Episode 59 Yasser Tamer
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(Opening mellow background music Driving Over the Hills (ID 1974) by Lobo Loco)


(Begin opening guest quote)

[00:00:00] Yasser Tamer: But I want to just normalize the idea of students coming to a classroom, finding a professor who's blind, different from them. And then I want to remove the idea of the stigma of how he's going to teach us. No, he's going to teach us by doing the same that other professors do. 

(End opening guest quote)

[00:00:23] Alan Levine: This is the voice of an open educator you will get to know better in this episode. 

This is Alan Levine from Open Education Global. We're starting up our new round of our OEG Voices Podcast. Over the next couple of months, we're going to be featuring, some really special people who are winners of the Open Awards for Excellence.

And I'm really excited the first one is going to be someone recognized with a student award. We're going to get to learn more about Yasser Tamer, from the American University in Cairo, who was recognized in the student award category.

So hello Yasser, how are you doing today?

[00:01:00] Yasser Tamer: Thank you so much, Alan, for having me today. I'm so much honored and it's a great pleasure to be here, especially after the OE Award event, which was featured on YouTube. And it was a day with lots of interaction on Twitter and on LinkedIn and all these places. I had so much joy witnessing that and observing these festivities and celebrations. Thank you so much for having me once again.

[00:01:27] Alan Levine: And thank you for being here. We should get to know you. There's so many things we could ask. Did you grow up in Cairo? Is that your home?

[00:01:35] Yasser Tamer: I'll just try to be brief. So I am a person with total blindness. To put an audio description of myself, I am a slightly tall person. I am a full Egyptian from Egyptian parents as well, born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. 

I grew up learning in an Arabic school and Arabic education national system. Then I moved to the American University in Cairo in 2021, starting my degree in comparative literature and minors in education and linguistics. I've been disabled all my life as well. This has been a great cornerstone in my identity and how I can see myself as a person, as an advocate, as a human being from the Global South, from an emerging economy, from a marginal geographical location, an area which very much lacks the resources that are available. This just makes it a bit unique to me as a person just to be recognized for an Open Ed award.

[00:02:39] Alan Levine: And we're so pleased to learn more about you . There's so many things we want to talk about. But I'm just kind of curious, what is life at a university in Cairo like? Day to day, what's campus life like?

[00:02:52] Yasser Tamer: I have to acknowledge that being a student of the American University in Cairo, I'm quite privileged because AUC features those elite types of students, those of higher social classes, like those who have the adequate financial resources to have a quality education and live in a liberal arts institution.

But as I come from this background, as I said, a marginalized background, having had the challenge to secure funding for my studies. So campus life reflects that for me. Many people do look at it from the idea that they want to finish their degree, but I come here at this campus to learn more about something that I haven't seen in my life before.

As I said, I was educated in this national system, an Arabic school, a school that has very limited resources. So coming to this campus with all the adequate resources, educational, social... It just feels so surreal to learn about these different backgrounds and to understand how different you are from these sets of skills being taught and how different you are from these people whom you have to learn about and whom you have to adapt your learning and your style to understand what you're going to do. 

And so day to day I have to say that my main goal is always centered around building connections. With these connections that are being built for me is learning along every opportunity that is being offered. I don't see the whole journey ending on the spectrum of courses. But I see it as a kind of growth.

What is after that? What is beyond the moment? So this moment ends, but I have to say what is beyond that.

[00:04:42] Alan Levine: Just hearing you speak, you're highly motivated. Where does that come from?

[00:04:45] Yasser Tamer: I have to acknowledge that I was raised by my grandparents. So I was influenced by how they raised me into the shape that I am right now. I guess the word that I would call here is empowered. So I wasn't actually prohibited from doing anything.

Any experience that pops up into my mind and I want to experience it, why not experience it? Why not learning more about how it takes to be the better person you are? And I was getting to the idea of seeing other disabled activists, and particularly blind people, seeing them travel through the whole world, attending conferences and presenting, then getting their PhDs and masters and all that.

So I've been questioning that as well for myself. What would hinder me from doing such steps? What would hinder me from doing these qualifications to be a better person, probably to be the first person in my whole family having grad studies or maybe a Higher Ed position in the future?

I guess that's sort of the two driven facts that empower me, getting me at the level of motivation that I'm kind of at now.

[00:05:57] Alan Levine: So tell us, part of the recognition was for your being an open advocate, for not only people with disabilities, but, equity and justice through Twitter. How did you get into Twitter? What was your first thoughts when you came across Twitter?

[00:06:11] Yasser Tamer: That's a pretty interesting provocation to put here . I have to just acknowledge the kind of privilege that I have, having learned English as a student in the U. S. Embassy in Cairo, in a program offered by the Regional English Language Office. And it was also supported by AUC, so I have known AUC ever since I joined it as a student. So this has been part of the way I was seeing myself.

So, this established my activism. Because here in Egypt, we don't have the obvious form of activism that the whole world sees and observes. And I've been trying to explore what is happening in the other parts of the world that we're kind of deprived from seeing due to the financial limited resources or the lack of support around conferences .

Being able to speak English is a privilege because you'll get to read blogs, you'll get to speak with people, you'll get to understand their mentality. Then you'll get to transform that experiential learning to Egyptian communities and to unprivileged youth. And Twitter has been a great step towards that.

I actually came into Twitter in 2018. It was one of those boring days, one of the monotonous ones that okay, I'm, I'm scrolling through Facebook, which is a familiar space, a space just to get to know what is happening around family, seeing their photos and stories and all that.

And of course, no alt text is being provided, so you get to be deprived from seeing the whole experience. I am not bothered or upset from not seeing these experiences. I feel like I'm not missing on a lot. And no one of my family had Twitter.

No one invited me, no one told me come on and follow me on Twitter. I just said, like, let's explore a new space. And then one of my great friends was living in the UK, who is now a professor and an international disability consultant, he had his Twitter account and I wanted actually to get to know this person.

And I just followed him and I followed other people who he follows. I just got to interact, to see their tweets, and then step by step I just felt like there are many great stuff being mentioned here. There are a lot of things that we're discussing here in Egypt as well that are absent from their discussions.

As I've been mentioning to you before we record, you would find problematic issues in the US and the UK and Europe around disability communities, particularly the blind community. They are often refused from getting into a restaurant or a club or a pool or whatever with their guide dogs.

That's a problem. That's an issue that we have to reconcile now and understand. Here in Egypt, you would never find that. Here in Egypt, you would find the problem of lacking employment, lacking the support around getting a Higher Ed. You can get denied the right of employment, you can get denied the right to get to a specific higher education institution.

Until now, in 2023, getting into a degree in computer science, for example, for some colleagues, has been one of the hardest steps to get through it. And you wouldn't be acknowledged as a computer scientist. You wouldn't be acknowledged in the coding stuff. I know at my institution, AUC, it's such an easy step because , AUC is a liberal arts American institution, and it follows the American with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Law 504.

There is the other end of the spectrum where it's very difficult even for people with disabilities to get through such degrees. I was denied the entry to the Faculty of Arts, English Literature Department, on the basis that I cannot write. I heard that people with hard hearing and the deaf community are denied the fact to get into Higher Ed in Egypt.

This was the nuance that motivated me to understand what is happening in the other parts of the world and how we can solidify that movement, get it here, transform it here and get it into the country and have people learn about it. And then I started learning more and more on Twitter. And this has been a surprise to me, Maha, the Educator Award winner, who is from my institution as well, I actually knew her on Twitter. This has been also interesting just , to form that community part on Twitter. 

To learn about it , it's been great. And now we're kind of deprived from that community because many people are leaving. The platform has become very brutal for disabled people. The accessibility team was actually laid off quite a while ago. And the support around accessibility is being decreased.

The recent news I have heard is that the header link has been removed from Twitter and this will just be too hard for disabled people to cope. I'm not leaving the platform right now. I might be leaving in the future. Now, I'm not, because I cannot imagine not reading the blog posts of my colleagues in the US and the UK, , having these conversations with them about their problems and letting them about mine as well. 

Twitter is great. It separates you from the physical, brutal world, and it gets you into a world that no one will judge you. You can enforce certain equalities on people because you want to enforce these values, because you want to represent yourself.

[00:11:46] Alan Levine: That's so good. You got to a lot of questions I wanted to ask about, the current state of Twitter. But also, can you give our audience and me even an idea, , like, there's the mechanics part of how you navigate Twitter for someone without vision. And you talk about scrolling through things, how do you describe the experience for someone who is sighted? What does it take for you to be participating in Twitter? 

[00:12:11] Yasser Tamer: I'm always driven by text, so, I'm not that person who will be mesmerized by a visual. So, the whole experience lies in the textual part. A post is being written, some comments, some threads are being initiated here and there. On Twitter, it's just these little corners of texts that are 280 characters for the most public part. 

And you get to read and you get to read the replies, respond to people and see how the community thinks. And, you will have the whole space. You will not have the problematic issue of getting to a place to participate, you can reply and participate,.

If it was an in person event, it would have been difficult , to have this whole idea every time. Getting from a place to another is sort of a difficult situation. And then scrolling through things here and there and getting to represent yourself is pretty much influenced by the text part.

How lovely if people also put alt text, it would, it would be really surreal and kind of an intriguing. 

[00:13:14] Alan Levine: I've been intrigued by this for a while . I would periodically go through my public timeline and go through like 50 tweets with images. I might count maybe five, never more than ten percent even had alt text. I imagine that probably hasn't changed.

[00:13:32] Yasser Tamer: That's part of your experience. That's you. I'm glad that you're counting even 10%. I never saw something in Arabic that taught alt text. That's an example that illustrates how hard it is here, how awareness is being diminished. Even the awareness campaigns are so hard to even do,. Activists are not getting paid, and the sessions are not of interest to people. In the global West, there are some percentage, and some people might be inspired by this small percentage.

Here, the percentage is not seen, and therefore progression is not being made because of the lack of awareness and the lack of experience around 

[00:14:12] Alan Levine: In the nomination for your award, what was pointed out was that in your advocacy, you don't really try to shame people or say what they're doing wrong. You really try to encourage them to understand. There's so much that happens in social media in general, where people do that, they say like, you're, you're doing this wrong.

How did you come to this place of trying to be more of a guide or an encourager or someone to try to influence people positively.

[00:14:41] Yasser Tamer: There has to be a sense of tolerance and forgiveness and forgiveness between people The idea of mentorship is important. That's what is missing from the global West community, from the foreign community. They want everything to be perfect, 100 percent perfect. And I would just recall this example of the newly launched campaign in the UK, which is Just Ask, Don't Assume.

People are just getting mad at the campaign, because they say that it will encourage the public to cross disabled people's boundaries and maybe assault them and just discriminate, harass them or whatever. And I see it from another point of view. Just ask, don't assume. If you are seeing it as disabled people, I mean the campaign that will encourage people to cross your boundaries.

If we are prohibiting disabled people from asking, how are we expecting them to learn and to be educated? That's the whole argument. Yeah, there has to be some boundaries. There has to be some sort of a place where an interaction happening. And then education is just, it's just happening informally.

Because classes around disability is also limited. Undergrad classes and grad classes around disability studies are limited. The global institutions, if they are even available, they will be available for grad people, and grad students are not interested in disability work.

And you would find the lack of education also around this whole idea. I don't have the capacity to shame people, because I'm not educating people if I shame them. If I shame them, , where is the education part here, and where is the understanding being, being shaped? Where is the footprint when Alan would see something about disability, they would just say, saying like, yes, there is this and has said this, has advised that.

If I'm shaming people, Alan would say, "disabled people are always confrontational." Disabled people are not educating us properly. And I understand the point, by the way, I'm not attacking disabled people in the UK or the US, saying like their point is not valid.

No, the point is fully valid because their backgrounds might be quite different. They might be exposed to assault. And they might be exposed to this public infringement and all that. I understand, but there has also to be some questioning around how disabled people can be approached.

By doing this whole thing of attacking and shaming, we discourage the public from approaching us. And then disabled people after a few years, I assume, will come saying, "we're excluded." No, you're not excluded. People are kind of fearing to come to you, to come over to you, to approach you because of that, because of the big argument that you're putting on the idea of approaching you.

[00:17:41] Alan Levine: I see that. We talked a little bit before the recording, all the things that you're doing. I know that from your interactions on Twitter, where you got to know Maha Bali and then got involved with Equity Unbound and MyFest. Now you're leading sessions with other educators.

And you mentioned working on some papers. So what are you looking at in the future? What are you excited about and what are you going to be working on after in this year?

[00:18:06] Yasser Tamer: I call this 2023. I don't know, I would call it the Big Bang year for me, personally. So the Earth has witnessed the Big Bang, and I have witnessed my Big Bang in 2023. So much has happened this year, and I couldn't have imagined that I would get to this point of transformation, reflection, interaction, community, work, professional development, and as well personal development .

What I'm mostly excited about, like If you come to an undergraduate student now and ask them what are you excited about they'll tell you graduation. But I can tell you what i'm mostly excited about is getting my PhD, like the day that I will defend it It'll not be the end because I don't have an end. Nelson Mandela said. "It's impossible until it's done." it's not impossible, it's just impossible for others. But it's not impossible for me. I'll do it. One of the initial dreams that I had set for myself this year was to publish something and I had the opportunity to submit something for a journal.

I hopefully will get a lot of other publications in the future. But this has been a kind of a dream. Like what prohibits me from publishing? What bans me from doing that. From reflecting on what I learned on MyFest. I've been leading sessions with educators. I have futurized the course at my institution that possibly can be taught in 20 years.

I've also, got awarded the Best Engaged Research Award at my institution as well. And then after these things that happened in the beginning of 2023, I been one of the core organizers of MyFest, managing and leading sessions and being responsible for the hospitality in these Zoom sessions.

And the Open Ed award complemented all that with recognition. After being represented in all these, social justice has come to an individual with a disability that Open Education is recognizing it. So, I think that's testament to what I want to do. 

My ultimate goal is teaching and teaching. My ultimate goal is teaching, just changing the whole domain of academia.

A professor possibly in the global west or in Egypt or whatever. But I want to just normalize the idea of students coming to a classroom, finding a professor who's blind, different from them. And then I want to remove the idea of the stigma of how he's going to teach us. No, he's going to teach us by doing the same that other professors do.

[00:20:35] Alan Levine: Right, because they're going to see you as this professor and see that first. I can see it. I can see it already, but I can hear it. And I'm just wondering, for people who may not be familiar. I know what MyFest is. I've been part of it, but how do you describe it?

What's the brief way you can give people a sense of what happens in MyFest?

[00:20:54] Yasser Tamer: MyFest is the three month professional development experience where educators and, generally speaking, facilitators, people interested in higher education come together to attend these sessions where we have no lecturing. And I would love to say we, I'm not saying Equity Unbound because I'm seeing myself as part of Equity Unbound.

You don't have this lecturing part. The sessions are interactive, reflections are always there for people. And it's throughout the summer. In 2022 and 2023, the schedules were emerging, so we didn't have the final program. I remember one day, someone was just saying in the chat, we want a session like this and this and this, and then another person responded in the chat, Yeah, let's do that together. Then they reached out to us and they said, " we want to do this session" and we scheduled it later.

So MyFest is emancipatory, rejuvenating, renewable journey for everybody, to get out of the institutional boundaries of lecturing. We're coming here to learn we're coming in to bond and we're coming here to build our community.

We have a community building sessions, sessions that are just designed for you with some activities in mind only to meet with people and to form relationships. I've been honored and I've been fortunate enough I've been the only undergraduate student.

[00:22:20] Alan Levine: It's a fantastic contribution. And I love the way you describe it as not being lectures that it's really activity driven. That's what I always like about the activities that go on there. 

I hate to ask the question... The thing that many educators are talking about is artificial intelligence, like-- What, Put aside trying to explain it broadly. As a student today in a university, how are students looking at this and what are they thinking in terms of what their institution and professor are doing?

[00:22:49] Yasser Tamer: Pretty much like the whole world, it's the idea of policing. It's the idea of plagiarism, it's the idea of surveillance. I have read about this area. And I've been, I don't have an opinion for it, but I always change my opinion from time to time. Very much, it's about we want to place some trust in students as teachers.

And as students, we want to place some interest in [indecipherable]. There has to be some mutual goal in those two, quite uncertain positionalities. Teachers are not certain about the AI world, and students are not always certain about what they can do with it. So do we have to ban it?

No. Do we have to fully depend on it? Also no. So what should we do? We have to decide. You have to decide, as a student, how you can learn, how you can leverage learning, how you can write fully, and how can you use AI as well to learn. And this has been problematic in many institutions around Egypt and abroad, in the US. There's no such reaffirmative policy, right?

None of the policies now, I think in any, at any university, at any institution has been saying no AI and none of the policy has been saying full yes to AI. And this has been my approach throughout this whole one and a half years. How to explore AI, how to see it, how to use it for learning.

Coming from this comparative literature degree where 80 percent of my work I do it in writing. So how professors are shifting their teaching modality to the in class assignments. We no longer write papers. I think, no, there is something missing here, which is the idea of reflection.

Nothing can be written in one hour, two hours, perfect.

[00:24:39] Alan Levine: I mean, individually, you Yasser, as a student, how are you using it? Is it helpful for summarizing? Do you use it to help shape writing? 

[00:24:46] Yasser Tamer: For me, I use it to make content accessible. Like the OCR technology, optical character recognition, I think it depends somehow on the AI technology, because you might have something that is not really organized well, PDF it's just the imaging of it is not really done properly.

So I use it to just provide like accessible contents. And Because blind people use Word document the most. Many times. , I use technologies, like chatPDF, apps like chatpdf, or chatdoc, or these technologies to get the correct page numbers. 

So when citing something, I kind of know the same page number in the PDF to properly cite it. When the professor checks the assignment, they find the right page number instead of like citing my word document, which is different from the original document that is being cited. 

Recently I also got an opportunity to test a new technology as an accessibility consultant, which is the Be My AI technology, which provides automatic alternative text.

So you, you upload an actual image to the application on the phone and then it gives you the alternative text.

[00:25:54] Alan Levine: How is that working? Is it effective? 

[00:25:56] Yasser Tamer: It actually hallucinates sometimes like any AI driven model and it sometimes does pretty good .But the good thing that they have done is that they banned it from recognizing any facial expressions. So I can't upload an image of Alan it will say photo is being blocked because it captures a human being. And I've been worried about that because like, people can upload nudity and unethical photos to the technology. Then AI will start to expand on the data, and then we will find its responses being affected by that. 

But they blocked the feature of recognizing human facial expression. Which you might see it as a kind of a drawback that people would like to picture all text of people, but I see it from an ethical point of view, that AI also learns from the data, which is feeded to the technologies, through the models.

We don't want AI to learn from unethical stuff.

[00:26:52] Alan Levine: Is a bad or hallucinated image description better than none?

[00:26:57] Yasser Tamer: It has some drawbacks. It has some assumptions, like, it assumes certain alt texts that are expressive of certain points of view. it's better than nothing. You know, people are trying to use AI to the best they see fit and we can't say it's bad. We can't say it's good. 

We have to assess the way that we're using AI right now, and the context of teachers and students as people. As blind people, we have to know what image we are uploading to the AI in order to get the best out of it.

[00:27:30] Alan Levine: I really enjoyed our conversation. I do wanna ask Yasser, like all the stuff you're doing, busy with school and writing papers, research, being an advocate... What do you do to get away from, it for fun? What's your hobby or your interest that you're most passionate about that let you get a reprieve from all the intense work of being a student?

[00:27:47] Yasser Tamer: Honestly speaking, I've been thinking this, recently that my favorite stuff, I've always. drawn towards learning. I'm not that person you will find in the cinema or a concert. 

But I just can't pick one. I love watching football. I love watching matches, enjoying the football commentators and their passion. 

[00:28:07] Alan Levine: Do you have a team that you follow? 

[00:28:09] Yasser Tamer: I've got quite a few. Of course, I support the teams here in Egypt are pretty good. I haven't experienced playing it myself., but I have a kind of a mental picture around the pitch, about how the field is just divided. I also picture the positionality of the players,

the positions of the midfielders, the goalkeeper, I have this in my mind. It sometimes makes sense, sometimes not. But at the end of the day, if I want to get out of what I do, I just go home, watch a football match with a favorite commentator who has passion to the football moving, rolling around the pitch.

[00:28:44] Alan Levine: So football fan. Do you watch the World Cup?

[00:28:47] Yasser Tamer: Yeah, yeah,

[00:28:49] Alan Levine: Who were you pulling for this year?

[00:28:51] Yasser Tamer: This year I've been pulling for England,

[00:28:53] Alan Levine: Uhhuh

[00:28:54] Yasser Tamer: As Egypt was not really nominated. But I've been pulling for England, I've been influenced by the UK in terms of their accessibility and disability work, so I've been cheering for them. Because, \ apparently there was some accessibility precautions taken into consideration in England when it comes to blind people going to the football matches and going also to experience the playgrounds and the, clothing rooms and all that.

It's been great, so I've been cheering for them, wanting them to advance seeing how they can go. Because with more matches for England with more blind people experiencing the tournament in their clothing. I've been also cheering for the England women in the World Cup. I think it also has had a greater impact on accessibility because there was so much work done and how disabled people and marginalized women are being represented in football and how we can also think of blind football. Blind football is also advancing and how we can think of that as well.

[00:29:55] Alan Levine: Say more. What is blind football?

[00:29:57] Yasser Tamer: It's played using a football that has a bell that rings inside. So whenever you move the bill, the blind person hears the football is going and then they just run towards the football and they score goals. I don't have the technicalities around it because I haven't played and it's not really good in Egypt here.

That's part of who I am as well is that I want to be granted an opportunity to just see how the physical world is thinking of accessibility and disability. I don't have the resources to go and travel on my own to explore the physical world when it comes to accessibility.

As much as I can do it online, unfortunately, I'm unprivileged to experience disability work being done in person, because Egypt has very, very limited resources when it comes to that.

[00:30:45] Alan Levine: I think beyond that PhD, you're going to do many things and I look forward to following. Thank you for joining us for this podcast. It's great to get to know you. 

Exchanges and Twitters are good, but getting a chance to talk to someone one on one is really something I enjoy doing.

[00:31:01] Yasser Tamer: Definitely.

[00:31:03] Alan Levine: Thank you Yasser and congratulations again for the award.

[00:31:06] Yasser Tamer: Thank you. And it's been great to also learn about more people who got the awards. Even those who were nominated and didn't get the chance to get that award this year. Catherine Cronin, whom I interacted with through MyFest. She's done great on leadership . 

Also, Patrina Law who also got the OE Award with her own relation in the Open University in the UK. I haven't known about the Open University, considering the fact that there are degrees in Open Education from Open University all over the world, it feels so right. 

It feels so great to see how the world is moving towards open access. And earlier in MyFest also witnessed the work about open textbooks. And there is so much done in the whole world. I don't wanna keep mentioning names because there are many people have to be mentioned, to be honest, because they do very good work towards OE

And OE also provides a room for accessibility. And I would like to just praise all that. And also thank OE Global this dedication and these events every year, recognizing people from different backgrounds, students, educators and people in leadership institutions as well.

And, I would like also to congratulate the students from Libritexts who got the Shared Student Award as well. They've done a lot. I haven't followed Libretexts that much, but I'm sure they've done great work also to be recognized. And yeah, I look forward to getting the educator award in the future. Why not right? 

[00:32:34] Alan Levine: You heard it here and I will predict it. 

[00:32:36] Yasser Tamer: Thank you, Alan. Thank It's so great to speak to you today.

(Closing mellow background music)

[00:32:40] Alan Levine: Thank you for listening to OEG Voices, along with our unique guest, each episode features a different musical track selected from the free music archive. For today's show, we selected a track called Driving Over the Hills, ID 1974, by Lobo Loco, and that's licensed under a Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4. 0 International License. 

You can find this episode at our site, voices dot oeglobal dot org. And we hope you engage in follow up conversations with Yasser in our OEG Connect community, connect dot oeglobal dot org. 

If you are listening and would like to share your own open education work or suggest a future guest, please let us know via our website or connect or by email to voices at oeglobal dot org. 

We hope to hear you here.