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Ed Webb

9 Ways Online Teaching Should be Different from Face-to-Face | Cult of Pedagogy - 0 views

www.cultofpedagogy.com/9-ways-online-teaching

education tools technology internet resources teaching online onlineeducation

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Jul 20 - Cached
  • Resist the temptation to dive right into curriculum at the start of the school year. Things will go more smoothly if you devote the early weeks to building community so students feel connected. Social emotional skills can be woven in during this time. On top of that, students need practice with whatever digital tools you’ll be using. So focus your lessons on those things, intertwining the two when possible. 
  • Online instruction is made up largely of asynchronous instruction, which students can access at any time. This is ideal, because requiring attendance for synchronous instruction puts some students at an immediate disadvantage if they don’t have the same access to technology, reliable internet, or a flexible home schedule. 
  • you’re likely to offer “face-to-face” or synchronous opportunities at some point, and one way to make them happen more easily is to have students meet in small groups. While it’s nearly impossible to arrange for 30 students to attend a meeting at once, assigning four students to meet is much more manageable.
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  • What works best, Kitchen says, is to keep direct instruction—things like brief video lectures and readings—in asynchronous form, using checks for understanding like embedded questions or exit slips.  You can then use synchronous meetings for more interactive, engaging work. “If we want students showing up, if we want them to know that this is worth their time,” Kitchen explains, “it really needs to be something active and engaging for them. Any time they can work with the material, categorize it, organize it, share further thoughts on it, have a discussion, all of those are great things to do in small groups.” 
  • The Jigsaw method, where students form expert groups on a particular chunk of content, then teach that content to other students. Discussion strategies adapted for virtual settingsUsing best practices for cooperative learning Visible Thinking routinesGamestorming and other business related protocols adapted for education, where students take on the role of customers/stakeholders
  • What really holds leverage for the students? What has endurance? What knowledge is essential?What knowledge and skills do students need to have before they move to the next grade level or the next class?What practices can be emphasized that transfer across many content areas?  Skills like analyzing, constructing arguments, building a strong knowledge base through texts, and speaking can all be taught through many different subjects. What tools can serve multiple purposes? Teaching students to use something like Padlet gives them opportunities to use audio, drawing, writing, and video. Non-digital tools can also work: Students can use things they find around the house, like toilet paper rolls, to fulfill other assignments, and then submit their work with a photo.
  • Online instruction is not conducive to covering large amounts of content, so you have to choose wisely, teaching the most important things at a slower pace.
  • Provide instructions in a consistent location and at a consistent time. This advice was already given for parents, but it’s worth repeating here through the lens of instructional design: Set up lessons so that students know where to find instructions every time. Make instructions explicit. Read and re-read to make sure these are as clear as possible. Make dogfooding your lessons a regular practice to root out problem areas.Offer multimodal instructions. If possible, provide both written and video instructions for assignments, so students can choose the format that works best for them. You might also offer a synchronous weekly or daily meeting; what’s great about doing these online is that even if you teach several sections of the same class per day, students are no longer restricted to class times and can attend whatever meeting works best for them.
  • put the emphasis on formative feedback as students work through assignments and tasks, rather than simply grading them at the end. 
  • In online learning, Kitchen says, “There are so many ways that students can cheat, so if we’re giving them just the traditional quiz or test, it’s really easy for them to be able to just look up that information.” A great solution to this problem is to have students create things.
  • For assessment, use a detailed rubric that highlights the learning goals the end product will demonstrate. A single-point rubric works well for this.To help students discover tools to work with, this list of tools is organized by the type of product each one creates. Another great source of ideas is the Teacher’s Guide to Tech.When developing the assignment, rather than focusing on the end product, start by getting clear on what you want students to DO with that product.
  • Clear and consistent communicationCreating explicit and consistent rituals and routinesUsing research-based instructional strategiesDetermining whether to use digital or non-digital tools for an assignment A focus on authentic learning, where authentic products are created and students have voice and choice in assignments
Ed Webb

Elgan: Why goofing off boosts productivity - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...article.do

internet socialnetworking work fun

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • I believe that not only are office slackers more productive than work-only employees, but that people who work from home are more productive than the office crowd -- and for many of the same reasons
  • 2. It gets personal things off your mind.
  • 1. The subconscious mind keeps working.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 3. It builds work relationships.
  • 4. It converts real-time interactions into asynchronous ones.
  • Ed Webb on 06 Apr 09
     
    That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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

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

lisahistory.net/...ut-the-way-we-thought-it-would

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gradually, closed spaces (Facebook, Ning, even Google if you understand what they’re up to) have become the norm, as have monetized sites. The spaces that were free are no longer free, although many of us freely contributed our own work to these sites, providing the basis of their popularity in the first place. Crowdsourcing, celebrated in story and song, has become the exploitation of the work of others in order to make money or provide cheap customer service. The use of personal information for marketing purposes is widespread, and creative people are leaving the platforms that brought everyone into the agora in the first place. Scholars at first enthusiastic about the future now see it as a lonely place. And I see conversations where people who care deeply about the web, education for the 21st century, and learning theories are beginning to back away from proselytizing about academic openness.
  • it’s about users becoming the products in the marketplace and the amusements in the panopticon
  • Where before it might have made sense to say we should make sure everyone is web literate, now such literacy extends beyond critical thinking about websites into a deeper understanding of what the using the web means for individual privacy and independence. This time, the enemies of openness and freedom won’t need to argue their philosophical reasons – they’ll argue that they’re protecting people. And the trouble is, they may be right.
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  • We need to be the antidote for blind adoption
Ed Webb

Please do a bad job of putting your courses online - Rebecca Barrett-Fox - 0 views

anygoodthing.com/...of-putting-your-courses-online

education technology internet edtech onlineeducation

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Please do a bad job of putting your courses online
  • For my colleagues who are now being instructed to put some or all of the remainder of their semester online, now is a time to do a poor job of it. You are NOT building an online class. You are NOT teaching students who can be expected to be ready to learn online. And, most importantly, your class is NOT the highest priority of their OR your life right now. Release yourself from high expectations right now, because that’s the best way to help your students learn.
  • Remember the following as you move online: Your students know less about technology than you think. Many of them know less than you. Yes, even if they are digital natives and younger than you. They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They need to reserve it for things more important than online lectures. Students who did not sign up for an online course have no obligation to have a computer, high speed wifi, a printer/scanner, or a camera. Do not even survey them to ask if they have it. Even if they do, they are not required to tell you this. And if they do now, that doesn’t mean that they will when something breaks and they can’t afford to fix it because they just lost their job at the ski resort or off-campus bookstore. Students will be sharing their technology with other household members. They may have LESS time to do their schoolwork, not more.
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  • Social isolation contributes to mental health problems. Social isolation contributes to domestic violence.
  • Do not require synchronous work. Students should not need to show up at a specific time for anything. REFUSE to do any synchronous work.
  • Do not record lectures unless you need to. (This is fundamentally different from designing an online course, where recorded information is, I think, really important.) They will be a low priority for students, and they take up a lot of resources on your end and on theirs. You have already built a rapport with them, and they don’t need to hear your voice to remember that.
  • Do record lectures if you need to. When information cannot be learned otherwise, include a lecture. Your university already some kind of tech to record lectures. DO NOT simply record in PowerPoint as the audio quality is low. While many people recommend lectures of only 5 minutes, I find that my students really do listen to longer lectures. Still, remember that your students will be frequently interrupted in their listening, so a good rule is 1 concept per lecture. So, rather than a lecture on ALL of, say, gender inequality in your Intro to Soc course, deliver 5 minutes on pay inequity (or 15 minutes or 20 minutes, if that’s what you need) and then a separate lecture on #MeToo and yet another on domestic violence. Closed caption them using the video recording software your university provides. Note that YouTube also generates closed captions [edited to add: they are not ADA compliant, though]. If you don’t have to include images, skip the video recording and do a podcast instead.
  • Editing is a waste of your time right now.
  • Listen for them asking for help. They may be anxious. They may be tired. Many students are returning to their parents’ home where they may not be welcome. Others will be at home with partners who are violent. School has been a safe place for them, and now it’s not available to them. Your class may matter to them a lot when they are able to focus on it, but it may not matter much now, in contrast to all the other things they have to deal with. Don’t let that hurt your feelings, and don’t hold it against them in future semesters or when they come back to ask for a letter of recommendation.
  • Allow every exam or quiz to be taken at least twice, and tell students that this means that if there is a tech problem on the first attempt, the second attempt is their chance to correct it. This will save you from the work of resetting tests or quizzes when the internet fails or some other tech problem happens. And since it can be very hard to discern when such failures are really failures or students trying to win a second attempt at a quiz or test, you avoid having to deal with cheaters.
  • Do NOT require students to use online proctoring or force them to have themselves recorded during exams or quizzes. This is a fundamental violation of their privacy, and they did NOT sign up for that when they enrolled in your course.
  • Circumvent the need for proctoring by making every exam open-notes, open-book, and open-internet. The best way to avoid them taking tests together or sharing answers is to use a large test bank.
  • Remind them of due dates. It might feel like handholding, but be honest: Don’t you appreciate the text reminder from your dentist that you have an appointment tomorrow? Your LMS has an announcement system that allows you to write an announcement now and post it later.
  • Make everything self-grading if you can (yes, multiple choice and T/F on quizzes and tests) or low-stakes (completed/not completed).
  • Don’t do too much. Right now, your students don’t need it. They need time to do the other things they need to do.
  • Make all work due on the same day and time for the rest of the semester. I recommend Sunday night at 11:59 pm.
  • This advice is very different from that which I would share if you were designing an online course. I hope it’s helpful, and for those of you moving your courses online, I hope it helps you understand the labor that is required in building an online course a bit better.
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

High-Tech Cheating on Homework Abounds, and Professors Are Partly to Blame - Technology... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...64857

cheating education homework technology teaching learning

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Apr 10 - Cached
  • "I call it 'technological detachment phenomenon,'" he told me recently. "As long as there's some technology between me and the action, then I'm not culpable for the action." By that logic, if someone else posted homework solutions online, what's wrong with downloading them?
  • "The feeling about homework is that it's really just busywork,"
  • professors didn't put much effort into teaching, so students don't put real effort into learning
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  • "The current system places too great a burden on individual faculty who would, under the circumstances, appear to have perverse incentives: Pursuing these matters lowers course evaluations, takes their severely limited time away from research for promotion, and unfortunately personalizes the issue when it is not personal at all, but a violation against the university."
  • In the humanities, professors have found technological tools to check for blatant copying on essays, and have caught so many culprits that the practice of running papers through plagiarism-detection services has become routine at many colleges. But that software is not suited to science-class assignments.
  • a "studio" model of teaching
  • The parents paid tuition in cash
  • The idea that students should be working in a shell is so interesting. It never even occurred to me as a student that I shouldn't work with someone else on my homework. How else do you figure it out? I guess that is peer-to-peer teaching. Copying someone else's work and presenting it as your own is clearly wrong (and, as demonstrated above, doesn't do the student any good), but learning from the resources at hand ought to be encouraged. Afterall, struggling through homework problems in intro physics is how you learn in the first place.
Ed Webb

What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09 | Beyond the Beyond from... - 0 views

blog.wired.com/...what-bruce-ster.html

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 09 - Cached
  • things in it that pretended to be ideas, but were not ideas at all: they were attitudes
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 25 Mar 09
       
      Like Edupunk
  • A sentence is a verbal construction meant to express a complete thought. This congelation that Tim O'Reilly constructed, that is not a complete thought. It's a network in permanent beta.
  • This chart is five years old now, which is 35 years old in Internet years, but intellectually speaking, it's still new in the world. It's alarming how hard it is to say anything constructive about this from any previous cultural framework.
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  • "The cloud as platform." That is insanely great. Right? You can't build a "platform" on a "cloud!" That is a wildly mixed metaphor! A cloud is insubstantial, while a platform is a solid foundation! The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!
  • luckily, we have computers in banking now. That means Moore's law is gonna save us! Instead of it being really obvious who owes what to whom, we can have a fluid, formless ownership structure that's always in permanent beta. As long as we keep moving forward, adding attractive new features, the situation is booming!
  • Web 2.0 is supposed to be business. This isn't a public utility or a public service, like the old model of an Information Superhighway established for the public good.
  • it's turtles all the way down
  • "Tagging not taxonomy." Okay, I love folksonomy, but I don't think it's gone very far. There have been books written about how ambient searchability through folksonomy destroys the need for any solid taxonomy. Not really. The reality is that we don't have a choice, because we have no conceivable taxonomy that can catalog the avalanche of stuff on the Web.
  • JavaScript is the duct tape of the Web. Why? Because you can do anything with it. It's not the steel girders of the web, it's not the laws of physics of the web. Javascript is beloved of web hackers because it's an ultimate kludge material that can stick anything to anything. It's a cloud, a web, a highway, a platform and a floor wax. Guys with attitude use JavaScript.
  • Before the 1990s, nobody had any "business revolutions." People in trade are supposed to be very into long-term contracts, a stable regulatory environment, risk management, and predictable returns to stockholders. Revolutions don't advance those things. Revolutions annihilate those things. Is that "businesslike"? By whose standards?
  • I just wonder what kind of rattletrap duct-taped mayhem is disguised under a smooth oxymoron like "collective intelligence."
  • the people whose granular bits of input are aggregated by Google are not a "collective." They're not a community. They never talk to each other. They've got basically zero influence on what Google chooses to do with their mouseclicks. What's "collective" about that?
  • I really think it's the original sin of geekdom, a kind of geek thought-crime, to think that just because you yourself can think algorithmically, and impose some of that on a machine, that this is "intelligence." That is not intelligence. That is rules-based machine behavior. It's code being executed. It's a powerful thing, it's a beautiful thing, but to call that "intelligence" is dehumanizing. You should stop that. It does not make you look high-tech, advanced, and cool. It makes you look delusionary.
  • I'd definitely like some better term for "collective intelligence," something a little less streamlined and metaphysical. Maybe something like "primeval meme ooze" or "semi-autonomous data propagation." Even some Kevin Kelly style "neobiological out of control emergent architectures." Because those weird new structures are here, they're growing fast, we depend on them for mission-critical acts, and we're not gonna get rid of them any more than we can get rid of termite mounds.
  • Web 2.0 guys: they've got their laptops with whimsical stickers, the tattoos, the startup T-shirts, the brainy-glasses -- you can tell them from the general population at a glance. They're a true creative subculture, not a counterculture exactly -- but in their number, their relationship to the population, quite like the Arts and Crafts people from a hundred years ago. Arts and Crafts people, they had a lot of bad ideas -- much worse ideas than Tim O'Reilly's ideas. It wouldn't bother me any if Tim O'Reilly was Governor of California -- he couldn't be any weirder than that guy they've got already. Arts and Crafts people gave it their best shot, they were in earnest -- but everything they thought they knew about reality was blown to pieces by the First World War. After that misfortune, there were still plenty of creative people surviving. Futurists, Surrealists, Dadaists -- and man, they all despised Arts and Crafts. Everything about Art Nouveau that was sexy and sensual and liberating and flower-like, man, that stank in their nostrils. They thought that Art Nouveau people were like moronic children.
  • in the past eighteen months, 24 months, we've seen ubiquity initiatives from Nokia, Cisco, General Electric, IBM... Microsoft even, Jesus, Microsoft, the place where innovative ideas go to die.
  • what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other. The web has to stop being a meringue frosting on the top of business, this make-do melange of mashups and abstraction layers. Web 2.0 goes away. Its work is done. The thing I always loved best about Web 2.0 was its implicit expiration date. It really took guts to say that: well, we've got a bunch of cool initiatives here, and we know they're not gonna last very long. It's not Utopia, it's not a New World Order, it's just a brave attempt to sweep up the ashes of the burst Internet Bubble and build something big and fast with the small burnt-up bits that were loosely joined. That showed more maturity than Web 1.0. It was visionary, it was inspiring, but there were fewer moon rockets flying out of its head. "Gosh, we're really sorry that we accidentally ruined the NASDAQ." We're Internet business people, but maybe we should spend less of our time stock-kiting. The Web's a communications medium -- how 'bout working on the computer interface, so that people can really communicate? That effort was time well spent. Really.
  • The poorest people in the world love cellphones.
  • Digital culture, I knew it well. It died -- young, fast and pretty. It's all about network culture now.
  • There's gonna be a Transition Web. Your economic system collapses: Eastern Europe, Russia, the Transition Economy, that bracing experience is for everybody now. Except it's not Communism transitioning toward capitalism. It's the whole world into transition toward something we don't even have proper words for.
  • The Transition Web is a culture model. If it's gonna work, it's got to replace things that we used to pay for with things that we just plain use.
  • Not every Internet address was a dotcom. In fact, dotcoms showed up pretty late in the day, and they were not exactly welcome. There were dot-orgs, dot edus, dot nets, dot govs, and dot localities. Once upon a time there were lots of social enterprises that lived outside the market; social movements, political parties, mutual aid societies, philanthropies. Churches, criminal organizations -- you're bound to see plenty of both of those in a transition... Labor unions... not little ones, but big ones like Solidarity in Poland; dissident organizations, not hobby activists, big dissent, like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. Armies, national guards. Rescue operations. Global non-governmental organizations. Davos Forums, Bilderberg guys. Retired people. The old people can't hold down jobs in the market. Man, there's a lot of 'em. Billions. What are our old people supposed to do with themselves? Websurf, I'm thinking. They're wise, they're knowledgeable, they're generous by nature; the 21st century is destined to be an old people's century. Even the Chinese, Mexicans, Brazilians will be old. Can't the web make some use of them, all that wisdom and talent, outside the market?
  • I've never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I'm bored with the deceit. I'm tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I'm disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I'm up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch. The cure for panic is action. Coherent action is great; for a scatterbrained web society, that may be a bit much to ask. Well, any action is better than whining. We can do better.
Ed Webb

The Future of WPMu at bavatuesdays - 1 views

bavatuesdays.com/the-future-of-wpmu

blogs blogging digitalidentity domains hosting jimgroom edupunk

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Oct 09 - Cached
  • I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.
  • what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.
  • we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.
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

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.
  • 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.
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?”
Ed Webb

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

chronicle.com/...144653

education research writing assignments

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • we need to construct meaningful opportunities for students to actually engage in research—to become modest but real contributors to the research on an actual question. When students write up the work they’ve actually performed, they create data and potential contributions to knowledge, contributions that can be digitally published or shared with a target community
  • Schuman’s critique of traditional writing instruction is sadly accurate. The skill it teaches most students is little more than a smash-and-grab assault on the secondary literature. Students open a window onto a search engine or database. They punch through to the first half-dozen items. Snatching random gems that seem to support their preconceived thesis, they change a few words, cobble it all together with class notes in the form of an argument, and call it "proving a thesis."
  • What happens when a newly employed person tries to pass off quote-farmed drivel as professional communication?
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  • Generally these papers are just pumped-up versions of the five-paragraph essay, with filler added. Thesis-driven, argumentative, like the newspaper editorials the genre is based on, this "researched writing" promises to solve big questions with little effort: "Reproductive rights resolved in five pages!"
  • Actual writing related to research is modest, qualified, and hesitant
  • our actual model involves elaborately respectful conversation, demonstrating sensitivity to the most nuanced claims of previous researchers
  • Academic, legal, medical, and business writing has easily understandable conventions. We responsibly survey the existing literature, formally or informally creating an annotated bibliography. We write a review of the literature, identifying a "blank" spot ignored by other scholars, or a "bright" spot where we see conflicting evidence. We describe the nature of our research in terms of a contribution to the blank or bright spot in that conversation. We conclude by pointing to further questions.
  • Millions of pieces of research writing that aren’t essays usefully circulate in the profession through any number of sharing technologies, including presentations and posters; grant and experiment proposals; curated, arranged, translated, or visualized data; knowledgeable dialogue in online media with working professionals; independent journalism, arts reviews, and Wikipedia entries; documentary pitches, scripts and storyboards; and informative websites.
  • real researchers don’t write a word unless they have something to contribute. We should teach our students to do the same
Ed Webb

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

Wired Campus: Whitman Takes Manhattan - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...whitman-takes-manhattan

literature edupunk poetry whitman NYC jimgroom collaboration WPMU

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Next fall, some modern New Yorkers — students at City Tech, CUNY’s New York City College of Technology — will explore the Fulton Ferry Landing that Whitman described in the poem and record their investigations on a Web site. Meanwhile, thanks to open-source software, students at three other institutions — New York University, Rutgers University at Camden, and the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia — will be recording their own literary and geographical explorations of Whitman’s work on that same Web site. The project, “Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman,” is the brainchild of a group of professors at all four schools led by Matthew K. Gold, an assistant professor of English at City Tech. It received a start-up grant of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities. James Groom, an instructional-technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington, is the site’s architect.
  • Mr. Gold believes that Whitman would appreciate the openness of the endeavor. The poet was nothing if not open source:
Ed Webb

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

chronicle.com/...8073

distance education plagiarism survey chronicle edu_trends

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 09 - Cached
  • You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results
  • older students tend to cheat less frequently than younger students
  • If you are interested in this topic, look for the interesting edited book called Student Plagiarism in an Online World: http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7031&v=tableOfContentsI wrote a chapter called, "Expect Originality! Using Taxonomies to Structure Assignments that Support Original Work." In it I discuss the complexities of plagiarism in the context of a digital culture of sharing and suggest that it is rarely black and white. I propose a continuum with intentional academic dishonesty on one end and original work on the other, with gradations in between. Based on my own research and teaching experience, I believe the instructional design and style of teaching can either make it easy-- or very difficult-- to cheat.
Ed Webb

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

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

education technology tools socialmedia web2.0 resources opinion internet teaching

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

Four Core Priorities for Trauma-Informed Distance Learning - MindShift - 0 views

www.kqed.org/...uma-informed-distance-learning

education tools technology resources internet trauma pandemics

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Apr 20 - Cached
  • The loss of our usual habits can cause shock and grief, so one way educators and parents can prioritize predictability is by creating routines.
  • Because trauma involves a loss of control, inflexible teaching methods can trigger some students into survival mode.
  • Relationships are key to resilience, “so anything that teachers can do to help foster relationships should be a priority right now,”
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  • people affected by trauma sometimes interpret neutral signals as negative
  • “I invite (educators) to be crystal, crystal clear with students that you miss them and you care about them,”
  • Trauma takes power from people, so trauma-informed educators need to think critically about not reproducing that dynamic. Venet said that means dropping power struggles, such as the demands she’s seen that students wear certain clothes or sit in certain parts of their house during distance learning.
  • focus instead on empowering students through shared decision-making and authentic choice
  • model consent by not taking pictures of Zoom calls or sharing students’ work without permission
  • “Now more than ever, kids don’t need to be doing fake work. They don’t need to be doing worksheets,”
  • Use trauma as “a lens, not a label” to understand students. Trauma is a response, not an event. Do not assume that any particular child definitely did or did not experience something as trauma. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is creating widespread anxiety, not all kids are experiencing it as stressful. Resources and relationships play a role.
Ed Webb

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

www.theguardian.com/...ce-us-schools-safety-shootings

surveillance US USA edtech education privacy

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it.
  • One leading student privacy expert estimated that as many as a third of America’s roughly 15,000 school districts may already be using technology that monitors students’ emails and documents for phrases that might flag suicidal thoughts, plans for a school shooting, or a range of other offenses.
  • Some parents said they were alarmed and frightened by schools’ new monitoring technologies. Others said they were conflicted, seeing some benefits to schools watching over what kids are doing online, but uncertain if their schools were striking the right balance with privacy concerns. Many said they were not even sure what kind of surveillance technology their schools might be using, and that the permission slips they had signed when their kids brought home school devices had told them almost nothing
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  • When Dapier talks with other teen librarians about the issue of school surveillance, “we’re very alarmed,” he said. “It sort of trains the next generation that [surveillance] is normal, that it’s not an issue. What is the next generation’s Mark Zuckerberg going to think is normal?
  • “It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”
  • “They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”
  • “They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.
  • Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”
  • As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.
  • Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.
  • there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.
  • Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.
  • The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.
  • “More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”
  • some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing
  • “I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”
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