Category: Education

Twitter list for #UnboundEq

Replied to Twitter Scavenger Hunt by Catherine CroninCatherine Cronin (Equity Unbound)
This activity is a great way to jumpstart community and networked learning using Twitter. Anyone interested in #unboundeq is welcome to join in this activity – we encourage educators and students in various classes and open participants take part!

A Twitter List

I started a bit of the Twitter scavenger hunt for Equity Unbound early this morning by creating a Twitter list of people who have been participating thus far with the #unboundeq hashtag.

For those new to the Twitter scene in education, knowing about Twitter lists, how to build them, and how one can use them are an invaluable set of tools and experiences. I highly recommend you spend a few minutes searching the web for these ideas and trying it out for yourself.

For those who are already well-versed in the idea of Twitter lists (no cheating; you’re only cheating yourselves if you’ve never done this before), feel free to subscribe to it or use it to quickly follow your peers. (Teachers are busy people and the 50+ of us don’t need to spend an inordinate amount of time doing the aggregation game, particularly if you’re doing it manually and not somewhat automated the way I’ve done.)

I’m sure the list will grow and I’ll update it over time, so check back if you don’t subscribe or use the list in a tool like TweetDeck. Apologies for those I’ve managed to have missed, please send me a tweet reply, comment below, or just keep using the hashtag and I’ll be more than happy to add you.

Even if you subscribe to the list or quickly follow everyone on it, I’d still highly recommend you spend a few minutes scrolling back into the Twitter timeline for the hashtag for the course and read what is going on. You’ll definitely have a better idea of who your class, teachers, and personal learning network are.

OPML List?

Perhaps I’ll also start a planet or subscribe-able OPML list of RSS feeds for those in the class soon as well for those who want to follow along in their feed readers? If you’ve got a particular tag/category/other that you’re using to aggregate all of your Equity Unbound participation on your own website, let me know in the comments below as well. As an example I’m using the tag UnboundEq, so all the related posts on my site can be seen at https://boffosocko.com/tag/unboundeq/ or subscribed to via https://boffosocko.com/tag/unboundeq/feed/. Let me know what yours are.

If enough people are doing this, I’ll publish a subscribe-able OPML file to make it easier for everyone to use these without us all spending the time to track them all down individually and put them into our feed readers to keep up with each other.

Reply to Equity Unbound Webcomic: Splintered Digital Identities | Kevin Hodgson

Replied to Equity Unbound Webcomic: Splintered Digital Identities by Kevin HodgsonKevin Hodgson (dogtrax.edublogs.org)
I am dipping into Equity Unbound, a new online course/collaboration with Mia Zamora, Maha Bali and Catherine Cronin. They will be working with university students as well as opening things up to other spaces where folks, like you and me, can jump in. (The Twitter tag is here: #unboundeq)  I am always interested in seeing how new offerings can be riffs off previous open learning networks, such as NetNarr, Rhizo, Digiwrimo, CLMOOC, and others.
Kevin, your comic really resonates, particularly for someone who’s got over 200 social media related accounts and identity presences in various places on the internet.

It reminds me of a line I wrote a few months back in an article about the IndieWeb idea of Webmentions for A List Apart entitled Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet:

Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like so many horcruxes across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.

Inherent in this idea is that corporate interests and others who run social sites can disappear, delete, or moderate out of existence any of my writing, photos, audio, video, or other content into the memory hole at any time and for almost any reason. And just like a destroyed horcrux, their doing so takes a bit of my soul (identity) with it each time.

A few years back, I decided to take back my own identity on the web and post everything of interest to me on my own website on my own domain first–a digital commonplace book if you will. Only then do I syndicate it into other communities, websites, or areas as needed. (Even this reply is on my own site before I syndicate it to yours.) As a result, I own a tremendously large part of my online identity (though even at that, a lot of it is published privately for myself or select small audiences).

I hope that as Equity Unbound continues and we explore the ideas of identity, public/private, and related topics, people might consider some of these ideas and implications and potentially work on expanding solutions for students, teachers, and the rest of the world.

👓 No, Half Of All Colleges Will Not Go Bankrupt | Forbes

Read No, Half Of All Colleges Will Not Go Bankrupt by Derek Newton (Forbes)
Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen has said that half of all colleges will go bankrupt. The problem is, there's no evidence that's true. Only the supposedly innovative, disruptive for-profit ones are going under.

👓 Invitation: Launching @unboundeq with @miazamoraphd and @catherinecronin | Reflecting Allowed | Maha Bali

Read Invitation: Launching @unboundeq with @miazamoraphd and @catherinecronin by Maha Bali (Reflecting Allowed)
This is an open invitation to come and join us for Equity Unbound:) You may have seen the hashtag #unboundeq on Twitter or seen us tag the account or link to our website: What is it? Equity-focused…

👓 Lenore Blum shocked the community with her sudden resignation from CMU. Here she tells us why. | Next Pittsburgh

Read Lenore Blum shocked the community with her sudden resignation from CMU. Here she tells us why. by Tracy Certo (NEXTpittsburgh)
This high-tech rockstar has done so much for women in the community, making her own experiences with sexism even more stunning.
Things like this are painful to hear, particularly given the recruitment and numbers that CMU has compiled over the past several years. I’m glad that Lenore and her husband have the wherewithal to do this and raise their voices to draw attention to it.

👓 Statement by Amie Wilkinson addressing unfounded allegations. | Amie Wilkinson

Read Statement by Amie Wilkinson addressing unfounded allegations. by Amie Wilkinson (math.uchicago.edu)
This statement addresses some unfounded allegations about my personal involvement with the publishing of Ted Hill's preprint "An evolutionary theory for the variability hypothesis" (and the earlier version of this paper co-authored with Sergei Tabachnikov). As a number of erroneous statements have been made, I think it's important to state formally what transpired and my beliefs overall about academic freedom and integrity. I first saw the publicly-available paper of Hill and Tabachnikov on 9/6/17, listed to appear in The Mathematical Intelligencer. While the original link has been taken down, the version of the paper that was publicly available on the arxiv at that time is here. I sent an email, on 9/7/17, to the Editor-in-Chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer, about the paper of Hill and Tabachnikov. In it, I criticized the scientific merits of the paper and the decision to accept it for publication, but I never made the suggestion that the decision to publish it be reversed. Instead, I suggested that the journal publish a response rebuttal article by experts in the field to accompany the article. One day later, on 9/8/17, the editor wrote to me that she had decided not to publish the paper. I had no involvement in any editorial decisions concerning Hill's revised version of this paper in The New York Journal of Mathematics. Any indications or commentary otherwise are completely unfounded. I would like to make clear my own views on academic freedom and the integrity of the editorial process. I believe that discussion of scientific merits of research should never be stifled. This is consistent with my original suggestion to bring in outside experts to rebut the Hill-Tabachnikov paper. Invoking purely mathematical arguments to explain scientific phenomena without serious engagement with science and data is an offense against both mathematics and science.
A response to an article I read the other day in Quillette.

👓 Why Is College in America So Expensive? | The Atlantic

Read Why Is College in America So Expensive? (The Atlantic)
The outrageous price of a U.S. degree is unique in the world.

“I used to joke that I could just take all my papers and statistical programs and globally replace hospitals with schools, doctors with teachers and patients with students,” says Dartmouth College’s Douglas Staiger, one of the few U.S. economists who studies both education and health care.

Both systems are more market driven than in just about any other country, which makes them more innovative—but also less coherent and more exploitive. Hospitals and colleges charge different prices to different people, rendering both systems bewilderingly complex, Staiger notes. It is very hard for regular people to make informed decisions about either, and yet few decisions could be more important.

In both cases, the most vulnerable people tend to make less-than-ideal decisions. For example, among high-achieving, low-income students (who have grades and test scores that put them in the top 4 percent of U.S. students and would be eligible for generous financial aid at elite colleges), the vast majority apply to no selective colleges at all, according to research by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery. “Ironically, these students are often paying more to go to a nonselective four-year college or even a community college than they would pay to go to the most selective, most resource-rich institutions in the United States,” as Hoxby told NPR.

👓 Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole | Quillette

Read Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole by Theodore P. Hill (Quillette)
In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for ...
I understand the potential political implications of such research, but blocking publication like this seems a tad underhanded. I’ve not yet read the paper, but want to take a look at it at least from an evolutionary theoretic standpoint. Admittedly on its face it sounds a bit more like pure theory rather than anything supported by actual evidence and underlying research in reality, but there’s no reason to stop the idea if it could potentially be a fruitful area.

If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals?

This is a very concerning issue and a good reason why people should also practice samizdat and place multiple copies online in various repositories.

👓 A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities | Johns Hopkins

Read A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities (The Hub | Johns Hopkins)
President Daniels: 'Hopkins believes in the essential value of humanistic inquiry and its capacity to aid you in realizing your aspirations and building lives you want to live and of which you will be proud'

Reply to Think About Capabilities, Not Permissions

Replied to Think About Capabilities, Not Permissions by Nathan Smith (The Piraeus)
I suggest we can move OER forward by shifting the conversation from permissions to capabilities.
Thanks for this Nathan. I did write a somewhat longer response to a few critiques late last week that clarified my position. In some sense I wanted to raise the idea of version control and it’s power/value more so than to just add on another “requirement” on the permissions side.

Reply to Florian Weil on annotations and webmention

Replied to Florian Weil on Twitter (Twitter)
“@memotv Isn't the annotations standard by w3c for this kind of needs? https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ this article summarised the key points very good https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/08/28/all-about-open-annotation/ for some more functional link back, I can highly recommend to check the indieweb webmentions”
Reminds me that I need to circle back to this discussion:

Reply to Robin DeRosa about citation management

Replied to a tweet by Robin DeRosaRobin DeRosa (Twitter)
I’ve been (slowly) pecking away at trying to own all of this type of data on my own website. It sounds like what you’re hoping for is a cross between Derek Sifford’s Academic Blogger’s Toolkit which has a pretty slick WordPress interface for looking up and importing references and David Shanske’s Post Kinds Plugin which allows one to create specific post types like bookmarks, reads, notes, highlights, annotations, etc.

I think if Academic Blogger’s Toolkit could create an internal database within WordPress and an interface to allow you to easily import/export it as well as use it within your own instance, that might be the simplest solution to have ownership over all of one’s reference data. The Post Kinds plugin would give you the rest including the ability to hide your posts as private just to you or others granted access on your site.

Like Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, Aaron Davis, and others I use my own site like a commonplace book and store bookmarks of things I’d like to read as well as things that I have read, usually along with notes, highlights, annotations, and other marginalia that I think would be of use.

Perhaps by adding one or two extensions, WordPress could be the perfect platform for doing this type of work without reliance on external sites?

Academic Blogger's Toolkit

https://wordpress.org/plugins/indieweb-post-kinds/