Sue Watling – Page 5

Watch this spotlight!

Sue Watling / February 22, 2015 / accessibility, digital inclusion, DSA, equality and diversity

Accessibility is no longer backstage but now waiting in the wings. It can’t be long before inclusive practice steps centre stage under the spotlight. The DSA is changing and the government says it expects higher education institutions to cover additional costs through their duty to make reasonable adjustments.

These are interesting times. The soapbox is out from the corner, getting dusted down, ready for action.

In 2000, the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) was taken to court for failing to make its website accessible to people with sight loss on three grounds; lack of ALT text associated with images, lack of alternative text for image maps and the use of JavaScript for navigation.

Some vision-impaired users could not access ticketing information, event schedules or postings of event results and SOCOG was found to have acted in a discriminatory and unlawful manner. http://itd.athenpro.org/volume9/number2/arch.html

No cases have reached court in the UK. When the RNIB served BMIBaby with legal papers in 2010 for failing to ensure its website could be used by blind and partially sighted users they settled out of court. It’s hard to find any mention on the internet of the time Tesco took down its accessible website overnight, excluding those were homebound and dependent on shopping online. The general view is a successful court case is required to set the precedent. Until then it’s business as inaccessibly usual. But the situation might be turning.

A week ago, ‘Advocates for the deaf on Thursday filed federal lawsuits against Harvard and M.I.T. saying both universities violated antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials.’ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit-sued-over-failing-to-caption-online-courses.html?_r=0

At the same time, in the UK, the Irwin Mitchell law firm is seeking permission for a Judicial Review of the proposals by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to limit the support offered by the DSA on behalf of two students, one is hearing impaired and hoping to begin university in September 2015 and a current student with autism, who receives DSA and claims be able to provide ‘invaluable information to the Secretary of State about the impact of changing DSA on disabled students’. Both claim students themselves should have been consulted about the changes while Secretary of State Vince Cable has said he has “no such duty to consult individuals” even though they will be directly affected. http://www.bataonline.org/news-events/Legal-challenge-to-DSA-cut-backs

There is renewed interest in the provision of digital information. The proposed changes to the DSA offers opportunities to revisit the arguments for inclusive practice. It may be enforced compliance with the law rather than being adopted voluntarily but sometimes the means is worth the ends and digital inclusion is worth it – isn’t it?

Reasonable adjustments; have you made yours?

Sue Watling / February 13, 2015 / digital inclusion, digital literacies, inclusive design, reasonable adjustments

This week the Inclusive Digital Resources Working Group met for the first time. The aim of this group is to make recommendations for ensuring all students/staff have access to accessible and inclusive digital resources for learning and teaching. One of the drivers for the formation of this group is changes to the DSA (Disabled Student Allowance) which will remove additional technology support for students with dyslexia and other conditions. Peter Willets announced the changes in April 2014 saying ‘The need for some individual non-medical help (NMH) may be removed through different ways of delivering courses and information. It is for HEIs to consider how they make both anticipatory reasonable adjustments and also reasonable adjustments at an individual level.’ Greg Clark in September 2014 added ‘alternative provision in the form of university provided services such as printing services and books and journals in electronic format to be considered as alternatives’ and included the reminder ‘Universities should discharge their duties under the Equality Act to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate disabled students.’ The changes will come into effect for September 2016.

Neither statement mentions the principles of universal design whereby changes for some create improvements for all. This is a shame because inclusion lies at the heart of the matter. It involves thinking beyond your own experience and considering diversity. Access to digital resources is a bit like the old Cadbury’s crème egg question How do you eat yours? We all have our own ways of working in online environments. The problems arise when assumptions are made which don’t take into account individual difference.

The key to reasonable adjustments is choice. Digital data supports personalisation. There is no one size fits all way of designing documents and presentations so the best alternative is uploading versions which can be customised to suit individual preference. The user should be able to change the size, shape and colour contrast to whatever works for them Where users can’t adjust content, it’s down to individuals to make reasonable adjustments like not placing text over an image and providing textual equivalents and user controls to multimedia.

Design is a political act. Putting content into the public domain involves decisions which determine access. This is power and with power comes responsibility. Reasonable adjustments to the provision of teaching and learning resources is not just about students with disabilities, its about maximising the affordances of virtual learning environments and improving access for everyone. The Inclusive Digital Resources Working Group will be contacting student reps, collating advice on best practice and making recommendations to the Learning Development and Environment Standing Group which reports to the Education and Student Experience group. The principle of reasonable adjustments is an opportunity to go back to basics, to review the minimum requirements for digital content and rethink what its means to be digitally literate.

So, on the question of reasonable adjustments – how will you be making yours?

Multiple ‘ologies…

Sue Watling / February 6, 2015 / PhD

The spectre of the Phd has moved in. Taken up residence. Where I go it goes; car, office, home. There’s no escape. I’ve reached the stage the ‘DIY PhD’ books tell you about. I hate it! Last week I wrote about the funnel effect, the logistical nightmare of having too many words and not enough space. This week it’s been the question of validity or the doctoral dilemma – how do I know it’s any good? The sad answer is you don’t – not until someone else passes judgement.

Validity includes lots of positivist measure of excellence like reliability and replicability; the ‘integrity of the conclusions’ (Bryman 2003:30). But the concept of validity itself is contestable. In the red corner there’s the quantitative view of reality as observable, measurable and infinitely knowable while over in the blue corner qualitative reality is more vague, forever open-ended and uncertain.

The Methodology chapter is a challenge. This is where it all comes together or falls apart. It’s a matter of pinning yourself down philosophically – for the purpose of the dissertation at least. There are so many alternative constructions. They can’t all be wrong so it’s a bit of a winner for the blue corner although the reds won’t have it. To a positivist we’re all as predictable as time and tide. Richard Dawkins versus Karen Armstrong. I know who I’d rather have dinner with.

Taking up a position midway between the corners, with an ontological realism and epistemological constructivism (see, I’m learning the language), there is a critical realist approach where the world is knowable but knowledge is fallible. This suggests a possible answer the crisis of validity where ‘There is no single interpretive truth [only] multiple interpretative communities, each with its own criteria for evaluating and interpretation’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000:23). Which in itself is something of a certainty, because one thing you can be sure of, another new philosophical lens for viewing reality is likely to be coming along quite soon.

Affliction of doubt; a common doctoral disease like procrastination

Sue Watling / February 1, 2015February 1, 2015 / PhD

I’m calling it the funnel effect. The process of writing up my dissertation is like fitting an umbrella the size of a planet into a box the size of an ant. Every day I find new pieces of information which weren’t there before and I gather them up – that’s me in the corner – with a Phd head and increasing sense of panic. How to know which words to use? Not find them in the first place, I’ve 100’s of 1000’s of the pesky things in 50 shades of font design. It’s more about how to identify the ones I need.

Then – instead of narrowing them down – I get side tracked and end up adding even more. Today it was phenomenography which is one of those linguistic research tricks to see if you can pronounce the word never mind produce a description of what it means. For some reason, known only to the deep web part of my brain, I decided action research was like ethnography because as the researcher I was in the position of observer – so maybe I wasn’t doing action research at all. Affliction of doubt is a common doctoral disease. Somehow, and only google history can explain this one, I ended up in a phenomenographical paradigm and another hour had passed. At least by then I’d forgotten about the ethnography .

Now I’m blogging which is another diversion and distraction technique. I’m good at D&D’s. In a previous life I would clean the oven rather than get on with the task in hand. It became a joke how a clean oven signified an assignment deadline. Today I have the internet. It’s amazing I get anything done at all. I’ve a weakness for cute kittens and babbling babes– have you seen the one about….

I get up early, make coffee, greet the laptop and begin. Three hours later I’ve done nothing of any value towards my dissertation other than add a few more hundred words which I’ll probably take out again tomorrow. Oh, and a blog post, aspirationally tagged PhD but in reality it should be the other P for Procrastination. They could give me a doctorate in that ten times over!

possibly impossible; adaptations which don’t adapt

Sue Watling / January 30, 2015February 3, 2015 / Creative Writing

In my writing class we’re looking at adapting text for radio. The most talked about adaption of the moment is Wolf Hall. The BBC have allegedly spent £7 million to make 6 hours of television. If I was a licence payer I’d complain. There must be lengthier returns on an investment of that kind while still retaining some quality. Six hours isn’t even half a day.

Last week we listened to Casablanca. A 1943 radio broadcast. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Dooley Wilson are all there, plus additional explanatory text and a reduction in time from 102 to 25 minutes. You get to hear all the famous lines:

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine.
Here’s looking at you kid.
Play it again Sam.

Only the last one is a misquote. No one says it. Both Rick and Elsa say play it Sam not play it again. When it comes to the difference between truths and beliefs, this shows how easily wrongs get privileged over rights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plSKtjfSjrA

I did my homework and watched the film before so it was fresh in my mind. For me the radio version didn’t work. Too much of the story, of necessity, was missing while those who hadn’t seen the film reported confusion about the plot and characters.

When you make an adaptation, like Wolf Hall and Casablanca, something has to go. The question is how much can the parts of a whole still offer a holistic experience. For me, Hillary Mantel has the art of preciseness, is expert at using the minimum of words for the maximum effect. I liked reading Wolf Hall but two episodes in and 4 to go, I’m feeling disappointed with the TV series.

The media reports a drop in viewing figures for episode two of Wolf Hall. The critics are out; they don’t like the darkness, the flashbacks, the slowness, the history. Condensing large books into small chunks of film was never going to be easy and it isn’t yet clear if the BBC has financed a success or a failure. The attention to authenticity in terms of clothes, props and locations is no substitute for inadequate attention to narrative.

It’s possibly impossible. Maybe Casablanca was made to be watched and not listened to. Maybe Wolf Hall was written to be read and not watched.

Getting the blogging habit back

Sue Watling / January 20, 2015January 20, 2015 / blogging, PhD

Habits can be hard to break. It took me years to stop smoking. The line between addiction and habit is blurred. I’ve blogged for years. It was my soap box, work record, window on the internet, my weekly reflective habit. Then it stopped and now I’m struggling to get the blogging habit back.

It’s not as if I’m short of words. Me and my laptop have bonded these past few weeks. In a threesome with the settee, I’ve written tens of thousands about VLE, critical realism, digital education, e-teaching and more.

But the blogging habit broke.

As I fell – slip – trip -snap – into the world of broken fibulas and fracture clinics, my life fell apart too. Become immobile in the winter and your world shrinks. I couldn’t even get to the allotment. My grape vine still needs pruning! In theory, this loss should have created space for blogging. I could have become a blog-a-day woman. Instead of scrabbling to fit a blog post into Friday mornings I had blog freedom. And I used it to stop blogging.

It was as unexpected as the trip itself. A trip of the non-travelling kind. You can make a metaphor out of most things in life, but I’m not too sure what to make of this. I missed the pin point where something sticks. A blog is a map; it’s where I pin things down each week. Usually with regard to digital inclusion, TELEDA, my PhD, or some digital scrap which has intrigued me.

Something magic happens when you take a thought and reproduce it in words. It works verbally – a la rubber duck syndrome – and it works when you recreate an experience in writing. There’s a flash of insight or resonance which is part of the whole learning experience. A regular blogging habit is an alchemical opportunity to focus on something which has happened and study it more closely.

I need to break the habit of not blogging and get the blogging habit back!

Happy New Year

Sue Watling / January 15, 2015 / PhD

Work in Progress

A broken ankle supports the development of a conceptual and theoretical framework for my PhD!

Out of the maze into the labyrinth

Sue Watling / December 16, 2014December 16, 2014 / PhD

My doctoral journey has been a maze. Full of dead ends when I wanted it to be a labyrinth with one winding path into the centre, direct with singular intent. I was trapped in Maze City, setting off on false paths, choosing inappropriate directions, getting totally lost. It’s taken a long time to find what I was looking for but with hindsight I can see it was necessary.

A Phd is like a mirror; it reflects who you are and where your interests lie. I didn’t realise how personal it would be although choosing Action Research has reinforced the personal dimension. I thought a PhD was a project. You made your choices about what to do and how to do it then wrote it up like a big essay. Well, not quite that simple but it was more complex than I anticipated. Getting out of the maze and into the labyrinth has been quite a challenge.

There’s confusion about the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. Even the OER refers to them as the same thing. I don’t understand why. The difference is simple. A maze is designed to get you lost. To frustrate and confuse. Mazes are puzzles. They pose problems to be solved. A labyrinth holds no physical secrets. It has a single path into the centre and out again. You can’t get lost in a labyrinth. There’s only one way to go.

A maze is a useful analogy for a PhD. For mine at least. I went off in so many different directions which turned out to be dead ends, made so many new beginnings. Each time thinking this is it – I know where I’m going – only to find I was lost again. The piles of books and papers grew. I chased every reference believing the next one might just have the answers I was looking for.

Everything you hear about the Phd is true. You have to let it take over your life. You’ll be trapped in that box of pathways and passages for some time. I only got out of the maze when the literature started to repeat itself. They tell you that will happen as well but it’s not the literature so much as the resonance. The literature never stops, it just starts to funnel, ever so slowly, as each dead end in the maze helps you put another theoretical approach to one side.

When it came to epistemology and ontology it wasn’t just the words I struggled with, it was finding a meaningful interpretation. It would be easy to adopt a surface approach to these components but the Viva is called a Defence for a reason. It’s hard to defend the choices you’ve made without being able to justify them and this is what being in the maze teaches you. It’s the linguistic duality of signs. We recognise dark because it’s the opposite to light. What isn’t working for you – as in every dead end in the maze – will lead the way to what does. The process is necessary because unless your choices have meaning you’re unlikely to find the links you need to hold your dissertation together.

It’s a dialectical dilemma. Nothing fits but you keep searching. It isn’t until you realise you’re creating rather than finding yourself that the fit begins to take shape. Once this idea has resonance you’re ready to step from the maze onto the opening loop of the labyrinth.

Out of the mess of random dots a shape appears.

Sue Watling / December 12, 2014December 12, 2014 / PhD

With a PhD you are never lonely. At least, not in the cognitive sense. There’s always something to read, write or reflect on. My enforced immobilisation has been in the company of text. No longer piles of paper and books across my floor. I’ve become neurotic about picking up the smallest bit of anything. Instead I’m surrounded with books on the settee, the coffee table and three dining chairs positioned for the purpose. I won’t slip on paper but I need to take care not to trip over chair legs.

For some time I’ve had problems with PhD boundaries. My reading was unstructured. Books started but not finished. Journal articles would arrive and I’d forget why I wanted them. Some times I’d forget by the time I picked up my printing. I was searching for research validation, for recognition – like a mirror on the pages.

It took time but I’ve found it in slim volume called The Action Research Dissertation*. Dated 2015 it explains how the AR dissertation is the new kid on the block. Not only do the authors give valuable advice on how to prepare for defending your AR, they also offered the resonance I needed. The aim of the action researcher is to study themselves ‘… in relationship to the program [they’ve] developed or to fold the action research immediately back into the program in terms of professional or organisation development…’ (2015:42). I couldn’t have put it better myself; the problem being I didn’t believe researching my own practice this was enough. Some deeply embedded discourse about the nature of academic research was telling me my choice was inadequate. It didn’t fit with anything I was reading and I didn’t know anyone else undertaking a practitioner based doctorate.

Overnight, it feels like boundaries have appeared and this affirmation of my research genre is another threshold on the PhD journey. I’m reminded once more of Castenda in the Tales of Don Juan who describes how he had to find his spot on the porch. He tried a dozen places until one felt right.

‘…I wanted to find it without doing any work because I had expected [Don Juan] to hand out all the information. If he had done so, he said, I would never have learned… I would never have had the confidence needed to claim it as true knowledge. Thus, knowledge was indeed power. (1968: 20)

No matter how qualitative your research, how critically reflexive or emancipatory, it’s still contained within academic discourse and subject to external processes of validation and rigour. In that respect all research is positivist yet there have to be moments on your research journey when intuition draws the lines between all the random marker points. This is where I’ve arrived. Out of the mess of random dots, a shape appears.

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*Herr, K. and Anderson, G. L. (2015) The Action Research Dissertation; a guide for students and faculty. Thousand Oaks: Sage.