Sue Beckingham NTF, Sheffield Hallam University @suebecks
Keynote for #DigitalEd Week GMIT
Making social connections: The importance of
empathy, storytelling and re(building) confidence

Making social connections: The importance of empathy, storytelling and
re(building) confidence
This keynote will draw upon the seven principles within the Social Media for
Learning Framework (Middleton and Beckingham 2015) as a lens to highlight the
different aspects that have informed some of my approaches to learning and/or
teaching. I will share my experiences as an educational developer, lecturer,
academic adviser and as a returning student. Stepping into these different shoes,
the one constant is the importance of making social connections. This can be
transformational personally and for the staff or students you work and learn with.

EMPATHY

Do you want to zoom?
Can you hear me?
You are muted...
You’ve frozen

Worries and
concerns
Entering the room first and
having to make awkward
conversation
Forgetting to mute..
Not knowing where the leave
button was

Zoom bombing

connecting
networking
connecting
collaboration
interactivity
communication
trust
multimodality
community-
building
curation
participation
flexibility
active
learning
collegiality
sharing
customisation
inquiry
responsibility
creativity

The Tutor’s story

The Tutor’s Story
When you go in to a teaching session and you’re
confronted with a screen of black rectangles because no
one will come on camera and they won’t even
have profile pictures on and despite the fact that
you might have emailed them beforehand to say please
enter the room and have your webcam switched on,
it makes for a much more interactive and engaging
experience for everyone in the room and myself, you
just have a wall of black rectangles and you ask them
why don’t you come on camera? They won’t.
You’re talking to just a black screen and it’s a really,
really hard experience – it’s a struggle to get the
students engaged. You can ask a question and it’s just
silence and you find yourself having to pick on a name
and say, so what do you think?​

The Students’ stories

The Students’ Stories
I’m embarrassed about what others will think of
my accommodation.
My sister is in the same room and she hasn’t put
on her hijab. I can’t turn on my camera.
I’m praying I won’t be picked on to answer a
questions. It makes me anxious.

The Tutor’s story

The Tutor’s Story
It seems that every week just at the point where
I ask the students to undertake an activity on the
whiteboard or join a breakout room, the same
students leave.

The Students’ stories

The Students’ Stories
My house has a really unreliable internet
connection.
My laptop is very old.
I tried to join the class using my phone, but then
the data allowance runs out.
I’m sharing the wi-fi with my siblings who are
home schooling and my parents who are
working from home.

ELI 7 Things you should know about...
The Educause learning initiative has a library of over
170 resources
April 2021 additions:
• 7 Things you should know about mental health and
higher education
• 7 Things you should know about the digital divide

The Digital Divide
scenario
https://library.educause.edu/-
/media/files/library/2021/4/eli7177.pdf

The Mental Health
scenario
https://library.educause.edu/-
/media/files/library/2021/4/eli7178.pdf

Middleton and Beckingham 2015

Socially inclusive
» supporting and validating learning through mutually
beneficial, jointly enterprising and communally
constructive communities of practice;
» fostering a sense of belonging, being and becoming;
» promoting collegiality, feeling connected, social
glue.

Learning
incomes
“I like nowadays to think of ‘learning
incomes’ as well as learning
outcomes. The more we know about
what our students can already do,
where they’ve already been, their
hopes, fears and hang-ups, the better
we can help them to learn. “
Race 2014

“More importantly, most students find that when they are alerted to
the things they did not realise that they could already do well, they
gain confidence and self-esteem. As teachers, we need to remind
ourselves that our work is not just about telling students what they
need to do, but equally about alerting to students to strengths they
already have “
Race 2019:27
Competence
Uncompetence
Unconscious Conscious
Target
Can do
Transit
Can’t yet do
Danger
Magic
Unconscious competence: the ‘magic’ box Race, 2019:26

About me
videos
Reflective
blog posts on
skills
Lego Serious
Play
Academic
Adviser 121s

Lifewide and lifelong
» connecting formal, non-formal and informal learning
progression;
» developing online presence;
» developing digital literacies for experiential, problem solving,
creative and critical learning approaches

My own CPD
Students and
Alumni
Family
As a student
Group chat
Department colleagues

Media neutral
» learning across and through rich multiple media;
» providing opportunities for choices and self expression

Learner centred
» creative self-expression,
building self-efficacy and
confidence;
» accommodating niche
interests and activities, the
‘long tail’ of education

https://socialmediaforlearning.com/smash/smash-framework/

Co-operative
»promotes working together productively and critically as peers (co-
creation) in self-organising, robust networks that are scalable, loosely
structured, self-validating, and both knowledge-forming and
knowledge-sharing

Applied
Live
Projects
Working with local businesses to develop
a Digital Marketing Strategy

Open and accessible
» supporting special openness (without physical division
» supporting temporal openness i.e. synchronously and
asynchronously;
» supporting social openness i.e. democratic, inclusive;
» supporting open engagement i.e. in terms of access being:
geographically extended, inclusive, controlled by the
learner, gratis, open market, unconstrained freedom, access
to content (Anderson 2013)
» being open to ideas

Authentically situated
» making connections across learning,
social and professional networks
» scholarly
» establishing professional online
presence and digital identity

https://lthechat.com/ @LTHEchat #LTHEchat
Weekly tweetchat about Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

“We are not all in the same boat. We are all in
the same storm. Some are on super-yachts.
Some have just the one oar.”
Damian Barr
Illustration by Barbara Kelly
https://www.damianbarr.com/latest/https/we-are-not-all-in-the-same-boat