Group items tagged

I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.

what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.

we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.

Education is technology’s Afghanistan — school-conquering technology keeps charging in, and the technology limps out defeated:

 Education is way harder than handheld personal computing.

 If we do teach more with MOOCs, we should be the harshest critics of MOOCs

the Indians I heard in London accepted the following premise: university education, at least in part, involves seasoned, well-educated people determining what less seasoned, less well-educated people should know, then proceeding to teach them. By contrast, at the Palo Alto gathering there was much more talk of “hacking college.” This worldview, though certainly not universal, reflects a certain disdain for hierarchies of knowledge and expertise. Instead, it embraces a radically individualistic approach to higher ed, one based on the idea that it’s always a great thing when students create their own education, piecing together courses and educational materials, free from the confines of convention.

Lots of students who want a college education, whether at the elite or mass-access end of the spectrum, either want to study a curriculum that has been proven, need support because they don’t have the tools to educate themselves, or both.

The edupunk aesthetic certainly has some appeal – why not blow up some traditional assumptions about the structure of education? And it is so varied that it wouldn’t be fair to say its proponents are all blind to questions of giving students the guidance they need to succeed. But its anarchistic edge risks leaving students to their own devices so much that oversight and quality control goes out the window

The Internet is a democratizing technology not because users have access to services like Twitter and Facebook but because it supported the development of these tools in the first place. Ignoring this distinction has led to the United States' unfortunate decision to craft public policies that focus primarily on expanding Internet "access" with too little attention paid to the fact that not all access is created equal (PDF). By focusing on access, disregarding the mounting threats to the openness of the Internet, our politicians and regulators are ignoring a growing divide between users with control over digital technologies and those without.

protect the rights of users to create

the iPhone is part of a new class of devices that actively keep the end user from having control