Access(Able): Envisioning Pedagogues as Student Advocates in Digital Spaces

How easily can students access data about course materials? How easily can corporations access data about students? The access imbalance in higher education has turned classes into obstacles and students into profit-generating data points. I highlight those issues in this talk, presented on 10 Aug 2021 as the opening keynote for Digital Pedagogy Institute 2021, hosted by the University of Toronto Scarborough, Ryerson University, and Brock University. Conference presentations focused on: Digital Pedagogy during the Pandemic; Anti-racist and decolonized approaches to Digital Pedagogy; Inclusivity, Accessibility, and Digital Pedagogy; and Digital Pedagogy and the Post-Truth society. You can also view the slide deck used for this talk.

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“Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.” — Martin Niemöller, 1946

You’ve probably heard this quote before. Many English variations of the poem it’s from have circulated since Martin Niemöller first spoke them in German back in 1946. Probably the most famous version comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The complete poem warns of the dangers of fascist regimes and urges audience members to speak out on behalf of those less fortunate, able, or visible while dissent is still possible.

The concerns I want to discuss here today certainly weigh less than the Holocaust Niemöller and his contemporaries faced, and I intend no suggestion of equivalence in degree. But I will assert that Niemöller’s suggested response to the threat of fascism in the 20th-century is just as critical when facing today’s challenges in digital pedagogy—and for the same reasons. Here in the 21st century, we face the challenges of corporate interests out to profit from user profiling, institutions ready to outsource every aspect of education, and the unquestioning acceptance of conditions that exploit the powerless and disenfranchised. We must speak up.

I hope in this talk to convince you that we have an ethical imperative as faculty, staff, and scholars to speak for those less able to do so, particularly in digital spaces, and especially in online education. To do that, I want to explore some common topics—diversity, accessibility, and access—but look at them from some perhaps uncommon angles to help provide clarity and guidance for enacting ethical pedagogy in digital environments.

So…diversity, accessibility, and access. Let’s start with diversity.

Digital diversity empowers students.

I assert that diversity is as critical in our digital tools as it is in our people.

Let’s start with something that’s allegedly easy to agree with: Diversity in people’s experiences and perspectives brings strength to organizations and teams. As a side note, I think it’s easier to say “diversity is important” up in Canada than it is in the United States. Y’all seem to value your people a bit more than We the People do down here in the “land of the free”. But I digress. That’s enough reflexive shade for the moment. So again, diversity in perspective and experience provides strength.

Anecdote: Diversity at Starbucks

As we go about our daily lives, we spend most of our time at home, at work, and at that third place—somewhere we go so regularly that we feel pretty much at home there. We are as familiar to that space as it is to us. We belong. If you’re old enough to remember Norm from Cheers, you should definitely be thinking of Norm from Cheers here—that one barstool was his third place, and everybody knew his name. Starbucks knows how important those third places are to people, and how habitually we will go to them and spend money in them. Starbucks also knows that if you make that experience reproducible and familiar everywhere, a third place can also be a reliable, familiar comfort when away from home. I once heard an executive from the company (I forget which one or where; sorry!) say that Starbucks isn’t in the coffee business. They’re in the customer-service business, and they just happen to sell coffee on the side. 

With those concepts of the company’s self-image in place, you’ll better understand a brilliant advertising move the company made back in 2019. Starbucks recognized that the importance they place on making people feel welcome by referring to them by name makes them a great resource for a particular demographic: trans folks trying out new names to fit their lived identities. They took the well-circulated suggestion that trans folks “try out” potential new names at Starbucks because if it feels right to have a stranger call you by that name in full voice in a crowded coffee shop, it’ll probably feel right anywhere. The company strategically used a simple consequence of their SOP to take credit for defending diversity and turned it into an award-winning trans-awareness commercial that shows values over product (They make coffee in this commercial? I guess?) and tugs at heart strings to make one specific demographic feel seen/welcome. It’s a powerful ad. It also aligns with corporate policy encouraging diversity in their baristas, too.

Point: The example you just heard illustrates diversity in front-lines employees at major international corporations. Early/entry-level exposure provides learning opportunities for the employees and visibility to the public they work with, both of which can be more important than we might realize.

At the same time, it’s really easy to accomplish front-line diversity because everyone needs a job. But giving someone a job does not give them a seat at the table for decision-making or influence. How can we push diversity beyond entry-level spaces and into leadership positions? People have access to our classes; do they have access to promotions? Leadership opportunities? Audiences?

Review: Diversity in Corporate Leadership

I just spoke about front-line diversity. Just for kicks, let’s take a look at leadership “diversity” in some large companies known for their public support of diversity initiatives, such as Pride and BLM.

Here’s a screenshot of Apple’s executive-team page on their website. For anyone with vision challenges, here’s the punchline of this particular joke: There’s a significant lack of melanin and estrogen in the bodies shown on screen.

Disney’s team does a bit better, proportionally speaking, but that first row is just…wow.

Starbucks does a bit better, with the first woman of color we’ve seen so far. (Spoiler alert: Only one(s) we’ll see.)

And then there’s Amazon’s page. They don’t display all the photos at once like everyone else. You can click on each name to display their photo and profile, but click on a second one, and the first goes away. I’ll bet you can guess why I think they designed their page this way. Here, let me give you a hint. I took the liberty of downloading the photos and arranging them into two rows for consistency’s sake.

Yeah. Fourth consecutive joke with the same punchline. Crazy how that works.

So what, exactly, do these companies mean when they say they celebrate diversity? How can the diversity they celebrate be promoted up the proverbial ladder? Which executive is expected, as Niemöller would say, to speak for non-white, non-male employees seeking advancement or even just representation?

The Importance of Agnosticism

No teacher ever cared what kind of pencil we used in class; only the machines did. When I was a kid, we all had to have our #2 pencils for tests because the Scantron-brand scoring machines needed a certain level of reflectivity in the graphite to read student answers and determine whether an answer was correct. The machines forced us to conform.

I’ve spent the past seven years teaching at a Catholic school as an atheist. Yeah, that’s been fun. I’m serious! Being a proverbial fish out of water really helps make things we normally take for granted much more important and obvious.

As an atheist at a Catholic school, I constantly had to take a step back and question why something worked a certain way. The reasons I did things often differed from the reasons the institution would offer. This divide made me appreciate the benefit of understanding motivations and avoiding “just because” as rationale.

Then I saw all the assignments students worked on that required a Word document and 1-inch margins and all the rest. The rationale? “Just because,” as far as the students understood. For a while, the school didn’t provide access to MS Word. Then, when they did, many students didn’t realize they could install the full-featured app on their devices; they thought they could only access it through a web browser. They were miserable. I’ve seen some “creative” approaches to moving data from the app a student prefers into the app a teacher demands, and it’s often a mess. “Just because.”

Listening to conversations around campus, from faculty and students alike, revealed that app-specific thinking is the norm: “let’s Google that” / “open a Word document to take notes” / “upload your PowerPoint.” This leads to thinking of the tech as the solution, rather than the tech as a tool to help get to the solution. If I believe Word is the only app where writing happens, I don’t think of other ways to process text, and I’m limited to thinking that if I don’t know how to do something in Word, it cannot be done. If I believe PowerPoint is the only app where image manipulation happens…you get the idea.

This same tech-as-solution approach plagues DH seminars, too: Well-meaning attendees start salivating over the promise of introductions to new tools. They want to see what’s out there that they can use in their classes. New, shiny things to show students. That’s quite literally a solution in search of a problem. Our approach should be to identify what we wish we could do, then go find a tool to let us do it. 

We should think of apps as tools, valuable for the services they provide. We should also refer to them that way: Open a web browser, use a search engine, load your word processor, create a slideshow. That’s product-oriented language that allows students to select the tool that works best for them—and not think that the app you use is the only available solution. And besides, these days, for most anything general-education students do, productivity suites from Apple, Google, and Microsoft have nearly achieved feature parity, so the differences come down to workflow—which is up to the student, not us.

Start with the question of goals; allow options for apps; and then, emphasize fidelity.

The Importance 
of Fidelity

When I scroll through various social feeds, I see a ton of screenshots. Some are clear and seem new. Some are grainy and jagged and look like they’ve been put through the wash a few times. And then I think of folks with visual difficulties scrolling through their feeds. A screen-reader would acknowledge the existence of an image, then move along. The “content” of that image is gone—the text is no longer readable as text because it’s been turned into a picture. Sharing a screenshot is digital colonialism: It forces one display method onto everyone, dictating the medium, colors, typeface, language, font size.

It’s also a horribly inefficient way to send information.

• Link to a tweet: 59 bytes; allows user to view with their preferred device/settings and interact as they wish, including URLs, hashtags, retweeting, etc.
• Tweet content: 258 bytes; allows user to view with their preferred device/settings and click on any URLs.
• Screenshot of tweet: 61,073 bytes: forces user to view using someone else’s preferred settings; no interaction.

Consider using example of how well Alexa, Google assistant, Siri, Cortana, etc. understand us; imagine if that were our only interface to the web. The more we circulate text on images, the more we relegate users with vision difficulties to struggle. And everyone will develop vision difficulties. Right now, people can shrug and say that Grandma never really understood the Internet anyway. But what happens when millennials turn 40 and their eyesight suddenly goes bad? This problem won’t disappear.

Keeping digital material in its original format wherever possible—or even just linking to the original—allows users’ devices to present that material the way each user can best perceive and process it. But after all this about the need for diversity in our tech, let’s move to my second point.

Accessibility benefits everyone.
 Tech is a red herring.

Accessibility guidelines are designed for the humans using the tech; the tech is a red herring (and the problem, not the solution).

Access and the “Curb-Cut Effect”

The “curb-cut effect” has reached the status of legend within the design world because it’s one of those situations that seems laughably obvious in hindsight but yet took momentous efforts to get started. In short, back in the 1960s and 70s, a group of disability-rights activists cut ramps into the sidewalk curbs at several intersections throughout Berkley, CA. These ramps made the city and its school accessible to people in wheelchairs, which was the whole point.

Except it also helps people pushing strollers. Or with balance issues and limited mobility. Even those people who forget to look down and end up tripping because that dang curb jumped up and grabbed their toe…or something. Adding a curb cut to help folks in wheelchairs has a wider-ranging effect that benefits everyone. Oh, and those bumps on the mats used on curb cuts? The small bumps add traction, reducing slips. The big bumps add texture, so folks with walking canes can still locate the now-missing curb. It also gives a heads-up to folks pushing strollers.

But that’s all very physical. This isn’t the Physical Pedagogy Institute.

The Curb-Cut Effect works the same way in today’s digital spaces as it originally did in the 1960s in Berkeley: When we craft our digital environments with accessibility in mind, they become better for everyone.

W3C Accessibility Principles

The W3C, or World-Wide Web Consortium, is responsible for establishing the standards that make sure your browser can work with the websites you visit. They do important work that helps people learn how to make good websites and good browsers. (As a side note, if you have a website that only works with one particular browser, that’s probably a result of the site or those other browsers failing to adhere to W3C standards.) When folks follow W3C guidelines, the Web works better for everyone.

The W3C pays a lot of attention to how humans interact with websites, and they’ve established basic principles for good web design that aim to allow everyone to meaningfully and purposefully interact with all websites. According to their four basic principles, all Web content should be:

• perceivable on any device,
• operable by any body,
• understandable by any mind, and
• robust on any platform.

Those are lofty goals that take a lot of work to live up to.

Now I have a hunch that, in the time it took me to talk through the premise of web accessibility, you’ve probably already done a mental relevance check. We all do it when listening to lectures. “Does this apply to me? If yes, pay more attention. If no, tune out.” I get it. And I have a hunch that the audience just self-sorted. If you’re faculty, I’ll bet you thought this is all fine and good but not relevant to the humans in your classes—it’s too tech-y. But if you’re in instructional design, your ears perked up, you nodded sagely, and you mentally reviewed a number of checklists that have become so engrained as to be habit. You’ve already congratulated yourself on having achieved the goals on this slide. You’ve got this.

But here’s the problem: Both of those groups are wrong. These principles should apply to the way we interact with people, not just tech. And that’s generally where folks fall short, especially outside the disability studies discipline. My question is this: What do accessibility principles look like when applied to human interactions? How might Web standards help us work with people in live classes?

Note added 20 Aug 2021: Another way of thinking of robustness comes from Josh Eyler’s concept of Resilient Pedagogy. While not directly related to the material of this talk, resilient pedagogy takes robustness in a different direction, aimed at saving faculty time, effort, and energy. Josh also explains that modality agnosticism is a core requirement for resilience, and I talk more about agnosticism below.

Applying W3C Accessibility to Pedagogy

We normally think of accessibility standards in terms of how tech can make tech work better. Instead, we should consider accessibility something students need from a course. How can the entire course be made accessible to students? 

With these examples, Lafayette College offers excellent, clear, actionable suggestions for tech solutions for accessible online materials. In each case, we can go a step further and make our solution humane.

• Perceivable
  • Tech-focused
    • Alt-text tags
    • Recorded/captioned lectures
    • Consistent fonts
  • People-focused: Students can access course/content on their terms when they need
• Operable
  • Tech-focused
    • Mobile websites
    • Dictation software
    • Playback controls
  • People-focused: Students practice disciplinary approaches to current situations
• Understandable
  • Tech-focused
    • Simple language
    • Clear navigation
  • People-focused: Clear purpose for, usefulness in, and necessity of tasks
• Robust
  • Tech-focused
    • Device agnosticism
    • OS agnosticism
    • Assist-tech agnosticism
  • People-focused: Learning experiences transfer outside this class/app/decade

“The nature of access, of being included, meant that you had to in some ways force yourself upon the world.” — Lawrence Carter-Long, Communications Director, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund

When recalling how curb cuts came to be out in Berkeley, Lawrence Carter-Long says inclusion sometimes requires “forcing yourself upon the world.” That’s an undue burden for students, who are in school for other reasons. But as librarians, staff, and faculty who interact with students, sit on technology committees, and contribute to decisions about technology use at our institutions, we are in a position to force ourselves upon the world. We must take responsibility for using tech in an accessible way—not just by meeting screen-reader standards, but by presenting the work of our courses as work all students can do with the tools they have available.

Principles of Ethical Ed-Tech

• Disciplinarity: How do people in your discipline use technology to do the work of your discipline?
• Functionality: What function does an app provide, and might another app do that, as well—or better?
• Fidelity: Maintain fidelity to ease access—keep text as text, for instance.
• Agnosticism: Make the app/platform/device/brand fade into the background and focus on the task/work at hand.
• Openness: Unless you coach track & field, remove all hurdles from your course—logins, registrations, paywalls, etc. Requiring sign-in to existing campus system (to access library databases, for instance) is low-disclosure but potentially tedious, especially on mobile.

Access (dis)empowers people.

And finally, I want to discuss how access is fluid, temporary, bidirectional, negotiable, and (dis)empowering.

Terms of Service and Privacy Policies are legal barriers to access—and many times, they’re compulsory. I got a COVID-19 test last week. It was my fourth, and the third different results-reporting system I’ve had to use. For this most recent test, I needed to make an appointment through the local drug store. They interface with another online system to process and report results. When taking the test, I got paperwork directing me to a URL from yet another company to actually find my results. Before scheduling an appointment, I had to agree to:

• 2,826 words of Walgreens’ Notice of Privacy Practices
• 4,153 words of Walgreens’ Terms of Use
• 4,827 words of PWNHealth’s Policies & Terms of Service

How do students access your content?

First, there is absolutely a need for accessible (aka, high-fidelity, screen-reader-compatible) material, as discussed above. We also need to consider access to that material, in terms of logins and ToS agreements and such. How many systems do we expect students to sign up for, who controls the data they provide those systems, and what connections are made with other accounts? How many students are outed because they have to put in legal information, such as given names?

People as Profit

What consent and agency do we lose by force? What ToS do we require students to accept when applying, enrolling, preparing, or attending? These days, even a textbook requires terms acceptance. Our books now set boundaries.

I start at a new school in just a couple weeks. This school, Kean University, is a public school, run by the state. For those familiar with the details of the U.S. geopolitical setup, it’s in New Jersey, which from what I’m learning and hearing is a special kind of state—and that’s coming from a Floridian. But talk about paperwork! HR has their stack of forms to complete, which I expected. Then the state had its collection of documents to be accepted. Sure. But the things I had to agree to didn’t stop there. 

Kean uses Google as their, shall we say, productivity platform. To be officially connected to Kean, I had to accept Google’s ToS. That’s no small ask. And when I looked through my new account’s settings, I noticed that ad personalization was turned on by default. In other words, when I accepted employment with Kean, I had to accept services from Google, and I was automatically turned into a profit source—me, not the institution paying Google for its services and support. My browsing habits, usage data, and user profile were automatically active as data sources to help Google earn money by advertising to me. As an employee.

“Literacy” v. “Fluency”

As an aside, I found Ryerson University Library’s strategic plan for 2009–13, which says they’re committed to information literacy—a term they use four other times in that plan. To their credit, they acknowledged that “In an era of the democratization of the web, teaching students information literacy is expanding to include information fluency”—and this was back in 2009. I want to acknowledge their foresight. Sadly, that specific concept didn’t persist into their 2014–19 plan, but I’ll hold out hope that it returns in the next iteration.

Librarians acutely see the frustrations of teaching information fluency, and many faculty address those challenges through our work, as well. I’m going for cheap brownie points with librarians in the audience here, but it’s true so I’ll say it: If you aren’t teaching students how to be fluent in your discipline’s sea of information, you’re doing them a disservice, and you’re omitting a key component of what it means to be a member of your discipline. Information fluency, in our information-oversaturated society, is a survival skill. We bear responsibility for helping students learn to be information-fluent in a variety of disciplines and contexts.

Access to Users via “Personalized” Ad Targeting

Bear in mind, Google phrases it as “personalized,” suggesting that it’s better to get ads that specifically target to my interests. Please note that in this discussion, I use the more aggressive word “targeted” while Google uses the more banal “personalized”—but we mean the same thing.

I ask your indulgence to let me linger on this one setting for a bit longer because there’s a lot hiding behind it. I want to think for a moment about literacy and fluency. In terms of reading, I think we’d agree that it’s easier to be literate than to be fluent. I could be capable with a language but not necessarily fluent in it. Moderately functional, but not fully capable. You’ve probably heard the terms “information literacy” and “information fluency” used as nearly interchangeable. The example of reading skills should highlight how much more critical fluency is in today’s information-saturated world. Being information-literate can almost be a liability: We can understand information without being fully capable of managing and navigating its nuances.

Back to that Google setting. If we have to work hard to teach information fluency, we need all the help we can get. Think about the demands placed on our brains to filter out what’s relevant and what’s superfluous. Remember, Google suggests that “personalized” ads are a good thing—they align with our interests and are “more useful”. But that’s only true for the advertiser, not the consumer. The less-personal our ads are, the less mental energy we have to expend to identify something as an ad.

I confess: As a gay male Floridian, I’m less likely to pause and consider an ad for, say, wool maternity clothing than I am am for an ad showing a rainbow-unicorn pool float (yes, that’s from experience, hush). If we’re trying to help students learn to be information-fluent, irrelevant and impersonal ads would help because they are easier to distinguish from the information we seek. It’s more obvious when something doesn’t interest us and can more easily be dismissed. Yet my new Kean Google account defaulted to targeting or distracting me with “personalized” ads. Google automatically activates personalization by default on all new accounts because they make more money when the ads they show us are highly targeted. We’re more likely to click on them. I confess, I don’t know why anyone would want to see ads they’re more likely to click on. But maybe I’m just ornery.

That one ad setting has two direct consequences: First, students and employees become profit-earning gifts provided to Google by the institution. Second, students and employees have a harder time differentiating work from marketing (no offense to folks in the audience from any business-marketing departments). Ad personalization should be turned off for all students, period. Students should not be for sale.

And that’s just one setting that I have access to only because Google decided to let me see it and possibly turn it off. And from the interface and language they use in the settings page, they try hard to entice me to leave that setting on. But how many other settings are hidden from me? How many other platforms don’t bother to offer even this much opt-out choice? When we ask students to create accounts on various platforms, what access do we give those platforms to student data? To student profiles? To students as advertising targets?

Access to Your Identity

In America, citizens are issued Social Security Numbers. They’re kind of a big deal because they’re government-issued identifiers, unique, nine digits long, and assigned for life. Around 20 years ago, people in America used our SSN as our identifier for basically everything. We’d type it in to login to stuff. Tell companies that number so they could verify our identity. Write it on forms nearly everywhere. Back when I was an undergrad, my university gave us all space on a web server to host our own sites—what’s known as a “tilde space”. The URL to each student’s site included numbers from their SSN.

And then identity theft became A Thing™, and that all ground to a halt. We don’t write or say our SSN anywhere. Asking for it almost feels rude or indecorous these days. Identity verification became kind of tricky.

But then came cellular phones. Suddenly people were being issued unique numbers, ten digits long in the U.S. and Canada, and we generally hang on to them for a while. For that matter, folks in the audience around my age probably have a cellular phone number right now with an area code indicating where they lived in the late 1990s. Cellular numbers have staying power.

Consider that the next time you sign up for a service and all that service needs in order to “verify your identity” is your phone number. What else can they learn about you with that number?

Then, consider apps that ask permission to upload your entire contact list to “see which of your friends is already using” that service. Apps like Facebook, Telegram, Venmo, (this list goes on and on) do this, which allows them at the very least to create a network of identity, mapping out connections between people not even using the service.

Access to Information

And before anyone starts hurling accusations that I’m anti-capitalist (which, well, I mean…), that’s not the point here. Even if we were to run schools like businesses, we would not be in the business of selling student information so others could make money off them. Yet here we are.

One very quick check to do with any digital exchange is to consider which way the information travels. What’s the minimal amount of data we need from students to provide them the access they need to learn?

Access to disciplinary information helps students learn.
Access to student information helps corporations profit.

And Then, the “Pivot”

Suddenly, the edge cases became ubiquitous, and students were compelled to register for whatever service their institution contracted with. In order to get access to school, students had to give companies access to their information. Access, these days, is everything—and students are never in control of it.

Yet many schools and teachers still think we should be entitled to more. But Zoom classes invade student privacy.

Institutions and faculty do not need access to the inside of student residences during class time. Students with roommates can’t control their backgrounds, and students often work where they sleep—watching a student’s bed should be seen as creepy, not required. In the past week, I’ve heard from three different friends about classes they took or meetings they joined for work where camera usage was mandatory, even though the participant’s environment had nothing to do with the meeting.

“It is not just the responsibility of ‘the tech people’ in the humanities to engage in action, but the responsibility of us all.” — Stephanie Vie, 2021

Students can’t object to these demands and still succeed. They have been disempowered by ed-tech. We have to step in and force ourselves upon the world, reducing demands for student information.