Group items tagged

We can say "Black lives matter," but we must also demonstrate through our actions that Black lives matter, and that means we must radically alter many of our institutions and practices, recognizing their inhumanity and carcerality. And that includes, no doubt, ed-tech. How much of ed-tech is, to use Ruha Benjamin's phrase, "the new Jim Code"? How much of ed-tech is designed by those who imagine students as cheats or criminals, as deficient or negligent?

"Reimagining" is a verb that education reformers are quite fond of. And "reimagining" seems too often to mean simply defunding, privatizing, union-busting, dismantling, outsourcing.

if Betsy DeVos is out there "reimagining," then we best be resisting

Please do a bad job of putting your courses online

For my colleagues who are now being instructed to put some or all of the remainder of their semester online, now is a time to do a poor job of it. You are NOT building an online class. You are NOT teaching students who can be expected to be ready to learn online. And, most importantly, your class is NOT the highest priority of their OR your life right now. Release yourself from high expectations right now, because that’s the best way to help your students learn.

Remember the following as you move online: Your students know less about technology than you think. Many of them know less than you. Yes, even if they are digital natives and younger than you. They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They need to reserve it for things more important than online lectures. Students who did not sign up for an online course have no obligation to have a computer, high speed wifi, a printer/scanner, or a camera. Do not even survey them to ask if they have it. Even if they do, they are not required to tell you this. And if they do now, that doesn’t mean that they will when something breaks and they can’t afford to fix it because they just lost their job at the ski resort or off-campus bookstore. Students will be sharing their technology with other household members. They may have LESS time to do their schoolwork, not more.

The Green Zone: Underappreciated Workhorses Starting with the green zone in the lower left, we have readings with text and images. These types of assignments may not seem exciting, but sharing readings with students in a consistent and organized way provides your online course with a very practical, solid foundation. Email and discussion boards also belong in this quadrant.  Online instructors have been using these three tools—file sharing (for readings and such), email, and discussion boards—for decades. And while that might make them sound boring, you can create some fantastic instructional experiences with just these three tools. 

The Blue Zone: Practical Immediacy Moving over to the lower right, we have low-bandwidth tools that can add immediacy to student interactions. If you’ve used Microsoft Office 365 or Google Drive, you’re probably already familiar with some of the features and benefits of collaborative document editors. These tools allow multiple people to edit and comment on the same document, spreadsheet, or presentation slides. Depending on how you structure your assignments, students could collaborate over an extended period of time, or they could go online at the exact same time and write and edit each other’s work simultaneously.  When it comes to group chat/messaging, there are lots of free apps that can be useful in an educational setting. Slack and GroupMe are two popular examples. These mobile-friendly apps allow students to post text-based messages and images without requiring anyone in the group (including you!) to share their phone numbers. These tools allow students to communicate quickly and easily without scheduling an entire day around a formal video conference.

Screencasting adds a human element to online courses because your voice creates a sense of presence that plain text can’t. 

If you’re ever going to turn a syllabus into an infographic, you must, MUST reduce the amount of text you are using. There are, of course, important things you’ll want and must include, but you can’t think of this document as ten pages of paragraphs. Strip down to only the essential information, with a bit of added info where you  think some flare or excitement is needed. Remember: your students are smart people. They can understand documents quickly without a bunch of extra fluff, so remove all the unnecessary stuff.

Once you’ve determined the sections, it’s easier to think about what relates to what and how you might organize your syllabus in a way that makes sense for your students.

try drawing it out on sketch paper first. While this will seem like an annoying task for most people, trust me when I say that it will save you a lot of time in the long run

shifts in metaphors matter

Today I noticed that Google Docs doesn't have a clipboard; instead, it has a "Web clipboard."

Notice that the Web clipboard isn't a conventional clipboard icon, but a clipboard with a cloud in front of it.

What exactly are the issues about attributing? Why is it good to not have to attribute? Is it a severe challenge to attribute? Does it hurt? Does it call for technical or academic skills beyond reach? Does it consume great amounts of time, resources? Why, among professional designers and technologists is it such a good thing to be free of this odious chore? I can translate this typical reason to use public domain content, “I prefer to be lazy.”

There is a larger implication when you reuse content and choose not to attribute. Out in the flow of all other information, it more or less says to readers, “all images are free to pilfer. Just google and take them all. Be like me.”

It’s not about the rules of the license, it’s about maybe, maybe, operating in this mechanized place as a human, rather than a copy cat.

The loss of our usual habits can cause shock and grief, so one way educators and parents can prioritize predictability is by creating routines.

Because trauma involves a loss of control, inflexible teaching methods can trigger some students into survival mode.

Relationships are key to resilience, “so anything that teachers can do to help foster relationships should be a priority right now,”

Resist the temptation to dive right into curriculum at the start of the school year. Things will go more smoothly if you devote the early weeks to building community so students feel connected. Social emotional skills can be woven in during this time. On top of that, students need practice with whatever digital tools you’ll be using. So focus your lessons on those things, intertwining the two when possible. 

Online instruction is made up largely of asynchronous instruction, which students can access at any time. This is ideal, because requiring attendance for synchronous instruction puts some students at an immediate disadvantage if they don’t have the same access to technology, reliable internet, or a flexible home schedule. 

you’re likely to offer “face-to-face” or synchronous opportunities at some point, and one way to make them happen more easily is to have students meet in small groups. While it’s nearly impossible to arrange for 30 students to attend a meeting at once, assigning four students to meet is much more manageable.

My recommendation for people planning their courses, is to stop thinking about ‘contact hours’. A contact hour is a constraint that is applied to the learning process because of the organizational need to have people share a space in a building. Also called a credit hour, (particularly for American universities) this has meant, from a workload perspective, that for every in class hour a student is meant to do at least 2 (in some cases 3) hours of study outside of class. Even Cliff Notes agrees with me. So… for a full load, that 30 to 45 Total Work Hours for students per course that you are designing.

Simple break down (not quite 90, yes i know) Watch 3 hours of video* – 5 hoursRead stuff – 20 hoursListen to me talk – 15 hoursTalk with other students in a group – 15 hoursWrite reflections about group chat – 7.5 hoursRespond to other people’s reflections – 7.5 hoursWork on a term paper – 10 hoursDo weekly quiz – 3 hoursWrite take home mid-term – 3 hoursWrite take home final – 3 hours

A thousand variations of this might be imagined

One of the most interesting changes that I saw in terms of online learning was the use of WhatsApp, a text and voice messaging app that is very popular in South Africa. Through the app’s group chat feature, instructors can moderate the discussion and students can leave voice notes, which gives them the ability to have their voices heard asynchronously

I’ve imagined a north–south dialogue. Now, due to COVID-19, it’s happening organically, and I’m in the process of reimagining the course I would have been teaching in Vancouver this summer as an online course. I need to factor in which apps to use, how to prepare for students who only have cellphones, and the reality that many students come from other countries to study at Emily Carr, and now they’ll be learning remotely. It’s fascinating that the forced global aspect of the classroom will influence the way I design the educational technology for my program

In the past, some educators might have been excited to tear everything apart and build it back up with a goal of helping students learn in a better way, but the institutions wouldn’t be able to support it. Not because they didn’t want to, but because it was difficult for them to do it. Now there’s an opportunity for institutions to let the reins go and encourage creative and new approaches. It’s scary, but it’s also inspiring for educators to have that freedom. The research is available, the interest is there, and the resources are open, so now is the time to make it happen

How and why do well-educated, well-intentioned scientists produce biased AI systems? Sociological theories of privilege provide one useful lens.

Scientists also face a nasty subconscious dilemma when incorporating diversity into machine learning models: Diverse, inclusive models perform worse than narrow models.

fairness can still be the victim of competitive pressures in academia and industry. The flawed Bard and Bing chatbots from Google and Microsoft are recent evidence of this grim reality. The commercial necessity of building market share led to the premature release of these systems.

The problem waiting round the corner for universities is essays generated by AI, which will leave a textual pattern-spotter like Turnitin in the dust. (Earlier this year, I came across one essay that felt deeply odd in some not quite human way, but I had no tangible evidence that anything untoward had occurred, so that was that.)

To accuse someone of plagiarism is to make a moral charge regarding intentions. But establishing intent isn’t straightforward. More often than not, the hearings bleed into discussions of issues that could be gathered under the heading of student ‘wellbeing’, which all universities have been struggling to come to terms with in recent years.

I have heard plenty of dubious excuses for acts of plagiarism during these hearings. But there is one recurring explanation which, it seems to me, deserves more thoughtful consideration: ‘I took too many notes.’ It isn’t just students who are familiar with information overload, one of whose effects is to morph authorship into a desperate form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and everything dissolves into a unitary flow of ‘content’, the identity of the author – as distinct from the texts they have read – becomes harder to delineate.