The Mirror is the third seminar in the Educational Optics series, and the first one where the series changes direction a little with this title:
The Mirror: Teaching is Deciding — What Digital Competence Reveals About HigherEd
In The Prism and The Lens, there was quite a lot of my research and of the ideas I have been using for some time to try to understand Educational Technology. This time, I wanted to go back to some of the things we have done, many of them in applied research projects, and see what they reflected back to me now.
Hence the mirror. I did not want to make a retrospective of projects, or simply use them as examples, but to go back to things we have built, tested, adapted and used, and ask myself what I could see in them now that perhaps was not what we were looking for when we did them. And when I put some of those projects in front of the mirror, four reflections started to appear: shape, contextualise, enact and take collective responsibility.
And I mean doing things in the most prosaic sense of the term. We had to build a game, define a competence, design a toolkit, adapt a European framework, think about how to certify it, create examples that could work for academics from completely different disciplines, understand why one administration used a tool and another decided not to, design institutional strategies, work with students, train those who make decisions…
While preparing the seminar, I realised that this obligation to take ideas somewhere concrete has been an enormous source of learning for me. Because as soon as you try to do something with a definition, a framework or a policy, problems start.
It is not enough to define: when you define, you are shaping something. What looked like a question of adaptation ends up forcing you to think seriously about what contextualising actually means. Frameworks do not simply land in places; people do things with them, and they also change what people see and do: they are enacted. And when you try to develop someone’s competence, you inevitably end up looking at those who create — or do not create — the conditions in which that competence can develop: responsibility starts to become collective.
But while preparing the ending, I wanted to do that exercise that appeared with the crack in the prism (which appeared first here on the blog and then in the seminar), and I decided to use as a critique something uncomfortable that belongs to mirrors themselves… the aberrations of manufactured mirrors… Because, in addition, all the mirrors in the presentation are manufactured mirrors…
I had chosen some projects and not others, I had placed them in a particular order, and I was looking at work from very different moments through the questions I have today. Also, although all these projects are collective work, on the stage it was only me telling their stories.
And then the mirror stopped being just a nice metaphor. A manufactured mirror selects according to where it is placed, it needs light to show some things and not others, and it gives you back an image from a particular position. Mine does too. That is why I end by saying that the reflection I had constructed was not false, but neither was it innocent.
And I left a question: If you look into these mirrors from where you stand, what do they reflect back to you?
Simon (Simon Buckingham Shum) was the first to answer: “I was hearing systems everywhere.” I had put four words in the mirror. He saw something else. And I think that was a great way to finish.
Here is the recording in case you are curious… and, as you know, comments are very welcome.