online learning platforms that were claiming to be the solution to all educational issues so my research focused on whether MOOCs could address the needs preferences and aspirations of marginalized youth but also focus not only on the material injustices but the cultural systemic and the political and geopolitical injustices they face so you can go on to the next slide thanks basically what I want to do today is just highlight three papers that I've written which is sort of like a clickbait for you to read them and look at some of the issues I've talked about the first one is on digital neocolonialism and MOOCs and this talks about how and a lot of my research focuses on the ideologies and the western centric epistemologies that are embedded in learning technology so moving away from just access issues to seeing how things are embedded with western logic so that research looked at how western centric epistemologies are embedded into MOOCs and how this can be detrimental for when you're trying to educate diverse and complex participants from around the globe it also looked at not only the past in terms of colonial agendas but new techno capitalist agendas that transcend borders the second paper then looked at MOOC designers and the embodiment in epistemic location the fact that many MOOC designers are based in global law institutions and how those knowledges and are for-fronted in what they design and this research highlighted that basically MOOCs represent what MOOC designers who they are how they think what they value and therefore you really need to have an epistemically diverse group of MOOC designers that can bring in different cultures and different value systems and different epistemologies into thinking about how MOOCs are designed just a quick example is MOOCs are designed for one user to interact through a profile whereas there are so many community learnings of models of education just looking at that on the third paper I look at the difference between social justice and decolonization and this came up in the chat as well social justice theories tend to be rooted from a I mean Tusking yes they tend to be rooted from global north literature although recent social justice literature has sort of merged with decolonial literature however decolonial literature rarely came from the south and so there's different understanding of how these are and just going on to the next slide that literature basically builds upon the dimensions of human injustice framework that draws from the social justice theories that look at redistribution and those from material levels to more geopolitical and epistemic levels and then draws into the owniality aspects that rarely look at forefronting different ideas and epistologies and this is the framework that I've used in my research to map and understand to critique and analyze learning technologies so yeah I'll stop then just I think the one last thing I would say what my research sought to do is to design an approach to designing justice orientated and decolonized mobs so hoping that will be an example of being followed. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Taskin for the presentation and thank you to our three presenters now we have questions for the presenters, the three presenters John do you have any questions on the chat? I'm going to check on anything yes I've just been so busy with the slides but if anybody can push forward any questions that there are I'm sorry that we've had to rush through so many of those talks well I'm waiting for somebody to come through I will say that we're hoping to do a couple more webinars and those with lightning talks this time can talk a little bit more in the next session because obviously there's so much of interest in there that we'd love to be able to get more information out to you so we've got a question here so what's the relationship between epistemic location and designers conceptualizations is there anything definite if we can say about this I'll ask that to Taskin first Thank you, so I'll pop the link that will explain that in detail but yes that came out so strongly so to be quite frank when I looked at the handful of black global south move designers they brought such different concepts into the work that they did and it really brought into a different understanding of like they were trying to challenge epistemic injustices in their work and they brought different elements into the design of the move not just at the end like not just a discussion at the end but brought different speakers from around the globe so there was a very significant difference in the design of the moves and how collaborative and engaging they was based on the different designers Great, thank you. I've just seen a question just came up there let me just see if there was another one a question from Miranda maybe this is to Mona is language one of the aspects you considered in the South African context South African context when I did my PhD research it was about the MENA region and specifically about the Syrian refugees in Jordan but language is definitely also part of the whole issue of decolonization because what we can see that we have for instance Arabic although we have so many Arabic speakers I don't I can't recall how many now the exact statistic but we have only 5 to 4.5% of the content that is there out there online is in Arabic for language is a very big issue whenever a child wants to know more about solar system unfortunately unfortunately he would refer mostly to curriculum to resources that have been written in English because there is a scarce of resources and learning material that is in Arabic for language is a very very big issue a very big one yes great thanks very much indeed Marla I could just cross the time we've got 2 more speakers to come we'll be playing time for questions I hope before the end of this hour so perhaps let's move on now and move on to I think Samantha was coming next and then we've got Kate so Samantha are you going to share your screen is that correct yes I'm trying to yes I think I've got the order right yeah now I'm trying to it's just having a bit of a alright there we go okay awesome okay I want to you have got 7 minutes yep I will be brief but understandable hopefully so I'm going to give a quick overview about the anti-racism technology working group which is I'm a part of what it is how we started why should we care about this and what we are doing as I said I will try to keep it brief okay so how things started off so Matt Lingardt who a lot of you may know he attended a talk by Angela Sonny last autumn but I think had him thinking along the way that a lot of us are thinking and that we do think that this critical digital pedagogic way of questioning technologies so he literally put out a mass call to the community going you know is anybody else thinking about this and does anybody else want to do anything about it and that's what kind of brought us to this anti-racism and technology working group and you know we kind of kicked off in I think January of this year actually and we are looking to become an old SIG and we are a community of practice we are people from across the spectrum of learning technology that really want to kind of address this kind of issues with the technologies and what happens with them and the things that are baiting you know and there are three subgroups for this things that we think about this the content developers group which I'm part of I've done a lot of learning design work in the past so that kind of makes more sense there's things around research connected activities and just questions about the equipment and staff development as well within learning technology it is ridiculously white you know there isn't as much diversity in these teams as we would hope in some places and you know and even where there is diversity unfortunately like a lot of higher education it's in the lower levels it doesn't feed all the way through what all the way through I will get that out in a way that makes sense in a minute and so far there's been a series of blog posts that there was one that introduced the group as whole and then each group has had their own posts and John's going to share the slides and there's links to the blog posts actually in the notes for this and then the research group actually did a presentation at the Winter Conference so that's kind of the background so all of this and I'm not going to be apologetic for putting this here because I know that this is an incredibly powerful poem and I picked it on purpose because we have to remind ourselves that you know by being bystanders we can place it in reproducing it and maintaining inbuilt inequalities and systemic racism and other social injustices in these tools and the approaches and I think that's kind of crucial and for me personally a couple of years ago I read two books I read Rene Adele Lodges Why I'm No Longer Talk to White People About Race and for me that was quite profound it made me see things I hadn't seen you know I am very much a you can almost argue I walk around with race into glasses I want to see the good in the world and leave the world a better place I don't always see the underside of things and I don't always question things that I should question so that made me kind of go oh okay that's not cool that's not right and at the same time I was reading Count Boeper's White Privilege as well and about how we we privilege things and people in our education systems and you know there's also a discussion about unacceptable whiteness as well so I totally agree with Laurie's comments in the chat about you know it's not just a thing it is a equitable and a social justice thing and then not always the same thing but we need to be mindful you know I'm very aware that I am first in family, first gen to go to university I remember the first time I walked into UCL and I was like this what it didn't compute I felt very different but I'm also acceptable you know I as they put a code switch there's interesting things said by Rua Benterman saying that we shouldn't have to you know I do it subconsciously the way I'm speaking now is very different to how I would speak at home to the friends that I grew up with and it is completely a subconscious thing because I've learnt to code switch and you know is that something that's truly necessary as well should you have to change to survive and I literally mean survive in a culture so why should we care well I think we care because technology and pedagogies are not apolitical they can't be they're socially constructed and they construct society they're the two things I was actually really quite disappointed by a comment actually someone reported about JISC in this one let's forget about the ethics of AI and let's think about how to roll it out and how it might be useful you can't the two things can't be ignored you have to truly think about both I think that we have to share the load as well you know it is not one person's job to say about this but I'm also very aware of being an ally and truly being an ally I have no desire to be a white saviour and I'm very cautious of knowing that we have this power yeah that's fine you know that we have power and in a way because I am the norm there are things I can say and I can do which won't be taken in the same way that they may be by somebody else so it is a very careful balancing act but it is everybody's job to remember that it is our job and maybe because we are not seen as a threat you know we should be doing a bit more about it so in terms of the content development group we had kind of two questions that we address in the reviewer frameworks blog and these were frameworks for decolonisation and inclusive curricula and thinking a bit about what that kind of meant the point now where based on actually John Traxler's post in the org group the work that we are doing with this and in conversations with Monica that we are in the process of drafting I don't know if framework or a toolkit is the best way to describe it for how as learning designers learning technologists we can think about this we can think about questioning the things presented to us to build in online courses about the technologies that we are asked to review to implement and the implications for that I am personally looking at learning design frameworks and where we can introduce thinking more broadly about what values are we embedding what content is there and what does that represent and what stereotypes are we reproducing that are good and bad we are going to go into conference where we are going to introduce the current version of the toolkit and we are going to be opening up for some community feedback on that so we are currently in the process of building it and a little supporting website so I am going to leave it there because there is so much to say and think and doing this space and we really are just opening up the conversation how do we open the conversation and how do we feel that we can raise this and even within the fact that I am the norm to a certain extent there is still power dynamics in playing our institution and how do we raise that and sometimes in some really quite uncomfortable situations so I hope that wasn't too much for Road Runner thank you that was very interesting we don't have much time so we go straight to the next presenter Ketchy are you there please unmute yourself is Ketchy in the room sorry I am here now I didn't have the option to unmute myself but I have got it now thank you that's alright I am glad it was fixable I was like oh no I don't know how to do this okay so yes thank you so much to everybody for all the things you have been saying I am going to talk briefly I have got slides which have more detail on that is for if you are interested in following any of this up but I just wanted to make a few main points really so I have got a poll to start with if we are able to carry if you are able to drop that into the chat how much influence you feel you have on decolonising in your current situation so there are choices in that poll I am not sure my work has or should have anything to do with decolonising I have no involvement I can occasionally influence decolonising decisions I am actively involved in decolonising or none of the above so if I just give you a minute to do that or not literally a minute I can't see any results on that sorry that is the joining page that is why I can't see results that is fine thank you I will turn the results on in a second Kate when people are so far 40 people just joining now Fab okay thank you I am on purpose being quiet because as a person with a disability I struggle with multiple things so I am giving you a little bit of time just to do that interesting okay so there we go that is showing that I am occasionally I can occasionally influence decolonising decisions and actions is by far and away the one that is getting the most votes at the moment and the others you can see for yourselves so the one at the top I am not sure my work has or should have anything to do with decolonising there are a fair few people thinking that the same with those who have no involvement and then D the fourth one down that is actively involved in decolonising okay thank you very much for sharing that next slide please so I wanted to return to the point we started off with so starting with why is my curriculum white I come to decolonising from an educational developer perspective I am interested very much in inclusive practice and I think that the decolonising agenda which quite rightly began focusing very much on race is something that we need to expand we need to look at the hidden power structures and who is affected by them and maybe broaden this out so there is a quote here whiteness exceeds the individual and is a ubiquitous multifaceted and inconsistent manifestation of power that informs social relations and the recognition of ability potential and the value of certain types of knowledge that thing about the ability potential and the value of certain types of knowledge is at the heart of what is not right with education we will talk about that in a minute next slide please so really this is all about power structures so we are still having a pandemic we have had a pivot to online education and these things have raised the issue of structural inequality for the first time some of these inequalities are now visible they have always been there but suddenly more of us can see them that has affected obviously students in the way that you have heard from other speakers and also the thing that these are typically invisible to people that they don't affect next slide please so historically then the norms in our education system are whiteness that's very clear they are also the people who put the education system together were privileged so they were independently wealthy presumed straight able bodied European male for the most part so all of these things shaped how our education system was set up and this is hidden and this is what we talk about as the hidden curriculum and I've got a lovely guide colleagues have just produced on that which I'll drop into the chat later next slide please but I wanted to look at the effects that the hidden invisible the hidden curriculum has on students so this slide and the one after it these are quotes direct quotes from students in situations they found themselves in I haven't got time to read them all through but I'm just going to highlight the issues that they're raising so the first point is from a student of colour who is being taught medicine and only being taught to diagnose symptoms in white-skinned individuals the second is from a non-binary student who's come across an example of statistics where they're saying this is an example of a binary statistic because all participants are male or female that doesn't represent that student's experience the third one's very concerning for all sorts of ethical reasons but it's a professor of genetics who is discussing removing disease genes from the population in a way that suggests that removing disability is desirable so in each of those instances you have a student sitting in a classroom hearing these kind of views as part of the curriculum unquestioning part of the curriculum for other students and possibly other staff with no understanding of the impact these things are invisible unless they're your particular visibility next slide please the same is true of identity so we have an issue with names a student talking about the inability to pronounce the name which signifies her African origin which meant that she stopped participating she said I found it easier I didn't want to draw attention to myself the impact is huge another one there from a transgender student university systems are only using the previous name their dead name so every single time they participate in a zoom call or whatever the university systems are organising it's their dead name it's not them so next slide please what I wanted to show with this is that these inequalities have always been here we see them in attainment gaps calling it an attainment gap this differentiation in degree attainment puts it on the students it's like saying you haven't achieved enough in our system well that's not right and here we have a nice quote from Advanced HE action needs to focus on institutional barriers and inequalities so it's not the students who are failing to achieve it's all of these hidden structures within their curriculum within the education system in terms of who has access who can participate who is able to achieve and so on so it's really important that you think about this from a designing for everybody perspective and in our field we're used to this idea a minute to go okay thank you that's lovely so next slide please and then the one after that so we'll skip a slide that's it so I wanted to talk about our role in decolonising things that we are doing so we're from lots of different contexts but if we seek EDI training opportunities that will help us to see what isn't obviously visible if we look for these hidden power structures we look for underrepresentation and we try and make these things visible to others through our own actions question practice and change it where we can so things like tools, systems, activities and so on acting inclusively so promoting and modelling things like digital accessibility is a big part of this as well universal design for learning that kind of concept scaffolding decolonising activity, inclusive practice allyship, standing with those who need our support to normalise equality issues like inclusive language and pronouns and working in partnership which I think is huge so this whole day nothing about us without us comes from the disabled community I think it's important for every community otherwise it's simply those of us with good intent changing things not working with others to smash these power structures and promote real equality and lastly push within your spheres of influence so do all the good you can whenever you can and I've got one more poll which perhaps we'll run in the background where I'm inviting you to list your spheres of influence so any areas where you can influence practice which might be conversations, it might be that you attend certain meetings, it might be that you're involved in sorting out what tools we had a question in the chat about how to make sure tools that we're looking at purchasing are going to not have an impact on equality and so on that's it, yes as I said there's more detail in the slides and there's a link to lots of really useful resources in the slides as well thank you very much thank you so much KT that was interesting okay so now we are running out of time I think we can just go into the question and answer session yes John, John are you there John see I'm sorry, okay sorry I have to be sure myself yeah I think we'll let people continue with this word cloud activity we'll run over the hour and obviously people need to get away that's absolutely fine, this will be recorded but we'll do this we'll take a couple of questions after this activity and then we'll wrap up so if you do have the time please stick around and participate in this activity Kerry if you could share the screen of VBOX again we'll jump into that and I want to take a couple of questions that have come up for Samantha and Kate to respond to it's just a warning the word cloud will move around so if you're not keen on moving things on the screen just look away for a moment so once this is completed can we fix it can we lock it in place Kerry so it's not changing yeah great okay should we do that now Kerry so Kate did you want to just maybe comment on this word cloud it's now paused thank you so much for putting that in interesting so you can see that we've got all kinds of different concepts all kinds of different areas where we can try and ask questions and push development particularly here digital technology meetings, conversations, policy design work guidelines, practice recruitment that's very important assessment, learning accessibility criticality, working groups yeah thank you so if we all do as much as we can wherever we can hopefully we make a little difference in the way things move forward indeed I think we need to write that down Kate that's a great quick quote okay so just a couple of questions that have come up and maybe Samantha and Kate in particular you could respond to these since one from Ryker saying how can we promote democratising learning with technology with the awareness of critical technology enhanced learning Samantha would you like to take that and then Kate that's an interesting one I think it comes down to right at the beginning when people conceptualise their courses so I did a bit of thinking out loud last week about kind of what I thought education could and should be and part of me was this about people finding themselves and their voice we've got to create a culture and a structure that allows that for students for me I've got a fundamental issue with our education system everything is about competition between institutions and between students and that becomes very difficult and when you've set up that false competition in many ways between things it doesn't leave the space or the freedom to do those things to take that risk to open that up and it's a hard task I think on an individual level we can think about our lessons we can think about the scheme of work for our module we can think about our programme but we are fighting something that is systemic all the way through and it's not even just in high rate it literally starts in primary school that a child is assessed in nursery with a prediction for how they're going to perform in primary and secondary school and it's all leagues and streamed and blah and I guess I have no easy answer apart from we do what we can in the space that we can but we question and we feedback and when there are consultations on things we make our voices heard and I think that's the we don't sit back where we have a voice we use it Wonderful thank you Kate would you like to comment on that would you like me to repeat the question Yes please sorry OK so how can we promote democratising learning with technology and raise awareness of critical tell I think it feeds into stuff we do already in terms of staff development around tell so criticality we are already there's a lot of work being done thinking about criticality in terms of our students so I think a lot of that is transferable into looking at tech I forgot the first half of the question again I'm sorry How do we promote democratising learning with technology Right that's something I think some of this comes down to we can take some of it to the digital accessibility agenda because that's gaining a lot of traction at the minute as it should but there are cultural implications for use of tech obviously as well so it's not just to do with disability so I think where you are writing guidance if you are in a situation where you can give guidance or somewhere you can raise questions because we're all from such different context I can't give more specific advice than that I'm sorry I hope that's not too unhelpful That's fine that's great Wonderful thank you we've got this from Kerry I think that's great Sorry I was just trying to share the tiles That's okay Really good question from Theodora as well and I'll ask it to both of you well if you want to take it and then maybe we can ask some of the other speakers to respond as well How do we keep the balance between opening the table to marginalise groups and not dumping on them all the emotional labour for training the rest of the world to respect us Kate would you like to take that first and then Samantha and then we'll open it out to the other speakers I think this is such a key question and thank you very much for asking it So what I would really like to see and it's a pipe dream wish but I would really like to see it is for the proper acknowledgement to be given to people in marginalised group who are engaged in this kind of work so time in your working contract or if you're a student paid time as a possible opportunity while also bearing in mind that it may be time is very scarce for people in marginalised situations because of their personal characteristics so the emotional point is very important I think it's really important that we keep saying there shouldn't be any expectation I have a disability I don't necessarily want to be the stand up person for disability in the room quite often I am just because but yeah I think it is about giving appropriate partnership opportunities and making it clear that this isn't equal thing this isn't here's a little seat as a token at the table we really need to change things so let's make it more meaningful Thank you and that comment about opening the table I think is coming to illustrates who owns the table it's a really good comment there as well It might as well be Shirley Chisholm's thing about if they don't give you a chair bring your own when she was talking about race and gender politics in 70s US which they still do not have a nationwide gender equality law which is just insane but there we go yeah I can't say anything other than what Kate said I think for someone who I'm not a marginalised group so for me it's listening and working in partnership with people and having their voice it may be that I can take some of that labour and I want to but not speaking for them you know and not again it's that being that saviour which is not what we want it's not that I am not going to speak for you I'm not going to pretend that I know but I want to talk to you and I want to understand and I want to help give your voice and I think there was a whole other thing it may have been a cedar event a student commented that there was nothing African about African studies and so on that all the resources in Africa were written by white Europeans which is just kind of a lot yeah yeah thank you maybe I can ask Tasti and then Sonya and Mona and John to just have a quick final comment about this particular question and then we'll close the session yes why we were talking here and I am listening to you I remembered a very interesting comment once a European North American group was providing professional development for teachers in one of the developing countries and then one of the teachers stood out and said why is it that always we are thrown with on top of our heads with curriculum and with guidance and tools and resources why isn't it that you listen to us we need to be heard and this was very powerful we need to be heard there is nothing in what you are offering that relates to us and he just left the room and he was so furious and I realized there was something wrong with how the programs are designed always top down which is actually which needs to change thank you very much Mona Tasti thanks I think I'll just conclude with saying that we really need to work with global south researchers and also just people on the ground so part of that is global north institutes sharing resources with them to help them mobilize and it's not just giving voice but actually having them being heard and owning the conversation often the narrative is shaped and then we ask as researchers we would ask them to input on a certain point but I think really the conversation needs to be led from those researchers those people that have a lived experience of these situations so I think we need to look at it more and more you see that the literature that's coming out from decolonization is actually from global north institutes or wider European academics and so we really need to think about who is leading the narrative on this topic and I think one of the comments said that does decolonization need to be decolonized thank you Sonya are you still here would you like to speak if she's there John are you still around yeah for sure yeah I'm just incredibly grateful to be exposed to all of this I mean conscious of my own kind of inadequacies in reading and thinking it through but very grateful for the provocation to think it through further and I'm quite conscious that people have made remarks about social justice on the one hand and anti-racism on the other and I can see this topic just being a kind of reflection or an aspect in many respects of just the power structures within our society and kind of intimidated by the enormity of it all and I think the shape of my head is probably such that I'm better at thinking what can I do now what can I do here but very grateful for other people making the connections and kind of taking me through to tomorrow I'm not a learning technologist in the sense it's normally portrayed and so I don't have much to contribute in that respect but I think actually that again that's only one corner and one contribution and it's very good to see the amount of interaction between the Association of Learning Technology which is essentially a UK based professional organisation and so many many many people from so many different time zones actually of whom are kind of staying up late and some of whom are getting up early and many of whom are missing lunch I imagine so yeah all I can say is you know I want to do this more and I want to do this better and keep in touch with everyone and it's going to take me quite some time to kind of assimilate all of the chat and all of the remarks and all of the input and I will definitely be doing that and hope that well thank you for your forbearance actually I mean this was this felt rather like I don't know some mixture of being the sorcerer's apprentice trying to keep hold of the tiger's tail you know catching up with the interest and the demand and the offers and hopefully we can do kind of slightly better in that respect in January and in February so thank you thank you ever so much everyone thank you John and Agnes would you like to any comments as well to this I think I've learned a lot you know even though it was so short I've learned a lot from the presenters but yeah of course this this topic of you know the colonizing learning technology we need to you know to keep on talking about this because I feel if we are not careful this technology especially this learning technology can perpetuate what we are trying to you know we are trying to decolonize the curriculum and if we are not careful the way we are using the technology for teaching and learning we are going to perpetuate what exactly that what we are trying to decolonize so yeah I think we need to keep on having these compositions we certainly do and on that note myself and John and Agnes have been talking about these and there are other opportunities and I think in the sense that actually I'm going to be handed over the baton to other people to be leading some of these other sessions with Agnes, with John and with whoever else wants to step forward and offer a chance to host another chance to present as well in these other sessions that we are looking to run and tweet chat hopefully in the next few weeks but also a couple of follow-up webinars so another one to sort of have sessions like these to talks outlining some of the key issues but then what we would like to do is have a third webinar that looks at trying to sort of bring some of these ideas together and start to sort of arrange some ideas and have some actions from them rather than just talking about it, how can we collaborate together, what can we take forward as individuals, as groups as alt and other organizations so you know hopefully this is just the start of a longer conversation. John would you like to just comment on that? I've just seen Mike has said about the strike action, good point there we'll keep that in mind as well John would you like to make any final closing comments? No, no, like I say I am incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to be part of this and to be exposed to everyone's ideas and reactions and thoughts and for the chance to build on it as well. Thanks, I wanted to say one final thing which was, which I haven't forgotten about which was mentioned in the chat I believe earlier about the alt winter conference which is happening soon and there is a particular sort of discussion around this ethical framework for learning technology which I'm sure will embrace a lot of the things we've talked about today so if you haven't already registered please do and of course there will be lots of other presentations as well on many similar topics and lots of other ones as well, it's a wonderful event so please look out for that as well as these other events that we've just mentioned today. Just to absolutely conclude now, thank you very much everybody for joining today, thank you for all of our speakers, thank you Agnes for chairing the session so well and we're really grateful for all of the interest that we've had like I've mentioned there are other webinars ahead so if you do have an interest in speaking, in hosting in doing anything please let myself for John or Agnes know and we'd love to include you in future sessions. Well thank you very much indeed everyone and have a good day.