All of us recognize that students’ communication skills benefit greatly from substantial amounts of writing. But many faculty members limit the amount of assigned writing because drafting comments and grading is too time-consuming. But one can imagine other ways to give students more opportunities to write while ensuring that they receive valuable feedback. These might include peer or near peer feedback, using carefully designed rubrics, or even a degree of auto feedback.

Many of the roughly forty percent of students at four-year institutions who never graduate would benefit greatly from access to alternate credentials.

We need to recognize that many students who are not ready for an exam on October 15 might succeed on November 1.

The queue of electronic hands could take so long to get through that some students abandoned hope and lowered their hands while others got into the habit of raising their hand pre-emptively just so they’d have a spot in line if an idea came into their head later on.

L’enseignant joue quatre rôles distincts : celui de client, qui juge l’adéquation du produit au cahier des charges, celui d’expert technique, en cas de difficulté bloquante, celui de chef d’entreprise lorsque cela s’impose et que des décisions autoritaires (concernant les coûts, les délais ou les méthodes) doivent être prises pour empêcher l’échec du projet, et enfin le rôle traditionnel de tuteur.

Pour leur faciliter la tâche, lorsqu’un enseignant dispense un cours magistral, un autre enseignant est présent dans la salle et joue un double rôle : il apporte éventuellement des points de clarification à travers une formulation alternative et il n’hésite pas à poser des questions, parfois volontairement naïves, afin de désinhiber les élèves qui n’oseraient pas intervenir.

Ces méthodes, qui pourraient sembler brutales si nous n’étions pas intimement convaincus de leurs vertus pédagogiques, s’avèrent avoir un effet extrêmement bénéfique sur les étudiants.

every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.

The least valuable category of device among educators was, by far, smart watches, with 59 percent saying they are either "not very valuable" (50 percent) or actually "detrimental" to education (9 percent).

For the most successful ed tech rollouts, teachers have to be on board with the plan and they need training to master the new technologies before introducing them in the classroom.

Interactive whiteboards were all the rage in ed tech purchases several years ago, costing schools millions of dollars but gaining little in the classroom.

Survey: Teachers dislike smartphones, interactive whiteboards in classroom

We commonly look at Ivy League institutions as the standard of higher education in America, but the truth is that the majority of the nation's workforce, innovation identity and manufacturing futures are tied to those institutions which graduate outside of the realm of high achievers from wealthy families. 

«Les tableaux intelligents ne fonctionnent pas, mais on fait comme à l'époque, quand la lumière d'un rétroprojecteur brûlait : on sort notre craie et on utilise le tableau! Ce n'est quand même pas la fin du monde. La terre n'a pas arrêté de tourner», conclut Francis Jacob.

Some of the other benefits include: Permits for peer review. Fulfills social responsibility of offering education to all. Increases standard of educational resources. Improves a university’s status and that of the researcher or educators.

.

“recognize and reward” public engagement

Take out your microphone, make some noise, and give your writing a voice.

this article is particularly concerned with the ways that uncritical adoption of educational technologies adversely impacts the autonomy of students and teachers within the shared enterprise of learning

narratives that pit students, teachers, and publics against one another

it’s productive to not only think of schools and colleges as sites of learning, but also as marketplaces where goods, knowledge, and services are consumed and produced

A network perspective not only lays bare the various stakeholders with a vested social, economic, and political interest in what happens within schools and colleges, but also the ways agency for what happens within classrooms at my institution extends beyond the students and educators charged with constructing learning.

frame the purposes and value of education in purely economic terms

who will (and will not) control and define the learning process, who will (and will not) profit from the ways that learning processes are enacted, who will (and will not) have access to science and scholarship and the infrastructure necessary for creating it, who will (and will not) participate in the design of curriculum and assessment and learning spaces, who will (and will not) profit from the benefits of science and artistry, and who will (and will not) have opportunities to attend schools and colleges.

ownership in educational systems

those most directly involved in learning

Foregrounding the critical role that autonomy plays within learning, Chris gestures tacitly toward the decreasing level of agency that those most directly involved in learning have in defining the processes and purposes of education on their own terms

captures values such as transparency and student autonomy

Activities such as time spent on task and discussion board interactions are at the forefront of research.

Research: Student data are used to conduct empirical studies designed primarily to advance knowledge in the field, though with the potential to influence institutional practices and interventions. Application: Student data are used to inform changes in institutional practices, programs, or policies, in order to improve student learning and support. Representation: Student data are used to report on the educational experiences and achievements of students to internal and external audiences, in ways that are more extensive and nuanced than the traditional transcript.

often private companies whose technologies power the systems universities use for predictive analytics and adaptive courseware

the use of data in scholarly research about student learning; the use of data in systems like the admissions process or predictive-analytics programs that colleges use to spot students who should be referred to an academic counselor; and the ways colleges should treat nontraditional transcript data, alternative credentials, and other forms of documentation about students’ activities, such as badges, that recognize them for nonacademic skills.

the ways colleges should treat nontraditional transcript data, alternative credentials, and other forms of documentation about students’ activities, such as badges, that recognize them for nonacademic skills.

colleges need to "shift from a compliance mentality to a responsibility mentality."

necessary to spot students at risk of dropping out or to improve teaching through so-called adaptive-learning courseware

Qualitative differences like spending on recruitment or types of degrees conferred matter to solvency and public perception.

mis-read or failed to read the labor market for different degree types.

The aggressive recruiting did not extend to aggressive retainment and debt management.

under-motivated or differently motivated students

Sociologist Dorothy Smith called this “textually-mediated social organization” or institutional ethnography.

If an organization works — and extracting billions of dollars in federal student aid money suggests ITT worked for a long time — then who it most frequently and efficiently works best for is one way to understand the organization.

One way to study for-profit colleges as organizations is to study for whom the organization is most efficiently organized.

a fundamental flaw in combining all things labeled LMS as a single market

I wonder what would have happened if someone I trust had provided me with a list of resources and people she admired when I started out in online learning and open education four years ago.

these decisions were ill-informed

if you are still reading these lines

curate

Where would you start?

Where would you start?

if you are still reading these lines

The news on the self-paced e-learning industry is so bad, Ambient Insight will no longer publish commercial syndicated reports on the industry

E-learning systems revenues in the United States and China are expected to drop by more than $6 billion annually, according to a new study. 

Some people define DH as divided into “hack” -- those who code and make digital things -- and “yack” -- those who critique and analyze “the digital.” I’m also interested in “stack” -- how do the structures of organizations and institutions enable or inhibit what we want to do? The people who “hack” and “yack” can’t work without the people in the “stack” (or without the people in the library stacks).

Imagine if our university system was structured around helping people accomplish the things that they're trying to do, Downes said — "that would be a real transformation."

“We need much more honesty, about what data is being collected and about the inferences that they’re going to make about people. We need to be able to ask the university ‘What do you think you know about me?’”

experts are using learning analytics to try to lower the number of drop-outs

"In a personalized learning environment, a student’s success is defined by knowledge, skills, habits and mindsets," she wrote. "Though we have a lot more work to do, we’re encouraged by student growth and survey results."

much-hyped personalized learning platform

University staff who are buying data-driven technology

One of the most important developments for the education system of today

The point of replication isn't to shame researchers — it's to build better science

"At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment,"

Coursera targeted higher ed students and discovered that many users were in companies and already had jobs

one iteration from success!

 As Neil Selwyn (2013) notes, the expansion of technology (and the rise of EdTech) coincides with a growth in libertarian ideals and neoliberal governmental policies, a one-two punch of individual exceptionalism and belief in the power of the outsider.

EdTech, or really any system or structure permeating society, does not function under modernist sensibilities.

Interestingly, the other MOOC professor at Stanford in 2011, who was not part of the media push or start-up aftermath,  was Jennifer Widom.  She has continued to teach MOOCs since 2011, and during her current sabbatical year is offering free courses in data and design…and those free courses are going to be in-person.

Content is the least stable and least valuable part of education.

play to their strengths while mitigating their weaknesses

this model of “personalization” is still building off of a deficit model in which students are steered away from doing the things they are good at so they can focus on the things they are bad at

I Annotate 2016 shows that it’s ready for prime time.

The Trending algorithm is clearly not ready for prime time

(Apple, Google and Samsung confirm that they don't collect any information about your shopping habits.)

A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify a large set of clickbait headlines. From there, we built a system that looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines. This is similar to how many email spam filters work.

appear lower in News Feed.

“He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”

The problem, as Taylor explained, is that the rise of e-commerce and social media has lowered the cost of entry for new competitors.

Gadget's movie, "The Revenge of the Electric Car," opens across the country next month.

Google’s chief culture officer

One way to do this is to bring someone into the C-Suite whose job it is to keep an eye on culture. The best-known example of this approach is Google GOOG 3.07% , which added “chief culture officer” to head of HR Stacy Sullivan’s job title in 2006. Part of her job is to protect key parts of Google’s scrappy, open-source cultural core as the company has evolved into a massive multinational.

there’s only a fine line between “WordPress in Higher Education” and “WordPress in the Enterprise”.

This includes making sure all students have access to the Internet, and the devices they need to readily access course materials, and making sure educators are trained and comfortable in the use of digital content

learning revolution

market for

institutions that are preparing tomorrow’s leaders

As schools and universities are quickly being populated with digital natives

students and administrators are making the most of it for now

GPS system

By many accounts

Montreal: Melding of Old and New

different from school

people mediated by technology in a virtual classroom

I maintain a great deal of excitement about the potential of the Internet of Things.

heart rate of students as they’re accessing (or not accessing) a course?

what do we do with that information?

How has learning already been changed by the tracking we already do?

By merely being in the room, the devices will monitor students’ behavior in the same way that the cameras and switches and lab coats did in Milgram’s experiments.

When Internet-enabled devices have thoroughly saturated our educational institutions

Even if I find the experiment itself icky, Milgram offers useful reflections on the bizarre techno theater that made his experiment go.

ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed

Remote proctoring tools

turn students and faculty into data points

E-texts could record how much time is spent in textbook study. All such data could be accessed by the LMS or various other applications for use in analytics for faculty and students.”

But my own personal curiosity and fascination are outweighed by my concern at the degree to which similar devices are being used in education to monitor and police learning.

I’ll be candid. I am quite often an unabashed fan of the Internet of Things.

relationship cannot be called free of values, ethics, or ideology.

I find something ominous about the capital-I and capital-T of the acronym IoT

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) report “7 Things You Should Know About the Internet of Things”

And some tools can never be hacked to good use.

empty all our LEGOs onto the table

ducational technologies have pedagogies hard-coded into them in advance

concerned by the idea that our tools are without ideologies

Like Martha

The less we understand our tools, the more we are beholden to them.

the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ

eliciting compliance

I sense glee in the language Milgram uses

the results remain compelling nonetheless

awe

obedience of volunteers

Alexandra “Sasha” Milgram, is played by Winona Ryder, and she serves as the on-screen stand-in for the film audience

The Internet is made of people

not as a way to monitor and regulate

Internet of Things as a space

reduce students, to mere algorithms

she sees human beings and not the experiment

and awe

“counteranthropomorphism”—the tendency we have to remove the humanity of people we can’t see

Unilever is fortunate they don’t have a shaving business to protect

leading to Dollar Shave Club capturing 15% of U.S. cartridge share last year

Both sides are wrong — Yiannopoulos is no free-speech martyr, and cheerleaders of the ban are likely fooling themselves if they interpret this as any sort of sign of evolving Twitter policy rather than a specific instance of damage control that’s unlikely to lead to wider reforms.

education vertical

Kieran Egan, Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences), Seymour Papert, Larry Cuban, and so forth.

Jean Piaget, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, or Paulo Friere

Most of the important things in life and work can’t be measured and quantified.

(Crooks, 1933; De Zouche, 1945; Kirschenbaum, Simon, & Napier, 1971; Linder, 1940; Marshall, 1968)

“Like the Web” is perhaps a good place to start, don’t get me wrong,

I could have easily chosen a different prepositional phrase. "Convivial Tools in an Age of Big Data.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of DRM.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Venture-Funded Education Technology Startups.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Doxxing and Trolls."

“the free software movement does this.” And again, I have to say: not quite. 

Convivial tools should be accessible — free, even.

I’ve heard it suggested often that the World Wide Web is an example of what Ivan Illich called “convivial tools” — although his book predates the Web by 15+ years, Illich speaks of “learning webs” in Deschooling Society. I grow less and less certain that the Web is quite “it."

the narrative that computer technologies are liberatory

education technology has become about control, surveillance, and data extraction

demanded by education policies — for more data

more efficient (whatever that means)

ed-tech hasn’t really changed much in schools

technology industry, the education technology industry programming the child

testing industry programming the child

textbook industry programming the child

The computer isn’t some self-aware agent here, of course.

The computer programming the child.”

Much of these new “learn to code” efforts are about inserting computer science into the pre-existing school curriculum.

create their own interactive learning tools

For all media, the original intent was 'symmetric authoring and consuming’.”

qualitatively extend the notions of 'reading, writing, sharing, publishing, etc. of ideas' literacy to include the 'computer reading, writing, sharing, publishing of ideas

reflexive communication

children would be the primary actors in this transformation

He believed this would foster a new literacy, a literacy that would bring about a revolution akin to the changes brought about by the printing press in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Alan Kay

a way for children could to learn computer programming but more importantly even, a way of giving them a powerful object, a powerful tool to think with

more in common with multiple choice than with student choice and agency

progressive change

school often neatly reinforces the hierarchies of our socio-economic world

our education system is controlling, exploitative, imperialist

education technologies that are not build upon control and surveillance

whose revolution this might be

resist some of the dominant narratives about what education technology can or should do

should probably not send my readers into this downward spiral of education technology despair

You hone your jokes; perhaps you localize them

don’t give ed-tech pep talks, where you leave the room with a list of 300 new apps you can use in your classroom.

(Let me stress “gender” there. I can’t but notice that this list, much like the list of those on the education speaking circuit today, is full of men.) 

The phrase comes from his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, published just 2 years after the book he’s probably best known for, Deschooling Society.  These are just two of a number of very interesting, progressive if not radical texts about education from roughly the same period: Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-education (1964). Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967). Neil Postman’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969). Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (first published in Portuguese in 1968 and in English in 1970). Everett Reimer’s School is Dead (1971).

series of radical educational paperbacks, published by Penguin in the series Penguin Education Specials in the 1970’s. These included: Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Opprressed ; Paul Goodman Compulsory Miseducation; Ivan Illich De-Schooling Society; Everett Reimer School is Dead. 

cautiously optimistic

data being collected about individuals for purposes unknown to these individuals

This means that even the ‘free choice’ of finding your own content and communicating with others is not completely in your own hands as a learner.

There is a lot of power coming from organisations that choose to fund particular initiatives and institutions who are able to push their content onto the rest of the world.

There is still much more emphasis in hyperbolic education discourse on pushing content rather than enabling connections between people

I don’t want to dwell on all the things that are still going wrong

those less privileged in developed countries

academics in developing countries

not to conference content, but to up-to-date conversations in the education field

localised to different regional contexts and curricula

efforts to expand worldwide

encouraged learners to use social media

Some digital pedagogues who teach MOOCs on traditionally xMOOC platforms find ways to infuse connectivist principles in their teaching.

content can potentially come from outside the developed world

on already-existing MOOC platforms like Coursera

Towards a More Postcolonial Internet for Learning

many people in the world without internet access, or with insufficient infrastructure

Translation apps continue to leave much to be desired.

what is the English-speaking world missing out on by not reading the content written in other languages

people who are not fluent in English

the voice of the rest of the world

a handful in a few major world languages

ironically while continuing to employ adjunct faculty

privileged institutions

The majority of content comes from Western, developed countries