Read Fall Scenario #13: A HyFlex Model (Inside Higher Ed)
The challenge of flexibility.

It’s important to note that the goal of HyFlex is two make both the online and in-person experiences equal. 

There are some pieces of this that immediately make me think that this model is more of a sort of “separate, but equal” sort of modality. Significant resources will need to go toward the equality piece and even then it is likely to fall short from a social perspective.

Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:27PM

Finally, the best HyFlex classrooms have someone assisting the faculty member. 

This is the understatement of the year. Faculty members will require extensive training and LOTS of assistance. This assistance SHOULD NOT come from student assistants, graduate students (who are likely to be heavily undertrained), or other “free” sources.

Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:35PM

These assistants could also be work-study students who are assigned a particular classroom (or digital space) or they might be volunteers from class who are given credit for assisting in the delivery of the course. 

And of course, the first pivot (even in the same paragraph!) is exactly to these “free” or cheap sources which are likely to be overlooked and undertrained.

If a school is going to do this they need to take it seriously and actually give it professional resources.

Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:38PM

Incidentally there is some pre-existing research about the measurable fairness of court proceedings being held online that would tend to negate the equality that might be dispensed in online courseware.

See https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/are-online-courts-less-fair-on-the-media for some references. 
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 02:42PM

This fall needs to be different. We need to ask students to be part of the solution of keeping learning flourishing in the fall. This includes asking them to help manage the class if it has a virtual component. 

This is moving education in exactly the WRONG direction. Students are already ill-prepared to do the actual work and studying of education, now we’re going to try to extract extra efficiency out of the system by asking them to essential teach themselves on top of it? This statement seems like the kind of thing a technology CEO would pitch higher education on as a means of monetizing something over which they had no control solely to extract value for their own company.

If we’re going to go this far, why not just re-institute slavery?

Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 02:46PM

RSVPed Attending Academia, race, and the pandemic

We're going to explore how racism and white supremacy shape social and academic responses to COVID-19.  On Thursday, May 21st, from 2-3 pm EST, we'll be joined by Jessie Daniels, an activist and scholar of racism and the digital world.  Daniels is faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and professor at Hunter College (Sociology) and The Graduate Center, CUNY (Sociology, Critical Social Psychology, Africana Studies).

Daniels is an internationally recognized expert in Internet expressions of racism, and the author or editor of five books, two of which are about racism on either side of the digital revolution: White Lies (Routledge, 1997) and Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). She is currently at work on Tweet Storm:The Rise of the Far Right, the Mainstreaming of White Supremacy, and How Tech and Media Helped. In 2016, she co-edited (with Karen Gregory and Tressie McMillan Cottom) Digital Sociologies, which has been adopted by courses at several universities around the world.

Daniels’ attention is increasingly focused on how digital media technologies are changing higher education. She has co-authored two books on this topic, Being a Scholar in the Digital Era  and Going Public , along with a number of articles. In 2020, Daniels launched Public Scholar Academy to help faculty who aspire to be public scholars achieve their goals and to help university administrators who want to assess and respond to attacks from the far right against their institutions. 
I plan on asking Dr. Daniels about how racism shapes the unfolding pandemic. How does that impact colleges and universities?  What can we do to create a more just academy?

Watched The urgency of intersectionality from ted.com

Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both. In this moving talk, she calls on us to bear witness to this reality and speak up for victims of prejudice.

Intersectionality is definitely a good word to have. 

🎧 ‘The Daily’: When Gun Violence Is a Daily Threat | The New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: When Gun Violence Is a Daily Threat by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

As hundreds of thousands of demonstrators prepared to march in Washington in response to the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., students on the South Side of Chicago felt sympathy, but also frustration.

Why hadn’t the gun violence in their community earned the nation’s outrage?



On today’s episode:

• Sameen Amin, a senior video producer at The New York Times.

Background coverage:

• Video: Ke’Shon Newman’s brother was shot and killed on the South Side of Chicago, where gun violence is a daily threat. He decided to join the march in Washington with high school students from Parkland, Fla.

• For some students who joined protests against gun violence over the weekend, bloodshed doesn’t come in isolated bursts of mass slaughter, it’s a constant urban reality.

• Highlights from the March for Our Lives: Students protesting guns say “enough is enough.”

👓 ‘The Daily’: Women We Overlooked | The New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: Women We Overlooked by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com
Obituaries in The New York Times have been long dominated by white men. We’re adding the stories of remarkable women like Ida B. Wells, who took on racism in the South.

Some nice pieces of history here that I’m sad to say I hadn’t heard about and didn’t know they were as egregious as I had thought. I knew about lynchings in general, but didn’t know that they rose to a level as high as the one described here.