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Ed Webb

TypeWith.me: Live Text Document Collaboration! - 0 views

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    Etherpad lives on
Ed Webb

Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All | IDDblog: ... - 0 views

  • 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. 
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  • Students are more likely to watch a series of shorter videos than a single, longer video, which is why I recommend instructors try to divide long screencasts into five-to-ten minute segments (whenever possible)
  • asynchronous discussion with audio and video. If you’re not familiar with this concept, I’m referring to discussion tools that allow students to respond with audio and video instead of just text. One tool that’s been a leader for a long time in this multimedia discussion space is VoiceThread. While VoiceThread’s defining feature is its user-friendly approach to audio-based commenting, it can also be used to create narrated presentations with PowerPoints slides, images, and video. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the interface of a traditional screencasting tool, VoiceThread is worth exploring as a simpler way of recording online lectures and fostering discussions that go beyond plain text
  • tools that require both high bandwidth and high immediacy, and the best examples of this are videoconferencing tools like Zoom or Skype.  Videoconferencing is a great way to engage with students when they truly need to see and hear each other in real time. It can also be useful for online office hours, since it’s easier to feel connected and avoid misunderstandings when you have the benefit of tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language.  Unfortunately, videoconferencing is one of the most inflexible and bandwidth-intensive activities we can ask our students to do. Before you rely on it too heavily, look at the other quadrants and ask yourself if there’s any other way to accomplish your learning objectives without it. 
  • None of this is to say that videoconferencing is inherently bad or that it has no place in an online course. It’s simply a reminder that seemingly small (and sometimes unconscious) choices about the technologies we use can have a big impact on how inclusive and effective our teaching is.
Ed Webb

Clear backpacks, monitored emails: life for US students under constant surveillance | E... - 0 views

  • This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it.
  • One leading student privacy expert estimated that as many as a third of America’s roughly 15,000 school districts may already be using technology that monitors students’ emails and documents for phrases that might flag suicidal thoughts, plans for a school shooting, or a range of other offenses.
  • Some parents said they were alarmed and frightened by schools’ new monitoring technologies. Others said they were conflicted, seeing some benefits to schools watching over what kids are doing online, but uncertain if their schools were striking the right balance with privacy concerns. Many said they were not even sure what kind of surveillance technology their schools might be using, and that the permission slips they had signed when their kids brought home school devices had told them almost nothing
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  • When Dapier talks with other teen librarians about the issue of school surveillance, “we’re very alarmed,” he said. “It sort of trains the next generation that [surveillance] is normal, that it’s not an issue. What is the next generation’s Mark Zuckerberg going to think is normal?
  • “It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”
  • “They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”
  • “They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.
  • Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”
  • As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.
  • Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.
  • there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.
  • Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.
  • The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.
  • “More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”
  • some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing
  • “I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”
Ed Webb

How to Turn Your Syllabus into an Infographic - The Visual Communication Guy - 0 views

  • 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
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  • If there is anything on your syllabus that can be quantified (like percentages for grades or assignments), consider making bar graphs or pie charts to visually represent it. This is helpful, too, so students can visually understand, very quickly, how much weight is given to each project.
  • Remember to only use pictures that you either created yourself (own the copyright) or that you found through creative commons or public domain websites. Don’t use ugly clipart or images that you don’t have permission to use. A great place to find free icons? Flaticon.com.
  • Remember to reduce as much text as possible and supplement what you write with an image. Consider using the images of your required textbooks, for example, and use icons and graphics that relate to each section.
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Don’t get so caught up in designing a cool infographic about your course that you forget to include information about accessibility, Title IX, academic dishonesty, and other related information. I might recommend not going too fancy on the institution-wide policies. You might still keep that in paragraph form, just so that there is no way to misinterpret what your institution wants you to say.
Ed Webb

Wired Campus: U. of Richmond Creates a Wikipedia for Undergraduate Scholars -... - 0 views

  • The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around the country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online. Students generate brief essays on American history, and the History Engine aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by tags. Call it Wikipedia for students. Except better. First of all, its content is moderated by professors. Second, while Wikipedia still presents information two-dimensionally, History Engine employs mapping technology to organize scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes.
  • “The challenge of a digital age is that that writing assignment hasn’t changed since the age of the typewriter,” Mr. Torget said. “The digital medium requires us to rethink how we make those assignments.”
Ed Webb

'There is no standard': investigation finds AI algorithms objectify women's bodies | Ar... - 0 views

  • AI tags photos of women in everyday situations as sexually suggestive. They also rate pictures of women as more “racy” or sexually suggestive than comparable pictures of men.
  • “You cannot have one single uncontested definition of raciness.”
  • “Objectification of women seems deeply embedded in the system.”
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  • Shadowbanning has been documented for years, but the Guardian journalists may have found a missing link to understand the phenomenon: biased AI algorithms. Social media platforms seem to leverage these algorithms to rate images and limit the reach of content that they consider too racy. The problem seems to be that these AI algorithms have built-in gender bias, rating women more racy than images containing men.
  • “You are looking at decontextualized information where a bra is being seen as inherently racy rather than a thing that many women wear every day as a basic item of clothing,”
  • suppressed the reach of countless images featuring women’s bodies, and hurt female-led businesses – further amplifying societal disparities.
  • these algorithms were probably labeled by straight men, who may associate men working out with fitness, but may consider an image of a woman working out as racy. It’s also possible that these ratings seem gender biased in the US and in Europe because the labelers may have been from a place with a more conservative culture
  • “There’s no standard of quality here,”
  • “I will censor as artistically as possible any nipples. I find this so offensive to art, but also to women,” she said. “I almost feel like I’m part of perpetuating that ridiculous cycle that I don’t want to have any part of.”
  • many people, including chronically ill and disabled folks, rely on making money through social media and shadowbanning harms their business
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