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Ed Webb

Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...07mind.html

learning cognition neuroscience education testing psychology

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. “We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
  • The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
  • Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. “With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.
  • “The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”
  • cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.
  • “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.
  • “Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”
  • The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,”
Ed Webb

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.
Ed Webb

Study Finds No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance - Wired Ca... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...25541

social networking socialnetworking generations facebook education students attention

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jul 10 - Cached
  • no connection between time spent on social-networking sites and academic performance
  • The trouble with social media is it stunts the development of social skills. Now we learn that time spent on social media does not damage GPA, which implies it's benign. What a tragedy. And precisely the mistaken impression that social development stunting craves.
  • The study in question focused only on first-year students, and traditional ones at that. (A read through of the study revealed the sample included mostly 18- and 19-year-olds and a few (3%) 20-29-year-olds).
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  • Such a broad generalization based on one narrowly defined study, along with the suggestion that college students should be unconcerned about how much time they spend on SNS, is, at best, naive and, at worst, irresponsible.
  • Will there soon be a study determining that partying had no effect on grades, despite "how often students used them or how many they used"?
Ed Webb

Study Shows Students Are Addicted to Social Media | News | Communications of the ACM - 0 views

cacm.acm.org/...fulltext

socialmedia research addiction students study technology

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Apr 10 - Cached
  • most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world. "I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," says one person in the study. "I feel like most people these days are in a similar situation, for between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."
  • what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections. Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family
  • they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."
  • students' lives are wired together in such ways that opting out of that communication pattern would be tantamount to renouncing a social life
  • "Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information,"
  • How did they get the information? In a disaggregated way, and not typically from the news outlet that broke or committed resources to a story.
  • the young adults in this study appeared to be generally oblivious to branded news and information
  • an undifferentiated wave to them via social media
  • 43.3 percent of the students reported that they had a "smart phone"
  • Quotes
Ed Webb

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.
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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
Ed Webb

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?
Ed Webb

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.
Ed Webb

Literature Review: GIS for Conflict Analysis « iRevolution - 0 views

irevolution.wordpress.com/...view-gis-for-conflict-analysis

GIS IR conflict geography geodata

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 09 - Cached
  • The study objective is to represent geographic and territorial concepts with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The paper describes the challenges and potential opportunities for creating an integrated GIS model of security.
  • The literature review is a good introduction for anyone interested in the application of GIS to the spatial analysis of conflict. As a colleague mentioned, however, the authors of the study do not cite more recent work in this area, which is rather surprising and unfortunate. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the academic peer-review process can seemingly take forever.
Ed Webb

Most Faculty Don't Use Twitter, Study Reveals -- Campus Technology - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...use-twitter-study-reveals.aspx

twitter faculty survey

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Aug 09 - Cached
  • 30.7 percent of respondents reported that they do, in fact, use Twitter in one way or another--a percentage that's fairly high compared with the percentage of the general adult American population that uses Twitter (which is projected to be in the neighborhood of 10 percent to 11 percent by 2010).
Ed Webb

How much 'work' should my online course be for me and my students? - Dave's Educational... - 0 views

davecormier.com/...urse-be-for-me-and-my-students

education opinion students engagement online

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jun 20 - Cached
  • My recommendation for people planning their courses, is to stop thinking about ‘contact hours’. A contact hour is a constraint that is applied to the learning process because of the organizational need to have people share a space in a building. Also called a credit hour, (particularly for American universities) this has meant, from a workload perspective, that for every in class hour a student is meant to do at least 2 (in some cases 3) hours of study outside of class. Even Cliff Notes agrees with me. So… for a full load, that 30 to 45 Total Work Hours for students per course that you are designing.
  • Simple break down (not quite 90, yes i know) Watch 3 hours of video* – 5 hoursRead stuff – 20 hoursListen to me talk – 15 hoursTalk with other students in a group – 15 hoursWrite reflections about group chat – 7.5 hoursRespond to other people’s reflections – 7.5 hoursWork on a term paper – 10 hoursDo weekly quiz – 3 hoursWrite take home mid-term – 3 hoursWrite take home final – 3 hours
  • A thousand variations of this might be imagined
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  • a possible structure recommended by one of the faculty we were talking to was – read/watch, quiz, lecture, student group discussion, reflection. The reasoning here is that if you give learners (particularly new learners) a reading without some form of accountability (a quiz) they are much less likely to do it. I know that for me, when I’ve done the readings, I’m far more likely to attend class. Putting the student group discussion after the lecture gives students who can’t attend a synchronous session a chance to review the recording
  • The standardization police have been telling us for years that each student must learn the same things. Poppycock. Scaffolding doesn’t mean taking away student choice. There are numerous approaches to allowing a little or a lot of choice into your classes (learner contracts come to mind). Just remember, most students don’t want choice – at first. 12-16 years of training has told them that you the faculty member have something you want them to do and they need to find the trick of it. It will take a while until those students actually believe you want their actual opinion.
  • You can have a goal like – get them acculturated to the field – and work through your activities to get there. It’s harder, they will need your patience, but once they get their minds around it, it makes things much more interesting.
Ed Webb

Start Calling it Digital Liberal Arts | The Transducer - 0 views

transducer.ontoligent.com/?p=1013

education DH LiberalArts liberal_arts opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • No longer an inno­cent place for the play­ful encounter between tech­nol­ogy and inter­pre­ta­tion, DH is now being inter­ro­gated for evi­dence of par­tic­i­pa­tion in an exclu­sivist techno­sci­en­tific imag­i­nary, and there are many will­ing to save the field by the­o­riz­ing what has remained for too long under­the­o­rized
  • This is in con­trast to the dig­i­tal human­i­ties, and indeed dig­i­tal schol­ar­ship as a whole, which has its heart in the edi­tion and the archive
  • DLA is inclu­sive of the entire arts and sci­ences spec­trum
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • DLA is explic­itly res­i­den­tial and dia­log­i­cal
  • Not so much a replace­ment as a sup­ple­ment to dig­i­tal human­i­ties, DLA broad­ens the scope and relo­cates the cen­ter of grav­ity of what I have referred to as the dig­i­tal human­i­ties sit­u­a­tion, the recur­ring, play­ful encounter of human­ists with tech­nol­ogy.  Instead of focus­ing on what may bet­ter be described as the com­pu­ta­tional human­i­ties (a use­ful term recently pro­posed by Lev Manovich), the dig­i­tal lib­eral arts seeks to locate dig­i­tal media squarely within the frame of the lib­eral arts, broadly con­ceived as a cur­ricu­lum, not a dis­ci­pline or even set of dis­ci­plines, and as a dis­tinc­tive mode of edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence, not a set of received the­o­ret­i­cal con­cerns. It is a fram­ing par­tic­u­larly suited to lib­eral arts col­leges — America’s great con­tri­bu­tion to higher learn­ing — but also to uni­ver­si­ties, such as UVa, whose souls are in the lib­eral arts as well.
  • the idea of Coursera-style MOOCs being part of the DLA is a non-starter, although dis­trib­uted and medi­ated forms of edu­ca­tion can, and I think must, become part of the lib­eral arts experience
  • DLA is as con­cerned with ped­a­gogy as it is with research
  • focus­ing on the real use of dig­i­tal col­lec­tions (for exam­ple) as much as on their cre­ation and publication
Ed Webb

Letting Us Rip: Our New Right to Fair Use of DVDs - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Highe... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...25797

video rip copyright tools fair_use

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System [CSS] when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances: (i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students; (ii) Documentary filmmaking; (iii) Noncommercial videos. [Note: the term "motion picture" does not solely mean feature films—for the Library of Congress, it refers to "audiovisual works consisting of a series of related images which, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion, together with accompanying sounds, if any." Hence, the term includes television, animation, and pretty much any moving image to be found on DVD.]
  • the longer explanation from the Library of Congress specifies that circumventing CSS on a DVD is only justified when non-circumventing methods, such as videotaping the screen while playing the DVD or using screen-capture tools through a computer, are unacceptable due to inadequate audio or visual quality. But nevertheless, this ruling greatly expands who can use ripping software to clip DVDs for academic and transformative use, including a range of derivative works like remix videos and documentaries.
  • Now, no matter your discipline, you (or your technological partners) can do what I've been doing for the past three years: assemble a personal (or departmental) library of clips to access for class lectures. Now we can expand the use of those clips to embed in conference presentations, public lectures, digital publications, companion websites or DVDs to include with print publications, or other innovative uses that had otherwise been stifled by legal restrictions. For me, having a hard drive full of video clips on hand enables a mode of improvisation not available with DVDs—if discussion shifts to talking about an example of a film or television show that I've ripped a clip for another course, I can instantly play it in class even without planning in advance by bringing the DVD. Think of the conference presentations you've seen where a presenter fumbles over cuing and swapping DVDs—with a little bit of planning, clips can be directly embedded into a slideshow to avoid awkwardly wasting time.
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  • Fair Use isn't a NEW right under the exemptions, but a REAFFIRMED and RESTORED right
  • .wav, .mpeg, .mp3, .avi are all formats and codecs with owners.
Ed Webb

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

openedconference.org/...1037

lms education Web2.0 socialmedia NITLE bryanalexander

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • 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

The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and tex... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

twitter neuroscience brain yoffe internet socialmedia addiction

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Aug 09 - Cached
  • For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.
  • Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag.
  • When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.
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  • But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.
  • all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."
  • If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly. This perhaps should make us cautious. In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin writes of driving two indoor cats crazy by flicking a laser pointer around the room. They wouldn't stop stalking and pouncing on this ungraspable dot of light—their dopamine system pumping. She writes that no wild cat would indulge in such useless behavior: "A cat wants to catch the mouse, not chase it in circles forever." She says "mindless chasing" makes an animal less likely to meet its real needs "because it short-circuits intelligent stalking behavior." As we chase after flickering bits of information, it's a salutary warning.
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

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.”
Ed Webb

The Myth Of AI | Edge.org - 0 views

www.edge.org/...the-myth-of-ai

AI opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • The distinction between a corporation and an algorithm is fading. Does that make an algorithm a person? Here we have this interesting confluence between two totally different worlds. We have the world of money and politics and the so-called conservative Supreme Court, with this other world of what we can call artificial intelligence, which is a movement within the technical culture to find an equivalence between computers and people. In both cases, there's an intellectual tradition that goes back many decades. Previously they'd been separated; they'd been worlds apart. Now, suddenly they've been intertwined.
  • Since our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on. And people often accept that because there's no empirical alternative to compare it to, there's no baseline. It's bad personal science. It's bad self-understanding.
  • there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems
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  • It's not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense. It's a mass incompetence, as opposed to Skynet from the Terminator movies. That's what this type of AI turns into.
  • What's happened here is that translators haven't been made obsolete. What's happened instead is that the structure through which we receive the efforts of real people in order to make translations happen has been optimized, but those people are still needed.
  • because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth. The consumer tech companies, we tend to put a face in front of them, like a Cortana or a Siri
  • If you talk to translators, they're facing a predicament, which is very similar to some of the other early victim populations, due to the particular way we digitize things. It's similar to what's happened with recording musicians, or investigative journalists—which is the one that bothers me the most—or photographers. What they're seeing is a severe decline in how much they're paid, what opportunities they have, their long-term prospects.
  • In order to create this illusion of a freestanding autonomous artificial intelligent creature, we have to ignore the contributions from all the people whose data we're grabbing in order to make it work. That has a negative economic consequence.
  • If you talk about AI as a set of techniques, as a field of study in mathematics or engineering, it brings benefits. If we talk about AI as a mythology of creating a post-human species, it creates a series of problems that I've just gone over, which include acceptance of bad user interfaces, where you can't tell if you're being manipulated or not, and everything is ambiguous. It creates incompetence, because you don't know whether recommendations are coming from anything real or just self-fulfilling prophecies from a manipulative system that spun off on its own, and economic negativity, because you're gradually pulling formal economic benefits away from the people who supply the data that makes the scheme work.
  • This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it. There are about to be a whole bunch of those. And that'll involve some kind of new societal structure that isn't perfect anarchy. Nobody in the tech world wants to face that, so we lose ourselves in these fantasies of AI. But if you could somehow prevent AI from ever happening, it would have nothing to do with the actual problem that we fear, and that's the sad thing, the difficult thing we have to face.
  • To reject your own ignorance just casts you into a silly state where you're a lesser scientist. I don't see that so much in the neuroscience field, but it comes from the computer world so much, and the computer world is so influential because it has so much money and influence that it does start to bleed over into all kinds of other things.
Ed Webb

Google and Meta moved cautiously on AI. Then came OpenAI's ChatGPT. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...chatgpt-google-meta

AI tech technology business ethics

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Jan 23 - Cached
  • The surge of attention around ChatGPT is prompting pressure inside tech giants including Meta and Google to move faster, potentially sweeping safety concerns aside
  • Tech giants have been skittish since public debacles like Microsoft’s Tay, which it took down in less than a day in 2016 after trolls prompted the bot to call for a race war, suggest Hitler was right and tweet “Jews did 9/11.”
  • Some AI ethicists fear that Big Tech’s rush to market could expose billions of people to potential harms — such as sharing inaccurate information, generating fake photos or giving students the ability to cheat on school tests — before trust and safety experts have been able to study the risks. Others in the field share OpenAI’s philosophy that releasing the tools to the public, often nominally in a “beta” phase after mitigating some predictable risks, is the only way to assess real world harms.
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  • Silicon Valley’s sudden willingness to consider taking more reputational risk arrives as tech stocks are tumbling
  • A chatbot that pointed to one answer directly from Google could increase its liability if the response was found to be harmful or plagiarized.
  • AI has been through several hype cycles over the past decade, but the furor over DALL-E and ChatGPT has reached new heights.
  • Soon after OpenAI released ChatGPT, tech influencers on Twitter began to predict that generative AI would spell the demise of Google search. ChatGPT delivered simple answers in an accessible way and didn’t ask users to rifle through blue links. Besides, after a quarter of a century, Google’s search interface had grown bloated with ads and marketers trying to game the system.
  • Inside big tech companies, the system of checks and balances for vetting the ethical implications of cutting-edge AI isn’t as established as privacy or data security. Typically teams of AI researchers and engineers publish papers on their findings, incorporate their technology into the company’s existing infrastructure or develop new products, a process that can sometimes clash with other teams working on responsible AI over pressure to see innovation reach the public sooner.
  • Chatbots like OpenAI routinely make factual errors and often switch their answers depending on how a question is asked
  • To Timnit Gebru, executive director of the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute, the prospect of Google sidelining its responsible AI team doesn’t necessarily signal a shift in power or safety concerns, because those warning of the potential harms were never empowered to begin with. “If we were lucky, we’d get invited to a meeting,” said Gebru, who helped lead Google’s Ethical AI team until she was fired for a paper criticizing large language models.
  • Rumman Chowdhury, who led Twitter’s machine-learning ethics team until Elon Musk disbanded it in November, said she expects companies like Google to increasingly sideline internal critics and ethicists as they scramble to catch up with OpenAI.“We thought it was going to be China pushing the U.S., but looks like it’s start-ups,” she said.
Ed Webb

ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender - 0 views

nymag.com/...e-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

AI ethics linguistics consciousness LLMs opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Mar 23 - Cached
  • Please do not conflate word form and meaning. Mind your own credulity.
  • We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text,” Bender told me when we met this winter. “But we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.”
  • A handful of companies control what PricewaterhouseCoopers called a “$15.7 trillion game changer of an industry.” Those companies employ or finance the work of a huge chunk of the academics who understand how to make LLMs. This leaves few people with the expertise and authority to say, “Wait, why are these companies blurring the distinction between what is human and what’s a language model? Is this what we want?”
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  • “We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms,” she co-wrote in 2021. “Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.”
  • chatbots that we easily confuse with humans are not just cute or unnerving. They sit on a bright line. Obscuring that line and blurring — bullshitting — what’s human and what’s not has the power to unravel society
  • She began learning from, then amplifying, Black women’s voices critiquing AI, including those of Joy Buolamwini (she founded the Algorithmic Justice League while at MIT) and Meredith Broussard (the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World). She also started publicly challenging the term artificial intelligence, a sure way, as a middle-aged woman in a male field, to get yourself branded as a scold. The idea of intelligence has a white-supremacist history. And besides, “intelligent” according to what definition? The three-stratum definition? Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences? The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale? Bender remains particularly fond of an alternative name for AI proposed by a former member of the Italian Parliament: “Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.” Then people would be out here asking, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”
  • Tech-makers assuming their reality accurately represents the world create many different kinds of problems. The training data for ChatGPT is believed to include most or all of Wikipedia, pages linked from Reddit, a billion words grabbed off the internet. (It can’t include, say, e-book copies of everything in the Stanford library, as books are protected by copyright law.) The humans who wrote all those words online overrepresent white people. They overrepresent men. They overrepresent wealth. What’s more, we all know what’s out there on the internet: vast swamps of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, neo-Nazism.
  • One fired Google employee told me succeeding in tech depends on “keeping your mouth shut to everything that’s disturbing.” Otherwise, you’re a problem. “Almost every senior woman in computer science has that rep. Now when I hear, ‘Oh, she’s a problem,’ I’m like, Oh, so you’re saying she’s a senior woman?”
  • “We haven’t learned to stop imagining the mind behind it.”
  • In March 2021, Bender published “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” with three co-authors. After the paper came out, two of the co-authors, both women, lost their jobs as co-leads of Google’s Ethical AI team.
  • “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” is not a write-up of original research. It’s a synthesis of LLM critiques that Bender and others have made: of the biases encoded in the models; the near impossibility of studying what’s in the training data, given the fact they can contain billions of words; the costs to the climate; the problems with building technology that freezes language in time and thus locks in the problems of the past. Google initially approved the paper, a requirement for publications by staff. Then it rescinded approval and told the Google co-authors to take their names off it. Several did, but Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru refused. Her colleague (and Bender’s former student) Margaret Mitchell changed her name on the paper to Shmargaret Shmitchell, a move intended, she said, to “index an event and a group of authors who got erased.” Gebru lost her job in December 2020, Mitchell in February 2021. Both women believe this was retaliation and brought their stories to the press. The stochastic-parrot paper went viral, at least by academic standards. The phrase stochastic parrot entered the tech lexicon.
  • Tech execs loved it. Programmers related to it. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in many ways the perfect audience: a self-identified hyperrationalist so acculturated to the tech bubble that he seemed to have lost perspective on the world beyond. “I think the nuclear mutually assured destruction rollout was bad for a bunch of reasons,” he said on AngelList Confidential in November. He’s also a believer in the so-called singularity, the tech fantasy that, at some point soon, the distinction between human and machine will collapse. “We are a few years in,” Altman wrote of the cyborg merge in 2017. “It’s probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate … and the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast.” On December 4, four days after ChatGPT was released, Altman tweeted, “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”
  • “This is one of the moves that turn up ridiculously frequently. People saying, ‘Well, people are just stochastic parrots,’” she said. “People want to believe so badly that these language models are actually intelligent that they’re willing to take themselves as a point of reference and devalue that to match what the language model can do.”
  • The membrane between academia and industry is permeable almost everywhere; the membrane is practically nonexistent at Stanford, a school so entangled with tech that it can be hard to tell where the university ends and the businesses begin.
  • “No wonder that men who live day in and day out with machines to which they believe themselves to have become slaves begin to believe that men are machines.”
  • what’s tenure for, after all?
  • LLMs are tools made by specific people — people who stand to accumulate huge amounts of money and power, people enamored with the idea of the singularity. The project threatens to blow up what is human in a species sense. But it’s not about humility. It’s not about all of us. It’s not about becoming a humble creation among the world’s others. It’s about some of us — let’s be honest — becoming a superspecies. This is the darkness that awaits when we lose a firm boundary around the idea that humans, all of us, are equally worthy as is.
  • The AI dream is “governed by the perfectibility thesis, and that’s where we see a fascist form of the human.”
  • “Why are you trying to trick people into thinking that it really feels sad that you lost your phone?”
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