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Ed Webb

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

www.iddblog.org/idth-teaching-will-save-us-all

education tools technology internet pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Mar 20 - Cached
  • 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

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atla... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...263523

web2.0 internet sharing analytics mobile socialmedia facebook twitter

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as "direct" or "typed/bookmarked" traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you
  • the idea that "social networks" and "social media" sites created a social web is pervasive. Everyone behaves as if the traffic your stories receive from the social networks (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon) is the same as all of your social traffic
  • direct socia
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  • Almost 69 percent of social referrals were dark! Facebook came in second at 20 percent. Twitter was down at 6 percent
  • if you think optimizing your Facebook page and Tweets is "optimizing for social," you're only halfway (or maybe 30 percent) correct. The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There's no way to game email or people's instant messages. There's no power users you can contact. There's no algorithms to understand. This is pure social, uncut
  • the social sites that arrived in the 2000s did not create the social web, but they did structure it. This is really, really significant. In large part, they made sharing on the Internet an act of publishing (!), with all the attendant changes that come with that switch. Publishing social interactions makes them more visible, searchable, and adds a lot of metadata to your simple link or photo post. There are some great things about this, but social networks also give a novel, permanent identity to your online persona. Your taste can be monetized, by you or (much more likely) the service itself
  • the tradeoffs we make on social networks is not the one that we're told we're making. We're not giving our personal data in exchange for the ability to share links with friends. Massive numbers of people -- a larger set than exists on any social network -- already do that outside the social networks. Rather, we're exchanging our personal data in exchange for the ability to publish and archive a record of our sharing. That may be a transaction you want to make, but it might not be the one you've been told you made. 
  • "Only about four percent of total traffic is on mobile at all, so, at least as a percentage of total referrals, app referrals must be a tiny percentage,"
  • only 0.3 percent of total traffic has the Facebook mobile site as a referrer and less than 0.1 percent has the Facebook mobile app
  • Ed Webb on 16 Oct 12
     
    Heh. Social is really social, not 'social' - who knew?
Ed Webb

Mark Zuckerberg says the email's end is nigh. LOL | John Naughton | Comment is free | T... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...naughton-mark-zuckerberg-email

facebook email opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • I can absolutely envision the rather hellish future, in which we use one of four organizations - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, or Google - for all of our media and communications needs, including talking, chatting, messaging, reading books, watching TV, listening to music, etc, etc.
Ed Webb

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live - TIME - 0 views

www.time.com/...0,8599,1902604-1,00.html

twitter Time

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth
  • "ambient awareness"
  • Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
Ed Webb

open thinking » The 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos - 0 views

educationaltechnology.ca/...1448

literacy socialmedia viral memes

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Recognizing the power of networks and nodes and understanding why certain messages become more wide-spread than others (whether by merit, messenger, or manipulation) are important media literacy skills.
Ed Webb

It's Time To Hide The Noise - 0 views

www.techcrunch.com/...its-time-to-hide-the-noise

noise signal twitter filtering apps tweetdeck seesmic twhirl techcrunch opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Oct 09 - Cached
  • the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.
  • the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug
  • if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all.  Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening.  It’s enough to make your brain explode.
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  • all I need is two columns: the most recent Tweets from everyone I follow (the standard) and the the most interesting tweets I need to pay attention to.  Recent and Interesting.  This second column is the tricky one.  It needs to be automatically generated and personalized to my interests at that moment.
  • search is broken on Twitter.  Unless you know the exact word you are looking for, Tweets with related terms won’t show up.  And there is no way to sort searches by relevance, it is just sorted by chronology.
Ed Webb

K-12 Media Literacy No Panacea for Fake News, Report Argues - Digital Education - Educa... - 0 views

blogs.edweek.org/...racy_no_panacea_fake_news.html

media literacy media_literacy MediaLiteracy

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • "Media literacy has long focused on personal responsibility, which can not only imbue individuals with a false sense of confidence in their skills, but also put the onus of monitoring media effects on the audience, rather than media creators, social media platforms, or regulators,"
  • the need to better understand the modern media environment, which is heavily driven by algorithm-based personalization on social-media platforms, and the need to be more systematic about evaluating the impact of various media-literacy strategies and interventions
  • In response, bills to promote media literacy in schools have been introduced or passed in more than a dozen states. A range of nonprofit, corporate, and media organizations have stepped up efforts to promote related curricula and programs. Such efforts should be applauded—but not viewed as a "panacea," the Data & Society researchers argue.
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  • existing efforts "focus on the interpretive responsibilities of the individual,"
  • "if bad actors intentionally dump disinformation online with an aim to distract and overwhelm, is it possible to safeguard against media manipulation?"
  • A 2012 meta-analysis by academic researchers found that media literacy efforts could help boost students' critical awareness of messaging, bias, and representation in the media they consumed. There have been small studies suggesting that media-literacy efforts can change students' behaviors—for example, by making them less likely to seek out violent media for their own consumption. And more recently, a pair of researchers found that media-literacy training was more important than prior political knowledge when it comes to adopting a critical stance to partisan media content.
  • the roles of institutions, technology companies, and governments
Ed Webb

The Greatest and Most Flawed Experiment Ever in Online Learning - CogDogBlog - 1 views

cogdogblog.com/...greatest-flawed-experiment

education technology tools socialmedia web2.0 resources opinion internet teaching

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Mar 20 - Cached
  • I don’t think we should at all be talking about “putting courses online.” What we are really faced with is coming up with some quick alternative modes for students to complete course work without showing up on campus. This does not call for apps and vendor solutions, but what the best teachers always do- improvise, change up on the fly when things change.
  • my suggestion an strategy would be… do as little as possible online. Use online for communicating, caring, attending to people’s needs, but not really for being the “course”. Flip that stuff outside.
  • This is why I cringe when what I seem to hear is “Zoom! Zoom! Can we have 30 students in zoom?” Everything you try to do online is going to call on for jumping unfair levels of barriers- access, technology, experience. I’d say recast your activities in ways students can do as much without going online- reading, writing, thinking, practicing, doing stuff away from the screen.
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  • The most important things to me are quickly establishing, and having backup modes, for students to be in touch with you, and you with them. As individuals. It might be direct messaging, email, texting. It could be but need not be something Slack-like. I’d really go simplest (email)
  • Get going with web annotation tools
  • We need not have just talking sessions for use of video. Think about drop in hours with Whereby (the new appear.in) – it lacks a need for logins and downloads, and works on mobile.
  • This experiment is going to.. well I bet, go bad in a lot of ways. I don’t know what we can expect of un-experienced teachers and unprepared students, who on top of all the concerns they carry and we rarely see, now have to ponder where they might live and sustain income to live on. It will be interesting… but it need not be awful nor a disaster, if we go about as sharing in the situation.
Ed Webb

Business as Unusual: The New Normal for Online Learning - BCcampus - 0 views

bccampus.ca/...new-normal-for-online-learning

teaching learning online internet education college colleges university universities

shared by Ed Webb on 29 May 20 - Cached
  • 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
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  • “What surprised me was the resurgence of many of the zombie ideas about online learning creeping into the discussions, such as the idea that online learning isn’t as personal, or that you can’t have interactivity, or that it just doesn’t work. And while it is true you need to change how you think about your course — you can’t just replicate what you used to do in the classroom — there’s an opportunity to evolve your teaching practices and create a better learning experience for your students.”
  • What’s happening now is going to reshape education for years, if not decades.
  • People want the old normal, not the new normal. We will, to some degree, get back to what we know and love, but it won’t ever look like it did before
  • “Like your physical buildings on campus, you also have a somewhat invisible set of resources called your educational technology. If you don’t understand it well and don’t treat it as important infrastructure, your ability to move online sustainably will be challenged. Sometimes institutions see eLearning as a project, not a strategy. Online learning isn’t a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants project; it has to be integrated into your academic plan and institutional strategy. I hope that COVID-19 underlined that for institutions.”
  • “We’ve known for over 30 years now that one-hour lectures are not a great way to teach: you can have a good one-hour session, but can you have 13 over a semester? It’s about cognitive load, and students can’t focus for more than 15 to 20 minutes at a time without being distracted. There’s room for synchronous discussion, but we can do it better. There’s a huge amount of research into online learning and what happens when students have access to online learning whenever they want it. And just like in real life, you have to know how to do both synchronous and asynchronous interactions well.”
  • We need to make space for the voices of communities who haven’t traditionally been heard: non-traditional learners, students who are food or housing insecure, students who are neurodivergent, students of colour, and Indigenous students. We must think of all these populations and the degree to which our educational system — our technology, our platforms — has not been built for them. We do a lot of work to make our methods accessible, but at the core, our systems, institutions, and platforms aren’t really built for — or by — those students
  • s challenging as it is, I’m seeing online pedagogy’s focus on equity and care resonating with many of those new to the medium
  • I’ve used really experimental styles over the past few years, but I won’t be doing that as much over the coming year because I shouldn’t. My classes are traditionally where students get to work with tools and platforms outside of the norm. If everyone moving online treats it that way, the cognitive load on the students will be absolutely overwhelming. My right to flex my academic freedom regarding platforms should be superseded by care and consideration for my students’ cognitive loads across a program. Navigating different platforms and tools is hard and distracting.
  • “One of the most vital tools and resources that I’ve seen people using is their human capacities for compassion and patience — the degree to which faculty are stepping up and approaching their students from a place of care, and a place of genuine desire for students to feel a sense of hope, safety, and flexibility.”
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