Education | Chris Aldrich

👓 OER as an Institutional Survival Strategy | Inside Higher Ed

Read OER as an Institutional Survival Strategy by Matt Reed (Inside Higher Ed)

The difference between “tuition and fees” and “total cost of attendance.”

A nice highlighting of why administrators should be pushing for OER. Unfortunately lost here is the actual cost of the remainder of the enterprise. Where do these OER resources come from? Who creates them? Who gets paid to create and maintain them? Or quite often, whose resources, time, and effort are being exploited to use them? Additionally, who on the institutional level is being paid to talk about OER, push it, educate educators about it, and help professors adopt it?

While it’s readily transparent how his accounting works in this limited example, there’s a lot more accounting and transparency that needs to be taken into account.

Let’s not take the cost and just shift it to others who are also ill-equipped to handle it.

👓 The Vulnerability of Learning | Desert of My Real Life

Read The Vulnerability of Learning by

Cathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)

Listening to the students talk about feeling unsure and vulnerable when they first encountered open educational practices made me think about my own learning. As a mid-career academic who has changed jobs and even disciplines, I am a confident learner. I have received lots of praise and other kinds of positive reinforcement for my ability to learn new things. If you have read previous posts on my blog, you might know that I am really interested in developments in the IndieWeb movement and am trying to write about some of my experiences with using IndieWeb tools to build my own web site. I’ve been building my own sites for years and so I have a lot of confidence in my ability there as well. Working on the IndieWeb stuff has been challenging because there’s a lot of new language and new concepts as well as some aspects of web development that I have not engaged with before. I often feel vulnerable when I write my posts about the IndieWeb because my understanding of how everything works is emerging. In other words, I don’t get it all yet but I’m still writing publicly about my work.

Reply to Aaron Davis

Replied to a post by

Aaron Davis (Read Write Collect)

#tdc2553 #ds106 Reach Out and Tweet Someone https://t.co/22MF7apKUS pic.twitter.com/3MaDicDhts
— ds106 Daily Create (@ds106dc) January 7, 2019

The voices & ideas who have stood out for me this year as a part of my newsletter https://t.co/m0beweICrE @kjinquiry @mrsfint @gregmiller68 @langwitches @BiancaH80 @Obi_Jon_ @davecormier @zephoria @twoodwar @wiobyrne @ChrisAldrich @antonyjfunnell @DrNomyn @ChrisWejr @austinkleon @LaTrioli #tdc2553 @ds106dc
— Aaron Davis (@mrkrndvs) January 10, 2019

Great post Aaron. I’ll also say thanks for including me in such an illustrious list. But to the others, I’ll suggest that you’re holding out on us. The meatier list he’s hiding is at: https://readwriterespond.com/wp-links-opml.php

Throw it into a feed reader like Inoreader that will let you import or subscribe to OPML lists and then come back to thank him all over again.

👓 Everything Old is New Again: Adventures in the IndieWeb | Desert of My Real Life

Replied to Everything Old is New Again: Adventures in the IndieWeb by

Cathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)

I’ve written about my forays into the IndieWeb movement before. I have even written about how I feel like I’m moving to a philosophy of sharing my work that is kind of old school. Last week, I had the occasion to see a perfect example of how the “new” ways that I’m working are actually the old ways.

Kudos Cathie for rolling up your sleeves and delving in like this! You’re getting some fairly solid results and have far stronger grasp of what is going on than I certainly did in my first year–not to say that I’m much better off now to be honest.

The tougher part is that some of your post seems a bit misleading to me.

The couple of microformats related lines you’re adding in your child theme like add_theme_support( ‘microformats2’ ); are in fact declaring that your theme properly supports microformats v1, v2, and microdata which it doesn’t quite. Those lines don’t actually add support (as the hook might indicate), but tell other WordPress plugins that your theme is microformats compatible which may prevent them from adding particular pieces of redundant microformats related code.

While you’ve got an h-entry in your header file, you’re closing the related </div> just after the title so that if the body of your post includes a p-summary or an e-content microformat, parsers are likely to have problems. Instead you might want to do something similar in either your content.php (or other file that adds the body of your post) or your footer.php files where you close that div in one of those two files instead of in your header.php file. If you need it the article page on the wiki has a simple example of what the final result should look like.

My favorite template for how to add microformats to a WordPress theme is David Shanske’s fork of the TwentySixteen theme. Because of GitHub’s interface and the fact that he made changes in relatively small increments, you can look at the history of his changes (start with the oldest ones and move forward) and see the highlights of what he added and removed in individual files to effect the necessary changes. (He made some other drastic changes like removing Post Formats in preference to Post Kinds as well as some other non-microformats changes, so you’ll necessarily want to skip those particular changes.) I think I learned more about WordPress Themes by going through this one example a change at a time than any of the books or tutorials I’ve ever seen.

Another tool in addition to indiewebify.me is the Pin13 parser which will parse your page and give you some indication about what it is finding (or not) and how things are being nested (or not).

If you need some help, feel free to catch one of the WordPress folks in the IndieWeb chat. I suspect that since you’ve got the fortitude to dive into the code the way you have, that you’ll be able to puzzle it out.

👓 AI Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat | WIRED

Read AI Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat (WIRED)

Teachers are being forced to adapt to new tools that execute homework perfectly.

The headline is a bit click-baity, but the article is pretty solid nonetheless.

There is some interesting discussion in here on how digital technology meets pedagogy. We definitely need to think about how we reframe what is happening here. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t look back at the history of the acceptance (or not) of the calculator in math classes from the 60’s onward.

Where it comes to math, some of these tools can be quite useful, but students need to have the correct and incorrect uses of these technologies explained and modeled for them. Rote cheating certainly isn’t going to help them, but if used as a general tutorial of how and why methods work, then it can be invaluable and allow them to jump much further ahead of where they might otherwise be.

I’m reminded of having told many in the past that the general concepts behind the subject of calculus are actually quite simple and relatively easy to master. The typical issue is that students in these classes may be able to do the first step of the problem which is the actual calculus, but get hung up on not having practiced the algebra enough and the 10 steps of algebra after the first step of calculus is where their stumbling block lies in getting the correct answer.

Reply to Bill Ferriter on Something Weird is Happening on Twitter Right Now.

Replied to Something Weird is Happening on Twitter Right Now. by

Bill Ferriter (THE TEMPERED RADICAL)

Check it out in the stream of comments that follow this Dean Shareski tweet:

I'm suspect of educators whose entire feed is a cacophony of pithy quotes and advice. They must spend hours thinking up that stuff. For some maybe it's helpful, I find it lacks a little humanity. Perhaps I need to lighten up.
— Dean Shareski (@shareski) December 28, 2018

Do you see what it is?

A REAL CONVERSATION! With some intellectual give and take. With people expanding on one another’s thoughts. With people offering differing viewpoints. With a few lighthearted jokes added to the mix to make everyone smile while wrestling with an important idea.

I definitely can get behind the idea of throwing fewer “edufuzzies”, because while they’re cute, entertaining, and can lighten the mood, it’s the conversation that matters more. The tougher part is that attempting to have a substantive conversation on Twitter can be difficult because of the character limitations as well as the painful UI involved of properly threading a conversation. I also suspect that taking the conversation somewhere other than Twitter will up the level of the conversation by an order of magnitude.

I far prefer Aaron’s idea of using our own websites to communicate back and forth:

Even better Bill is if we had such conversations from the comfort of our own backyard using bridgy and webmenbtions, rather than someone else’s playground?

So I’ll post my reply to you on my own website and manually copy it across to yours and (begrudgingly) syndicate a copy into Twitter, so everyone can play along. I’m hoping that the ability to automate these sorts of conversations from site to site will improve them all around in the coming year.