This one’s a gem. Well, they all are, but this interview is especially relevant for me because at the time of the interview UMW’s DTLT had just moved into their shiny new digs - and the Taylor Institute at UCalgary was still under construction. There were a LOT of parallels between DTLT and what was becoming the TI at UCalgary. The tension between “Innovation” and “Enterprise” colours all of our work, and it was great to hear from these amazing people about their work and experiences in the field.

Reclaiming Edtech Part 2:  Fostering a culture of innovation, featuring commentary from:

Direct link to audio file

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello again, my name is D’Arcy Norman and today I’m bringing you another episode that was recorded at the University of Mary Washington after the Open Education 2014 conference the series is titled reclaiming education educational technology and I’m realizing this was just under five years ago this one episode that that that’s included in this podcast right now Is actually it’s one I’ve referred to back many many times over those past five years I think it’s probably got some really important insights in there and I think it’s a great discussion of how innovation happened at UMW and how it wasn’t magic. I think that’s an important thing. So we have three people. We have Martha Berdis who was at UMW. She’s now at the Open CoLab at Plymouth State University. Tim Owens who was at UMW now at Reclaim Hosting and Jim Groom who again was at UMW and now at Reclaim Hosting. Without further ado, here is Fostering a Culture of Innovation, part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology Series. I am Martha Burtis. I work in teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington, and currently I am director of the Digital Knowledge Center, which is a new center in our division that just opened. It is a unit at the university whose primary mission is to help faculty think about how use technology in their classrooms. 

So like in a very simple way that’s what we do. The work that we do tends to be really focused on partnerships with faculty. 

We don’t see ourselves as kind of a production shop where people bring us courses and we transform them. We try and have a really kind of productive partnering relationship with faculty where they come to us with particular ideas or challenges that they’re facing and we present them with different possible options and then work together to figure out how to implement and try it out and iterate on that depending on the successes or problems that arise. DTLT has existed at the university in the form that it currently is in since about 2005. It was in other forms as DTLT for a few years before that, so we had various other staff who ended up moving into different areas at the university. Even prior to that, what we were known as was instructional technology, and that goes back to 1996 here at the university. I think the most important part of the original vision that was always here for instructional technology was the idea of investing in people and investing in as many people as possible to work with faculty. That said, we had our original kind of instantiation here at the university. We were very much sort of like tech support for faculty, so we worked in academic buildings and they came to us with jammed printers and projectors that had dead bulbs and we would try every chance we got to also get them to talk to us about teaching. And that gradually over time, we were able to transition more and more away from them seeing us as tech support and instead seeing us as sort of an asset and a service for really thinking about innovative pedagogy. But that legacy of investing in people is something that I think we’ve managed to continue to sustain and recognize that we don’t get some place innovative by just buying stuff. 

We do it by working together and working hard. My name is Tim Owens. 

I’m from here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and I work for the University of Mary Washington. 

For us, I think the IT Convergence Center sort of reflects a mindset that DTLT has had for a while, which is this idea of flexibility, this idea of impermanence to things, which I think carries over in a lot of different areas. So for us, the building, you see a lot of furniture on wheels. You see a lot of spaces where it’s like we thought we might do this, but we might do something different. And so we want to have the ability to change things up. And for us as a department, we’ve sort of followed a similar mindset in the projects that we’ve done, this idea that nothing is necessarily so enterprise and so institutional that you can’t in a weekend just decide to do things completely different. It’s a very hard culture to change, but you can sort of build in that idea of not being afraid of failure. You know, we talk about that quite often. 

This idea that, you know, things are gonna break. No big deal. Get ready for them. Get ready for them to break, but you’re gonna do awesome stuff. When they break, we’re gonna fix it, and at the end of the semester, things are gonna be, you know, So you’re just going to be like, how could I ever go back to that consistent, boring vanilla world that we were in? And so for us, this building is so much less than that bland, boring world of this is the way it is and this is the way it will be. Our office reflects that. I mean, we don’t sit in cubicles all in the same squares and do our own thing with standard issue computers and same sets of stuff. You know, we move tables together, we walk across the hall, we move the furniture around. And so for me it’s that idea of flexibility and changing things up on the fly and never being afraid to say, I bet there’s something different out there. I’m Jim Groom. I’m the director of teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary, Washington. The question of leadership in edtech is a tricky one because a lot of times it starts in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily suggest was a leadership role. A few people had an idea. 

We got domains. We got web hosting. We spun up systems. 

People started to find that attractive. And they started to use them. 

And they started to use them. And it’s funny. It’s at the point where people start naming you as leaders in a field that your relationship to that sense of leadership has to change. And I think anyone in the field now realizes that when the MOOCs broke big, When online learning seemed to be an efficiency or a reality that was going to actually come home, many groups, not just DTLT, but many groups around the country were changed in their relationship to leadership, particularly in online or hybrid or just notions of digital pedagogy. So we were lucky that we had 25 years of investment on part of the university since 1995 about the war that may get 20 years of investment since 1995, of people actually being paid to think about how teaching and learning is affected by the web and what that means. And so I think the latest iteration of DTLT and that notion of innovation is part of a really long road of work, of thinking, of investment on the part of the university, in kind of a broader sense that, you know, we know the web was evolving and developing being as a space to share and to collaborate, but within the last eight or nine years, that really reached a new plateau or a new level. And I think this group just basically was in the right place at the right time, thinking about the right things. And we just had good people, right? Like we had access to technology, we had freedom to do it, and we had a lot of good people who stayed a long time. I mean, if you take our group right now, we probably have between the six of us, between between 60 and 70 years of experience in EdTech. And that goes a long way, because we have people who’ve seen the bigger picture, we have people who know the politics of the institution, and we have people who are willing to push hard upon what it is that’s possible, and what it is that makes sense also for faculty on a very practical level. So balancing the possible and the practical has probably been that sweet spot of innovation for DTLT, and it’s always come back to people, and it’s come back to faculty and it’s come back to students. And we’re not so much R&D in this abstract weapons development, like we’re out there building the next kind of system that will change everything. We’re constantly iterating out pilots that we see that are useful, that we kind of define as a possible alongside a politic. And we see how that works. We see if people like it. We see if it’s relevant. And then we move from there. there. And I think we’ve been lucky. We’ve had a lot of successes. People look to us and I think now so more than ever for a variety of reasons to building where in one of them. And I like that. I like the fact that the pressures are on and that we have to step up to it and that we have to do it in ways that are far more thoughtful, nuanced, and I would imagine kind of definitive for not only us as a group but for the field more generally. That’s a good place to be at. When you’re at the top of your game, how do you go higher? It’s like, well, this is great. What would the next thing do? 

What would the next thing do? I can remember every year I would sit down with Jim for an annual review, and he’d be like, oh my god, you’ve just been doing awesome stuff. 

In the first year, it was just like, DTLT Today, gangbusters, awesome. It’s so cool to be sharing all that stuff out, and you figured out the live streaming to the web and stuff. And I was just like, Yeah, I mean, it was just sort of like, you know, for me it was picking a passion at the time. And then the year after, it was like, oh my God, Domain of One’s Own, like this idea that we’ve dreamed about, you know, and now we’ve got Domain of One’s Own and we’re giving students web hosting, like, holy crap, what’s next, you know? And I said, I have no idea what’s next. I never do. You know, and I think for me it’s about worrying less about whatever’s next, whether it will be bigger than the last thing. Who cares? It doesn’t have to be bigger. It just has to be relevant to others. It has to be relevant to others. It has to meet an individual passion, I think, because I don’t think real innovation can come without an inert passion. And so for me, it’s about following the things that I’m interested in that I see a potential to make better and make more meaningful for a lot of different people. So for the makerspace is another great example. So you know working with faculty and and and starting to play around with 3d printing and it’s like wow This is great. How do we get students involved with that kind of thing? And the makerspace idea was starting to grow in other places other libraries were starting to maybe think about it so we talked to our library and just created one and and you know don’t don’t ask for permission and you know It’s just you just like you know beg borrow and steal to create something and and throw everything against the wall and some stuff works and some stuff doesn’t and you make it work. But I think when you’re engaged with something, as we know from students, when they’re engaged by something and they have a real passion for it, great stuff’s going to come out of that regardless. And whether it continues to build on or is better than the previous thing, who knows? I mean, Domain of One’s Own might be like the top of the game, But, you know, I think the stuff we can do, you know, with Reclaim hosting at other institutions, with Docker and newer technologies, even on a much smaller scale for the individual application and the individual user in very meaningful ways, making cPanel better on those kind of things. So sometimes it’s more about just building on top of the existing work and continually refining it rather than this worry that I have to create something completely different that’s really big and that’s going to be the next big thing. I just continually look around and there’s never a lack of problems because things are always getting better. We’re getting newer technologies all the time and with that comes efficiencies, with that comes possibilities and so you know pick the passions and and jump towards the needs and we got it. 

Every time I ever whenever I talk to schools about the work that we do the question I always get is some variation on what you just asked me just kind of like well how do you do that and and what’s different about about what you have and and the end question being well how can we do that and like how do we replicate that or how do we make that happen and so I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to come up with a good answer so I don’t really have one but but I do think like you’re kind of you’re hitting on it is that it isn’t it isn’t a recipe it isn’t there isn’t steps it really is about an ethos and a philosophy and a set of values that we all have the first one being what I already mentioned which is that it’s about people and it’s about like respecting and honoring the people who work here and giving them the space to experiment, and try new things, and to fail, and then try again, and not to always think that the solution is something that we can buy, but instead imagine that the solution is something that we build. And that doesn’t mean that we all code, but I mean, building can come in lots of different forms. Sometimes we build it through relationships, and sometimes we build it through bringing people in from other schools, and sometimes we do code it or, you know, make it. So that’s one part of it. But the other part of it, which is something like I kind of hit on just like in the past year or so, because I would go visit people at other schools and realize that the way they worked was so different from how we worked. So I think that maybe part of it has to do with that too, which like you can’t see it in the camera, but like our office is right over here and it’s not a traditional office. We have desks that are all kind of like pushed up against each other, it’s sort of a bullpen and we can’t escape each other in there. But it also means that we’re constantly bouncing ideas off of each other and working through things together. We’re not isolated. 

We’re not in our little offices. To solve a problem, we don’t have to schedule a meeting. We just yell across the desk and we work on it for a few minutes and we solve it and we fix it. And I think there’s something about that that’s been pretty special in terms of how we work. We’re really close as a result, we drive each other crazy sometimes, but it also allows us to be really agile and really adaptive, and I think to make people feel like this is a kind of a welcoming, vibrant place to come into. So I think those are some of the things that make us different maybe, and maybe that’s part of why we are the way we are. And that’s a tension we’re constantly playing with, and it’s a really good question. You know about it very well. And that tension between, you know, student-centered technologies and approaches and maybe institutionally scalable and sustainable approaches is usually the fact is that most places the question starts at institutional, scalable, sustainable. That’s it. And if it’s not that from the beginning, then oftentimes it doesn’t, it’s not possible. Hence the, you know, proliferation of the LMS. It was that at once. But for us, we often started with smaller pilots that actually centered around the question of we’re a liberal arts school, we believe in small, focused teaching and learning experiences, and we could actually abstract out from that focused technologies that promoted that idea. And through that, we were able to do that, right, we were able to bring up blogging and but at the same time suggest how that’s not just you know this one-off, it’s also scalable. 

And it’s scalable because you know people are scalable if they’re interested. 

People are scalable if they’re learning together and it’s what makes the web so awesome. 

So we’ve constantly used the web as our template for innovation and it’s like well if the web could have made this dramatic impact in the last 25 years how can we model the work we’re doing as much as possible on the web rather than these closed monolithic systems, which serve their purpose, but oftentimes get us away from where the most interesting teaching and learning happens. And so we made a really focused point to support the LMS, but not to be defined by it. And that’s really how we’ve pushed forward, and I think the great effect, I mean I think some of our best work actually pushes back on the notion that the LMS is a foregone conclusion. 

And not that it’s not necessarily a part part of what you do, but it’s not that it has to be a conclusion. And there’s a lot of thought right now that’s going out there like, the LMS is kind of inevitable because faculty want a grade book, or faculty want this and they want speed greater. And I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think what’s the problem more times than not is there’s not relationships between people who spent the time thinking about this and helping faculty who have a million other things to do to get their head around some of these possibilities and to be in partnership for some period of time, to think about the web in ways that might really be constructive and redefining for their approach to teaching and learning in some very focused ways when it comes to technology. So we have the support to do that. And that’s that long tale of investment that we’ve seen since 1995. That’s still paying off. And so it could come like, you’re a leader in this group and there’s a lot of leaders in this group. There’s six of them. And there’s six of them, and there’s been another probably 30 or 40 of them before us. And that matters, and it matters because it’s a cumulative effect of decades of work that we’re starting to see the fruits of, but we don’t need to be kind of confused that we’re defining it, you know? It’s helped define who we are in our jobs now. And I think that respect for the past and that hope for the future is what’s kept us in a situation that’s been both humble, well not me, but the group humble and also focused, right? So I want to think that’s it. 

And I think leadership is a tricky, tricky thing, like, because once you’re, it’s not like you can define your leadership just like you can’t, you know, erase notions of power, but you can get caught up in the notion of, hence, leadership means, you know, that this is the way it’s done or Or this is kind of follow me and you will. And I think leadership often has more to do with listening and learning and what most of what we’re doing over the last three or four days has been about. Like sharing out what’s happening in the field so that we can come back, we can take stock, and we can rethink how we’re working it. So just the kind of collective sense of working together to understand the bigger issues in the field rather than looking to one person to be the guiding light because that’s oftentimes you know it’s oftentimes a dead end you know at least in my estimation you find me in a period where you know we moved into a whole new building so you know for years we were in a very different space and I’ll even take you over there to see it like this kind of old you know half the size of this room beat up you know fabric walls they’re kind of peeling up as if someone and put them in the washer, and it’s just ugly. But it was a space where we came together and we just did stuff on the cheap. And we were kind of outside everyone’s view. Whereas here, we’re a lot more focused. There’s a lot more attention, and we’ve talked about that. And I think the play in that regard was really powerful because we were pushing on our notions of what’s possible, what we can afford, what we can do, and we just have a really good relationship as a group. I think for the last three or four months, we’ve been in a different space because we have a whole different convergence of resources and possibilities. And I know me personally, that’s a little scary and it’s a little kind of like, I feel a lot more comfortable when we don’t have many resources and we have to do stuff with a little. The point about creative play and the work DTLT has done, I find that’s because we’ve had a very interesting office set up and that why I want to focus on the office is We had a bullpen and we were always there together at a series of desks shooting ideas around and so Dr. 

Oblivion, for example DS 106 to summer of oblivion. 

I was doing this. I shaved my head My wife was like, what are you doing making it was also like you look weird stay away from my kids I don’t come near me because you were not you and And I actually really went through this identity crisis, right, like I was like, who the hell am I? And I go there through them often and breakdowns often, but this was a particular one. So come Thursday night, we had done this class for three days and I was really in the office after I’d done it. I was like, like, distraught. This class is ridiculous. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know who I am. I’m stopping. I’m going to just be Jim Groom again and be done. And Martha’s like, yes, you should and Dr. 

Oblivion should go missing. And then you should have a narrative around that, and then the rest of the office started picking up on the narrative and writing it. And it wasn’t about Dr. 

Oblivion or Jim Groom. It was about a community sharing ideas and building. And I think that’s a very good example of what DTLT has done for a long time. It’s a group of people who put their work out there, who put their ideas out there, and the rest of us pick up on it, we riff on it, and we share on it. And it’s been a good, you know, it’s tricky, because it’s like working with your family sometimes. And you know how family relations go, you know how work relations go. It’s not always easy, it’s not always clean, but we’ve done a real good job of focusing on what we do, which is bring innovative teaching and learning to our faculty. And we thought the best way to do that is to make it fun. Because if it’s too serious, like a lot of these issues are, sometimes they’re hard to approach. 

But if you couch them in a fake professor that can only lecture to the camera and then goes missing, people are like, what the hell are you doing? And it piques a certain amount of interest that otherwise may get lost. So it’s also been a kind of, for lack of a better word, a marketing approach. 

You make things fun, you make them approachable for faculty and students, and maybe they’re a little bit more interested in the work you’re turned the camera back on our faculty and students. We’ve actually promoted their work. You know, how often when the faculty members working with students and students do great work or faculty do great work, does anyone in the university say, that was awesome work? You know, they forget it, they don’t mind it, it’s there, but when we had the blogging platform, all that became visible. And so rather than us just sitting to the side and saying, you know that, I made a pointed effort of us going in there and actually promoting it, featuring it, saying look at the awesome work our faculty is doing and I think that really paid dividends forward for years and it’s something that the blogging platform we lose in that kind of discussion is it exposes work that’s often the best happening at the University and a group like ours could also play that strange marketing role that when our marketers is saying look have you seen the great work they’re doing in chemistry? Have you seen the awesome work they’re doing in foreign languages. Have you seen the amazing work happening in history? And if you haven’t, come to our group and see it. And that’s a really weird role. The thing is, is none of it’s scripted, none of it’s planned. Like you could say, you’ve been detailed, he’s been a strategic force of innovation for the last 10 years. And I think if you ask anyone in the group, they’d be like, yeah, it kind of worked that way, but there was no particular plan. We just got lucky that good people stayed for long enough to have a sense of institutional history, but also had a shared ethos that open student-centered and faculty-centered learning was important. 

important. And we tried to circle back everything we did to ask them, how does that match against that ethos? 

And I think That was really our guiding principle everything else could be an experiment on top of that It could be as silly or as serious as long as it in some way took that principle that guiding principle seriously Or held some of its truths dear if that makes any sense the sense of community within UMW is pretty strong I think and I don’t want to say it’s like all faculty because it’s not we have about 200 faculty and And we did an initiative recently for the domain of one’s own project, which is a project where we give faculty, staff, and students their own domain. And so we did calls out for faculty to actually come and work with us for six weeks to kind of get up and running with their own domain. And in the last two years, we worked with close to 50 faculty, which is a quarter of our faculty. And we were able to kind of work with them to think about how they use this stuff to get them thinking about how this is a personal space, how this helps them manage their personal Brand, for lack of a better word, it allows them to think about their discipline and how discipline is engaged with the digital. Questions of digital sciences, digital humanities, digital social sciences. Questions of portability of their data. What is big data? How is all of this stuff changing the very fields they work in? And that conversation on campus started to make our group less of, you have a problem, let us fix it and we’ll fix it with a tool. and more of a conceptual, disciplinary-specific group that can speak to them about the changing nature of their field in relationship to the digital. And that gave us a real different approach to notions of partnership. And we do deal in tools, and we do deal in technology, and the technology does matter, but we’re also really embedded in the concepts around that and the thinking around that and the broader implications for that stuff on what we call the liberal arts. Like, we’re knee deep in that, like we’re all thinkers, and EdTech is a space that needs to be interrogated just like their spaces do, and just like they do in their disciplines. And I think we have a lot of respect from that group because we don’t blindly suggest that any one thing we do or provide will solve their problems, or make their jobs easier, or make them better looking. It’s not going to happen, right? I think that higher education does an abysmal job of contextualizing for students why online spaces in the digital world matters. And I think because we invest in these big tools and systems, we think that that’s what we should be talking to our students about, and that’s what matters, and those systems and tools are really somewhat irrelevant outside of the walls of our schools. So for me, what matters is that we’re recognizing the importance of this for our students and our faculty and that we’re doing the hard work to make sure that they have opportunities to really explore and interrogate these spaces. So, I just started this new center this fall and that’s something that I’ve been kind of dreaming about for years and the opportunity to make that happen is really, really important to me because we’ve worked with students for years but it’s always been through the kind of channels of visiting classes and working through faculty and this is a way for us to one-on-one, helping them through a peer support mechanism and I really hope that it allows us to get at some of these issues at a more grassroots level at the institution where students see that other students care about this and this matters. We have like an amazing group of student workers now who work in the center and who work with their friends and peers and I think that kind of modeling and that kind of dynamic isn’t something we can easily reproduce from where we sit, but it is something we can enable and we can encourage through something like the center. So that’s, to me, that’s the thing I most, that’s where my head is completely right now.