The instructive meme I made with Glitch for EDU522.
Tag: edu522
👓 The Future of Digital Teaching and Learning-my point of view | Cheri Ouimet
For some people and some learning styles, technology is a scary and uncomfortable word, let alone medium. Yes, students of today understand technology better than most adults. But, that doesn’t mean that all students understand technology to the same extent as their peers. We have created many opportunities to even the playing field for learning differences in our educational system, but have we done enough to do that with technology? Or do we just assume that all students understand it to the same extent and glide over those that don’t? I believe that we assume… We haven’t done enough to make sure that all students are comfortable with technology and we NEED to do that moving forward. Why? Because technology is here to stay and we need to make sure that we bring enough students along on this journey as possible.
👓 Digital Literacy, Identity and a Domain of One’s Own | Connected Learning Alliance
Doug Belshaw (Connected Learning Alliance)Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours. That domain name could be your gamer tag, it could be your real name, it could be a heteronym — it was up to you!
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours. ❧
Why have we gotten away from this? In short, I think it’s because it was easier for big companies with massive resources to do the initial heavy lifting.
If we look at history, Gutenberg created the first printing press and guarded it heavily for years. Eventually others figured out how to do it and printing presses spread like wildfire. Now, with some modest means and some time, almost anyone can publish.
With simple standards and accessible hosting people can now broadly own their own domain name and create their own websites using a variety of content management systems. In a few years, this will be even more ubiquitous. Facebook is going to be just like Gutenberg attempting to hold onto his monopoly, but failing miserably.
The best part, I think, is that the speed of digital technology means that the Facebook edifice is going to crumble faster than Gutenberg’s.
Twitter and Facebook are publicly-traded companies and beholden to shareholders looking to make a profit. Google, which owns YouTube and processes over 70% of the world’s search traffic, is likewise legally obliged to return a profit. ❧
legally obligated? they’re definitely supposed to try or shareholders may move their money elsewhere, but why can’t they create things for the common good as well?
A world where one’s primary identity is found through the social people-farms of existing social networks is a problematic one. Educators and parents are in the privileged position of being able to help create a better future, but we need to start modeling to future generations what that might look like. ❧
This is exactly what I’ve been attempting to do with my own website. Naturally I use it selfishly for my own purposes, but I’m also using it to model potential behaviours for friends, family and colleagues.
I’m sometimes tempted to change the tagline on my website to “A digital canary in the coalmine”.
📺 Blogging Basics | YouTube
Learn in six easy steps how to become a master blogger (Caveat the only way is to read and write a lot)
I’m reminded here of my friend and Academy Award nominated screenwriter Millard Kaufman who once told me while standing in front of his immense library, “If you want to be a good writer, then practice writing; if you want to be a great writer, then read everything and then steal from the best.”
📺 No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences | YouTube
Interesting thoughts about identity (both offline and online) presented here.
The idea of decorating one’s locker as an example of presenting one’s identity in school is interesting. I also liked the idea that students continued using a forum long after the class was over–presumably because it represented their identity and connections and relationships from the class.
🔖 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan
Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.
I’m sure this has been on my “list” at one time or another, but giving it a bump.
hat tip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc& from EDU522 course.
📑 Our Cultural Commonwealth
...cyberinfrastructure is something more specific thanthe network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular proj-ect, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline. ❧
Quote highlighted in the video from module 1 of EDU522
Looks like an interesting report. I’ll note that Jeremy Dean has annotated a bit of the report in the past, so it may be useful to circle back around and read the entire thing.
📺 Learner Identities | YouTube
Dr. Mary Kalantzis from YouTube Human Diversity and Learner Transformation
I really like this video quite a bit. It definitely has an air of Big History to it, or at least Big History on the human scale portion of the timeline. I recognize and have written a bit about one of the smaller infographics from the video, though here it’s far too small to see what it is or what she’s referring to.
Learner identities, Big History, and collective learning also generally remind me about shrinking numbers of languages, which I’ve mentioned before. In teaching and passing on knowledge, we will need to be even far more accomodating about culture and language, or eventually we’ll loose all of the diversity of languages we’ve got today.
In digging around a bit I note that Dr. Kalantzis has some interesting course content available on Coursera that might be worth delving into shortly as well.
👓 #EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress | Greg McVerry
Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)Hello in today’s first daily update I wanted to share about RSS if you wanted a little background here you go:
My feeds for the class would be:
- for the tag edu522: https://boffosocko.com/tag/edu522/feed/
- for the dailyponderances: https://boffosocko.com/tag/dailyponderance/feed/
I don’t have everyone in it yet, but I’ve started an OPML file for the class that one could use to subscribe to in Inoreader. Otherwise you can save the file (typically with the extension .xml) and upload it into the reader of your choice, however you’ll need to come back and get updates as I add new feeds. If you’d like me to add you to the list, drop your details into the comments as you’d like them to appear on my Following Page or send my original post a webmention from your site.
📺 EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress | YouTube
I’ve recently learned that even searches on WordPress websites can have their own feeds. This way if the author doesn’t provide reliable tags or categories and they publish a lot (like I tend to), you can create custom RSS feed for any search term on their site using the format
http://example.com/?s=searchterm&feed=rss2📺 RSS in Plain English | YouTube
A short explanation of RSS and how it helps you save time reading the web.
This video introduces RSS as a way to subscribe to websites and save time on the Web. An "old vs. new" theme illustrates how RSS differs from visiting web sites independently, including:
• The new and old ways of reading news on the web
• An introduction to RSS Readers
• How to identify and subscribe to an RSS feed
• What to expect when using an RSS reader
A nice (visual) overview of RSS from a technical perspective but small parts of it are dated including some of the currently available feed readers. I might recommend Inoreader and Feedly now instead.
📺 Quote Post-Kind on SemPress #IndieWeb Theme | YouTube
I might have gone the step further and put the Dewey portion in the
Author tab and then put the source of the quote into the name field instead, but the output is still pretty solid, though some of the wrapped metadata that the plugin provides will be slightly off.As I look at some of the websites being created for the EDU522 class, it’s exciting to see what people are creating and how they’re expressing themselves. As hinted at in the Who Am I module, I do think it may be useful for some to think about the readability and accessibility of their sites. Even simple things like the color of a background against text can make it unpleasant or difficult to read. For ideas on readability, I recommend Kevin Marks’ WIRED article How the Web Became Unreadable.1
Be creative and have fun, but remember the multiple audiences and communities who may not consume your content the same way you do.
References
1.
Marks K. How the Web Became Unreadable | Backchannel. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-the-web-became-unreadable/. Published October 19, 2016. Accessed August 1, 2018.
👓 Sometimes Confusion Is A Good Thing | NPR
Confusion gets a bad rap.
A textbook that confuses its readers sounds like a bad textbook. Teachers who confuse their students sound like bad teachers.
But research suggests that some of the time, confusion can actually be a good thing — an important step toward learning.
Some interesting research referenced here.
hat tip: mrkean.com
📑 Code of Conduct
J. Gregory McVerry (edu522.networkedlearningcollaborative.com)Incessentaly correcting graamer ❧
This may be my favorite line of the entire code of conduct! I’m doing my best to resist….