Skip to main content

Home/ Instructional & Media Services at Dickinson College/ Group items tagged participation

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
14More

Reflections on open courses « Connectivism - 0 views

www.connectivism.ca/?p=267 connectivism open education collaboration pedagogy technology
shared by Ed Webb on 22 Aug 10 - Cached
  • There is value of blending traditional with emergent knowledge spaces (online conferences and traditional journals) - Learners will create and innovate if they can express ideas and concepts in their own spaces and through their own expertise (i.e. hosting events in Second Life) - Courses are platforms for innovation. Too rigid a structure puts the educator in full control. Using a course as a platform fosters creativity…and creativity generates a bit of chaos and can be unsettling to individuals who prefer a structure with which they are familiar. - (cliche) Letting go of control is a bit stressful, but surprisingly rewarding in the new doors it opens and liberating in how it brings others in to assist in running a course and advancing the discussion. - People want to participate…but they will only do so once they have “permission” and a forum in which to utilize existing communication/technological skills.
  • The internet is a barrier-reducing system. In theory, everyone has a voice online (the reality of technology ownership, digital skills, and internet access add an unpleasant dimension). Costs of duplication are reduced. Technology (technique) is primarily a duplicationary process, as evidenced by the printing press, assembly line, and now the content duplication ability of digital technologies. As a result, MOOCs embody, rather than reflect, practices within the digital economy. MOOCs reduce barriers to information access and to the dialogue that permits individuals (and society) to grow knowledge. Much of the technical innovation in the last several centuries has permitted humanity to extend itself physically (cars, planes, trains, telescopes). The internet, especially in recent developments of connective and collaborative applications, is a cognitive extension for humanity. Put another way, the internet offers a model where the reproduction of knowledge is not confined to the production of physical objects.
  • Knowledge is a mashup. Many people contribute. Many different forums are used. Multiple media permit varied and nuanced expressions of knowledge. And, because the information base (which is required for knowledge formation) changes so rapidly, being properly connected to the right people and information is vitally important. The need for proper connectedness to the right people and information is readily evident in intelligence communities. Consider the Christmas day bomber. Or 9/11. The information was being collected. But not connected.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The open model of participation calls into question where value is created in the education system. Gutenberg created a means to duplicate content. The social web creates the opportunity for many-to-many interactions and to add a global social layer on content creation and knowledge growth.
  • Whatever can be easily duplicated cannot serve as the foundation for economic value. Integration and connectedness are economic value points.
  • In education, content can easily be produced (it’s important but has limited economic value). Lectures also have limited value (easy to record and to duplicate). Teaching – as done in most universities – can be duplicated. Learning, on the other hand, can’t be duplicated. Learning is personal, it has to occur one learner at a time. The support needed for learners to learn is a critical value point.
  • Learning, however, requires a human, social element: both peer-based and through interaction with subject area experts
  • Content is readily duplicated, reducing its value economically. It is still critical for learning – all fields have core elements that learners must master before they can advance (research in expertise supports this notion). - Teaching can be duplicated (lectures can be recorded, Elluminate or similar webconferencing system can bring people from around the world into a class). Assisting learners in the learning process, correcting misconceptions (see Private Universe), and providing social support and brokering introductions to other people and ideas in the discipline is critical. - Accreditation is a value statement – it is required when people don’t know each other. Content was the first area of focus in open education. Teaching (i.e. MOOCs) are the second. Accreditation will be next, but, before progress can be made, profile, identity, and peer-rating systems will need to improve dramatically. The underlying trust mechanism on which accreditation is based cannot yet be duplicated in open spaces (at least, it can’t be duplicated to such a degree that people who do not know each other will trust the mediating agent of open accreditation)
  • The skills that are privileged and rewarded in a MOOC are similar to those that are needed to be effective in communicating with others and interacting with information online (specifically, social media and information sources like journals, databases, videos, lectures, etc.). Creative skills are the most critical. Facilitators and learners need something to “point to”. When a participant creates an insightful blog post, a video, a concept map, or other resource/artifact it generally gets attention.
  • Intentional diversity – not necessarily a digital skill, but the ability to self-evaluate ones network and ensure diversity of ideologies is critical when information is fragmented and is at risk of being sorted by single perspectives/ideologies.
  • The volume of information is very disorienting in a MOOC. For example, in CCK08, the initial flow of postings in Moodle, three weekly live sessions, Daily newsletter, and weekly readings and assignments proved to be overwhelming for many participants. Stephen and I somewhat intentionally structured the course for this disorienting experience. Deciding who to follow, which course concepts are important, and how to form sub-networks and sub-systems to assist in sensemaking are required to respond to information abundance. The process of coping and wayfinding (ontology) is as much a lesson in the learning process as mastering the content (epistemology). Learners often find it difficult to let go of the urge to master all content, read all the comments and blog posts.
  • e. Learning is a social trust-based process.
  • Patience, tolerance, suspension of judgment, and openness to other cultures and ideas are required to form social connections and negotiating misunderstandings.
  • An effective digital citizenry needs the skills to participate in important conversations. The growth of digital content and social networks raises the need citizens to have the technical and conceptual skills to express their ideas and engage with others in those spaces. MOOCs are a first generation testing grounds for knowledge growth in a distributed, global, digital world. Their role in developing a digital citizenry is still unclear, but democratic societies require a populace with the skills to participate in growing a society’s knowledge. As such, MOOCs, or similar open transparent learning experiences that foster the development of citizens confidence engage and create collaboratively, are important for the future of society.
6More

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

blog.mahabali.me/...-webcam-obsession-youre-having education tools technology opinion video engagement
shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jun 20 - Cached
  • 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
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 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
4More

Would You Protect Your Computer's Feelings? Clifford Nass Says Yes. - ProfHacker - The ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...27081 book review computers psychology
shared by Ed Webb on 22 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The Man Who Lied to His Laptop condenses for a popular audience an argument that Nass has been making for at least 15 years: humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.
  • At first blush, this sounds absurd. Everyone knows that it's "just a computer," and of course computers don't have feelings. And yet. Nass has a slew of amusing stories—and, crucially, studies based on those stories—indicating that, no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares. For example: In one study, users reviewed a software package, either on the same computer they'd used it on, or on a different computer. Consistently, participants gave the software better ratings when they reviewed in on the same computer—as if they didn't want the computer to feel bad. What's more, Nass notes, "every one of the participants insisted that she or he would never bother being polite to a computer" (7).
  • Nass found that users given completely random praise by a computer program liked it more than the same program without praise, even though they knew in advance the praise was meaningless. In fact, they liked it as much as the same program, if they were told the praise was accurate. (In other words, flattery was as well received as praise, and both were preferred to no positive comments.) Again, when questioned about the results, users angrily denied any difference at all in their reactions.
  • Ed Webb on 22 Sep 10
     
    How do you interact with the computing devices in your life?
2More

The Wired Campus - Bringing Alumni Back to the Classroom, Virtually - The Chronicle of ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...8316 technology education tools socialmedia livestreaming video alumni relations
shared by Ed Webb on 03 Oct 09 - Cached
  • In an effort to engage former students with events on campus, Colgate University is using Webcast technology to allow even the most remote alumni to watch and participate when prominent writers visit the school.
  • “There’s a real appetite for intellectual engagement among our alumni,” he says. “They miss the classroom and the Colgate liberal-arts experience, and now we have the means to give it to them again.”Mr. Mansfield says that while the class might be costly for the English department -- authors don’t come cheap -- the decision to pay for the universal broadcast was a “no brainer” since the school already had the technology and had to pay only a “negligible” monthly fee to run the site on Livestream.
3More

Liberal Education Today : What Function for Study Abroad? Service Learning in Internati... - 0 views

let.blog.nitle.org/...international-studies-programs studyabroad NITLE servicelearning technology
shared by Ed Webb on 01 Oct 09 - Cached
  • a trend toward the integration of service learning into study abroad and global studies more generally at the liberal arts colleges I work with
  • an element to the study abroad experience that goes beyond cultural immersion. Students grapple with important and timely issues
  • I am currently working with Andy Wallis from Whittier College and Chris Boyland from Bryn Mawr College on planning a virtual program for later the Fall semester, and the integration of service learning with international education was one of the issues that most resonated on the survey we are conducting to help us develop a program responsive to the needs and interests of folks at NITLE’s participating colleges.
1More

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

www.politicsdaily.com/...ias-move-to-college-classrooms socialmedia education web2.0
shared by Ed Webb on 17 Jul 09 - Cached
  • 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.
2More

News: A Gripe Session at Blackboard - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...blackboard blackboard
shared by Ed Webb on 17 Jul 09 - Cached
  • At an open "listening session" with top executives of Blackboard here Wednesday at the company's annual conference, college officials expressed frustration with many of the system's fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed to turn into a communal gripe session, with complaints ranging from the system's discussion forum application, to the improved -- but still lacking -- user support, to the training materials for faculty members. Participants' concerns were often greeted with nods of agreement and outright applause from their peers as they spoke of their frustrations with the system.
  • "We recognize there are still some shortcomings in our products," responded Michael Chasen, president and CEO of Blackboard.
3More

Views: How Tweet It Is - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...mclemee246 twitter education technology
shared by Ed Webb on 23 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Part of my interest in this turn to Twitter comes from disappointment with most university press blogs, which often seem more like PR vehicles than genuine blogs with discussion, disagreement, expressions of real enthusiasm or curiosity or whatever. Reading very many of them at one sitting feels like attending a banquet where you are served salt-free soda crackers and caffeine-free Mountain Dew that's gone flat.By contrast, university-press publicists seem more inclined to experiment and to follow tangents with Twitter than they do on their own official websites. They link to material they have posted at the press’s blog, of course – but also to news and commentary that may be only obliquely related to the books in their catalog. It’s as if they escape from beneath the institutional superego long enough to get into the spirit of blogging, proper.
  • The range and the interest of Duke's tweets make its presence exemplary, in my opinion. Between drafting and rewriting this column, for example, I followed Duke's tweets to a newspaper article about whether or not English was approaching one million words, a blog post about rock songs cued to Joyce's Ulysses, and the Twitter feed of Duke author Negar Mottahedeh, who has been posting about events in Iran.
  • She then makes a point that bears stressing given how often university-press blogs tend to be coated in institutional gray: “I think that any kind of social networking needs to have a personality tied to it in order for it to be successful. Also, I think you really need to participate in the media in order for it to be successful. We ask people for questions and opinions, offer giveaways sometimes. My main goal is to try to get people talking -- either with me or with each other about our books and authors.... You can't just provide information or news feeds to reviews and articles about your books. Involving the Press in what is going, contributing to the various discussions, and asking (and answering) questions is really the way to grow your following.”
1More

NITLE - Crossing Borders - 0 views

www.nitle.org/...903-crossing-borders NITLE studyabroad workshop
shared by Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09 - Cached
  • For faculty members, leaders of study-abroad programs, instructional technologists, and librarians from the Hobart and William Smith Colleges and other participating institutions who are interested in how multimedia storytelling might be adapted for use with students in all three phases of the study abroad experience: pre-departure, on-site, and reentry.
2More

Views: Vertigo Years - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...durden Dickinson education future college university
shared by Ed Webb on 18 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Capturing the spirit of the times, one prominent advocate styled the three-year degree as the "higher ed equivalent of a fuel-efficient car" compared to the "gas guzzling four-year course." A metaphor from the food industry might be more apt. Slow education, as in slow cooking, is enthusiastically replaced by Fast Ed or McEd, with comparable results. Higher education is certainly in need of efficiency. Our current business model, which has yielded steadily increasing costs, needs change and, perhaps, radically so. Let us not be fooled by adapting across the system solutions that appear corrective but may be destructive of the virtue and distinction of American higher education and its ambition -- education for the workforce and for participation and leadership in a democracy.
  • Ed Webb on 18 Aug 09
     
    President Durden and Dean Weissman resist the 3-year Bachelor's degree
11More

The Internet Intellectual - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...the-internet-intellectual book review internet technophilia
shared by Ed Webb on 17 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • 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
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Ed Webb on 17 Oct 11
     
    In which Evgeny rips Jeff a new one
6More

Guest Post: The Complexities of Certainty | Just Visiting - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...st-post-complexities-certainty education opinion internet distance pandemics teaching pedagogy
shared by Ed Webb on 27 Apr 20 - Cached
  • Privileges abound in academia, but so do experiences of loss, instability and fear. And into this situation we were called to respond to a pandemic.
  • It is tempting to reach for certainties when everything around us is in chaos, and for a vast swath of higher ed instructors, the rapid shift from face-to-face teaching to emergency distance learning has been chaos. Small wonder, then, that people have offered -- and clung to -- advice that seeks to bring order to disorder. Many people have advised instructors to prioritize professionalism, ditching the sweatpants and putting away the visible clutter in our homes before making a Zoom call, upholding concepts like "rigor" so that our standards do not slip. To some, these appeals to universal principles are right-minded and heartening, a bulwark against confusion and disarray. But to others they have felt oppressive, even dangerously out of touch with the world in which we and our students live.
  • certainties can be dangerous; their very power is based upon reifying well-worn inequities dressed up as tradition
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • there is no objective standard of success that we reach when we insist on rigor, which is too often deployed in defense of practices that are ableist and unkind
  • We are not just teachers, or scholars, or professionals. We are individuals thrown back in varying degrees on our own resources, worried about ourselves and our families and friends as we navigate the effects of COVID-19. Many of us are deeply anxious and afraid. Our pre-existing frailties have been magnified; we feel vulnerable, distracted and at sea. Our loved ones are sick, even dying. This is trauma. Few of us have faced such world-changing circumstances before, and as our minds absorb the impact of that reality, our brains cannot perform as capably as they usually would.
  • The most professional people I know right now are those who show up, day after day, to teach under extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps they do it with their laundry waiting to be folded, while their children interrupt, thinking constantly of their loved ones, weathering loneliness, wearing sweatpants and potentially in need of a haircut. But I know they do it while acknowledging this is not the world in which we taught two months before, and that every student is facing disruption, uncertainty and distraction. They do it creatively, making room for the unexpected, challenging their students, with the world a participant in the conversation.
5More

Waving the Asynchronous Flag - CogDogBlog - 0 views

cogdogblog.com/...asynchronous-flag online education cogdogblog asynchronous opinion
shared by Ed Webb on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • in all the pivot talk, there’s a tinge of favoring the synchronous over the asynchronous
  • it’s not synchronous BAD / asynchronous GOOD
  • In terms of teaching, it seems now seen through sepia toned web glasses, is one of my favorite approaches, of participants/learners creating/writing/publishing in their own spaces and the class space being a syndication hub. The old gold ds106, which, as I must remind is still chugging along after 10 years, while in that span, most every Name Your Tech Fad has crested and sunk to the bottom of the Gartner hype trough
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I think we ought to be placing a lot of thought and effort into asynchronous events and activities
  • The whole idea of distributed activity, woven in with daily challenges and assignment banks, was asynchronous beauty. But not without synchronous bits, be it class visits or running live sessions on ds106radio. Twas a mix.
4More

Offering Seminar Courses Remotely | Educatus - 0 views

words.usask.ca/...ering-seminar-courses-remotely education tools technology internet
shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 20 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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
22More

William Davies · How many words does it take to make a mistake? Education, Ed... - 0 views

www.lrb.co.uk/...does-it-take-to-make-a-mistake education tools technology edtech opinion analysis humanities UK Britain higher-ed surveillance politics STEM
shared by Ed Webb on 21 Feb 22 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • This generation, the first not to have known life before the internet, has acquired a battery of skills in navigating digital environments, but it isn’t clear how well those skills line up with the ones traditionally accredited by universities.
  • From the perspective of students raised in a digital culture, the anti-plagiarism taboo no doubt seems to be just one more academic hang-up, a weird injunction to take perfectly adequate information, break it into pieces and refashion it. Students who pay for essays know what they are doing; others seem conscientious yet intimidated by secondary texts: presumably they won’t be able to improve on them, so why bother trying? For some years now, it’s been noticeable how many students arrive at university feeling that every interaction is a test they might fail. They are anxious. Writing seems fraught with risk, a highly complicated task that can be executed correctly or not.
  • Many students may like the flexibility recorded lectures give them, but the conversion of lectures into yet more digital ‘content’ further destabilises traditional conceptions of learning and writing
  • the evaluation forms which are now such a standard feature of campus life suggest that many students set a lot of store by the enthusiasm and care that are features of a good live lecture
  • the drift of universities towards a platform model, which makes it possible for students to pick up learning materials as and when it suits them. Until now, academics have resisted the push for ‘lecture capture’. It causes in-person attendance at lectures to fall dramatically, and it makes many lecturers feel like mediocre television presenters. Unions fear that extracting and storing teaching for posterity threatens lecturers’ job security and weakens the power of strikes. Thanks to Covid, this may already have happened.
  • In the utopia sold by the EdTech industry (the companies that provide platforms and software for online learning), pupils are guided and assessed continuously. When one task is completed correctly, the next begins, as in a computer game; meanwhile the platform providers are scraping and analysing data from the actions of millions of children. In this behaviourist set-up, teachers become more like coaches: they assist and motivate individual ‘learners’, but are no longer so important to the provision of education. And since it is no longer the sole responsibility of teachers or schools to deliver the curriculum, it becomes more centralised – the latest front in a forty-year battle to wrest control from the hands of teachers and local authorities.
  • an injunction against creative interpretation and writing, a deprivation that working-class children will feel at least as deeply as anyone else.
  • There may be very good reasons for delivering online teaching in segments, punctuated by tasks and feedback, but as Yandell observes, other ways of reading and writing are marginalised in the process. Without wishing to romanticise the lonely reader (or, for that matter, the lonely writer), something is lost when alternating periods of passivity and activity are compressed into interactivity, until eventually education becomes a continuous cybernetic loop of information and feedback. How many keystrokes or mouse-clicks before a student is told they’ve gone wrong? How many words does it take to make a mistake?
  • This vision of language as code may already have been a significant feature of the curriculum, but it appears to have been exacerbated by the switch to online teaching. In a journal article from August 2020, ‘Learning under Lockdown: English Teaching in the Time of Covid-19’, John Yandell notes that online classes create wholly closed worlds, where context and intertextuality disappear in favour of constant instruction. In these online environments, readingis informed not by prior reading experiences but by the toolkit that the teacher has provided, and ... is presented as occurring along a tramline of linear development. Different readings are reducible to better or worse readings: the more closely the student’s reading approximates to the already finalised teacher’s reading, the better it is. That, it would appear, is what reading with precision looks like.
  • Constant interaction across an interface may be a good basis for forms of learning that involve information-processing and problem-solving, where there is a right and a wrong answer. The cognitive skills that can be trained in this way are the ones computers themselves excel at: pattern recognition and computation. The worry, for anyone who cares about the humanities in particular, is about the oversimplifications required to conduct other forms of education in these ways.
  • Blanket surveillance replaces the need for formal assessment.
  • Confirming Adorno’s worst fears of the ‘primacy of practical reason’, reading is no longer dissociable from the execution of tasks. And, crucially, the ‘goals’ to be achieved through the ability to read, the ‘potential’ and ‘participation’ to be realised, are economic in nature.
  • since 2019, with the Treasury increasingly unhappy about the amount of student debt still sitting on the government’s balance sheet and the government resorting to ‘culture war’ at every opportunity, there has been an effort to single out degree programmes that represent ‘poor value for money’, measured in terms of graduate earnings. (For reasons best known to itself, the usually independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has been leading the way in finding correlations between degree programmes and future earnings.) Many of these programmes are in the arts and humanities, and are now habitually referred to by Tory politicians and their supporters in the media as ‘low-value degrees’.
  • studying the humanities may become a luxury reserved for those who can fall back on the cultural and financial advantages of their class position. (This effect has already been noticed among young people going into acting, where the results are more visible to the public than they are in academia or heritage organisations.)
  • given the changing class composition of the UK over the past thirty years, it’s not clear that contemporary elites have any more sympathy for the humanities than the Conservative Party does. A friend of mine recently attended an open day at a well-known London private school, and noticed that while there was a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers, nobody was waiting to speak to the English teacher. When she asked what was going on, she was told: ‘I’m afraid parents here are very ambitious.’ Parents at such schools, where fees have tripled in real terms since the early 1980s, tend to work in financial and business services themselves, and spend their own days profitably manipulating and analysing numbers on screens. When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.
  • Leaving aside the strategic political use of terms such as ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, it would be hard to deny that we live in an age of heightened anxiety over the words we use, in particular the labels we apply to people. This has benefits: it can help to bring discriminatory practices to light, potentially leading to institutional reform. It can also lead to fruitless, distracting public arguments, such as the one that rumbled on for weeks over Angela Rayner’s description of Conservatives as ‘scum’. More and more, words are dredged up, edited or rearranged for the purpose of harming someone. Isolated words have acquired a weightiness in contemporary politics and public argument, while on digital media snippets of text circulate without context, as if the meaning of a single sentence were perfectly contained within it, walled off from the surrounding text. The exemplary textual form in this regard is the newspaper headline or corporate slogan: a carefully curated series of words, designed to cut through the blizzard of competing information.
  • Visit any actual school or university today (as opposed to the imaginary ones described in the Daily Mail or the speeches of Conservative ministers) and you will find highly disciplined, hierarchical institutions, focused on metrics, performance evaluations, ‘behaviour’ and quantifiable ‘learning outcomes’.
  • If young people today worry about using the ‘wrong’ words, it isn’t because of the persistence of the leftist cultural power of forty years ago, but – on the contrary – because of the barrage of initiatives and technologies dedicated to reversing that power. The ideology of measurable literacy, combined with a digital net that has captured social and educational life, leaves young people ill at ease with the language they use and fearful of what might happen should they trip up.
  • It has become clear, as we witness the advance of Panopto, Class Dojo and the rest of the EdTech industry, that one of the great things about an old-fashioned classroom is the facilitation of unrecorded, unaudited speech, and of uninterrupted reading and writing.
1 - 16 of 16
Showing 20▼ items per page