This collection of essays explores the authors’ work in, inquiry into, and critique of online learning, educational technology, and the trends, techniques, hopes, fears, and possibilities of digital pedagogy. For more information, visit urgencyofteachers.com.
Tag: pedagogy
👓 Digital learning experts reflect on evolving field in new book | Inside Higher Ed
Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris examine their evolving thoughts on classroom technology and online education. A lot has changed in a short time, they found.
Nice little interview. Definitely makes me want to read the book.
Syndicated copies to:👓 The risks of treating 'academic innovation' as a discipline (opinion) | Inside Higher Ed
Calls to create a discipline around the term risk reinforcing existing problems with how it is used -- and misused -- in higher education, Rolin Moe writes.
👓 The role of the faculty in the post-LMS world (opinion) | Inside Higher Ed
If it isn’t already, the learning management system will soon be obsolete, Jonathan Rees argues. Let’s replace it in ways that treat professors like the professionals they are.
This article has the flavor of IndieWeb about it…
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
The real internet is structured by myriad people with different aesthetics and different needs. Online course design decisions should reflect the instructor’s individuality in the same way that everyone else’s webpages do. ❧
September 26, 2018 at 05:22PM
Third, the post-LMS world should protect the pedagogical prerogatives and intellectual property rights of faculty members at all levels of employment. This means, for example, that contingent faculty should be free to take the online courses they develop wherever they happen to be teaching. Similarly, professors who choose to tape their own lectures should retain exclusive rights to those tapes. After all, it’s not as if you have to turn over your lecture notes to your old university whenever you change jobs. ❧
Own your pedagogy. Send just like anything else out there…
September 26, 2018 at 05:27PM
👓 Electracy | Wikipedia
Electracy is a theory by Gregory Ulmer that describes the kind of skills and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social software, and virtual worlds. According to Ulmer, electracy "is to digital media what literacy is to print." It encompasses the broader cultural, institutional, pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in the transition from a culture of print literacy to a culture saturated with electronic media. "Electracy" is the term he gives to what is resulting from this major transition that our society is undergoing. The term is a portmanteau word, combining "electrical" with "literacy", to allude to one of the fundamental terms used by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to name the relational spacing that enables and delimits any signification in any medium.
👓 Update on Badging with Webmentions | Greg McVerry
Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)As #EDU522 Digital Teaching and Learning Too wraps up I find myself reflecting on my goals for the class…I mean “my goals” in the class not the hopes on the instructional design. Much more on that later. All summer, well before EDU 522 began, I set off to create a remixable template others cou...
I suspect that Dr. McVerry could have gotten further a bit faster had he built the course on WordPress directly instead of on a remixable platform. This would have made it easier to send webmention-based badges which could have been done by creating a badge page on which he could have added simple links to all of the student pages that had earned them. This would have made things a bit less manual on his part.
But at the same time, he’s now also got a remixable platform that others can borrow and use for similar courses!
Syndicated copies to:👓 ‘Inclusive access’ takes off as model for college textbook sales | Inside HigherEd
Hundreds of colleges are signing on to publishers’ programs, with apparent savings to students. Some applaud the movement, while others are skeptical.
Inclusive Access is a great marketing term. It sounds nice, but has some insidious implications. It would be interesting to do some additonal in-depth reporting on the economics of these models. The article could have done at least a back of the envelop calculation and been far more skeptical of what was going on here.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
The “inclusive” aspect of the model means that every student has the same materials on the first day of class, with the charge included as part of their tuition. ❧
It almost sounds to me like they know they’re not getting a cut of the money from poorer students who are finding the material for free online anyway, so they’re trying to up the stakes of the piece of pie that they’re getting from a different angle.
This other model of subscription at the level of the college or university is also one that they’re well aware of based on involvement with subscription fees for journal access.
August 21, 2018 at 10:17PM
She said that her institution, which has inclusive-access agreements with more than 25 publishers, had saved students more than $2 million this semester alone. Morrone said this figure was calculated by taking the retail price of a textbook, subtracting the cost that students paid for the equivalent etextbook and then dividing the cost saving in half to account for the fact that many students would not have bought the book new. ❧
$ 2million compared to what? To everyone having purchased the textbooks at going rates before? This is a false comparison because not everyone bought new in the first place. Many bought used, and many more still probably either pirated, borrowed from a friend, from the library, or simply went without.
August 21, 2018 at 10:21PM
Students like the convenience of the system, said Anderson, and all have access to the most up-to-date content, instead of some students having different editions of the same textbook. ❧
They’re also touting the most up-to-date content here, when it’s an open secret that for the majority of textbooks don’t really change that much from edition to edition.
August 21, 2018 at 10:24PM
A key difference between inclusive access and buying print textbooks is that students effectively lease the content for the duration of their course, rather than owning the material. If students want to download the content to access it beyond the duration of their course, there is often an additional fee. ❧
So now we need to revisit the calculation above and put this new piece of data into the model.
Seriously?! It’s now a “rental price”?
August 21, 2018 at 10:26PM
Campus stores are often the ones driving inclusive-access initiatives, as they receive a cut of the sales. While the profit margins are smaller than for print, inclusive access means that the stores receive revenue from a larger number of customers. Donovan Garcia, course materials manager at the University of Mary Washington, said that lower margins were also mitigated by lower overheads. “We’re not purchasing books, we’re not paying shipping, we’re not having to put any time or effort into returning unused books or paying restocking fees,” said Garcia. ❧
I suspect the publisher is also saving on sales commissions to their sales staff as well.
August 21, 2018 at 10:27PM
👓 Make Your Daughter Practice Math. She’ll Thank You Later. | New York Times
The way we teach math in America hurts all students, but it may be hurting girls the most.
Reply to Greg McVerry on Memes as Lazy Metaphors
Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)You could choose any picture in the world to represent you and you chose a meme… Day One We started off our #dailyponderances in #EDU522 thinking visually. Each person was asked to post a picture that represented how you felt. The funny memes flooded in I laughed, but I also grasped how frustrated...
As I’ve been reflecting on this further, it does dawn on me that on day one or two of the course many of us had probably just read the Schedule of Assignments/Workflow page of the course site, which also carries the title How The Sausage is Made.
Perhaps we all went to meme-speak because you had subtly primed us to go there? You could try a nice experiment when you teach this course again…
I had almost forgotten that it was not so long ago that I’d outlined how I use Hypothesis to own my own highlights and annotations on my website. For the benefit of those in Dr. McVerry’s EDU522 course, I’ve included a link to it here.
For those who would like to see some examples you can find several below:
Specific stand-alone highlight posts
Specific stand-alone annotation posts
Other posts (typically reads) which I’ve highlighted and/or otherwise annotated things
I created the stand-alone posts using customized post kinds using some custom code for the Post Kinds Plugin.
I’ll begin tagging some of these pieces with the tag “backstage” for those in the EDU522 class that wish to follow along with how I’ve built or done certain things. You can subscribe to these future posts by adding /feed/ to the end of the URL for this tag archive.
To some extent my IndieWeb Collection/Research page has a lot of these “backstage” type posts for those who are interested. As part of the IndieWeb community, I’ve been documenting how and what I’ve been doing on my site for a while, hopefully these backstage posts will help other educators follow in my path without need to blaze as much of it anew for themselves.
Backstage posts are in actuality a very IndieWeb thing:
As we discover new ways to do things, we can document the crap out of them. —IndieWeb.org
IndieWeb technology for online pedagogy
An ongoing case study
Very slick! Greg McVerry, a professor, can post all of the readings, assignments, etc. for his EDU522 online course on his own website, and I can indicate that I’ve read the pieces, watched the videos, or post my responses to assignments and other classwork (as well as to fellow classmates’ work and questions) on my own website while sending notifications via Webmention of all of the above to the original posts on their sites.
When I’m done with the course I’ll have my own archive of everything I did for the entire course (as well as copies on the Internet Archive, since I ping it as I go). His class website and my responses there could be used for the purposes of grading.
I can subscribe to his feed of posts for the class (or an aggregated one he’s made–sometimes known as a planet) and use the feed reader of choice to consume the content (and that of my peers’) at my own pace to work my way through the course.
This is a lot closer to what I think online pedagogy or even the use of a Domain of One’s Own in an educational setting could and should be. I hope other educators might follow suit based on our examples. As an added bonus, if you’d like to try it out, Greg’s three week course is, in fact, an open course for using IndieWeb and DoOO technologies for teaching. It’s just started, so I hope more will join us.
He’s focusing primarily on using WordPress as the platform of choice in the course, but one could just as easily use other Webmention enabled CMSes like WithKnown, Grav, Perch, Drupal, et al. to participate.
Syndicated copies to:📑 Launching #EDU 522 Week Zero | INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION
Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)I also think as educators we should own what we make, or at least have it released to the Commons. Copyright on teacher created materials in the public school makes little sense. Nobody wants to steal your stuff and no municipality will ever profit on sales. Give it an open license.🔖 Timelinely
Create interactive video stories on Timelinely. Timelinely empowers people to go beyond just video.
Highlight interesting parts of a video on a timeline with interactive comments, pictures, links, maps, other videos, and more.
This tool reminds me of a somewhat more commercialized version of Jon Udell’s Clipping tools for HTML5 audio, HTML5 video, and YouTube. I wonder if this is the sort of UI that Hypothes.is might borrow? I can definitely see it being useful functionality in the classroom.
Syndicated copies to:👓 My College Degree as an Open Digital Humanities Project | Mark Corbett Wilson
I’m developing a new model for adult learners so they can avoid the experience I had while trying to improve my skills at a Community College. Combining Self-Directed Learning, Computational Thinking, Digital Pedagogy, Open Education and Open Social Scholarship theories with Open Education Resourc...
This sounds to me to be a bit like an open digital commonplace book.
(I’m noticing, yet again, that Disqus is automatically marking any comments I make as spam.)
Syndicated copies to:👓 Interviewing my digital domains | W. Ian O’Byrne
W. Ian O'Byrne (W. Ian O'Bryne)Alan Levine recently posted a series of questions to help others think through some of thoughts and motivations as we develop and maintain a domain of our own.
I’ve written a lot about this in the past, and I’ll try to include some links to content/posts as I respond to the prompts. This is a bit long as I get into the weeds, so consider yourself warned.
And now…let’s get to it…
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Having a domain is important to me as I research, develop, and teach.
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 09:07AM
example of a domain as thinking out loud or thought spaces
blogging as thinking
This should be a space where you can create the identity that you want to have. You can write yourself into existence.
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 09:43AM
I like this sentiment. Had René Descartes been born a bit later might he have said “Blogeō, ergo sum”?
Most of this work is focused on collaboration, transparency, and working/thinking in the open.
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 09:44AM
The plan is to use the site to share surveys, interviews, and researcher notes.
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 09:46AM
Note to self: I need to keep documenting examples of these open labs, open notebooks, etc. in the open science area.
teachers hid their Facebook accounts for fear of being fired.
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 09:49AM
The sound of this to me know reminds me of the type of suppression of thought that might have occurred in the middle ages. Of course open thought and discussion is important for teachers the same way it is for every other person. However there are a few potential counterexamples where open discussion of truly abhorrent ideas can run afoul of community mores. Case in point:
- Florida public school teacher has a white nationalist podcast | Huffington Post
- Forida teacher says her racist podcast was satire | New York Times
PLN
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 09:54AM
personal learning network perhaps marking it up with <abbr> tags would be useful here?
luck
Highlight (Gray) added on June 21, 2018 at 09:54AM
lucky
.A
Highlight (Gray) added on June 21, 2018 at 10:09AM
space
I feel like this culture in academia may be changing.
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 10:14AM
academia is built on the premise (IMHO) of getting a good idea, parlaying that into a job and tenure, and waiting for death. I’ve had a lot of colleagues and acquaintances ask why I would bother blogging. Ask why I share all of this content online. Ask why I’m not afraid that someone is going to steal my ideas.
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 10:08AM
Though all too true, this is just a painful statement for me. The entirety of our modern world is contingent upon the creation of ideas, their improvement and evolution, and their spreading. In an academic world where attribution of ideas is paramount, why wouldn’t one publish quickly and immediately on one’s own site (or anywhere else they might for that matter keeping in mind that it’s almost trivially easy to self-publish it on one’s own website nearly instantaneously)?
Early areas of science were held back by the need to communicate by handwriting letters as the primary means of communication. Books eventually came, but the research involved and even the printing process could take decades. Now the primary means of science communication is via large (often corporate owned) journals, but even this process may take a year or more of research and then a year or more to publish and get the idea out. Why not write the ideas up and put them out on your own website and collect more immediate collaborators? Funding is already in such a sorry state that generally, even an idea alone, will not get the ball rolling.
I’m reminded of the gospel song “This little light of mine” whose popular lyrics include:
“Hide it under a bushel? No! / I’m gonna let it shine” and
“Don’t let Satan blow it out, / I’m gonna let it shine”
I’m starting to worry that academia in conjunction with large corporate publishing interests are acting the role of Satan in the song which could easily be applied to ideas as well as to my little light.
Senior colleagues indicate that I should not have to balance out publishing in “traditional, peer-reviewed publications” as well as open, online spaces.
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 10:14AM
Do your colleagues who read your work, annotate it, and comment on it not count as peer-review? Am I wasting my time by annotating all of this? 🙂 (I don’t think so…)
or at least they pretend
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 10:15AM
I don’t think we’re pretending. I know I’m not!
PDF form
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 10:17AM
Let me know when you’re done and we’ll see about helping you distribute it in .epub and .mobi formats as e-books as well.
This is due to a natural human reaction to “Google” someone before we meet them for the first time. Before we show up to teach a class, take a class, interview for a job, go on a date…we’ve been reviewed online. Other people use the trail of breadcrumbs that we’ve left behind to make judgements about us. The question/challenge is that this trail of breadcrumbs is usually incomplete, and locked up in various silos. You may have bits of your identity in Facebook or Twitter, while you have other parts locked up in Instagram, Snapchat, or LinkedIn. What do these incomplete pieces say about you? Furthermore, are they getting the entire picture of you when they uncover certain details? Can they look back to see what else you’re interested in? Can they see how you think all of these interests fit together…or they seeing the tail end of a feverish bout of sharing cat pics?
Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 10:29AM
I can’t help but think that doing this is a form of cultural anthropology being practiced contemporaneously. Which is more likely: someone a 100 years from now delving into my life via my personal website that aggregated everything or scholars attempting to piece it all back together from hundreds of other sites? Even with advanced AI techniques, I think the former is far more likely.
Of course I also think about what @Undine is posting about cats on Twitter or perhaps following #marginaliamonday and cats, and they’re at least taking things to a whole new level of scholarship.
Guide to highlight colors
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through