Thoughts on: Third Space Slowposium ( Connecting)

Forgive me blog father, it has been more than a year since my last post.

I have been working on the first draft of my PhD thesis – just currently (anxiously) awaiting feedback on that one. Oh and I’ve also been organising this little event – the Third Space Symposium with my colleagues in the TELedvisors Network. This is an event in two parts, with the first part, an asynchronous online ‘Slowposium’ having just started on Friday. This is a (mostly) drop-in-in-your-own-time asynchronous site featuring more than 50 different contributions about all aspects of working and thriving in the tertiary education third space. (Neither academics nor professionals but something in-between and across both)

If you’re hearing about this for the first time – come on down and join us. The Slowposium is free. This has been and is being run entirely by volunteers (so many wonderful, kind, patient and forgiving volunteers). More than 500 people so far have signed up to participate.

Ok, so preamble done, I thought it might be useful to capture what I’m actually learning from this event. It is conveniently organised into eight themes:

• Connecting – How we communicate with each other and build a community in the third space
• Identity – Who third space practitioners are: our roles, titles, and values
• Practice -The things that we do working in the third space
• Recognition – Demonstrating our value and raising understanding of our contribution
• Relationships – Building better collaboration with the people that we work with
• Research – Developing better understanding of the third space and the people in it
• Technology – Tools we use and the ways we use them
• Workplace – Practicalities of being a third space worker

In the spirit of easing in to this exercise, I’m starting with the smallest theme – Connecting. This is largely going to take the form of loose notes and observations on the fly rather than a structured, thought out post.

Two of the five sections in this are live events – Coffee with Puva and the #LTHE Twitter chat.

What’s beyond Twitter/X?
Meredith Hinze (Uni Melbourne), Sharon Altena (QUT) & Rebecca Ng (Uni of Wollongong)

Meredith, Sharon & Rebecca research aspects of third space working in their own time – because it isn’t supported work. Twitter/X has been a useful communication tool – they examined posts on the @TELedvisors twitter feed and found that Twitter was an important part of a learning designer’s network. This session focuses on what’s next – given the descent into fascist hellhole and all (my words). These networks and connections help people to learn what is happening outside their institution.

“We concluded that Twitter was an underutilised, non-hierarchical, open platform for learning designers to share their ideas, promote their work and to have conversations with a global community of like-minded individuals. Twitter should be considered an important part of a learning designer’s professional learning network (Ng et al., 2023)”

I have previously scanned this paper but it’s probably a good time for another proper read

These platforms offer “global, non-hierarchical connections” and “raise the profile of their contributions”. The networking they did during the pandemic, to share resources and ideas, may have been beyond the scope of their institutional roles [but I would suggest is very much in keeping with the Get Things Done nature of these roles].

Research questions – who were LDs talking to and what were they talking about.

Huh, we (TELedvisors) had 1006 accounts in our network. 550k tweets between Jan 2020 and 21. 110k from LDs.

14 main themes in the tweets:
(1)social and emotional support (54%)

(2)political 7%)

(3)non-teaching and learning (professionally relevant) (11%)

(4)teaching and learning related (28%)

(a)online and remote learning

(b)general pedagogy and teaching practice

(c)assessment and feedback

(d)accessibility

(e)educational technology

(f)Student engagement

(g)open education

(h)professional development

(i)promotion of research or event

(j)learning design.

The importance of connection and community in this network really stands out (and I must say is something that I am really proud of as it is one of the 4 purposes of the TELedvisors network. It really reinforces that we need to work out what comes next. Bluesky I guess. Though honestly LinkedIn seems increasingly popular.

Third Space Networks and Alliances
Silke Kirberg, Hochschule Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences

I think Silke might be our only German contributor, so it’s nice to get this perspective. She offers a simple provocation for discussion, asking for information about what supra-regional and regional networks exist to support instructional design/eLearning – or specific technologies such as Moodle.

I shared information about the TELedvisors Network, ACODE, ODLAA and the AITD and generally just banged on a bit about why and how they come together.

Leading from the third space
Gosia Drewniok, University of Bristol

Gosia is one of our European colleagues who has been helping put this event together, so it was nice to dive into less organisational/logistical topics. Her section (18 min video) relates to leaders in the third space.

Gosia moved into the 3S from academia, always feeling in between. The fluidity of the 3S sets up third space practitioners (TSPs) well for the fluidity of leadership. Important to know how to speak the language of both worlds/areas – academic and professional. She mentions that TSPs are able to speak the language of both academics and professionals (though she uses my least favourite term “non-academics”) – I posted a question noting that academics sometimes criticise professional TSPs for not speaking the language and asking what we can do about this.

How do you build credibility and develop? Active listening, ‘can do’ attitude, familiarity with how unis work, validating other people’s experiences, fostering collaboration, not hoarding information or power,

Conclusion

A common thread through these sections is the importance of relationships in the third space. I think that when you are working between and across so many boundaries, often in situations where we have very little power (and occasionally some resistance), this is arguably one of the most important skills we can have.