Supporting a prestigious UK art school in their use of teaching and learning technology was of great appeal to me when first starting in my role at my current institution. In my previous one, I deeply enjoyed the different approaches required to support a Drama department, which accepted students on an audition basis, with no academic requirements whatsoever. The variety of backgrounds and experiences, and the full focus on the creative heart and vocation necessitated a more open, flexible approach to supporting institutional technology – for example, many students had not taken A-levels which necessitated essay submission, so had little to no practice with submitting a document to a Turnitin inbox, and needing walking through this.

I had early contact with the Art school when, when I started the role in July 2020, faced with the prospect of a new term entirely delivered as Emergency Remote Teaching, they asked me if I had any recommendations for a “digital noticeboard”. I perhaps got off on something of the wrong foot, as I enthused about ways in which Moodle could be used to update students on happenings, how a forum might be used for students to promote their own events, and how digital events could easily be signposted, curated or embedded. I had not realised at this point, that the Art school’s teaching and learning content and digital hub was situated entirely in SharePoint, a platform not centrally supported for teaching, and a setup that was entirely unknown by central teams. Whilst Moodle was used for a few specific modules delivered throughout the art programmes, it was perceived as specific to those modules, and not suitable for use at programme level, not least because of the breadth and depth of historic content held on the SharePoint.

The SharePoint is maintained by academics and technicians within the Art school, and I myself only had limited access to this. It operates as more of a repository for information, and holds all manner of technical documentation, as well as links to booking forms for machinery, equipment, and technician support. When I was first given access to this, I realised I would need to take a step back, and rethink my approach to supporting the use of technology for teaching, learning and assessment in fine art – not least because, as things stood, there was very little use of it at all.

After my first mis-step, the school was hesitant to speak with me on day-to-day matters, and I suspect they were concerned that my intentions were to try to “push” Moodle into wider usage. To be very honest, I felt as if doing this might solve a lot of problems in terms of digital delivery, but, wary of my newness to the institution and the scenario, I had no intention of pushing anything, and wanted to take some time to see how I could develop my understanding of the school, and support existing practice. As mentioned in my Contextual Statement, I consider relational trust vital to the success of my role, and, where opportunities to support individual academics with technicalities (as described in 1b.) were consequently lacking, I needed a different opportunity to present myself and my expertise.

This opportunity swiftly arose in the form of a need for a digital assessment platform, and, as detailed in 2b) An Understanding of Your Target Learners, I came to work with every academic and student in the School of Art over the course of a term, giving me an unprecedented insight, contact and influence in this area. The deployment of this platform went exceptionally well, unlocking all manner of conversations around the digital complexities of art. Conversations that arose as a result of this project included:

• How can we mark art we cannot see in real life?
• How should students submit time-based media to mimic the spontaneous walk through a gallery?
• How do we consider the collective impact of work when we can only view one piece of work at a time?
• How should sculpture and students with textural artwork convey this alongside their photos/video?
• Does resolution matter when it comes to images and video?

These questions and more gave me ample opportunity to dig into discussing the nature of art, and assessment, within the limitations and possibilities of capture, and resulted in some very rewarding conversations. I happen to be married to a fine artist, and this has equipped me with a high capacity to dig into the details of discussions like this – the more I was able to meet the academics’ concerns and address them, and consider them as real issues, the easier it was for them to trust me with the development of the assessment.

This very discipline-centred exposure to the department opened a number of doors for me, and I went on to be contacted around several more possibilities which had been lacking in support and development as a result of the lack of local, bespoke learning technology support. It felt like, having proven that I could demonstrate an understanding of the concerns around technology for Fine Art, I could also be trusted to demonstrate the benefits.

One of the first projects I was asked if I could support was students in a Critical Studies course. Designed to give students the tools and room to develop their own critical context for their work, the academic was hoping for a space within university platforms which would allow students to present their work as if on their own artist website.

I suggested we use Reflect, the institutional version of CampusPress, as this would fulfil all requirements whilst conferring several digital skills bonuses:

• Students to develop their own content in a simple website format.
• Students to be able to share this site with external viewers if desired (real world site value).
• Students to gain WordPress and basic web 2 understanding; transferable digital skills.
• Academics to be able to assess student work on the choice of aesthetics and the content, rather than on, specifically, web design expertise (a form of digital levelling).
• External examiners to be able to view the student sites as required.

Evidence 1 is a partial recording of the session we led with students, supporting them into the platform, and working with them to get used to adding content to the site. The workshop element of this went well, and all students were able to log in, had brought some media with them, as suggested, and were able to add this content to the site.

Overall, this particular project went well enough, and the students produced good sites, and gained the experience hoped for, but I would say that the fact that this was only used in one module, and that the use of it comprised a relatively small period of time in that module meant that the students didn’t necessarily get as much out of it as they might have. Were I to run this again, I would hope to catch up with the students at the end of the module to see if they had decided to create their own site elsewhere, or if they might actively go on to use their Reflect site for their artwork in future.

I have since met with the Head of Undergraduate students to discuss offering Reflect for all undergraduate students. Evidence 2 is the request email relating to this – it also shows the effectiveness of word of mouth when working with close departments. This resulted in a pilot with another module later that term. Evidence 3 includes an academic’s strategic outline for this deployment. It was extremely rewarding to be able to continue to work with the department to see if we could better embed the platform across a module. In 2022/23, we hope to continue looking at ways to develop this still further.

More than ever, with the Art School, I must be incredibly specific about the purpose of platforms, the value of them, and their relevance to the student-artist. Anywhere I can draw parallels to the ways in which early career artists may be expected to inherently understand or utilise platforms has proven particularly useful. Examples of this type of interplay between learning and technology include:

• Understanding how to present and share work to galleries / agents.
• Understanding how to present one’s art digitally.
• Knowing the ways in which digital presentations of one’s artistic style affect the perception of the viewer, and finding ways to ensure the purpose and context of the art is retained, wherever it is shown.
• Having the skills to create digital representation of one’s artwork, whether via photography, video, presentation or performance, and the basic editing, hosting and sharing skills to distribute and manage it.
• An elementary understanding of the risks of sharing art in the digital realm – copyright, security, privacy and the right of platforms to define the content they host.
• The ability to conduct one’s artistic career in a digital world – digital identity, digital literacies, organisation and workflows, meeting deadlines and managing communications.

I found that all these conversations and considerations were so specific, and so interesting, but being the only Art School in my institution, and being one of the only creative areas in the university at all, I felt like there must be others out there in the digital education specialist community also supporting art schools, and started to actively seek out my peers. In part, this is how I came to form #EdTechOutlaws with Puiyin Wong (on which more in Advanced Areas, but, as Evidence 3 shows, this community first began as an attempted to bring learning technology support in Art & Design together). Whilst that group expanded to include a much wider group of digital education specialists, regardless, it gave me an opportunity to discuss and work through some of these questions and vocational requirements, to see how others were doing these things, and to check that my own advice and understandings seemed sound to others in similar scenarios.

I had the pleasure of appearing on Puiyin Wong’s My Liminal Pod, to discuss, and reflect specifically on, supporting art, art academics, and art students in the use of learning technology. Evidence 4 includes links to both episodes of this. This episode generated some excellent discussion amongst my peers, and gave me the opportunity to reflect on the enthusiasm I have for supporting this particular discipline in the use of technology. It also allowed me to challenge some of the myths surrounding technology and art – for example, the idea that fine art is inherently ant-technology.

Reflection:

The fact that I am in a position to provide such specialist support, whilst also working to support such a wide variety of traditional courses in other areas of the Faculty, means that I am in a fine position to reflect upon the contrast between the Arts and the Humanities – to see the similarities and differences, and to adjust my support as the context requires.

The Art School intersects more specifically than many with my own personal interests in education – as I’ve mentioned, my wife is an artist, and I enjoy art a great deal myself: it occupies a notable amount of my free time. I also considered the nature and quality of art as part of my own Philosophy undergraduate degree, and working with these issues now has given me opportunities to use arguments and perspectives I studied twenty years ago as part of my daily work.

The entire industry around art, art media, and the digital world has also given me a significant amount of work to do to ensure I work to keep myself up to date in this area. As mentioned in Advanced Areas, when I noticed the impact that web3 was having on conversations between young artists, I wanted to ensure I was sufficiently informed to support conversations around emerging platforms and modalities, like NFTs, in order to understand the new and developing intersections of art and technology in the commercial world.

As the frontiers keep extending, so does the conversation, and whilst I can’t be an expert in everything, I do try to ensure that I remain aware of areas in which expertise lies. This can be challenging to balance, and sometimes it’s a space in which work doesn’t always feel like work. If consulting with academics on the morality of AI-generated art, and what marking parameters might be, time quite genuinely flies for me, and it feels like just the sort of conversation I might have in a pub with friends. Whilst fun, and certainly something that makes going away and reading up on these things always a pleasure, I do occasionally need to remind myself of the purpose of my involvement, and the outcomes that we need to get to. A scintillating conversation is a wonderful thing, but I do find that I have to bring the guidance towards outcomes, and next actions, in a way that I might not so much need to in other areas. This is in part because there are fewer right answers with art, in itself such an exciting complexity, but that doesn’t change the fact that we do need to find boundaries, and establish ways of working that hold the accessibility, equity and parity that I aim for across my work. This is a luxury issue to have though, and a good opportunity in itself to exercise my own boundaries around my role.

I hope to find more ways to support and integrate my work with this area, building on the relational trust I’ve already achieved, and making space to design and support uses of technology that will further assist students’ learning and vocational outcomes. I also hope to find more spaces to connect with UK Higher Art Education, and am currently looking to design a session to present at the ART+ conference in January 2023.

Evidence:

1. Reflect for Critical Studies Workshop Recording: https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/92g4CaEh

2. Proposal for Reflect for Undergraduate students:

3. Minutes from a meeting to discuss the strategic use of Reflect in a Critical Studies module:

4. Invitation to the inaugural #EdTechOutlaws meeting (at which we also decided the name!):

5. My Liminal Pod: Resisting the Resistance in Arts Schools:

https://anchor.fm/puiyin-wong/episodes/Resisting-the-Resistance-in-Arts-Schools-Part-1-e1i5e96/a-a7sk0b1 - Part 1

https://anchor.fm/puiyin-wong/episodes/Resisting-the-Resistance-in-Arts-Schools-Part-2-e1ifmh3/a-a7tursk - Part 2