"The classroom-management system we use, Sakai, comes with this massive surveillance infrastructure. You can see what students clicked on, and you can see what they did. Early in the semester, I show students all of the tools that follow them around, and we talk about it.
I tell them, I'm not going to look. I don't want to decide whether or not you read something based on whether you clicked on the article. I don't want to play these surveillance games. I just want to see, did you write something thoughtful in the forum?
We use it to start a conversation about what it means to be a student in this day and age. They usually have no idea that their professors can see every click."
Thought this was interesting but with several strong caveats:
1) this is from a company that takes an promotional and generally uncritical view of edtech companies. 2) the claim si that people don't use threaded discussions anywhere in the real world - what about facebook?! It's all about threaded discussions! 3) the solution to all of this is threaded video discussions because writing is hard. All that said, I do like the shout out to 1st gen college students finding it more welcoming.
In Alvin Toffler’s groundbreaking book, Future Shock, he claims, “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” When projecting our educational objectives going forward, perhaps we should consider another form of fluency: change literacy.