Education | Chris Aldrich

For Micro Monday, I’m following and recommending @jennifermjones, another in the growing list of educators and altacs on micro.blog. Do stop by and welcome her to micro.blog.

Read Scientists Call for Academic Shutdown in Support of Black Lives (Gizmodo)

White supremacy is baked into science and academia, from racist language in textbooks to a culture that excludes Black scientists from innovating and advancing at the same pace as their colleagues. But rather than more milquetoast statements and diversity initiatives, researchers want action. Organizers are asking the scientific community to participate in a work stoppage on Wednesday, June 10 to bring attention to racism in the world of research.

Replied to a thread by geonz, ThomasJTobin, actualham (Twitter)

My statewide university system is likely going to go with a single LMS across all institutions. Moodle and Canvas are the two contenders. I have my thoughts, but would like to know yours. If you would cast a vote for one or the other, let me know. Use replies to explain.
— Robin DeRosa (@actualham) June 8, 2020

Paging @OnlineCrsLady to come in and advocate for the "no LMS" option and hire a bunch of FT people with the $ saved.
— Thomas J. Tobin (@ThomasJTobin) June 8, 2020

#indieweb! There are better ways!
— Cognitively_Accessible_Math (@geonz) June 8, 2020

I’m helping to host an online IndieWebCamp at the end of June. I’ve stubbed out a session on A Domain of One’s Own “LMS” to discuss just this problem. I’d encourage other creators to join as well to propose other education, #DoOO, and OER related topics for that weekend. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Domain of One’s Own LMS

The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly forced educators to flee online where there is a wealth of predatory, amoral, and questionable platforms for managing online pedagogy. Starting closer to first principles, how might we design and build an LMS (Learning Management System) based on IndieWeb Principles or using the related ideas behind A Domain of One’s Own where the teacher and students own their own content, learning content, and personal learning network. Can we dovetails ideas and principles from the Open Educational Resources (OER) space with this at the same time?

#DoOOLMS

A Short Essay on the Relationship of STEM and Racist Ideas

I’ve seen many tweets today with the hashtag #shutdownSTEM. Some of them included some people asking why such a thing would be necessary. What does STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) have to do with racism they ask?

I find myself seeing some immediate and excellent historical examples in Dr. Ibram X. Kendi‘s book Stamped from the Beginning. In chapter nine of the book he discusses the variety and flavors of racism espoused by Thomas Jefferson in his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which would become the most consumed American nonfiction book until well into the mid-nineteenth century.

Shortly afterward Samuel Stanhope Smith countered portions of Jefferson’s racist ideas in the 1787 annual oration to the august American Philosophical Society. This annual lecture was already one of the most heralded scholarly lectures in America and was attended by the wealthy and elite leaders and thinkers in the country. The lecture would be published as the influential Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species.

While Smith used the lecture to attack the abhorrent racist idea of polygenesis, he did espouse a wide array of other racist tropes including assimilationist climate theory. Dr. Kendi specifically notes that he may have picked up this idea from James Bowdoin’s opening oration of the newly established American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston on May 4, 1780.

To quote Dr. Kendi:

Samuel Stanhope Smith joined those preeminent intellectuals in Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society in attacking polygenesists, in reviving climate theory in America. His scholarly defense of scripture was quickly printed in Philadelphia, in London, and in Lord Kames’s back-yard, Edinburgh. By the time he sat down in Princeton’s presidential chair in 1795, he had amassed an international scholarly reputation.

So in just a few pages Kendi lays out some serious evidence of the direct spread of a wide variety of racist ideas by not only by the academic elite, but the leaders of multiple influential universities and scientific and philosophical institutions in America. The reverberating echos of these wrongs are still haunting us today. They still need to be addressed and righted. We need to use our moral alembic and distill these racist ideas out of science in America.

Lest one wonder about the influence of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s essay, I’ll note that Noah Webster cited Smith directly in Webster’s 1828 Dictionary in the definition of philosophy. The citation was from Smith’s second edition of his Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1810). The quote as given: “True religion, and true philosophy must ultimately arrive at the same principle.”

We’re obviously still seeking both true religion and true philosophy.

While you’re thinking about #shutdownSTEM on June 10th and long thereafter, I recommend you spend some time sitting with the ideas that have been handed down to us and question them closely, for this is what science and philosophy are all about. If you find you can’t do that hard work–and it is hard, then perhaps read a bit of Dr. Kendi’s excellent and ardent text Stamped from the Beginning.

Listened to Designing and Developing New Tools For Thought with Andy Matuschak from Village Global's Venture Stories

Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak), joins Erik on this episode. He is a technologist, designer and researcher. They discuss:
- The key thread throughout his work and what he’s trying to accomplish.
- Why people read books despite remembering little of what they read.
- What books should look like and the features they should have in the digital age.
- Why spaced repetition is so powerful.- His requests for startups in the space.

Thread Reader and Micropub for PressEdConf

In March I wrote about Participating in PressEdConf20 directly from WordPress.

While using that method for publishing is still my preference for owning the content first and syndicating it to Twitter, there’s another method that many educators might find simpler. ThreadReaderApp now has beta support for the Micropub Spec so you can publish Twitter threads directly to your blog.

This means that participants can write their threads directly on Twitter and reverse syndicate them to their websites if they support the Micropub spec.

For PressEdConf participants who have WordPress.org based sites (or .com sites with a subscription that supports plugins), this should be relatively easy since there’s a Micropub plugin for WordPress.

Download the plugin, activate it, write your Twitter thread, and have Thread Reader unroll it. Then authentic Thread Reader to your website at https://threadreaderapp.com/account/micropub and click the publish button on the thread you want to copy to your site.

This functionality in Thread Reader will also work for any other blogging platform or CMS that has either native or plugin support for Micropub. This includes platforms like Drupal, Grav, WithKnown, and many others including several static site generators.

Once things are set up, it’s pretty straightforward. You can read about my first experience (linked above) for more details.

If you have prior unrolled Twitter threads in your Thread Reader account you can use them as test cases before the next PressEdConf.

The rising tide of education lifts all boats.

Have you thought about the benefit of graduating college beyond increasing an individual’s earning ability? The whole community benefits when people earn diplomas/degrees. #publichgood #publiceducation

— Xinli Wang (@xinli_w) May 29, 2020

Bookmarked a tweet (Twitter)

#pcPopUp2020 is 6 hours old in the UK, but way older in other parts of the world, feel free to join in
— PressED Conf - A tweeting WordPress conference (@pressedconf) May 27, 2020

It’s starting to feel too late on the West coast of the US to start something right now, but my mind is buzzing. I’ll see if I can come up with something IndieWebby/Domain of One’s Owny overnight to post tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, I’m curious what Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, and others might whip up while I’m sleeping?

Bookmarked Subscribe to Hypothesis annotations (diegodlh.github.io)

Do you want to know when someone annotates your webpages? Do you want to follow somebody's annotations? You have come to the right place.

I’ve seen a few people in the wild using Hypothes.is as a blog commenting system.^[1][2] Since they don’t yet have separate support for Webmention or require a bit of programming to get notifications, I thought I’d highlight this particular implementation as it has a simple, but relatively elegant user interface for creating feeds to provide notifications for just such a use case.

One could easily wire up the output from this through a service like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc. to push the notifications to email, or other modalities as desired.

It doesn’t give anything over and above what a Hypothes.is addict with some programming skills could already produce, but for those who are code averse, or just too busy with building other pieces of the Domain of One’s Own this could allow some simpler outputs.

If you are a tinkerer, there is a GitHub repo for the project.

While you’re at it, why not throw in the usernames of some of your favorite annotators and subscribe away in your favorite feed reader? Some of the best things I discover online are through colleagues’ annotations, I think, in part, because it’s a much higher level of engagement with the material than the pablum found in many Twitter feeds.

It could also be a good means of following annotations on some of your favorite hashtags in the system as well. Want to learn some new words? Follow wordnik in your feed reader. Want to know the state of the art in Open Education Resources? There’s a tag serious people are annotating with that you could follow in your reader.

Read Fall Scenario #13: A HyFlex Model (Inside Higher Ed)

The challenge of flexibility.

It’s important to note that the goal of HyFlex is two make both the online and in-person experiences equal. ❧

There are some pieces of this that immediately make me think that this model is more of a sort of “separate, but equal” sort of modality. Significant resources will need to go toward the equality piece and even then it is likely to fall short from a social perspective.

Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:27PM

Finally, the best HyFlex classrooms have someone assisting the faculty member. ❧

This is the understatement of the year. Faculty members will require extensive training and LOTS of assistance. This assistance SHOULD NOT come from student assistants, graduate students (who are likely to be heavily undertrained), or other “free” sources.

Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:35PM

These assistants could also be work-study students who are assigned a particular classroom (or digital space) or they might be volunteers from class who are given credit for assisting in the delivery of the course. ❧

And of course, the first pivot (even in the same paragraph!) is exactly to these “free” or cheap sources which are likely to be overlooked and undertrained.

If a school is going to do this they need to take it seriously and actually give it professional resources.

Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:38PM

Incidentally there is some pre-existing research about the measurable fairness of court proceedings being held online that would tend to negate the equality that might be dispensed in online courseware.

See https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/are-online-courts-less-fair-on-the-media for some references. ❧
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 02:42PM

This fall needs to be different. We need to ask students to be part of the solution of keeping learning flourishing in the fall. This includes asking them to help manage the class if it has a virtual component. ❧

This is moving education in exactly the WRONG direction. Students are already ill-prepared to do the actual work and studying of education, now we’re going to try to extract extra efficiency out of the system by asking them to essential teach themselves on top of it? This statement seems like the kind of thing a technology CEO would pitch higher education on as a means of monetizing something over which they had no control solely to extract value for their own company.

If we’re going to go this far, why not just re-institute slavery?

Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 02:46PM

Read - Want to Read: Digital Sociologies by Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom (eds.) (University of Chicago Press | Bristol University Press)

520 pages | 6 3/4 x 9 1/2 | © 2016 This handbook offers a much-needed overview of the rapidly growing field of digital sociology. Rooted in a critical understanding of inequality as foundational to digital sociology, it connects digital media technologies to traditional areas of study in sociology, such as labor, culture, education, race, class, and gender. It covers a wide variety of topics, including web analytics, wearable technologies, social media analysis, and digital labor. The result is a benchmark volume that places the digital squarely at the forefront of contemporary investigations of the social.

Replied to A thread on Hypothes.is in relation to Audrey Watters' Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Tech by Audrey Watters, Jeremy Dean, Dan Whaley (Hack Education / Hypothes.is)

it supports students and teachers and schools in managing their own infrastructure, their own labor, their own data.
—Audrey Watters

Ok, so is hypothes.is doing this? How can it?

my annotations must be better accessible/organizable --the current "My Annotations" is not enough

annotation must be exportable

—jeremydean on Dec 30, 2015

And ultimately, you need to be able to completely run your own annotation infrastructure, but create and access it through a universal client.

—dwhly on Dec 30, 2015

Sure. Less clear to me how that looks/works and what that I do today online is similar in "ownership." But does your "you" refer to students or teachers or schools or all of the above?

The first two (I list) seem key in terms of practical adherence to these principles for everyday users.

—jeremydean on Dec 30, 2015

It's similar in character to the Domain of One's Own initiative. From a long term perspective, you might be better off taking ownership of your own infrastructure, that you can carry with you and guarantee will be available over long time periods (decades to centuries). Hypothes.is should at the very least permit you to do so if you prefer-- regardless of whether we continue to provide an annotation service at scale (which I very much think we should).

Your question around "you" is an important one. I might for instance, set up my own annotation server for my personal notes-- with the confidence that I'll always be able to find a reliable hosting provider for those. Similar to how I have my own web domain, and I host it at one place now, but I can always move it if that location goes out of business-- and my website will be identical to its current form in the new place. In the same way, my current personal email is through an address at my own domain. I don't need to depend on gmail being around forever.

As a teacher, I might use a more common service provider (like Hypothes.is) for class lessons-- one that my students are already likely to have accounts on. As web travelers, we're really accustomed to browsing seamlessly between servers-- it's understood to be the essential architecture of the web. Bringing it to the world of annotations has extraordinary benefits (IMHO) and will serve to foster more adoption and more diversity of applications.

—dwhly on Dec 30, 2015

I’ve been thinking over some of this question for the better part of a decade and even more pointedly since November.

Some of what I’ve been looking at relates back to the renaissance ideas of the commonplace book as well as memory techniques dating back to ancient Greece and even further back. There are ideas like wikis (personal as well as public–Audrey references a great post by Mike Caulfield in her article) and online notebooks tools like Evernote, OneNote, TiddlyWiki, Roam Research, etc. If a student could quickly add all their highlights/annotations into their website, online notebook, Zettelkasten, or other related learning tools, then they could use them for reading, reviewing, or even spaced repetition as provided by platforms like Anki, Mnemosyne, or NeuraCache.

Going back to Jeremy’s original question though:

Ok, so is hypothes.is doing this? How can it?

Hypothesis could immediate do this and quite effectively if it supported the W3C recommended Micropub spec. In short, it’s a standard and open source method for publishing data to a broad spectrum of surfaces so that developers don’t need to build custom solutions for each of thousands of snowflake platforms.

That is, in addition to its current functionality, you could add some code to make Hypothesis a Micropub client!

The quickest and most flexible approach I might suggest would be to allow users to publish their annotations/highlights not only to their accounts, but have UI to trigger a micropub request to their website, online notebook, or other platform.

There’s nothing more I’d want than an easy way to own all the data I’m collecting with Hypothesis and Micropub could quickly add it for a wide variety of set ups and systems. There are already implementations of Micropub servers for a variety of CMS software including WordPress, Drupal, Known, Craft, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, Blot, and Micro.blog with others being added, including Grav. Some of us are actively working on adding it to Wiki-related software as well. Since large portions of the Domain of One’s Own movement are built on these handful, you’d have some pretty quick coverage of not only all this space but even more.

I suspect your dev team could build an implementation in just a few days and it would open up a huge advantage for allowing users to more easily own their H related data on their own websites or in other online locations (while still utilizing the Hypothesis platform for more complex functionality).

There’s some solid documentation and a wealth of open source clients you could look at or borrow code from as well as a test suite. I suspect the IndieWeb Dev chat channel would surface a few additional developers to answer questions about any other issues as they crop up.

If you’d like a quick 5-10 minute demo of how this works for a handful of other clients in conjunction with something like WordPress, I’m happy to volunteer the time and spitball some potential ways Hypothesis could dovetail it and leverage its power.