Programme: 2021

This short presentation will provide some hints and tips for how digital tools can be used to support and enable team work in the hybrid work place. It will explore how tools can be adopted to ensure the team are able to access, share and collaborate effectively regardless of their location.

Technology should enhance and expand what people can do, therefore people must be central to a digital change programme for it to succeed. Those using digital technologies need to be empowered stakeholders who are listened to, supported and have opportunities to engage with digital change initiatives. This engagement should include opportunities to explore how new digital technologies can be embedded into practices and transform processes. There needs to be space for experimentation and building understanding and confidence through the development of digital skills.

Successful digital transformation is reliant on culture and staff engagement across all levels of the organisation. In this interactive workshop we will consider barriers to digital change, the opportunities presented by digital technologies and steps we can take to build a digital culture. Workshop participants will get the opportunity to reflect on and share their current digital practices, explore how digital technologies can be used to transform processes and start to develop a digital culture action plan.

Sometimes digital can feel like an end in itself, rather than a tool to mitigate the limitations posed by a non-digital status quo. This presentation explores some of the challenges posed by paper marking, and how tablet marking can be used to eliminate them, without losing the efficiency, fluidity and ease that annotating physical scripts affords. With a balance between exploring ideas and practical demonstration, the session aims to facilitate discussion around the relevant issues and highlight a range of possible solutions, rather than simply showcasing a specific tool.

Have you ever wondered how Yorkshire coped with the Black Death? Or heard the one about the medieval nun who faked her own death in York, ran away from the convent, and later turned up alive and well in Beverley? These stories are just some of the many that have been uncovered as part of the recent AHRC-funded ‘Northern Way’ project.

A partnership project between University of York and The National Archives, with the support of York Minster, ‘The Northern Way’ has brought together academics, specialist researchers, librarians, archivists and IT specialists – online throughout Covid – to index the registers of the medieval Archbishops of York between 1304 and 1405. The project has created an online searchable database of the content of the registers, and an index to material held by The National Archives relating to the Archbishops of York over the same period. This talk will outline how the project has gone about using the collaborate expertise of the project team to vastly improve access to these previously underused records, and how the database can be used for future remote research projects.

Have you ever wanted to

• copy and paste maths to make your own notes?

• convert your handwritten maths into digital maths?

• listen to maths read out?

• zoom in to see maths more clearly?

• collaborate easily with others on a maths problem?

This interactive workshop helps you to get started with accessible maths. If you have equations in your learning resources, this workshop will help you to take control and personalise them for your own needs. We will learn to use the Chrome or Firefox browser for accessible maths, and we'll cover the basics of the EquatIO app and OrbitNote.

Details tbc

There is a long history of the science of intelligent machines and its potential to provide scientific insights have been debated since the dawn of AI. In particular, there is renewed interest in the role of AI in research and research policy as an enabler of new methods, processes, management and evaluation which is still relatively under-explored. This empirical paper is based on a published piece we wrote in AI & Society, and explores interviews with leading scholars on the potential impact of AI on research practice and culture through deductive, thematic analysis to show the issues affecting academics and universities today. Our interviewees identify positive and negative consequences for research and researchers with respect to collective and individual use. AI is perceived as helpful with respect to information gathering and other narrow tasks, and in support of impact and interdisciplinarity. However, using AI as a way of ‘speeding up—to keep up’ with bureaucratic and metricised processes, may proliferate negative aspects of academic culture in that the expansion of AI in research should assist and not replace human creativity.

Students have valuable insights into their own learning experiences, and are well placed to inform curricula and learning design, ensuring that their needs are met. Inequalities in society also manifest in unequal access to and participation in instructor-student partnerships. This has major consequences on which student voices are heard and incorporated in curriculum development.

In this talk we will introduce partnership in Higher Education, explore how this can be used to further further equality, diversity, inclusion goals, reflect on our experiences of collaborating remotely to improve digital accessibility, and share recommendations for facilitating inclusive student internships. Our team included student and staff members with lived experience of disability and these experiences enriched and informed the outcomes of this successful project. We worked flexibly and remotely using a variety of digital tools including Google Suite Collaborative tools, assistive technology, and the Virtual Learning Environment. Mindful of the limits of our knowledge and experience, we consulted with students with relevant lived experience outside of the team.

Lockdown forced us to postpone the first SAQN Collaboration Building Workshop, and it was possibly the best thing that could have happened to it. As a result, we re-thought the format entirely, switching to a virtual workshop that participants told us was even better than meeting in person. The workshop was designed to develop interdisciplinary working relationships between new communities of scientists, and for them to create new research projects that could be funded. The process was so successful that we refined and repeated it in a second online workshop, and the format is now being used by other research groups.

In this presentation, we will share the challenges and successes of building a collaborative community online, how we have used different platforms, and how we're applying our experience to other networking activities.

In previous years, Steph's shown us how to make an Advent calendar and a Christmas cracker using nothing but spreadsheets and hope. What unusual but seasonal use for spreadsheets will she have found for us this year?