Education | Chris Aldrich

👓 Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business? | Hack Education

Read Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business? by Audrey Watters

Within the past week, two well-known and well-established coding bootcamps have announced they’ll be closing their doors: Dev Bootcamp, owned by Kaplan Inc., and The Iron Yard, owned by the Apollo Education Group (parent company of the University of Phoenix). Two closures might not make a trend… yet. But some industry observers have suggested we might see more “consolidation” in the coming months.

Some great observations on non-profit vs. for-profit educational institutions and the social inequality that exists between the two.

Reply to I defy the world and go back to RSS by Bryan Alexander

Replied to I defy the world and go back to RSS by Bryan Alexander (bryanalexander.org)

It may be perverse, but in this age of Facebook (now 2 billion strong) I’ve decided to rededicate myself to RSS reading. That’s right: old school, Web 2.0 style. Why? A big reason is that Facebook’s front page is so, so massively unreliable. Despite having huge numbers of people that are my friends, clients, and contacts, it’s just not a good reading and writing service. Facebook’s black box algorithm(s) may or may not present a given’s user’s post for reasons generally inscrutable. I’ve missed friends’ news about new jobs, divorces, and deaths because the Zuckerbergmachine deems them unworthy of inclusion in my personalized river of news. In turn, I have little sense of who will see my posts, so it’s hard to get responses and very hard to pitch my writing for an intended audience. Together, this makes the FB experience sketchy at best. To improve our use of it we have to turn to experiments and research that remind me of Cold War Kremlinology.

Bryan, so much of what you’re saying is not only not backwards, but truly awesome and inspiring, and not just with respect to RSS.

I’ve lately become more enamored of not only RSS, but new methods for feeds including lighter weight versions like microformats h-feeds. A few months ago I was inspired to embed the awesome PressForward plugin for WordPress into my site, so I could have an integrated feed reader built right in. This makes it far easier to not only quickly share the content from my site, but it means I can also own archival copies of what I’m reading and consuming for later reference, some of which I store privately on the back end of my site as a sort of online commonplace book.

There also seems to be a recent renaissance with the revival of blogrolls. I’ve even recently revived my own to provide subscribe-able OPML lists that others can take advantage of as well. Like your reading list, it’s a work in progress.

On the subject of blogs not being dead and decrying the abuses of the social silos, you might be interested to hear about the Indieweb movement which is helping to both decentralize and re-democratize the web in useful and intelligent ways. They’re helping people to take back their identities online and let them own their own content again. They’re also using open protocols like Webmention (a platform agnostic and universal @mention) and Micropub or syndication methods like POSSE to make it easier to publish, share, and interact with people online anywhere, regardless of the platform(s) on which they’re publishing.

As an example of what they’re doing, I’m publishing this comment on my own site first, and only then sending it as a comment to your post. If you supported Webmention, this would have happened seamlessly and automatically. I’ll also syndicate it as a reply to your tweet, and if you reply on twitter, the comment will be pulled back into my comment stream at the original.

As you may expect, some educators are also using some of these tools and specs for educational reasons.

👓 Another tenure-track scientist bites the dust | Science

Read Another tenure-track scientist bites the dust by Adam Ruben (Science)

Matthew knew the deal when he joined his department: 10 years of work, and then you have to apply for tenure. “But,” he told me, “nobody talks about, ‘What if I run out of money beforehand?’”

We’ve really got to reorganize how research is done in this country. The brain drain is destroying our tremendous lead in basic research.

👓 Teaching With Emerging Technologies | Inside Higher Ed

Read Teaching With Emerging Technologies by Michelle Pacansky-Brock (Inside Higher Ed)

Michelle Pacansky-Brock says digital learning is reshaping the higher ed landscape, and suggests five things instructors need to succeed. As online and blended learning reshape the landscape of teaching and learning in higher education, the need increases to encourage and support faculty in moving from delivering passive, teacher-centered experiences to designing active, student-centered learning. Our new social era is rich with simple, free to low-cost emerging technologies that are increasing experimentation and discovery in the scholarship of teaching and learning. While the literature about Web 2.0 tools impacting teaching and learning is increasing, there is a lack of knowledge about how the adoption of these technologies is impacting the support needs of higher education faculty. This knowledge is essential to develop new, sustainable faculty support solutions.

This might make an outline for a nice book, but as an article it’s a bit wonkish and doesn’t get into the meat of much.

👓 Something New For Baby To Chew On: Rocket Science And Quantum Physics | NPR

Read Something New For Baby To Chew On: Rocket Science And Quantum Physics by Lynn Neary & Julie Depenbrock (NPR)

The books introduce subjects like rocket science, quantum physics and general relativity — with bright colors, simple shapes and thick board pages perfect for teething toddlers. The books make up the Baby University series — and each one begins with the same sentence and picture — This is a ball — and then expands on the titular concept.

Ooh! We definitely need more books like these in early childhood education.

👓 Thoughts on Audrey Watters’ “Thoughts on Annotation” | Jon Udell

Read Thoughts on Audrey Watters’ “Thoughts on Annotation” by

Jon Udell (Jon Udell)

Back in April, Audrey Watters’ decided to block annotation on her website. I understand why. When we project our identities online, our personal sites become extensions of our homes. To some online writers, annotation overlays can feel like graffiti. How can we respect their wishes while enabling ...

👓 HxA’s Guide to Colleges in The Wall Street Journal | Heterodox Academy

Read HxA’s Guide to Colleges in The Wall Street Journal by Jeremy Willinger (heterodoxacademy.org)

We are beginning to see a few universities taking concrete steps to show that they value viewpoint diversity and the free and open exchange of ideas. An article over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal describes some of these steps and discusses them in the context of HxA’s newly revised Guide to Colleges. (See Colleges Pledge Tolerance for Diverse Opinions, But Skeptics Remain, by Douglas Belkin.)

The article opens with a discussion of an extraordinary step at Johns Hopkins (for which we just raised its HxA score and its rank):

A string of protests on college campuses that shut down events hosting conservative speakers has prompted universities around the country to pledge more tolerance for diverse opinions, but skeptics say they’ll believe it when they see it. Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday a $150 million effort to “facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse.”… The new initiative at Johns Hopkins, an institute funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, hopes to “examine the dynamics of societal, cultural and political polarization and develop ways to improve decision-making and civic discourse,”

The article contrasts Hopkins with Harvard (as well as Berkeley and Yale):

Harvard University, which has repeatedly been in the crosshairs of free-speech advocates, was 103rd out of 106 schools in the Heterodox ranking. Heterodox, which weighs schools’ regulations as well as the ratings of other first-amendment groups, cited Harvard’s history of censoring outside speakers, a blacklist on private clubs, fraternities and sororities, and a laminated “social justice” place mat handed out to students before winter break in 2015.

The article closed by discussing our top-ranked school:

The top-ranked school is the University of Chicago. Provost Daniel Diermeier said the ideal of viewpoint diversity is central to the university’s mission. “We believe that the best education we can provide students to prepare them for the world is to hear diverse points of view even if they feel uncomfortable,” Dr. Diermeier said. “We want to provide them with the tools to find counterarguments.

IndieWeb Summit 2017 is upon us this weekend. If you haven’t RSVP’d it isn’t too late OR you can participate remotely.

Resources from Domains 2017

Bookmarked Domains 2017 Conference (Reclaim Hosting)

Indie EdTech and Other Curiosities, June 5-6, 2017 at University of Oklahoma

Twitter Stream for #Domains17

Keynote: Neither Locked out nor locked in by Martha Burtis

Live-streamed videos from Virtually Connecting

DoOO Curriculum on Github

JBJ blogpost: Looking back at #Domains17

👓 Indie, Open, Free: The Fraught Ideologies of Ed-Tech – Hybrid Pedagogy | Digital Pedagogy Lab

Read Indie, Open, Free: The Fraught Ideologies of Ed-Tech by Kris Shaffer (Hybrid Pedagogy)

The ideas of being independent and signed are inherently contradictory, and this contradiction is what makes indie hard to define. Its ephemerality gives it both a mystique and a resistance to criticism ― after all, you can’t critique what you can’t define. And thus, using the term indie is often a great marketing move. But it’s a problematic critical move.

Indie, Open, Free: The Fraught Ideologies of Ed-Tech | Hybrid Pedagogy

Replied to Indie, Open, Free: The Fraught Ideologies of Ed-Tech by Kris Shaffer (Hybrid Pedagogy)

But the ability to work on indie projects is not available to all. The time and resources required to work indie are a sign of privilege, as is encouraging (and certainly expecting) all to work indie. As Anne Pasek writes, “all materials and practices … have a cost and thus a tollgate for participation.” (And there are many, often intersecting, forms of privilege that contribute to that “toll” ― race, gender, orientation, cultural background, economic background, able-bodiedness, etc.) So while indie work is great, and I’ve done a lot of it myself, we need to be careful about the ways in which we encourage and characterize indie work, noting in particular what it costs and who may be left behind or left out.

This is all important and certainly true.

However, as someone who knows he’s certainly privileged, I view my definition of indie as something that is also open for others to come behind me and use for free or have the ability to reuse and remix in a way that corporate interests or non-indie work wouldn’t. In a large sense, to me this means that while I may be privileged (whether that be socio-economically or even the time-encumbered), I’m helping to lower the cost and the burden for the less privileged who may come behind me to be able to do more, go further, or go faster.

In some sense too, as described, indie has such a nebulous definition. Often when I see it in a technology related space I really read it as “Open Sourced”.

Twitter List from #Domains17

Bookmarked Twitter List from #Domains17 by Chris Aldrich (Twitter)

Teachers, educators, researchers, technologists using open technologies in education #openEd, #edTech, #DoOO, #IndieWeb

I’ve compiled a twitter list of people related to #openEd, #edTech, #DoOO, #indieweb, and related topics who tweeted about #domains17 in the past week. The list has multiple views including members and by tweets.

Feel free to either subscribe to the list (useful when adding streams to things like Tweetdeck), or for quickly scanning down the list and following people on a particular topic en-masse. Hopefully it will help people to remain connected following the conference. I’ve written about some other ideas about staying in touch here.

If you or someone you know is conspicuously missing, please let me know and I’m happy to add them. Hopefully this list will free others from spending the inordinate amount of time to create similar bulk lists from the week.

📺 Domains2017 Conference: Tuesday June 6, 3:00pm with the OU Crew | YouTube

Watched Tuesday June 6, 3:00pm with the OU Crew from YouTube

For more information see the blog post for the event at http://virtuallyconnecting.org/blog/2017/05/31/domains17/

Indieweb for Education: Some thoughts after the Domains 17 Conference

There’s some interesting discussion of Indieweb-related principles in this live-streamed (and recorded) conversation (below) from the Domains 2017 conference for educators and technologists which covers a lot of what I’d consider to be Indieweb for Education applications.

In particular, some asked about alternate projects for basing education projects around which aren’t WordPress. Some suggested using WithKnown which is spectacular for its interaction model and flexibility. I suspect that many in the conversation haven’t heard of or added webmentions (for cross-site/cross-platform conversations or notifications) or micropub to their WordPress (or other) sites to add those pieces of functionality that Known comes with out of the box.

Another section of the conversation mentioned looking for ways to take disparate comments from students on their web presences and aggregating them in a more unified manner for easier consumption by the teacher and other students (as opposed to subscribing to each and every student’s RSS feed, a task which can be onerous in classrooms larger than 20 people). To me this sounded like the general concept of a planet, and there are a few simple ways of accomplishing this already, specifically using RSS.

I was also thrilled to hear the ideas of POSSE and PESOS mentioned in such a setting!

An Invitation to Attendees

I’d invite those in attendance at the Domains 17 conference to visit not only the Indieweb wiki, but to feel free to actively participate in the on-going daily discussions (via IRC/Slack/Matrix/Web). I suspect that if there’s enough need/desire that the community would create a dedicated #education channel to help spur the effort to continue to push the idea of owning one’s own domain and using it for educational purposes out into the mainstream. The wiki pages and the always-on chat could be useful tools to help keep many of the educators and technologists who attended Domains17 not only connected after the event, but allow them to continue to push the envelope and document their progress for the benefit of others.

I’ll admit that one of my favorite parts of the Indieweb wiki is that it aggregates the work of hundreds of others in an intuitive way so that if I’m interested in a particular subject I can usually see the attempts that others have made (or at least links to them), determine what worked and didn’t for them, and potentially find the best solution for my particular use case. (I suspect that this is some of what’s missing in the “Domains” community at the moment based on several conversations I heard over the past several days.)

If you’d like, please add yourself to the growing list of Indieweb related educators and technologists. If you need help connecting to any of the community resources and/or chat/IRC/Slack, etc. I’m more than happy to help. Just call, email, or contact me via your favorite channel.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=INB-h9eEcpY

🔖 dokieli

Bookmarked dokie.li (dokie.li)

dokieli is a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions.

dokieli envisions research results, analysis and data all being produced interactively on the Web and seamlessly linked to and from articles. Through annotations and notifications, the academic process of peer-review can be open, transparent and decentralised for researchers.