Skip to main content

Home/ educators/ Group items tagged openness

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Ed Webb

Open Educator as DJ - 0 views

  •  
    Scott Leslie's presentation
Dave Truss

» Would You Please Block? Bud the Teacher - 11 views

  • What we’ve decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool.  Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them.  Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem. 
    • Dave Truss
       
      A brilliantly worded statement that needs to be said!
  • This opens up possibilities for students and staff using websites for instructional purposes that in the past were blocked due to broad category blocks.  It requires that staff and students manage their technology use rather than relying on a third party solution that can never do the job of replacing teachers monitoring students.
  •  
    What we've decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool.
Dave Truss

open thinking » Freedom Sticks For The Classroom - 4 views

  •  
    So let's go through the list of things of issues: * Filtering blocked some really important, educational sites. * No visual editor in Wordpress because of IE 6 (it seems). * No ability to attach files to blogposts. * No Flash player. Frustrating! Solution:
Dennis OConnor

E-Learning Graduate Certificate Program: Finding E-Learning Jobs - 10 views

  • Online teaching was the perfect part-time job for me. E-learning and online teaching replaced coaching and after school clubs as a way to supplement my income. I loved it! I was working with great teachers from around the world and learning new things everyday. I also realized I was opening a door to a new career. Eventually, after 25 years in a traditional classroom, I decided to take early retirement, and pursue my passion for online teaching and learning full time.
Vicki Davis

Legal Experts on How Murdoch's Threats May Impact "Fair Use" Doctrine | BNET Media Blog... - 2 views

  • Media industry titan Rupert Murdoch’s explicit threats this week to block Google from searching his content sites, and to sue the BBC for its use of content he says is “stolen” from his sites got me to wondering whether the head of News Corp. has, in fact, any basis in the law for launching these calculated attacks at this time and in this manner.
  • Murdoch perhaps does have at least a narrow legal perch to stand on.
  • he is not trying to grow his audience any longer, he says.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • is for nonprofit educational purposes;
  • the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
  • he says he is re-tuning his business model around monetizing his content.
  • four factors in determining whether the reproduction of any copyrighted work qualifies as Fair Use
  • he’s trying to shrink his audience back to the people who will pay for his content
  • Therefore Google’s caching of his content would make it free even as he’s trying to charge for it
    • Vicki Davis
       
      So basically, Google is taking something he wants to charge for and making it free. But my question is, if he wants to charge for it, shouldn't it be bedhind some sort of firewall or is it Google's job to see which sites it is allowed to index? Aren't there certain protocols that make the Net what it is? Certain standards? Isn't one of those the open indexing or crawling of unprotected sites? I'm not sure but hoping someone will respond.
  • Google allows Murdoch, or any publisher, to “opt out” of allowing its pages to be indexed?
  • know how to use the Robots Exclusion Protocol
  • he wants a closer relationship with Google.
  •  
    Excellent overview of Rupert Murdoch's taking on of Google and that they should not index his sites, even though he can easily opt out of indexing, that they are somehow demonetizing his work by searching since he wants to "reduce his audience to those who will pay" not "increase his audience." This is a fascinating read and case study for those following Fair Use.
Maggie Verster

OpenOffice.org Solutions - OpenOffice.org Wiki - 8 views

  •  
    Wish me luck I am emerging myself in Openoffice for the next few months...who knows maybe I will then stiuck with it....
  •  
    Good luck! I have recently fallen in love w/ Open Office. I mostly enjoy the ability to save to gDocs.
Suzie Nestico

#WW Twitter Welcome Wednesday -just the "Guidelines" | Kalinago English - 1 views

  • For example, do this#WW welcome @Craig an English Language Teacher based in Dubai, #ELT ~ interested in #dogme and chocolate. #TEFL#WW @Jenny - she's a Teen Fiction author based in Ireland. Open to being interviewed by your students.  #fiction #ireland #education #younglearners #WW shout out 2 @Bob a good buddy of mine, help me welcome him! - #mlearning evangelist #edublogger and head of #edtech at @UniversityofMiami But please don't do this:#WW @Jenny @Craig @Bob @June @Alice @TomatoHead @eLearningGuru  as this is unhelpful to everyone.
  •  
    Great idea to help colleagues get started on Twitter with a #WW ~ "Welcome Wednesday"
Barry Peterson

Connect Administrators, Teachers and Classrooms, Anywhere, Anytime - 23 views

GVO Conference has no limits or restrictions. This system will take whatever you throw at it! GVO Conference requires absolutely no download and works on all operating systems. This highjly secure ...

administrator all_teachers bestpractices edublogger curriculum history literature math science technology language edu_news edu_trends edu_newapp digitalcitizenship techintegrator professionaldevelopment edublog web2 web3d elementary middleschool grants

started by Barry Peterson on 21 Apr 11 no follow-up yet
Suzie Nestico

Google+ could make Twitter the next Myspace | VentureBeat - 4 views

  • Although Twitter is growing (having just hit 200 million tweets a day), Twitter has left itself open to be displaced with a slow pace of adding features. Even newly returned founder Jack Dorsey has said that it was too difficult for “normal” people to use Twitter.
  • Google+ is decidedly in the Twitter camp — meaning you can follow anyone, including Google CEO Larry Page. Google+ lets you see Page’s posts and “like” his photos of kite surfing in Alaska. When posting on Google+, it forces users to select specific social circles they are posting to, which includes “everyone” as an option that mimics a Twitter-style broadcast. I
  • There are two different types of social networks, private and public — each defined by its default privacy setting. Facebook is by default private and meant to connect actual friends. Twitter by default is public and anyone can follow anyone else.
  •  
    Interesting article found on Google+ via @markwagner
Vicki Davis

WP Clipart - 9 views

  •  
    WPClipart is a collection of high-quality artwork and photos optimized for use with word processors and inkjet printers. Citation: @wfryer: WP Clip Art is great site of openly licensed clip art http://www.wpclipart.com via @kfasimpaur #iste11
Martin Burrett

39 new special free schools to open in England - 0 views

  •  
    "Thousands of new school places are being created for children with special educational needs or those facing additional challenges in mainstream education, providing tailored support to help children thrive. Every region in the country will benefit from a new school, which include 37 special free schools and two alternative provision free schools. This will create around 3,500 additional school places, boosting choice for parents and providing specialist support and education for pupils with complex needs such as autism, severe learning difficulties or mental health conditions, and those who may have been or are at risk of being excluded from mainstream schools."
Ed Webb

The academy's neoliberal response to COVID-19: Why faculty should be wary and... - 1 views

  • In the neoliberal economy, workers are seen as commodities and are expected to be trained and “work-ready” before they are hired. The cost and responsibility for job-training fall predominantly on individual workers rather than on employers. This is evident in the expectation that work experience should be a condition of hiring. This is true of the academic hiring process, which no longer involves hiring those who show promise in their field and can be apprenticed on the tenure track, but rather those with the means, privilege, and grit to assemble a tenurable CV on their own dime and arrive to the tenure track work-ready.
  • The assumption that faculty are pre-trained, or able to train themselves without additional time and support, underpins university directives that faculty move classes online without investing in training to support faculty in this shift. For context, at the University of Waterloo, the normal supports for developing an online course include one to two course releases, 12-18 months of preparation time, and the help of three staff members—one of whom is an online learning consultant, and each of whom supports only about two other courses. Instead, at universities across Canada, the move online under COVID-19 is not called “online teaching” but “remote teaching”, which universities seem to think absolves them of the responsibility to give faculty sufficient technological training, pedagogical consultation, and preparation time.
  • faculty are encouraged to strip away the transformative pedagogical work that has long been part of their profession and to merely administer a course or deliver course material
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • remote teaching directives are rooted in the assumption that faculty are equally positioned to carry them out
  • The dual delivery model—in which some students in a course come to class and others work remotely using pre-recorded or other asynchronous course material—is already part of a number of university plans for the fall, even though it requires vastly more work than either in-person or remote courses alone. The failure to accommodate faculty who are not well positioned to transform their courses from in-person to remote teaching—or some combination of the two— will actively exacerbate existing inequalities, marking a step backward for equity.
  • Neoliberal democracy is characterized by competitive individualism and centres on the individual advocacy of ostensibly equal citizens through their vote with no common social or political goals. By extension, group identity and collective advocacy are delegitimized as undemocratic attempts to gain more of a say than those involved would otherwise have as individuals.
  • Portraying people as atomized individuals allows social problems to be framed as individual failures
  • faculty are increasingly encouraged to see themselves as competitors who must maintain a constant level of productivity and act as entrepreneurs to sell ideas to potential investors in the form of external funding agencies or private commercial interests. Rather than freedom of enquiry, faculty research is increasingly monitored through performance metrics. Academic governance is being replaced by corporate governance models while faculty and faculty associations are no longer being respected for the integral role they play in the governance process, but are instead considered to be a stakeholder akin to alumni associations or capital investors.
  • treats structural and pedagogical barriers as minor individual technical or administrative problems that the instructor can overcome simply by watching more Zoom webinars and practising better self-care.
  • In neoliberal thought, education is merely pursued by individuals who want to invest in skills and credentials that will increase their value in the labour market.
  • A guiding principle of neoliberal thought is that citizens should interact as formal equals, without regard for the substantive inequalities between us. This formal equality makes it difficult to articulate needs that arise from historical injustices, for instance, as marginalized groups are seen merely as stakeholders with views equally valuable to those of other stakeholders. In the neoliberal university, this notion of formal equality can be seen, among other things, in the use of standards and assessments, such as teaching evaluations, that have been shown to be biased against instructors from marginalized groups, and in the disproportionate amount of care and service work that falls to these faculty members.
  • Instead of discussing better Zoom learning techniques, we should collectively ask what teaching in the COVID-19 era would look like if universities valued education and research as essential public goods.
  • while there are still some advocates for the democratic potential of online teaching, there are strong criticisms that pedagogies rooted in well-established understandings of education as a collective, immersive, and empowering experience, through which students learn how to deliberate, collaborate, and interrogate established norms, cannot simply be transferred online
  • Humans learn through narrative, context, empathy, debate, and shared experiences. We are able to open ourselves up enough to ask difficult questions and allow ourselves to be challenged only when we are able to see the humanity in others and when our own humanity is recognized by others. This kind of active learning (as opposed to the passive reception of information) requires the trust, collectivity, and understanding of divergent experiences built through regular synchronous meetings in a shared physical space. This is hindered when classroom interaction is mediated through disembodied video images and temporally delayed chat functions.
  • When teaching is reduced to content delivery, faculty become interchangeable, which raises additional questions about academic freedom. Suggestions have already been made that the workload problem brought on by remote teaching would be mitigated if faculty simply taught existing online courses designed by others. It does not take complex modelling to imagine a new normal in which an undergraduate degree consists solely of downloading and memorizing cookie-cutter course material uploaded by people with no expertise in the area who are administering ten other courses simultaneously. 
  • when teaching is reduced to content delivery, intellectual property takes on additional importance. It is illegal to record and distribute lectures or other course material without the instructor’s permission, but universities seem reluctant to confirm that they will not have the right to use the content faculty post online. For instance, if a contract faculty member spends countless hours designing a remote course for the summer semester and then is laid off in the fall, can the university still use their recorded lectures and other material in the fall? Can the university use this recorded lecture material to continue teaching these courses if faculty are on strike (as happened in the UK in 2018)? What precedents are being set? 
  • Students’ exposure to a range of rigorous thought is also endangered, since it is much easier for students to record and distribute course content when faculty post it online. Some websites are already using the move to remote teaching as an opportunity to urge students to call out and shame faculty they deem to be “liberal” or “left” by reposting their course material. To avoid this, faculty are likely to self-censor, choosing material they feel is safer. Course material will become more generic, which will diminish the quality of students’ education.
  • In neoliberal thought, the public sphere is severely diminished, and the role of the university in the public sphere—and as a public sphere unto itself—is treated as unnecessary. The principle that enquiry and debate are public goods in and of themselves, regardless of their outcome or impact, is devalued, as is the notion that a society’s self-knowledge and self-criticism are crucial to democracy, societal improvement, and the pursuit of the good life. Expert opinion is devalued, and research is desirable only when it translates into gains for the private sector, essentially treating universities as vehicles to channel public funding into private research and development. 
  • The free and broad pursuit—and critique—of knowledge is arguably even more important in times of crisis and rapid social change.
  • Policies that advance neoliberal ideals have long been justified—and opposition to them discredited—using Margaret Thatcher’s famous line that “there is no alternative.” This notion is reproduced in universities framing their responses to COVID-19 as a fait accompli—the inevitable result of unfortunate circumstances. Yet the neoliberal assumptions that underpin these responses illustrate that choices are being made and force us to ask whether the emergency we face necessitates this exact response.
  • The notion that faculty can simply move their courses online—or teach them simultaneously online and in person—is rooted in the assumption that educating involves merely delivering information to students, which can be done just as easily online as it can be in person. There are many well-developed online courses, yet all but the most ardent enthusiasts concede that the format works better for some subjects and some students
  • Emergencies matter. Far from occasions that justify suspending our principles, the way that we handle the extra-ordinary, the unexpected, sends a message about what we truly value. While COVID-19 may seem exceptional, university responses to this crisis are hardly a departure from the neoliberal norm, and university administrations are already making plans to extend online teaching after it dissipates. We must be careful not to send the message that the neoliberal university and the worldview that underpins it are acceptable.
« First ‹ Previous 461 - 480 of 482 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page