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Ed Webb

Waving the Asynchronous Flag - CogDogBlog - 0 views

  • in all the pivot talk, there’s a tinge of favoring the synchronous over the asynchronous
  • it’s not synchronous BAD / asynchronous GOOD
  • In terms of teaching, it seems now seen through sepia toned web glasses, is one of my favorite approaches, of participants/learners creating/writing/publishing in their own spaces and the class space being a syndication hub. The old gold ds106, which, as I must remind is still chugging along after 10 years, while in that span, most every Name Your Tech Fad has crested and sunk to the bottom of the Gartner hype trough
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  • I think we ought to be placing a lot of thought and effort into asynchronous events and activities
  • The whole idea of distributed activity, woven in with daily challenges and assignment banks, was asynchronous beauty. But not without synchronous bits, be it class visits or running live sessions on ds106radio. Twas a mix.
Ed Webb

Business as Unusual: The New Normal for Online Learning - BCcampus - 0 views

  • 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

  • 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

Stephen's Web ~ First data on the shift to emergency online learning ~ Stephen Downes - 0 views

  • The short version: pretty much everyone went online; professors with the least online experience had to make the most adjustments, had the most to learn, and were most likely to just jump into giving lectures by videoconference.
Ed Webb

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

  • 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

  • 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

Stephen's Web ~ The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning ~ ... - 0 views

  • here's the question: just how bad are the 'just get it online' courses? How much extra value does all that expertise, time and money buy you? If we could spend less money and expand our access proportionately, would it still be worthwhile? I know that the professionals won't applaud the idea of a whole bunch of amateurs doing the job. But my take is, wouldn't it be great if they could? And where is the evidence that they can't?
Ed Webb

Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All | IDDblog: ... - 0 views

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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

  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • “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.”
  • “They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”
  • 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.”
Ed Webb

A Few Responses to Criticism of My SXSW-Edu Keynote on Media Literacy - 0 views

  • Can you give me examples of programs that are rooted in, speaking to, and resonant with conservative and religious communities in this country? In particular, I’d love to know about programs that work in conservative white Evangelical and religious black and LatinX communities? I’d love to hear how educators integrate progressive social justice values into conservative cultural logics. Context: To the best that I can tell, every program I’ve seen is rooted in progressive (predominantly white) ways of thinking. I know that communities who define “fake news” as CNN (as well as black communities who see mainstream media as rooted in the history of slavery and white supremacy) have little patience for the logics of progressive white educators. So what does media literacy look like when it starts with religious and/or conservative frameworks? What examples exist?
  • Can you tell me how you teach across gaslighting? How do you stabilize students’ trust in Information, particularly among those whose families are wary of institutions and Information intermediaries?Context: Foreign adversaries (and some domestic groups) are primarily focused on destabilizing people’s trust in information intermediaries. They want people to doubt everything and turn their backs on institutions. We are seeing the impact of this agenda. I’m not finding that teaching someone the source of a piece of content helps build up trust. Instead, it seems to further undermine it. So how do you approach media literacy to build up confidence in institutions and information intermediaries?
  • For what it’s worth, when I try to untangle the threads to actually address the so-called “fake news” problem, I always end in two places: 1) dismantle financialized capitalism (which is also the root cause of some of the most challenging dynamics of tech companies); 2) reknit the social fabric of society by strategically connecting people. But neither of those are recommendations for educators.
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