Why you should ditch the rankings, stop worrying about the “best” law school, and focus on these 10 factors instead
A WordPress Conference about education on Twitter
A company best known (and sometimes rebuked) for its plagiarism checker has just received one of the biggest checks in the education technology ...
Pat Lockley talking about PressEd the conference about WordPress run completely on twitter. PressEd uncovers many aspects of the use of WordPress in all areas of education.
We discussed some of the aspects and features of running a conference on twitter the previous and upcoming conferences. Pat invites anyone who uses WordPress in any area of education to submit a proposal to the conference.
- Pat Lockley on twitter Pgogy WebStuff (@Pgogy)
- Pat’s Website: Pgogy Webstuff – Pedagogic and Techological Outfitters – WordPress / Drupal / Moodle / Digital Humanities
- PressED Website: 2019 PressED conference – A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference on Twitter
- PressED PressED Conf – A tweeting WordPress conference (@pressedconf) on twitter.
I think that such a conference could be held online and actually use WordPress; it would require more of the participants to be using IndieWeb philosophies and technology/plugins like Webmention and perhaps one of the more modern feed readers that are using Microsub.
Alternately, I could see a place where a platform like IndieWeb.xyz could be leveraged as a location to which all the participants could syndicate their content to a particular sub there (it has the ability to force Webmentions for people who can’t send/receive them yet) and then act as the reader in which the conference was taking place. In this sense IndieWeb.xyz would act a bit like an impromptu planet to aggregate all the conversation. I haven’t looked, but if IndieWeb.xyz also had RSS or other feeds coming back out of individual subs, then it would be a bit more like a traditional planet and people could subscribe in their feed reader of choice, and with WebSub or an occasional manual refresh, a conference like this could be done directly from WordPress (or honestly any IndieWeb friendly platform/website) and have much the same impact. In fact, perhaps a bit more impact since all the presenters and participants would and could have archival copies of the conference on their own websites at the end of the day and the ephemeral nature of such an online conference could tend to disappear.
Incidentally, I could almost hear the gears turning in John’s head as I’m sure he was thinking much the same thing. He carefully restrained himself and managed to keep the conversation on track though.
Now I’ll have to brainstorm an IndieWeb for Education using WordPress proposal for this year’s pending PressEd Conference if there’s time left.
I loved the short snippet at the end of the episode where Pat Lockley gave a brief bio on his Twitter handle and domain name. It reminds me a bit of the podcast My URL Is, which I hope comes back with more episodes soon.
The last page of the review had an interesting information theoretical take on not only book reviews, but the level of information they contain with respect for improved teaching and learning in an era prior to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas about “flow”.
As it isn’t the easiest thing to track down, I’ll quote the relevant paragraphs from page 185:
The purpose of a scientific book (we at least hope!) is to store and convey information in a given field. The purpose of a review is to convey information about a book. It is therefore legitimate to attempt a mathematical theory of writing books and to find the optimal conditions which make a book good. At first it may seem that the optimal conditions consist of maximizing the amount of information per page, that is, in minimizing the redundancy. But a certain amount of redundancy may not only be desirable, but necessary. When presenting a new subject to young students who have never heard of it, a judicious amount of repetition is good pedagogy. Giving an exact abstract definition and then illustrating it by an example already constitutes a logical redundancy. But how useful it frequently is! The minimum of redundancy that is found in some well-known and excellent mathematical books (nomina sunt odiosa!) occasionally makes those books difficult to read even for mathematicians.
The optimum amount of redundancy is a function of the information and intelligence of the reader for whom the book is written. The analytical form of this function is to be determined by an appropriate mathematical theory of learning. Writing a book even in a field which belongs entirely to the domains of Her Majesty the Queen of Sciences is, alas, still more an art than a science. Is it not possible, however, that in the future it may become an exact science?
If a reviewer’s information and intelligence are exactly equal to the value for which the book has been optimized, then he will perceive as defects in the book only deviations from the optimal conditions. His criticism will be objective and unbiased. If, however, the reviewer’s information and intelligence deviate in any direction from the value for which the book is intended, then he will perceive shortcomings which are not due to the deviation of the book from the optimum, but to the reviewer’s personal characteristics. He may also perceive some advantages in the same way. If in the society of the future every individual will be tagged, through appropriate tests, as to his information and intelligence at a given time, expressed in appropriate units, then a reviewer will be able to calculate the correction for his personal bias. These are fantastic dreams of today, which may become reality in the future.
Some of this is very indicative of why one has to spend some significant time finding and recommending the right textbooks [1][2] for students and why things like personalized learning and improvements in pedagogy are so painfully difficult. Sadly on the pedagogy side we haven’t come as far as he may have hoped in nearly 70 ears, and, in fact, we may have regressed.
I’ve often seen web developers in the IndieWeb community mention the idea that “naming things is hard”, so I can’t help but noticing that this 1950’s reviewer uses the Latin catchphrase nomina sunt odiosa which translates as “names are odious”, which has a very similar, but far older sentiment about naming. It was apparently a problem for the ancients as well.
Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)A few years ago I worked with a committed group of volunteers in Erode, India. For awhile I provided a bit of webspace as they learned the simple mechanics of running websites. using chalk to lay out websites We focused on HTMl first. Why? Mainly because we believed it to be the most equitable pathw...
As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.
Now if only we could get them to all go IndieWeb using a Domain of Their Own and practice academic samizdat…
Live coding screencasts are way more awesome when the text can be copied. asciinema makes this possible.
This could be an awesome teaching tool, particularly for programming.
We welcome anyone who is interested, so feel free to pass the invitation along to your colleagues, students, and friends who are interested in using their websites as more than “just a business card” or “just a blog”. Even if you don’t yet have a domain or web hosting, show up and we’ll see what we can help you create over the weekend.
Feel free to come with ideas, propose an online session (maybe?!!), or just watch, listen, and absorb ideas from others. Find out more about what you can do with a simple domain name and website.
Perhaps sometime in the future we ought to have an IndieWebCamp specifically for the education space?! Let me know if you’re interested in helping to organize one.
Of course if you can’t join us this weekend, there is an IndieWebCamp Online coming up on –
Don’t worry if you can’t RSVP this late, just show up… We all hope to see you there!
👤 Stephen Downes,William Ian O’Byrne, Greg McVerry, Kimberly Hirsh, John Johnston, Aaron Davis, Cathie LeBlanc, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Nate Angell, Robin DeRosa, Jon Udell, Dan Cohen, Tim Owens, Taylor Jadin, Mark Grabe, Rick Wysocki, Doug Holton, Jim Groom, Anelise H. Shrout, Jeffrey Keefer, Jeremy Dean, Audrey Watters, Dan Scott, Antonio Sánchez-Padial, Miriam Avery, Tom Critchlow, Ken Bauer, Kim Hansen, Larry Sanger
Having enjoyed the mobile app TimeHop and its functionality for a long time, I’d spent a long time a while back searching for what I was sure would be multiple WordPress plugins that might offer such functionality. At the time I could only find one and seemed deeply hidden: the Room 34 Presents On This Day plugin which has served my needs for a while.
While the two are implemented somewhat differently and have different levels of UI features, it’s nice that there’s now a bit of competition and options available in the space. Alan’s excellent version is a shortcode-based plugin with some options for configuring the output and he’s got lots of additional details for customizing it. The Room 34 version creates an archive view of most of its data and also includes a widget for adding the output to various widget locations.
I’ve added some of these examples and links to the On This Day page of the IndieWeb wiki, so that others looking for UI examples, options, and brainstorming for their WordPress-based or other sites might have an easier time tracking them down and building additional iterations or coming up with new ideas.
These sorts of plugins provide some useful functionality commonly found in other social media sites, including Facebook which allow you to go back in time. I find they’re even more valuable on my own site as my content here is generally far richer and more valuable to me than it is on other social sites which often have a “throw away” or a more ephemeral feel to some of their content. It’s nice to be able to look back at old thoughts, revisit them, possibly reshape them, or even see how far I’ve come in some of my thinking since those older days.
Now, if we could only get Timehop to dovetail with the WordPress API so that they could add WordPress websites to their offerings…
Open Apereo 2019 is an international, inclusive event offered by the Apereo Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing and sustaining innovative open-source software solutions for education. Learn how higher education is using open-source software to help deliver the academic mission, control costs, and retain the capacity to innovate.
Ken Bauer (blog.kenbauer.me)The “First Post” on this blog was back in 2013 but I’ve had a presence on the web since the 1990s. My first page would have been one that I had as a graduate student at the University of Washington (1993-1995). In fact one of the early (and extremely popular) web search engi...
If you haven’t come across it, there is a wiki page for IndieWeb for Education with some documentation about some of our experimentation and help for others. Feel free to add yourself to the examples and add to the page to help out the community.
Let us know if we can be of any help.
Kevin (The Tattooed Professor)A few days ago, news broke in the higher-ed sphere about a new paper in the Educational Psychology Review, “How Much Mightier Is the Pen Than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014),” which seemed to undercut a study that’s become the go-to ...
It's ugly, but it was foreseeable, maybe even inevitable.
I’m curious what other economic pressures are causing this issue and ones like it? Solidarity and unions are a stopgap at best, eventually the entire system is going to come down unless some drastic changes are made. Eventually it’ll only be the tier 1 schools that have tenure anymore, and everyone else will just be teachers. But even the tier 1 schools may have problems eventually too…
Apparently tenure numbers in rankings don’t mean enough after some point to force colleges to grant it at a reasonable level.
Aaron Davis (Read Write Collect)Learning and Teaching
Letter Grades are the Enemy of Authentic & Humane Learning: Bernard Bull discusses how grades work against authentic and self-determined learning. Although they are ingrained in education, he recommends considering the aspects of life free from grades and having these conversations with others. What is interesting is this is only one post being shared at the moment. Bill Ferriter shared his concerns about the association between standard grades and fixed mindset, while Will Richardson argues that grades only matter because we choose to let them matter.This continues some of the points discussed in Clive Rose’s book The End of Average and Jesse Stommell’s presentation on grades and the LMS. It is also something that Templestowe College has touched in the development of alternative pathways to higher education. ❧
I’d recently come across Robert Talbert’s post Traditional Grading: The Great Demotivator which likely fits into this same sub-topic.
