Tag Archives: community

#GrowDX event at MTU–this time online

View to a grove of trees, all leafy and green, surrounding a small circle of very short standing stones. This is my back yard, in North Carolina.
I could not be in Cork for this event, so here is a view of part of my back yard. Note the standing stones (very small ones) at the bottom.

I attended (online) the latest Munster Technological University digital transformation (Dx) event a week or so ago.  You can catch up with this recording of it.  The idea was to facilitate a conversation about the regional impact of digital connection, in the context of education and non-profit organizations.  Speakers Keith Smyth and Frank Rennie, from the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Scotland, joined Grainne O’Keefe, CEO of the Ludgate Digital Hub in Skibbereen, Co. Cork, on a discussion panel moderated by Gearoid O Suillebhain and Tom Farrelly, both of MTU.  

These events at MTU (I was physically present in Cork for the previous one, along with my colleague Lawrie Phipps, to talk about digital transformation in HE contexts) are designed to provoke thought and provide information about what is happening with digital places and tools, and also what we would like to happen with digital places and tools in the larger context of our professional and educational and personal practices.  I see these conversations as a way to step around the futurecasting that continues to dominate much of the discourse (“What will education look like post-pandemic??” as if we are out of the pandemic, and as if we have a good handle on what it looks like now, let alone in the future…).  Grounding discussions in the practices of people now, and recognizing the continuity with what has happened in the past, feels like a more constructive way of going about trying to create a future, rather than have one handed to us.

The GrowDx conversation centered on the relationship between communities and the educational and other institutions embedded within those communities.  UHI is scattered across a wide physical area, much of it remote and isolated from major population centers, and has historically had to figure out ways to connect students and staff at a distance, well before pandemic concerns made that a priority for everyone involved.  Keith Smyth talked about the “co-located and dislocated campus,” referring to the ways that physical distance and digital proximity combine to produce a multiplicity of ways to participate.  The new MTU is similarly scattered across a wide area (“from Ballyferriter to Youghal” as Tom Farrelly pointed out), and has as one of its primary remits a responsibility to conserve, develop, and curate connections at a distance.  Digital places and platforms provide crucial ways for those connections to happen.  

Grainne O’ Keefe pointed out early in her discussion of the development of the Ludgate Digital Hub, now a model for the rest of Ireland for how to provide a place for rural communities to connect with educational and professional services and networks beyond their immediate physical environment, that none of those connections are possible without investing in digital infrastructure.  The first step was getting strong broadband installed down to Skibbereen, in West Cork.  The idea is to give people a chance to study and work where they want to live, rather than having to leave their communities for opportunities.  Leaving Ireland has a long and devastating history for Irish people; colonization and the post-colonial experience has long made it necessary for them to go elsewhere to make a living (or simply, to live).  Creating places, with the help of digital affordances, that make it possible not just to stay but to stay and thrive, feels to me like a radical act.

Both Ludgate and UHI share the model of “hubs” as a way of bringing digital to people, and also bringing people to each other, in the same physical location as well as connected to each other digitally.  Students can attend classes without having to leave their immediate area, but also can connect with other local people doing the same thing, via these hubs.  People working in Skibbereen don’t have to rely on their household set up to do their work online, or to study for their degrees, and also do not have to do any of it in isolation if it does not suit them.  Grainne O’Keefe also made the point that spaces without programming, without intentional planning around what will happen in those spaces,  will fail.  Connecting people to possibilities and each other takes more than “a physical location, filled with tech.”  She described Ludgate as a “community informed social asset” and I think that description also fits the new MTU.

I always wish for more time for discussion in events like these, and attending online meant I did not have access to the chats over tea and coffee when some of these discussions take place. Those of us in the chat did manage to ask some questions about what places like UHI and Ludgate can offer, in helping us think about possibilities.  

My primary question after the discussion was about how to protect those possibilities, especially in countries like the US and the UK, where there are fewer resources being offered to us in the educational sector.  Ireland has the advantage of being in the EU, and also of a government that sees the value in investing in the public sector.  

​What is the role of institutions in keeping “doors open” for people who could benefit from multiple modes of engagement (I feel like this is all of us)? Flexibility like that requires more resources, including people who need to be paid to do the work of setting up the spaces, the tech, and social and educational programming.  More resources requires more money. 

There’s something here about the importance of carrying forward the good things that being online brings us while also keeping up with the good things that physically embodied experiences can yield.  What these hubs do is expand and support the choices that people can make around how and where they want and need to work and study.  The hub model provides more open doors to people, rather than presenting with a “do it all online, or do it all on campus/in the office” binary.

Something about Networks and Connections

Butterfly amaryllis from my mother’s garden

I grew up on Air Force Bases in the continental US and moved around fairly frequently (though not as frequently as some!) in my childhood. My parents had met in their small Louisiana town, and started dating when they were in college at LSU.  I get to thank a hurricane–I think it was Betsy– for them spending a weekend on the phone together that made them realize they wanted to spend their lives together.  Once they had left their small town for Baton Rouge, they began building relationships that are still strong, friendships with my mom’s roommates (a woman who was sent from Cuba by her relatives, a Cajun woman after whom I am named) and their boyfriends (now husbands)–they remained close with those people, after leaving Louisiana, and we see them when we can, they are present in my mom’s life and mine.

They moved to Arizona for Daddy’s first posting and had me, and their social network grew to include the friends they made in Tucson, as well as their family and friends back in Louisiana.  That core group of friends knew me before I was born, and even though we knew we would not be in Tucson forever, those friends stayed a part of my parents’ (and my) life even after we were sent to Minot, ND, and then to Vandenberg AFB CA.  We sent letters, traveled to see them for Thanksgiving or Easter.  My parents had local connections, too, made friends (and kept many) where they found themselves, but also kept the connections they had made before.  

When things were hard where they were, if they were lonely, their local network was not the only one they had to draw upon.  

Local circumstances were not their entire circumstances , they were only a part, and the larger entirety of their lives, their scattered network of friends, made it easier to deal when tough times happened in other parts of their lives. 

When I moved from school to school, it was hard, but also gave me practice in connecting with new people.  My mother helped me in this because she knew I was a person who craved other people; she sought out kids for me to meet when we moved somewhere new, made sure I had chances to find at least one friend in a new place.  

When we left for a new base, I was sad to leave friends behind but because of my parents’ habits of keeping connections, I never really felt that they were gone forever.  We got Xmas letters, sometimes we would get to visit them, we were in touch and real to each other (even before the internet, which did eventually make that kind of thing easier).

When I was in high school I had a small group of very close friends but they were not all in the same place all the time at school.  I had swim team friends and speech and debate friends and in-class-with-me-friends and they were not all part of the same network.  So when (inevitably) there were fallings-out or misunderstandings or breakups in one group I still had the other groups.  It was never terrible all the time.

I realize that my circumstances were lucky, but also think that my parents were very deliberate in building that capacity in me, in modeling for me a way to have a kind of resilience (I know, I know) in my own personal life, so that when there were struggles in one place it wasn’t everywhere and didn’t make my entire life hard.  I had refuges, other places and people I could turn to for relief and respite and support.

I almost made the mistake of shrinking my entire undergraduate university experience down to one group, the anthropology department.  I knew I wanted to major in that from the beginning, and threw myself into everything anthropology my first year.  My friends, (including romantic partners) were in the department. My social life was in the department and when it was going well it was great.

When it did not go well I had nowhere else to go.

Almost on a whim, I decided my second year to live in an International dorm on campus, one where every room had one American student and one exchange student from a different country.  I roomed with a Korean woman, my suite-mate from LA had a roommate from Japan.  In addition to Japanese and Korean students there were Italian and British and French and Australian students.  

I had a fantastic year.  And when I had a hard time with my studies, or with relationships (yeah, still with anthropology students), I had this part of my life that was my dorm hall, and the friends I made there (and who I still have).

Living in that dorm meant that I decided to study abroad.  I went to Ireland for the following year and it changed my trajectory through anthropology, because up until that point I was studying archaeology, and I realized in Ireland that if I went to grad school I wanted to study living people. 

So when I did apply to graduate school it was to study folklore and anthropology and also as a newly married person (because living apart from my boyfriend for the year helped me to figure out that it would be nice to have him in my life all the time).  And I arrived in grad school ready to be a grad student but also not entirely dependent on graduate school to be my entire life.  

The friends I made, the network I built in graduate school was almost entirely independent of my studies.  I hung out with archaeologists (they are much better at being constructively social than socio-cultural anthropologists…) and so when I had a hard time in any given seminar, or conflicts with professors, I had somewhere else to go, other connections to draw upon.  And, not just there in the town where I was in grad school, but the connections I had built and my parents had built were still there, and I had multiple places and sets of people to ask for support when I needed it.  I had a partner (also an academic, so not completely out of the world I was in) and was an entire person independent of my graduate studies.

This helped me survive graduate school.  I would not have, if my entire world had been my studies.

When we moved to Charlotte, with our two young kids, we moved to be a part of the department of anthropology here, and that helped us have a local network right away.  But we were also moving to the state where my partner grew up, and so we had a personal network, too.  We had brothers and sisters and in-laws and cousins to be with, our life was not reduced just to the university, we had other options.  With kids in school we made friends with some of the parents of their friends, and that was good and also sometimes complicated, so it was (again) good that when that was hard we had other networks to rely on.  

I am repeating myself.  I am working through to see a pattern.

When I started working in libraries I did not leave my anthropology network behind, it was still right there with me.  When I was working in libraries I also built connections with ed tech and instructional design people, because it made sense and also because I made friends.  When I had to stop working in libraries, those co-existing networks helped me not to despair, or think that there was nothing else I could do.  

I was more than my job.  I was (and am) part of more than one network.  I am so lucky, I have so many kinds of people in my life.  

I worry about my students who seem to only have university-based networks, or who are isolated from their non-university networks in some way.  I am more confident for my students who already show up with strong connections to a supportive community, with connections independent of the university. I worry about colleagues who are deeply embedded in one organization, or attached to one conference, who don’t have a different place to go when things go wrong. Things always go wrong, at some point.

When I hear people in a variety of contexts talking about “building community” for students or colleagues (or, customers), I worry about that, too.  Is the motivation an additive one?  “Let’s give them more people to connect with and rely on?”  Or is it intended to be a kind of capture?  I think in situations where money is concerned (conferences.  tuition) it can too often be the latter.

I wonder if one of the differences, in professional networks, is if we are people or products?  Maybe that was the difference in grad school, too.  I connected with and kept people in my networks who were people to me, and who treated me as more than what my degree or career would or could be.  

When I returned to the anthropology department of my graduate program after the death of my child, the people who saw me as a person hugged me and asked me how I was.  The people for whom I was a (failed) product did not see or speak to me at all, even as I passed them in the hallway.

I have witnessed a lot of extractive networking. I’ve probably done my fair share, too. Extractive practices do not build the kind of networks that endure and support. I have long been wary of organizations or events that claim to “build community.” All we can do is make space, and do things we think might be useful (for ourselves, for each other). Whether a community emerges from any given organization or event or series of events isn’t up to us.

I am looking at 2022, when I get to start working as a Professor of Practice for a new MA on Climate Science Leadership at Virginia Tech, thanks to a grade school friend who is still in my life.  I get to work with Munster Technological University thanks to connections that have come to me via edtech circles but also my insistence on keeping connected to people in Ireland.  My daughter is getting married this year and my best friend, who I have known since I was 13 years old, will attend the wedding along with my mom who taught me over and over again the importance of keeping good people in your life, even across long distances and gaps in time.  

I remain here with questions, at the end of this ramble.  How are we people to each other, in our (ideally) various networks, offline and online alike?  How are we treated as (how do we treat others as) products?  What does that difference mean for our experience of our networks?