After a productive early morning call with my excellent OSI colleagues and a satisfying burst of administrivia deck-clearing, I made a second cup of coffee and settled down to read this morning’s HESA blog post from Alex Usher. Today he was summarising his thoughts from the first HESA-organised AI Summit in Calgary last week. I will confess to some FOMO about not being at that event myself. Many friends were live-texting me updates from sessions as well as sending me beaming group selfies with collections of people I get to spend far too little face-time with. The upside was that I spent last week on-site in Kamloops working with Thompson Rivers University and most of those selfies came through as I was spending face-time with the all too many wonderful folks up there.

The big takeaway from the conference in the blog post was that:

“Institutions need to experiment widely to see what works, and that means changing our cultures to accept, acknowledge, and learn from the occasional failure along the way. We need to share experiences and learn from others, and that means changing our cultures to understand that not everything needs to be “invented here.” And above all, it calls for ambition. Just as no institution is going to cut its way to greatness, no institution is going to reach new heights by avoiding the implications of radical technological change.

In short, it’s not so much the details of specific initiatives that matter so much as the ability to shift institutional cultures towards greater ambition, experimentation and the sharing of/ learning from that experimentation. Institutions that can manage this are going to leap to the forefront of higher education not just for the next decade but possibly for the rest of the century.”

(https://higheredstrategy.com/higher-educations-ai-future/)

This sounds familiar. Back in 2023 I wrote something similar in a few articles I produced for an online learning website:

“Invest in people and trust first, technology second

Beyond high-level messaging, we then need to actually do the work to create a safe climate for exploration and open spaces for dialogue and critical questions. Can you bring together your university community to hear both concerns and creative ideas for exploration and change? Symposiums, guest speakers, workshops … We tend to be rather good at this kind of thing anyway, so let’s lean into those strengths.

Take the following three steps:

1. Recognize that some of your faculty may be anxious and provide reassurance. Do they have concerns for their jobs? Are they worried about academic integrity? Do they feel the institution is lagging behind? This is another way in which these moments tell us something about how we are today, so maybe also have a think about what these concerns mean for institutional capacity to change.

2. Resist the rush to formulate policy and start with permissive guidelines that create space for exploration and play, with the appropriate guardrails around academic standards and ethical behaviours. Where possible, work to co-create these guidelines with students. Maybe this is also the time to check that you have some policies on the ethical use of students’ personal data on which to base your guardrails.

3. Finally, consider how digitally literate your colleagues are and whether that might be another people area you need to invest in. What kind of digital leadership do you need on the academic side of the house? A senior role? A visible presence in your teaching and learning centre?”

(https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/how-guide-faculty-navigating-ai-avalanche-higher-education-academic-administrator)

I’m not interested in any kind of one-up-womanship here; my comments above are specific to AI at this moment in time, but would be equally relevant for any other technology du jour. Rather I want to underscore that point about “Invest in people and trust first, technology second”. Shifting “institutional cultures towards greater ambition, experimentation and the sharing of/ learning from that experimentation” will not happen by buying everyone a license for <insert LLM of choice>. That’s the worst kind of esssentialist and instrumentalist thinking. Organisational culture work is people centered work and requires us to grapple with complexity and human messiness. It requires us to understand that there are proximate concerns that colleagues have (academic integrity, digital literacies) and ultimate concerns (job security, the nature of thinking itself). It requires us to understand that technologies are cultural artefacts, not just “tools”, and are therefore imbued with a set of assumptions and values that might conflict with our own. It requires us to understand that there are wider political and economic forces at play that our institutions are embroiled in. And if I have to spell that out to anyone in this very moment then I have some MUCH BIGGER QUESTIONS.

Colleagues who are charged with developing institutional policies right now have some of the hardest jobs I suspect. Trying to wrangle a university committee into charting a course between wild enthusiasm and deep concern and reaching some sort of consensus that does more than achieve “status-quo with a twist” is a hard task at the best of times, and this is not the best of times by any stretch. The challenge is that educational institutions don’t exist seperate from the people within them (universities are collections of labour, to paraphrase Raewynn Connell), and in our times of heightened financial pressure here in Canada, as well as in other jurisdictions, creating a culture of play and experimentation with AI can feel like we’re asking colleagues to collaborate in their own redundancy and demise. Add into that the whole climate crisis thing and that sense of potental demise can feel pretty existential. Suggesting that colleagues who resist AI are “reluctant to change” in those kinds of circumstance then becomes a pretty weird kind of gaslighting and shuts down conversation at exactly the point we need to keep communicating.

And this is where I see opportunity and strength, because if there’s one thing educational institutions are really good at, it’s exploring under-researched spaces and grappling with complexity. So I come back to the point I made above about formulating “permissive guidelines that create space for exploration and play, with the appropriate guardrails around academic standards and ethical behaviours” and to another gripe I have about the lack of ethical decision-making frameworks in the operations sides of universities because this is where it comes homes to roost. Absent an appropriate equivalent to the kinds of ethical frameworks we have in the research space, we risk trapping ourselves into paralysis or tearing each other apart as we try to do new things with technologies in our operations. Without good review frameworks and processes we bog ourselves down in endless discussions and mud-slinging between “evil administrators” and “laggard faculty” which is about the most boring argument I can think of and feeds every cliche about public education systems. Without good evaluation practices and peer advice given in a spirit of critical friendship we miss the immense potential for learning from our successes and our failures.

So I think where I’m getting to is that I’d actually like to see us shift back to what uniquely makes us academic instutions – ambition, experimentation, sharing, learning. This is already our culture, or it should be. It should not be beyond us to hold oppositional views, to disagree, and still to find paths forward to experiment and learn. I also cannot pretend that the world isn’t a difficult place right now, and that there won’t be some job losses in educational institutions here and in the UK etc. There will be more automation. There will be more cost-cutting, and we *are* asking some of those who will be affected to play a role in that. Let’s not sugar-coat that or sweep it out of sight. I wish very much that the world was different, that there was more money for public education systems, and I will continue to press that point, but in this moment I also think we need to attend to the present circumstances and their reality and try act with some care to minimise harms. Because the question I come back to ALWAYS is, if not us then who?

And I think I know what the answer to that looks like. And it’s worse.

https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/people-and-trust-first-technology-second/