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Ed Webb

I unintentionally created a biased AI algorithm 25 years ago - tech companies are still making the same mistake - 0 views

theconversation.com/making-the-same-mistake-203734

AI algorithms race racism bias DickinsonCollege dickinson technology opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 10 May 23 - No Cached
  • How and why do well-educated, well-intentioned scientists produce biased AI systems? Sociological theories of privilege provide one useful lens.
  • Scientists also face a nasty subconscious dilemma when incorporating diversity into machine learning models: Diverse, inclusive models perform worse than narrow models.
  • fairness can still be the victim of competitive pressures in academia and industry. The flawed Bard and Bing chatbots from Google and Microsoft are recent evidence of this grim reality. The commercial necessity of building market share led to the premature release of these systems.
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  • Their training data is biased. They are designed by an unrepresentative group. They face the mathematical impossibility of treating all categories equally. They must somehow trade accuracy for fairness. And their biases are hiding behind millions of inscrutable numerical parameters.
  • biased AI systems can still be created unintentionally and easily. It’s also clear that the bias in these systems can be harmful, hard to detect and even harder to eliminate.
  • with North American computer science doctoral programs graduating only about 23% female, and 3% Black and Latino students, there will continue to be many rooms and many algorithms in which underrepresented groups are not represented at all.
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

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...pt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

AI internet analysis opinion LLMs writing education pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Feb 23 - Cached
  • Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.
  • a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large-language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine per cent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.
  • ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.
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  • large-language models like ChatGPT are often extolled as the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, it may sound dismissive—or at least deflating—to describe them as lossy text-compression algorithms. I do think that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the tendency to anthropomorphize large-language models
  • Even though large-language models often hallucinate, when they’re lucid they sound like they actually understand subjects like economic theory
  • The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
  • starting with a blurry copy of unoriginal work isn’t a good way to create original work
  • If and when we start seeing models producing output that’s as good as their input, then the analogy of lossy compression will no longer be applicable.
  • Even if it is possible to restrict large-language models from engaging in fabrication, should we use them to generate Web content? This would make sense only if our goal is to repackage information that’s already available on the Web. Some companies exist to do just that—we usually call them content mills. Perhaps the blurriness of large-language models will be useful to them, as a way of avoiding copyright infringement. Generally speaking, though, I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information.
  • Having students write essays isn’t merely a way to test their grasp of the material; it gives them experience in articulating their thoughts. If students never have to write essays that we have all read before, they will never gain the skills needed to write something that we have never read.
  • Sometimes it’s only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas. Some might say that the output of large-language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.
  • What use is there in having something that rephrases the Web?
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

CRITICAL AI: Adapting College Writing for the Age of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT: Some Next Steps for Educators - Critical AI - 1 views

criticalai.org/...-some-next-steps-for-educators

AI education opinion internet analysis pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jan 23 - Cached
  • In the long run, we believe, teachers need to help students develop a critical awareness of generative machine models: how they work; why their content is often biased, false, or simplistic; and what their social, intellectual, and environmental implications might be. But that kind of preparation takes time, not least because journalism on this topic is often clickbait-driven, and “AI” discourse tends to be jargony, hype-laden, and conflated with science fiction.
  • Make explicit that the goal of writing is neither a product nor a grade but, rather, a process that empowers critical thinking
  • Students are more likely to misuse text generators if they trust them too much. The term “Artificial Intelligence” (“AI”) has become a marketing tool for hyping products. For all their impressiveness, these systems are not intelligent in the conventional sense of that term. They are elaborate statistical models that rely on mass troves of data—which has often been scraped indiscriminately from the web and used without knowledge or consent.
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  • LLMs usually cannot do a good job of explaining how a particular passage from a longer text illuminates the whole of that longer text. Moreover, ChatGPT’s outputs on comparison and contrast are often superficial. Typically the system breaks down a task of logical comparison into bite-size pieces, conveys shallow information about each of those pieces, and then formulaically “compares” and “contrasts” in a noticeably superficial or repetitive way. 
  • In-class writing, whether digital or handwritten, may have downsides for students with anxiety and disabilities
  • ChatGPT can produce outputs that take the form of  “brainstorms,” outlines, and drafts. It can also provide commentary in the style of peer review or self-analysis. Nonetheless, students would need to coordinate multiple submissions of automated work in order to complete this type of assignment with a text generator.  
  • No one should present auto-generated writing as their own on the expectation that this deception is undiscoverable. 
  • LLMs often mimic the harmful prejudices, misconceptions, and biases found in data scraped from the internet
  • Show students examples of inaccuracy, bias, logical, and stylistic problems in automated outputs. We can build students’ cognitive abilities by modeling and encouraging this kind of critique. Given that social media and the internet are full of bogus accounts using synthetic text, alerting students to the intrinsic problems of such writing could be beneficial. (See the “ChatGPT/LLM Errors Tracker,” maintained by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.)
  • Since ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content, it seems like a poor foundation for building students’ skills and may circumvent their independent thinking.
  • Good journalism on language models is surprisingly hard to find since the technology is so new and the hype is ubiquitous. Here are a few reliable short pieces.     “ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use Now” edited by Susan Dagostino, Inside Higher Ed, January 12, 2023  “University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?” by Katyanna Quach, The Register, December 27, 2022  “How to spot AI-generated text” by Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, December 19, 2022  The Road to AI We Can Trust, Substack by Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI researcher who writes frequently and lucidly about the topic. See also Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, “GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s Language Generator Has No Idea What It’s Talking About” (2020).
  • “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, March 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, doi: 10.1145/3442188. A blog post summarizing and discussing the above essay derived from a Critical AI @ Rutgers workshop on the essay: summarizes key arguments, reprises discussion, and includes links to video-recorded presentations by digital humanist Katherine Bode (ANU) and computer scientist and NLP researcher Matthew Stone (Rutgers).
Ed Webb

William Davies · How many words does it take to make a mistake? Education, Education, Algorithm · LRB 24 February 2022 - 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

How to Turn Your Syllabus into an Infographic - The Visual Communication Guy - 0 views

thevisualcommunicationguy.com/...r-syllabus-into-an-infographic

syllabi education design infographic access

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Jul 20 - Cached
  • If you’re ever going to turn a syllabus into an infographic, you must, MUST reduce the amount of text you are using. There are, of course, important things you’ll want and must include, but you can’t think of this document as ten pages of paragraphs. Strip down to only the essential information, with a bit of added info where you  think some flare or excitement is needed. Remember: your students are smart people. They can understand documents quickly without a bunch of extra fluff, so remove all the unnecessary stuff.
  • Remember to only use pictures that you either created yourself (own the copyright) or that you found through creative commons or public domain websites. Don’t use ugly clipart or images that you don’t have permission to use. A great place to find free icons? Flaticon.com.
  • try drawing it out on sketch paper first. While this will seem like an annoying task for most people, trust me when I say that it will save you a lot of time in the long run
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  • If there is anything on your syllabus that can be quantified (like percentages for grades or assignments), consider making bar graphs or pie charts to visually represent it. This is helpful, too, so students can visually understand, very quickly, how much weight is given to each project.
  • Once you’ve determined the sections, it’s easier to think about what relates to what and how you might organize your syllabus in a way that makes sense for your students.
  • Remember to reduce as much text as possible and supplement what you write with an image. Consider using the images of your required textbooks, for example, and use icons and graphics that relate to each section.
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Don’t get so caught up in designing a cool infographic about your course that you forget to include information about accessibility, Title IX, academic dishonesty, and other related information. I might recommend not going too fancy on the institution-wide policies. You might still keep that in paragraph form, just so that there is no way to misinterpret what your institution wants you to say.
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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

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

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

blog.mahabali.me/...-webcam-obsession-youre-having

education tools technology opinion video engagement

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jun 20 - Cached
  • About that obsession you’ve got with students turning on their cameras during class. I understand why you’ve got it. I’d like to help you deal with it. I say “deal with it” because many students complain to me that they don’t like being forced to turn their cameras on
  • it’s probably essential to our wellbeing to see human faces. As a teacher and presenter and facilitator, seeing facial expressions and reactions of audience/participants makes a huge difference. I get it. I get that you need to know someone is listening, and see those reactions. I get it. I recently gave a keynote and asked a few friends to be on webinar panel so I could see their smiling faces. However, when I am in a position of power like in the class, I never ask students to turn on their cameras. And my students were *almost always all engaged* last semester in our Zoom calls.
  • You can’t make eye contact online
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  • Reasons why people want to keep their cameras off include: Discomfort or shyness with showing their faces online. This is real, people. For most people, it gets better with time, but not always and not in every context.Noisy or busy home environments e.g. spouse or kids or siblings moving about. I have occasionally had to mute and turn camera off in the middle of a webinar I am personally giving for those reasons! Women and girls can be especially vulnerable to kids and spouses not respecting their work/learning timeNot being dressed for company (for me personally, I often don’t want to cover my hair for a meeting where I’m not presenting, I want to lounge around in comfy clothes). Or your home not being tidy enough for company. This is a thing.Slow/unstable internet connection. Turning off webcam can be the easiest way to get better quality audioDiscomfort over recording
  • Ask questions and ask everyone to respond in the chat. You will know if they are focused and engaged by their responses and every single person can participateAsk questions for them to answer orally. Either call on people round robin, or call out some people from the chat (also keeping in mind some people are voice shy, and some people have noisy home environments)If you can divide students into smaller groups go talk to each other and you can move between them like a butterfly, this can help some people engage/talk more and occasionally even turn their cameras onUse things like Annotation or Google docs to have folks contributeAsk students to have a profile picture up when their camera is off. This helps sometimes.You might learn to distinguish student voices as you would close friends on the phone (remember life pre-caller ID where close friends and family would expect that?) and use them as proxies for how they are feeling. You already have this skill, but are not expecting to use it.If you record, consider having an unrecorded portion. You will be surprised how much some people participate or are willing to turn cameras on in the unrecorded portion.
  • it seems we need to consider ways of allowing people to “be there” in alternative ways that they are comfortable with and that tell us they are really listening to us and responding in more explicit ways
Ed Webb

The Ed-Tech Imaginary - 0 views

hackeducation.com/...imaginary

education technology futures sciencefiction sci-fi opinion analysis edtech

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Jun 20 - Cached
  • We can say "Black lives matter," but we must also demonstrate through our actions that Black lives matter, and that means we must radically alter many of our institutions and practices, recognizing their inhumanity and carcerality. And that includes, no doubt, ed-tech. How much of ed-tech is, to use Ruha Benjamin's phrase, "the new Jim Code"? How much of ed-tech is designed by those who imagine students as cheats or criminals, as deficient or negligent?
  • "Reimagining" is a verb that education reformers are quite fond of. And "reimagining" seems too often to mean simply defunding, privatizing, union-busting, dismantling, outsourcing.
  • if Betsy DeVos is out there "reimagining," then we best be resisting
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  • think we can view the promotion of ed-tech as a similar sort of process — the stories designed to convince us that the future of teaching and learning will be a technological wonder. The "jobs of the future that don't exist yet." The push for everyone to "learn to code."
  • The Matrix is, after all, a dystopia. So why would Matrix-style learning be desirable? Maybe that's the wrong question. Perhaps it's not so much that it's desirable, but it's just how our imaginations have been constructed, constricted even. We can't imagine any other ideal but speed and efficiency.
  • The first science fiction novel, published over 200 years ago, was in fact an ed-tech story: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. While the book is commonly interpreted as a tale of bad science, it is also the story of bad education — something we tend to forget if we only know the story through the 1931 film version
  • Teaching machines and robot teachers were part of the Sixties' cultural imaginary — perhaps that's the problem with so many Boomer ed-reform leaders today. But that imaginary — certainly in the case of The Jetsons — was, upon close inspection, not always particularly radical or transformative. The students at Little Dipper Elementary still sat in desks in rows. The teacher still stood at the front of the class, punishing students who weren't paying attention.
  • we must also decolonize the ed-tech imaginary
  • Zuckerberg gave everyone at Facebook a copy of the Ernest Cline novel Ready Player One, for example, to get them excited about building technology for the future — a book that is really just a string of nostalgic references to Eighties white boy culture. And I always think about that New York Times interview with Sal Khan, where he said that "The science fiction books I like tend to relate to what we're doing at Khan Academy, like Orson Scott Card's 'Ender's Game' series." You mean, online math lectures are like a novel that justifies imperialism and genocide?! Wow.
  • This ed-tech imaginary is segregated. There are no Black students at the push-button school. There are no Black people in The Jetsons — no Black people living the American dream of the mid-twenty-first century
  • Part of the argument I make in my book is that much of education technology has been profoundly shaped by Skinner, even though I'd say that most practitioners today would say that they reject his theories; that cognitive science has supplanted behaviorism; and that after Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky trashed Beyond Freedom and Dignity, no one paid attention to Skinner any more — which is odd considering there are whole academic programs devoted to "behavioral design," bestselling books devoted to the "nudge," and so on.
  • so much of the ed-tech imaginary is wrapped up in narratives about the Hero, the Weapon, the Machine, the Behavior, the Action, the Disruption. And it's so striking because education should be a practice of care, not conquest
Ed Webb

Offering Seminar Courses Remotely | Educatus - 0 views

words.usask.ca/...ering-seminar-courses-remotely

education tools technology internet

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 20 - Cached
  • In an online environment, seminars will work best if they occur asynchronously in the discussion boards in an LMS
  • The 4 key elements for a seminar that need to be replicated during remote instruction include: A prompt or text(s) that the student considers independently in advance Guiding questions that require analysis, synthesize and/or evaluation of ideas The opportunity to share personal thinking with a group Ideas being developed, rejected, and refined over time based on everyone’s contributions
  • Students need specific guidance and support for how to develop, reject, and refine ideas appropriately in your course.  If you want Students to share well, consider requiring an initial post where you and Students introduce yourselves and share a picture. Describe your expectations for norms in how everyone will behave online Provide a lot of initial feedback about the quality of posting.  Consider giving samples of good and bad posts, and remember to clarify your marking criteria. Focus your expectations on the quality of comments, and set maximums for the amount you expect to reduce your marking load and keep the discussions high quality. Someone will need to moderate the discussion. That includes posting the initial threads, reading what everyone posts all weeks and commenting to keep the discussion flowing.  Likely, the same person (you or a TA) will also be grading and providing private feedback to each student. Consider making the moderation of a discussion an assignment in your course. You can moderate the first few weeks to demonstrate what you want, and groups of Students can moderate other weeks. It can increase engagement if done well, and definitely decreases your work load.
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  • Teach everyone to mute when not speaking, and turn off their cameras if they have bandwidth issues. Use the chat so people can agree and add ideas as other people are speaking, and teach people to raise their hands or add emoticons in the participants window to help you know who wants to speak next
Ed Webb

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

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

www.insidehighered.com/...st-post-complexities-certainty

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

Online pivot & the absence of a magic button - The Ed Techie - 1 views

blog.edtechie.net/...-the-absence-of-a-magic-button

education technology opinion onlineeducation

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Apr 20 - Cached
  • Now we’re getting into the online pivot more substantially, higher education institutions are coming to terms it may not be a short-term emergency shift. It looks like the first semester of the 2020-21 year may be online, and if Covid-19 flares up again, who knows how long it may continue. While you could get away with “sticking classes on Zoom” for the immediate emergency, that won’t cut it in the medium term.
  • I’m sorry to tell you – there is no Go Online button
  • The good news is that it is entirely possible to create good, online courses in just about any subject, and students will do well in them and their performance and long term understanding of the topics will be as good, if not better, than those taught face to face. So that’s the good news, higher education isn’t going to die.
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  • It is not cheapIt is not quickYou need to invest in building up your own staff expertiseIt will bring additional problems that you didn’t have beforeStudents will need different types of support
  • the main issue here is the cut in academic staff and the outsourcing of expertise. Invest in your staff.
  • a better solution is to invest in staff (and here institutions might want to get expertise in to help), use OER for content, and make strategic decisions that have as their basis the belief that online, distance ed is a useful, valid form of education.
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

Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All | IDDblog: Instructional Design Tips, Advice, & Trends for Online & Distance Learning | Educational Technology and Online Course Design Help - 0 views

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

education tools technology internet pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Mar 20 - Cached
  • The Green Zone: Underappreciated Workhorses Starting with the green zone in the lower left, we have readings with text and images. These types of assignments may not seem exciting, but sharing readings with students in a consistent and organized way provides your online course with a very practical, solid foundation. Email and discussion boards also belong in this quadrant.  Online instructors have been using these three tools—file sharing (for readings and such), email, and discussion boards—for decades. And while that might make them sound boring, you can create some fantastic instructional experiences with just these three tools. 
  • The Blue Zone: Practical Immediacy Moving over to the lower right, we have low-bandwidth tools that can add immediacy to student interactions. If you’ve used Microsoft Office 365 or Google Drive, you’re probably already familiar with some of the features and benefits of collaborative document editors. These tools allow multiple people to edit and comment on the same document, spreadsheet, or presentation slides. Depending on how you structure your assignments, students could collaborate over an extended period of time, or they could go online at the exact same time and write and edit each other’s work simultaneously.  When it comes to group chat/messaging, there are lots of free apps that can be useful in an educational setting. Slack and GroupMe are two popular examples. These mobile-friendly apps allow students to post text-based messages and images without requiring anyone in the group (including you!) to share their phone numbers. These tools allow students to communicate quickly and easily without scheduling an entire day around a formal video conference.
  • Screencasting adds a human element to online courses because your voice creates a sense of presence that plain text can’t. 
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  • Students are more likely to watch a series of shorter videos than a single, longer video, which is why I recommend instructors try to divide long screencasts into five-to-ten minute segments (whenever possible)
  • asynchronous discussion with audio and video. If you’re not familiar with this concept, I’m referring to discussion tools that allow students to respond with audio and video instead of just text. One tool that’s been a leader for a long time in this multimedia discussion space is VoiceThread. While VoiceThread’s defining feature is its user-friendly approach to audio-based commenting, it can also be used to create narrated presentations with PowerPoints slides, images, and video. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the interface of a traditional screencasting tool, VoiceThread is worth exploring as a simpler way of recording online lectures and fostering discussions that go beyond plain text
  • tools that require both high bandwidth and high immediacy, and the best examples of this are videoconferencing tools like Zoom or Skype.  Videoconferencing is a great way to engage with students when they truly need to see and hear each other in real time. It can also be useful for online office hours, since it’s easier to feel connected and avoid misunderstandings when you have the benefit of tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language.  Unfortunately, videoconferencing is one of the most inflexible and bandwidth-intensive activities we can ask our students to do. Before you rely on it too heavily, look at the other quadrants and ask yourself if there’s any other way to accomplish your learning objectives without it. 
  • None of this is to say that videoconferencing is inherently bad or that it has no place in an online course. It’s simply a reminder that seemingly small (and sometimes unconscious) choices about the technologies we use can have a big impact on how inclusive and effective our teaching is.
Ed Webb

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

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

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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

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

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

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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.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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.
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