Last week was for me an object lesson in how to survive and thrive in the continuum of virtual education life in 2021. I saw our inimitable EDUC90970 (Facilitating Online Learning) virtual leader Thom in the Zoom lecture first thing Monday, and then in physical form on Thursday evening — unusual in itself, given we have existed to each other in pixels and computer-generated audio only up to this point — and Thom suggested I write a blog about the week which had had the potential to evolve into either a virtual nightmare, or a rich context of multiple applied learnings in the digital sphere. So this is it…

Sunday: using Uni computer at home all day to catch up on work, I was embracing learning a new technology (Adobe Spark presentation software) in real time while rewriting 2 lectures on Academic Engagement in University Cultural Collections, bringing in the virtual delivery mode stimulated by COVID-contexts last year. My first-year Arts Uni daughter questioned this approach (high risk) but I was embracing authentic learning, and was in the zone. Enjoying the fact that it was a weekend, and I wanted to de-couple from the home office and monitor, I was flying free on PC internal battery (but failed to notice when I plugged it in to the office again on Sunday evening that the power point was off… First mistake, which didn’t reveal it’s true impact until the following morning). Lecture happily completed. Second lecture, also in Spark, on Access to Complex Cultural Collections also updated, tick…

Beer time.

Monday, it’s going to be a big one, in at the office (see glamour pic above). Online lecture (EDUC90970) as student, followed directly by Masters student thesis supervision meeting (online), then online lecture with me delivering (no.1), break, then online lecture from me no.2, followed by some meetings in the office (new Melbourne Connect building, Science Gallery staff offices. (What is coming to be a fairly typical day in the office…) When I rocked into the Uni for the EDUC class, my laptop wouldn’t start. Oh no. It had been misbehaving, with weird slow loading and other mild problems during Sunday, and I jumped to the conclusion that it had potentially got a virus. (Second mistake – fail in Differential Diagnosis). Practicing my (evolving) open-plan-office social skills, I negotiated rapidly with my colleagues to use the only available networked desktop PC in the place, and settled with headphones into a fascinating lecture on heutagogy by Vickel Narayan… Brilliant. I shared the potential applications of the ideas synchronously with my colleagues in the class via multiple strands of Zoom chat, one with Solange (shared excitement on the potential for incorporating music-focussed academic outcomes and the idea of Frisson…more to come in this space!) and another with Samantha (shared excitement on the potential for health sciences multidisciplinary research using Science Gallery). I’m excited.

I’m also deeply relieved that I prepared both the lectures today in online formats (Adobe Spark, as mentioned), so that it didn’t matter what hardware I was using… I was flying free in virtual space! Jump straight from lecture into supervision meeting, also enjoyable and stimulating, and in the back of my mind wondering how to deal with the rapidly approaching scenario of giving an hour long lecture in an open plan office.

A whip-around the office of available technology revealed a new laptop that hadn’t yet been logged into the Uni system in someone’s filing cabinet… Colleague Matt supported a focussed scramble for electricity, internet; loading my Uni Identity so I could logon to my mail for the zoom link; then loading Zoom from scratch; then logging in to Adobe on a new device (which required a password to be sent to my phone which has by Adobe ID)…countdown 1 minute before postgrad class of Collection Management students expects me to appear magically online before them, and I’m racing out to the Melbourne Connect Superfloor next to the Science Gallery open plan office, to find a quiet corner (with a power point, as the new laptop shows 4% power). Whew, here I am… Here we all are (mostly with videos turned on, nice to see…) I warm up to my topic, go over the ‘Trigger Warning” about potentially disturbing material relating to Percy Grainger (important in a lecture, dealing in detail with complex content that has been addressed already in the public sphere . I’m on a roll…

6 minutes in, Zoom dies. My students disappear. More accurately, I disappear for my students.

I text the lecturer in charge: “finding another computer. back in 5” and race back to the office, trailing multiple cords, notebook and reading glasses. Addressing the hunched backs of my diligent colleagues, I announce that I have to give a lecture: I’m sorry I’m going to be talking out loud, a lot, about odd and potentially offensive stuff… I logon to the only Desktop computer again, find my Adobe tabs (I’ve been logged out, but it fortunately doesn’t take long to login and reload), and I’m off again. Successful lecture, engaged students, lots of curly questions at the end (a good sign in the context). Tick.

I apologise profusely to the office team for noise pollution, grab the borrowed laptop with it’s Zoom update problem, and head back out to the Superfloor for lecture number 2. A restart gets me back in the land of the digital living on this device, I sign back into Adobe Spark for the 3rd time for the day and reload the second lecture; jump into Outlook via the UoM Staff Portal to find the Zoom link for the lecture, then kick off the program to virtually meet 56 new faces for what is a highlighly pertinent conversation about museum pedagogy, SoTL, SoTEL, and the learnings we are all making about our new hybrid teaching and learning environments in a COVID-changed University world. Tick.

After lunch (no beer), I ring Uni IT to help talk me through my own laptop’s failure to start that morning. Mitch, the endlessly cheerful IT support technician I’ve had the pleasure of calling on multiple times in the past year, asks “So…did you plug it in?”

SHOOT. No. (Well, I thought I had.)

Total embarrassment. Mitch was very sweet about it, and we sorted some lagging CPU problems while we were at it.

Tuesday was virtually uneventful. Wednesday saw me delivering my Adobe Spark lecture no 1 again, this time in Dual-Delivery mode in Arts West, 30 students in the room, another 30 on the screen. Once again the online nature of Adobe Spark saved the day, as there was no tech that I could see to plug my PC in when I arrived in the room, so we found the Spark link I’d emailed to my colleague earlier, and logged into the lecture via his Mac computer. I found it quite curious presenting to simultaneous live and virtual students, and the chat was fun to negotiate, making sure everyone in the room could see (or hear) the questions that were asked, as well as the answers. It was old-school engagement, no virtual polls or collaborative MIRO boards, just enthusiastic conversation, conducted in cross-over f2f and virtual learning. Tick.

Thursday was a presentation to the public, in the context of Melbourne Knowledge Week, officially launching and talking about Living Instruments, a beautiful collaborative cross over of old school tech (musical instruments) and new school digital tech, all for the purpose of engaging audiences creatively with common cultural assets.

Dr Anthony Lyons (FFAM) and Abdul Rehman Mohammad (eResearch Comp Sci) and I presented together in the MC building, each using a different presentation software: me on Adobe Spark, Ant and Abdul in powerpoint, and Interactive Composition student Reuben Cumming through a pre-record video, loaded to Vimeo and linked to Spark:

All went swimmingly with the presentation, and afterwards we handed out old-school iPads for the 30 members of the public audience to try their hand in real time, playing with the application. Big tick.

So, what were my takeaways from this big tech week of teaching and learning in formal and informal environments? Be flexible, be collaborative; hold your nerve when the tech fails and trust in the skills we have all acquired in this last decade or two to problem solve in complex environments; remember you are human and fallible, and every other human around you is the same; and remind yourself that you’re lucky to be doing all this is a working environment that privileges innovation and Life-Long Learning…

What did I learn about ecologies of resources? I enjoy Adobe Spark, partly because it looks so professional despite being darned easy to use. (I am slightly nervous that when I come to give these lectures again in 2022 they may have mysteriously disappeared, or my account has been suspended unless I hand over $$ and I can’t access them, but I’m willing to trust at this point). I enjoy thinking about the affordances of different virtual presentation platforms and what they communicate to my audience by their structure and flow (For example, Prezi is delightful when I want to situate my audience in a physical space – for example, I’m describing a museum context so I use the metaphor of walking through the museum space via the virtual museum space, to ‘walk through’ key concepts that have a linear flow and I like that Prezi has a downloadable desktop app so I don’t have to online to create and shape and deliver my content). Adobe Spark allows me to use multiple images to ‘colour’ my presentation, without them being the centre of attention, as well as being very adaptable to embedded content. Prezi can’t embed video as far as I can tell… And I loved the way the guest lecturer Vickel used a MIRO board to share his content, which again exploited the platforms affordances and character in a way that aligned perfectly with his content. I am reminded again of Marshall McCluhan, and his aphorism The medium is the message…

… the latest approach to media study considers not only the “content” but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates…

and

What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs…

McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Chapter 1

Final learning: make sure that Friday night beer is waiting in the fridge.

REFERENCES:

Marshall McLuhan. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.