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Ed Webb

Twitter 101: Social Media's Move to College Classrooms -- Politics Daily - 0 views

  • It is likely too early to gauge the effectiveness of these social media courses, degrees, and classroom experiments. Perhaps such endeavors are akin to, as a colleague recently mused, "a massively expensive For Dummies book." Our understanding of online culture will continue to evolve with or without academia's involvement, but it does beg the question: Should our institutions of higher education share some of the responsibility of explaining the online frontier of social media, or are its participants fully capable of self-management and adaptation? The answer may require more than 140 characters.
Ed Webb

The Wired Campus - Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe not. - The Chronicle... - 0 views

  • You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results
  • older students tend to cheat less frequently than younger students
  • If you are interested in this topic, look for the interesting edited book called Student Plagiarism in an Online World: http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7031&v=tableOfContentsI wrote a chapter called, "Expect Originality! Using Taxonomies to Structure Assignments that Support Original Work." In it I discuss the complexities of plagiarism in the context of a digital culture of sharing and suggest that it is rarely black and white. I propose a continuum with intentional academic dishonesty on one end and original work on the other, with gradations in between. Based on my own research and teaching experience, I believe the instructional design and style of teaching can either make it easy-- or very difficult-- to cheat.
Ed Webb

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation... - 0 views

  • Note that this isn’t just a technological alternate history. It also describes a different set of social and cultural practices.
  • CMSes lumber along like radio, still playing into the air as they continue to gradually shift ever farther away on the margins. In comparison, Web 2.0 is like movies and tv combined, plus printed books and magazines. That’s where the sheer scale, creative ferment, and wife-ranging influence reside. This is the necessary background for discussing how to integrate learning and the digital world.
  • These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.
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  • CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference. Students (and staff) also contribute to this peering world; more on this later. For now, we can observe that as teachers we grapple with this mechanism of change through many means, but the CMS in its silo’d isolation is not a useful tool.
  • those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.
  • unless we consider the CMS environment to be a sort of corporate intranet simulation, the CMS set of community skills is unusual, rarely applicable to post-graduation examples. In other words, while a CMS might help privacy concerns, it is at best a partial, not sufficient solution, and can even be inappropriate for already online students.
  • That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.
  • Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature. It is too open, goes the thought, constituting a “Wild West” experience of unfettered information flow and unpleasant forms of access. Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments, iPhone-style walled gardens that protect the learning process from the Lovecraftian chaos without.
  • social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed.
  • at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.
  • For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
  • Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?
  • The internet of things refers to a vastly more challenging concept, the association of digital information with the physical world. It covers such diverse instances as RFID chips attached to books or shipping pallets, connecting a product’s scanned UPC code to a Web-based database, assigning unique digital identifiers to physical locations, and the broader enterprise of augmented reality. It includes problems as varied as building search that covers both the World Wide Web and one’s mobile device, revising copyright to include digital content associated with private locations, and trying to salvage what’s left of privacy. How does this connect with our topic? Consider a recent article by Tim O’Reilly and John Battle, where they argue that the internet of things is actually growing knowledge about itself. The combination of people, networks, and objects is building descriptions about objects, largely in folksonomic form. That is, people are tagging the world, and sharing those tags. It’s worth quoting a passage in full: “It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two. For example, You R Here, an iPhone app, neatly combines these two approaches. You use your iPhone camera to take a photo of a map that contains details not found on generic mapping applications such as Google maps – say a trailhead map in a park, or another hiking map. Use the phone’s GPS to set your current location on the map. Walk a distance away, and set a second point. Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.” (http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194) What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?
  • imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.
Ed Webb

Putting Syllabi Online « Easily Distracted - 0 views

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    An excellent set of questions and answers. We should encourage people to do this, no?
Ed Webb

The Internet Intellectual - 0 views

  • Even Thomas Friedman would be aghast at some of Jarvis’s cheesy sound-bites
  • What does that actually mean?
  • In Jarvis’s universe, all the good things are technologically determined and all the bad things are socially determined
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  • Jarvis never broaches such subtleties. His is a simple world:
  • why not consider the possibility that the incumbents may be using the same tools, Jarvis’s revered technologies, to tell us what to think, and far more effectively than before? Internet shelf space may be infinite, but human attention is not. Cheap self-publishing marginally improves one’s chances of being heard, but nothing about this new decentralized public sphere suggests that old power structures—provided they are smart and willing to survive—will not be able to use it to their benefit
  • Jarvis 1.0 was all about celebrating Google, but Jarvis 2.0 has new friends in Facebook and Twitter. (An Internet intellectual always keeps up.) Jarvis 1.0 wrote that “Google’s moral of universal empowerment is the sometimes-forgotten ideal of democracy,” and argued that the company “provides the infrastructure for a culture of choice,” while its “algorithms and its business model work because Google trusts us.” Jarvis 2.0 claims that “by sharing publicly, we people challenge Google’s machines and reclaim our authority on the internet from algorithms.”
  • Jarvis has another reference point, another sacred telos: the equally grand and equally inexorable march of the Internet, which in his view is a technology that generates its own norms, its own laws, its own people. (He likes to speak of “us, people of the Net.”) For the Technology Man, the Internet is the glue that holds our globalized world together and the divine numen that fills it with meaning. If you thought that ethnocentrism was bad, brace yourself for Internet-centrism
  • Why worry about the growing dominance of such digitalism? The reason should be obvious. As Internet-driven explanations crowd out everything else, our entire vocabulary is being re-defined. Collaboration is re-interpreted through the prism of Wikipedia; communication, through the prism of social networking; democratic participation, through the prism of crowd-sourcing; cosmopolitanism, through the prism of reading the blogs of exotic “others”; political upheaval, through the prism of the so-called Twitter revolutions. Even the persecution of dissidents is now seen as an extension of online censorship (rather than the other way around). A recent headline on the blog of the Harvard-based Herdictproject—it tracks Internet censorship worldwide—announces that, in Mexico and Morocco, “Online Censorship Goes Offline.” Were activists and dissidents never harassed before Twitter and Facebook?
  • Most Internet intellectuals simply choose a random point in the distant past—the honor almost invariably goes to the invention of the printing press—and proceed to draw a straight line from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, as if the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Reign of Terror, two world wars—and everything else—never happened.
  • even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.
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    In which Evgeny rips Jeff a new one
Ed Webb

Offering Seminar Courses Remotely | Educatus - 0 views

  • In an online environment, seminars will work best if they occur asynchronously in the discussion boards in an LMS
  • The 4 key elements for a seminar that need to be replicated during remote instruction include: A prompt or text(s) that the student considers independently in advance Guiding questions that require analysis, synthesize and/or evaluation of ideas The opportunity to share personal thinking with a group Ideas being developed, rejected, and refined over time based on everyone’s contributions
  • Students need specific guidance and support for how to develop, reject, and refine ideas appropriately in your course.  If you want students to share well, consider requiring an initial post where you and students introduce yourselves and share a picture. Describe your expectations for norms in how everyone will behave online Provide a lot of initial feedback about the quality of posting.  Consider giving samples of good and bad posts, and remember to clarify your marking criteria. Focus your expectations on the quality of comments, and set maximums for the amount you expect to reduce your marking load and keep the discussions high quality. Someone will need to moderate the discussion. That includes posting the initial threads, reading what everyone posts all weeks and commenting to keep the discussion flowing.  Likely, the same person (you or a TA) will also be grading and providing private feedback to each student. Consider making the moderation of a discussion an assignment in your course. You can moderate the first few weeks to demonstrate what you want, and groups of students can moderate other weeks. It can increase engagement if done well, and definitely decreases your work load.
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  • Teach everyone to mute when not speaking, and turn off their cameras if they have bandwidth issues. Use the chat so people can agree and add ideas as other people are speaking, and teach people to raise their hands or add emoticons in the participants window to help you know who wants to speak next
Ed Webb

About That Webcam Obsession You're Having… | Reflecting Allowed - 0 views

  • About that obsession you’ve got with students turning on their cameras during class. I understand why you’ve got it. I’d like to help you deal with it. I say “deal with it” because many students complain to me that they don’t like being forced to turn their cameras on
  • it’s probably essential to our wellbeing to see human faces. As a teacher and presenter and facilitator, seeing facial expressions and reactions of audience/participants makes a huge difference. I get it. I get that you need to know someone is listening, and see those reactions. I get it. I recently gave a keynote and asked a few friends to be on webinar panel so I could see their smiling faces. However, when I am in a position of power like in the class, I never ask students to turn on their cameras. And my students were *almost always all engaged* last semester in our Zoom calls.
  • You can’t make eye contact online
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  • Reasons why people want to keep their cameras off include: Discomfort or shyness with showing their faces online. This is real, people. For most people, it gets better with time, but not always and not in every context.Noisy or busy home environments e.g. spouse or kids or siblings moving about. I have occasionally had to mute and turn camera off in the middle of a webinar I am personally giving for those reasons! Women and girls can be especially vulnerable to kids and spouses not respecting their work/learning timeNot being dressed for company (for me personally, I often don’t want to cover my hair for a meeting where I’m not presenting, I want to lounge around in comfy clothes). Or your home not being tidy enough for company. This is a thing.Slow/unstable internet connection. Turning off webcam can be the easiest way to get better quality audioDiscomfort over recording
  • Ask questions and ask everyone to respond in the chat. You will know if they are focused and engaged by their responses and every single person can participateAsk questions for them to answer orally. Either call on people round robin, or call out some people from the chat (also keeping in mind some people are voice shy, and some people have noisy home environments)If you can divide students into smaller groups go talk to each other and you can move between them like a butterfly, this can help some people engage/talk more and occasionally even turn their cameras onUse things like Annotation or Google docs to have folks contributeAsk students to have a profile picture up when their camera is off. This helps sometimes.You might learn to distinguish student voices as you would close friends on the phone (remember life pre-caller ID where close friends and family would expect that?) and use them as proxies for how they are feeling. You already have this skill, but are not expecting to use it.If you record, consider having an unrecorded portion. You will be surprised how much some people participate or are willing to turn cameras on in the unrecorded portion.
  • it seems we need to consider ways of allowing people to “be there” in alternative ways that they are comfortable with and that tell us they are really listening to us and responding in more explicit ways
Ed Webb

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

  • 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
  • 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
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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
  • direct socia
  • 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
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    Heh. Social is really social, not 'social' - who knew?
Ed Webb

Keep the 'Research,' Ditch the 'Paper' - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • we need to construct meaningful opportunities for students to actually engage in research—to become modest but real contributors to the research on an actual question. When students write up the work they’ve actually performed, they create data and potential contributions to knowledge, contributions that can be digitally published or shared with a target community
  • Schuman’s critique of traditional writing instruction is sadly accurate. The skill it teaches most students is little more than a smash-and-grab assault on the secondary literature. Students open a window onto a search engine or database. They punch through to the first half-dozen items. Snatching random gems that seem to support their preconceived thesis, they change a few words, cobble it all together with class notes in the form of an argument, and call it "proving a thesis."
  • What happens when a newly employed person tries to pass off quote-farmed drivel as professional communication?
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  • Generally these papers are just pumped-up versions of the five-paragraph essay, with filler added. Thesis-driven, argumentative, like the newspaper editorials the genre is based on, this "researched writing" promises to solve big questions with little effort: "Reproductive rights resolved in five pages!"
  • Actual writing related to research is modest, qualified, and hesitant
  • our actual model involves elaborately respectful conversation, demonstrating sensitivity to the most nuanced claims of previous researchers
  • Academic, legal, medical, and business writing has easily understandable conventions. We responsibly survey the existing literature, formally or informally creating an annotated bibliography. We write a review of the literature, identifying a "blank" spot ignored by other scholars, or a "bright" spot where we see conflicting evidence. We describe the nature of our research in terms of a contribution to the blank or bright spot in that conversation. We conclude by pointing to further questions.
  • Millions of pieces of research writing that aren’t essays usefully circulate in the profession through any number of sharing technologies, including presentations and posters; grant and experiment proposals; curated, arranged, translated, or visualized data; knowledgeable dialogue in online media with working professionals; independent journalism, arts reviews, and Wikipedia entries; documentary pitches, scripts and storyboards; and informative websites.
  • real researchers don’t write a word unless they have something to contribute. We should teach our students to do the same
Ed Webb

It's just not working out the way we thought it would « Lisa's (Online) Teach... - 0 views

  • Gradually, closed spaces (Facebook, Ning, even Google if you understand what they’re up to) have become the norm, as have monetized sites. The spaces that were free are no longer free, although many of us freely contributed our own work to these sites, providing the basis of their popularity in the first place. Crowdsourcing, celebrated in story and song, has become the exploitation of the work of others in order to make money or provide cheap customer service. The use of personal information for marketing purposes is widespread, and creative people are leaving the platforms that brought everyone into the agora in the first place. Scholars at first enthusiastic about the future now see it as a lonely place. And I see conversations where people who care deeply about the web, education for the 21st century, and learning theories are beginning to back away from proselytizing about academic openness.
  • it’s about users becoming the products in the marketplace and the amusements in the panopticon
  • Where before it might have made sense to say we should make sure everyone is web literate, now such literacy extends beyond critical thinking about websites into a deeper understanding of what the using the web means for individual privacy and independence. This time, the enemies of openness and freedom won’t need to argue their philosophical reasons – they’ll argue that they’re protecting people. And the trouble is, they may be right.
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  • We need to be the antidote for blind adoption
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