Responding to the invitation from Academic Support to display information from our collaborative presentation at the Who Do We Think We Are conference in June, 2022, Innovation Management (MA IM) student and recently appointed 2022-23 CSM Changemaker Poojitha Lal and I have been discussing the question our presentation ended with, asking the group assembled: How can we actively facilitate opportunities for community and social learning?
Poojitha has a background in design and visually mapped out the issues discussed in a Miro board, screenshots of which are here. Beginning with thinking about the places collaboration can happen, framing the issue: “we need a system that facilitates collaboration, by taking off pressure from the individual.” As we see it, the current system places the entire burden on the individual, meaning that it’s not impossible for there to be opportunities to meet and collaborate (as we are doing), but it is entirely happenstance and done despite the system rather than being aided by it.
A way to address some of this would be to have a platform through which students and staff can network and socialise, addressing both the communication issue at the school—of complete inability to connect with people unless you happen to meet them in person—and providing some connections between the heavily siloed colleges, programmes, and courses.
Beginning by looking at the issue at a Programme/Department level and dividing the issue into two parts, Work and Network, illustrates two key aspects of interactions and building strong ties and access points.
Work means curricular, structural access in some way, with an emphasis on creating space for interactions within the courses. Both Poojitha and I have been frustrated by our inability to access the other two full-time MA courses within our department (both of us having inquired about sitting in on some lectures and being given categorical “No’s”), and feel very strongly that they could all be strengthened by opening the possibility of some fluidity/sharing.
Network is more along the lines of what I have been working on, as a way to circumvent the slow bureaucracy of system-changing by opening up more, new spaces for people to interact through socials. Poojitha also has the idea to extend MA IM weekly “Collaboration Hour” to the rest of the students in C&E.
At this next level of creating connections with different Programmes/Departments at the same college, there needs to be a different approach as the scale changes. For Work we discussed the possibility of building some sort of simple web sharing platform where people can share projects, as well as some sort of forum where people can ask questions, share resources, etc. I suggested something like the legacy website Craigslist which has retained its simple format over almost 30 years and allows for exchange. We discussed that beginning small with something like a Padlet could be a way to start. There are other Network ideas like having cross-course “Sprint weeks,” and more of the Socials (which I am working on with GCD, C&E, and Spatial Practices) that can open channels of communication/collaboration.
When extending to different colleges, the idea of a digital way to share and interact becomes even more appealing. There could also be more emphasis on in-person Academic Support workshops, as the online workshops don’t allow for networking/socializing to happen.
Finally, coming back around to the opportunity to use the Academic Support website in a productive way lead us to an analysis of the current site. To access the location in the Academic Support website we will have available to us, you have to know to click very specific links in 5-6 locations, leading us to question if anyone would see what we uploaded. We decided it might be most useful to upload information to a padlet and create a mini-forum for people to respond with input about their experience currently, visions for where we could be, and finally, ideas of how to get there. This could exist on the Academic Support website, and also can be something that we test with attendees of our postponed workshop around Collaboration, which we think will be happening in October.
We are still reviewing how we want to display the relevant information from the presentation, as the slides don’t have the depth of information, and the presentation was designed for an in-person experience, to convey verbally and also to elicit an emotional response. As Poojitha says, we have to consider how “each medium has its own affordances and signifiers.”
Since Poojitha is also passionate about these ideas of collaboration and creating space for exchange, she will be raising this as something the CSM Changemakers might work on over the coming year.