connectedness isinfluenced by more than simply personal or interpersonal factors. It is also shapedby the social infrastructure of the community (or communities) i

Social networks are getting smaller, and levels of social participation are decliningdistinct from whether individuals report that they are lonely.

key measures of isolation and lonelinessmay miss whether they are reaping the benefits of social connection in other ways,such as feeling adequately supported or having high-quality, close relationships

chronic loneliness (evenif someone is not isolated) and isolation (even if someone is not lonely) representa significant health concern

one ofthree vital components of social connection: structure, function, and quality.

Moreover, it is critical to carefullyconsider equity in any approach to addressing social connection, as access andbarriers to social opportunities are often not the same for everyone and oftenreinforce longstanding and historical inequities

loneliness and isolation are associated with lower academicachievement44,45 and worse performance at work.

Social isolation among older adults alone accountsfor an estimated $6.7 billion in excess Medicare spending annually

Glossary

While social connection is often consideredan individual challenge

In my book Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up, I explore how the design of platforms and the way people engage with those designs helps to shape the cultures that emerge on different social media platforms. I propose three layers for understanding this process.

“My job involves supporting faculty wellness through pedagogy, but also supporting students’ wellness through the practice of pedagogy,”

Students working together in a group trying to make meaning out of their own data could find themselves in a similar situation. Your lack of imagination about your own data may not result in a lack of imagination by others about what they think of you. Putting students in these situations without preparing them about assumptions they might make of others could lead to embarrassment and misunderstanding. 

Another way of understanding Michelle’s “so what?” feeling as she looked at her inaccurately targeted ads is that “so what?” is an expression of ambivalence, and ambivalence is complicated. Ambivalence is created when we hold contradictory ideas that are hard to square with one another, and holding contradictory ideas can be kind of exhausting. Sometimes it’s easier to disconnect and say to ourselves, “If it’s so complicated then why should I care about this topic at all?”

When engaging in data literacy work in our classrooms, it’s helpful to keep two ideas at play at once: on the one hand, these algorithmic systems are nowhere near as “smart” as these platforms want to lead us to believe they are; and on the other hand, concerns about accuracy can distract us from the bigger picture, that these platforms are built on a logic of prediction that, one nudge at a time, may ultimately infringe upon users’ ability to make up their own mind.

The funny thing is, despite having already reflected on this “trap of accuracy” before, Michelle still fell for it when she saw her inaccurately targeted ads staring at her on the screen. The promise of accuracy and of being seen is just too alluring. 

ultimately advertisers are more interested in understanding what might nudge users towards certain behaviors, and that’s perhaps better understood as a game of probable futures more than accurate presents

This need not mean continuing face-to-face lectures online, but it does mean that the pandemic is not the time to deploy radical pedagogies or new technologies.

The skill to spot objects of interest amid the general detritus can also be said to be a defining characteristic of the educational technologist—it takes time to get “your eye in” and appreciate what is important and useful in new technological developments and to separate them from the pro- or anti-technology rhetoric.

series of museums

Mead (1934) suggests that an individual’s identity is created by the degree to which that person absorbs the values of their community, summarized in the phrase “self reflects society.” Snow (2001) also argues that identity is largely constructed socially and includes, as well as Mead’s sense of belonging, a sense of difference from other communities. Identity is seen as a shared sense of “we-ness” developed through shared attributes and experiences and in contrast to one or more sets of others.

Association for Learning Technology’s certified membership process

Techniques for developing commonality among individuals can include running primers for people new to ed tech, explicitly bringing multidisciplinary perspectives to bear on tech issues, having common problems to address, crowd-sourcing principles, and so on. This is akin to making the suitcase items individual while also making their combined contents mutually useful. The approach is to reach some form of consensus, but that consensus itself is fluid and changeable, varying over time and location, just as the contents of the suitcase will vary depending on specific trips.

evaluating evidence

A recognized ed tech discipline in fact might be interdisciplinary and incorporate components from psychology, sociology, education, computer science, statistics, et cetera. This would help to establish a canonical body of texts, presumably, with which most people in the field are familiar.

core of immutability

In this model, it is also necessary to create a cultural context in which students themselves see the value in such experimentation and are not penalized for it.

Education is often decried for being slow to change, for being stuck in the past, but whether tech companies realize it or not these are exactly the values that they seek to appropriate. Education is a (generally) recognized universal good. It has longevity, history, and social capital. These characteristics, as much as the millions of users with associated dollars, are assets that tech companies seek to acquire

the historical immutability of the position of the aristocracy

gestation

However, with both of these uses of metaphor, our existing views on ed tech will also influence how we then think about the validity of the metaphor itself. The mapping outlined in the introduction is not just one way from the base domain to the target domain, but there is a reverse influence from our knowledge of the target domain that shapes how we view the base domain.

Lukeš (2019) proposes three uses of metaphor in explanation.

The freedom to play with ideas, and to explore new ways of thinking, critiquing, deploying, and analyzing ed tech provided by metaphors, is much needed if we are to develop a better appreciation of its possibilities, implications, and limitations.

I always wonder about the campus fetishists: how close do you live to campus, and is your parking free?

But, let's turn our attention to HyFlex for a moment.

Also, your issue isn't feeling exhausted due to "not being with smart people in a room".  Those same smart people are on Zoom.  Your issue is the overabundance of meetings and zoom fatigue.

You can have the illusion that watercooler talk "just happens," hence cultivating a community seems seamless in a F2F context, but you're really not examining the factors that lead you there, and how's privileged.

One of the risks I heard mentioned is that of becoming/ being perceived as an ”arm of the university bureaucracy”, as CTLs become more involved in decision-making on educational issues.

Dilemma: should/ can the CTL be neutral territory (and can it be?)

Thanks to everyone who wrote to say they enjoyed the blogs. I had thought social media killed blogging, but a few of you seem to be here in the afterlife. Isn't it strange how a blog without comments is so much more intimate than social media? I think the key is that blogs are like letters, and letters are the most intimate human experience that doesn't involve touching someone's butt. Come to think of it, they may be more intimate now than in their heyday because only a few of you will even bother to read.

Social networks may thus be “sticky” because social integration provides both benefits that encourage staying and social deterrents to leaving, increasing the chances of persistence.

persistence is the product of not only individual processes but also relational ones

Students in a gateway biology course were randomly assigned to complete a control or values affirmation exercise, a psychological intervention hypothesized to have positive social effects. By the end of the term, affirmed students had an estimated 29% more friends in the course on average than controls. Affirmation also prompted structural changes in students’ network positions such that affirmed students were more central in the overall course friendship network.

relying upon adjunct labor is wrong, because it is cruel. The system capitalizes upon the desperation of a vulnerable population, profits from that population’s labor, and then willfully turns its back on the needs and suffering produced by the conditions of the population’s employment. The adjunct system not only uses people, it uses people up.

Colleges should exist not to produce winning athletic teams; sustain multilayered administrative bureaucracies; deliver fine food, fancy gyms, and luxury housing; or even find jobs for students. They exist to educate a populace, secure the peace of our republic, seed innovation, and model virtue.

Interested in launching a similar experiment in your organization?

adopt the mindset of a curator – objective, opinionated, and reflective.

Among the many purported benefits of diversity initiatives is the promise that when minority members contribute novel perspectives, they create a learning opportunity for their peers. However, for minority contributions to affect the performance of others, majority members must attend to them.

By investigating the patterns of who pays attention to whom, our study provides evidence of a racial attention deficit: Even when in their self-interest, Whites pay less attention to Black peers. Specifically, White Americans rate Black peers as less competent than White ones and are less likely to follow their example as a guide to making a better decision.

When I hear people in a variety of contexts talking about “building community” for students or colleagues (or, customers), I worry about that, too.  Is the motivation an additive one?  “Let’s give them more people to connect with and rely on?”  Or is it intended to be a kind of capture?

It is essential that by far the greater part of what is said or done in the world should be so ephemeral as to take itself away quickly; it should keep good for twenty-four hours, or even twice as long, but it should not be good enough a week hence to prevent people from going on to something else.

He assured me that he would never open another hypothetical book after he had taken his degree, but would follow out the bent of his own inclinations.

every one is a genius, more or less

But here they depart from the principles on which they justify their study of hypothetics; for they base the importance which they assign to hypothetics upon the fact of their being a preparation for the extraordinary, while their study of Unreason rests upon its developing those faculties which are required for the daily conduct of affairs.

If the youths chose it for themselves I should have wondered less; but they do not choose it; they have it thrust upon them, and for the most part are disinclined towards it.

The main feature in their system is the prominence which they give to a study which I can only translate by the word “hypothetics.” They argue thus—that to teach a boy merely the nature of the things which exist in the world around him, and about which he will have to be conversant during his whole life, would be giving him but a narrow and shallow conception of the universe, which it is urged might contain all manner of things which are not now to be found therein. To open his eyes to these possibilities, and so to prepare him for all sorts of emergencies, is the object of this system of hypothetics. To imagine a set of utterly strange and impossible contingencies, and require the youths to give intelligent answers to the questions that arise therefrom, is reckoned the fittest conceivable way of preparing them for the actual conduct of their affairs in after life.

Students also cited the frequent interruptions that accompanied each transition from group activities to instructor feedback (14 responses), a concern that their errors made during class would not be corrected (10 responses), and a general feeling of frustration and confusion (14 responses) when discussing their concerns about the actively taught classes.

In addition, students presented several scenarios in which they could imagine reporting that a teacher was highly effective even if they personally did not feel they learned very much—for instance, if they were not sufficiently prepared for a class or too tired to pay close attention.

What if we designed faculty learning experiences that took less time, were more consistent, and were packed with meaning that compelled us to share and connect with our colleagues and students? What would that look like? I’d think I’d like to explore that question with all of you in 2022.

Why is the 60-minute workshop the gold-standard in faculty development/learning?

Folks would sometimes show up with specific pedagogical or technical questions about the work of designing and teaching online courses, but mostly, they showed up to laugh, cry, and vent together.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve seen more faculty declining learning opportunities and expressing a need to protect their time than ever before in fifteen years of doing this work.

[responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though

Men need to turn up to the teacher courses I attend on empathy and restorative practice. Men are consistently in the minority at these events and whilst the men who do attend are inspiring, the empty seats are a reminder that change is not happening quickly enough.

hard to imagine

During our faculty retreat in the summer of 2010, Kenyon faculty said that they want to talk more about teaching and learning. They used phrases like "mission critical" to describe the formal commitment of time and resources to their ongoing development as teachers. The Center for Innovative Pedagogy is a response to that desire.

Maybe there are situations in the United States where it is still dangerous to say who the land belongs to

The important thing, C.Wright Mills argues, is that you keep a journal, a place for ‘fringe-thoughts’, where you “will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person” as part of learning “how to keep your inner world awake.” While we might think of such journaling as merely a step towards the ‘real’ intellectual work of writing papers or publishing blog posts, crucially Mills argues that “the maintenance of such a file is intellectual production.” That message should be just as inspiring as the idea that we can all blog because we have stories to tell.

However, there’s no technological imperative that makes blogging more important than discussing books and our experiences in person with friends and colleagues.

Educators already learn and share in many ways and, on balance, may decide that blogging isn’t worth their time or energy given their range of options.

Reading is a stillness that another stillness called forth. At its root it is a communal meditation.

To avoid that divide in community discussions, we recommend having participants collectively establish discussion norms each time.

Anchoring our discussion in a particular argument or set of principles -- for example, safe/brave spaces or individualized instruction -- also helped focus our conversations without leading to despair or circular discussions.

To connect with students more deeply, we designed a quantitative and qualitative study inquiring into undergraduates’ opinions about best practices for antiracist pedagogy at our university.

We hoped that posting anonymous discussion notes made the barrier to engagement even lower, as it allowed people to engage asynchronously and to catch up before the next discussion.

All topics were framed as specific but open questions

we first thought about starting a reading group, as many other institutions and departments have done. But we wanted to make the barrier to joining the conversation as low as possible

On scientific networks

Tracy noted Leslie was not conducting her reflection in a vacuum; rather, Leslie wrote to Tracy.

Avoid *Spray and Pray Equity 

Unless their self-assessments have power—either to shape future learning activities, or to change the gradebook—they will not be true self-assessments.

One of the defining features of a conference is that you go there.

Regardless of an explicit requirement, it is an implication of membership in the academic community that its members have a responsibility, and a right, to contribute to the intellectual corpus of their time.

I had always understood that academic freedom was associated with job security; however, and forgive my naïveté, I was disappointed to learn that academic freedom was inexorably tied to tenure. Before that revelation, I had always thought of academic freedom as a principle complemented by tenure, not contingent upon it.

CLAMP does not recommend one option over the other, but we do recommend that you make a choice

Passwords are still the most widespread means for authenticating users, even though they have been shown to create huge security problems.

External toolComment, reply, repeat: Engaging students with social annotation External tool

And they have direct bearing on classroom practice — if I am to choose between the two, the choice is clear.

None of the caterwaulers we hear crying about cancel culture have been canceled. We know that because we can still hear them.

There is no such thing as “cancel culture” — there is only culture.

CHOICE:Maximize choice, addressing how privilege, power, and historic relationships impact both perceptions about and ability to act upon choice.COLLABORATION: Honor transparency and self-determination, and seek to minimize the impact of the inherent power differential while maximizing collaboration and sharing responsibility for making meaningful decisions.

5The Missouri Model for Trauma-Informed SchoolsA school that only addresses the impact of trauma on students will struggle with staff burnout, turnover, and compassion fatigue. The science around trauma is clear: the most powerful resource for young people is a supportive, unwavering relationship with an adult. Adults in schools must be capable of being unwavering supports for students. This means addressing the vicarious and secondary trauma experienced by staff-not as an afterthought, but as a focal point of the trauma-informed journey.

An accountability model of discipline employs behavioral supports and restorative practices to enable individuals to develop the skills they need to be successful in an educational setting.

How can we help our students feel safe?

A trauma-informed pedagogy enables us to recognize that amid a pandemic, our students may have a difficult time completing basic tasks they normally would, including keeping track of the slightest changes in our classes, making decisions about their learning, being motivated to study or to show up, prioritizing assignments, engaging with classmates or the subject, managing their time, or simply not quitting.

proctored, multiple-choice tests are necessary to prepare students to take other multiple-choice assessments they may encounter in the course of their education

And though flags from this software don’t automatically mean students will be penalized—instructors can review the software’s suspicions and decide for themselves how to proceed—it leaves open the possibility that instructors’ own biases will determine whether to bring academic dishonesty charges against students. Even just an accusation could negatively affect a student’s academic record, or at the very least how their instructor perceives them and their subsequent work.

When I asked Alessio whether her work addressed the possibility that proctoring itself could affect scores, she said it’d make for an interesting study.

To make matters worse, her proctor kept calling her “sweetheart.”

“They can see you, but you can’t see them, which I didn’t feel good about,”

Rather than the night before a quiz or exam, it may be more important to sleep well for the duration of the time when the topics tested were taught. The implications of these findings are that, at least in the context of an academic assessment, the role of sleep is crucial during the time the content itself is learned, and simply getting good sleep the night before may not be as helpful.

When giving negative feedback, teachers can use the positive sandwich approach—starting and ending with a positive comment

Unfortunately, saying, "Build a relationship" is too vague and leaves too much up to the teacher's instincts.

Interaction strategies are a type of accommodation that typically go unnamed and unwritten

The teacher is 50 percent of every interaction with a student

Doctoral programs are often highly unstructured learning and training environments, where individual autonomy and freedom are highly valued. Decisions as to what counts as a good idea, a worthwhile project, or adequate progress are often left to the discretion of professors, and criteria for success can be opaque for students. This is even more so for those who are not already “in the know.”

Teaching Tolerance offers some clear practices that can help establish connectedness:

Too often, rubrics are tools for measurement more than guidance, and they are more prescriptive than aspirational.

THE ILLUSION OF COMMUNICATION

What is particularly interesting to me is this criticism of technology, especially in the midst of an intense focus on learning new tools—Zoom, Panopto, Slack, Google Meetings, etc—in order to be in closer contact with my students.

His frequent and asynchronous essays, letters, and replies meant there was always something to look forward to, without immediate pressure to respond.

Could a learning environment have seasons

contributions made by students

it’s not clear yet how well those extra mics will work for students who may be speaking through masks

It is not unusual for one individual to possess several dozen different usernames and passwords.

A digital identity is made up of the sum total of digital traces relating to an individual or a community

“The Trouble with Rubrics,” Alfie Kohn

the indexable nature of human beings themselves via the traces they consciously or unconsciously leave on the network, that is to say the question of their digital identity.

America, for white people, is like the yellow sun for Kal-El.

weak ties can turn a mild grievance into something that feels like political action

other institutions that serve markedly different demographics or who take different approaches to teaching and learning may need to revise ACE or start fresh with a framework of their own

What is missing from most of the remote teaching contingency planning is a framework for helping the people inside institutions understand and make decisions about pedagogy from inside the pandemic’s evolving reality. Pedagogy is not an ancillary or optional part of conversations about remote teaching. Pedagogy is the category that describes how we teach. For that reason, whether we foreground it or not, pedagogy is a key part of how our learners understand and assess their experience at our institutions during this crisis.

So this is one case where we could test and sort individuals to predict success in different learning tasks, something I talked about in this short article about helping students develop strategies for memorization. Perhaps researchers could tackle some other ways to harness the multiple capacities idea to steer students into the subjects and learning strategies that will work best for them.

One notable barrier that has prevented faculty from adopting OER is concerns about the quality of the materials. The present study extends upon a growing body of research indicating that OER are not perceived to be lower in quality than traditional textbooks.

One reason why the students assigned open textbooks may use those textbooks more is that they perceive a greater need for/relevance of their textbook relative to those assigned traditional textbooks

students taking classes in the classroom report significantly higher rates of underutilized textbooks than those taking classes online

and students assigned an open textbook reported a significantly higher percentage of underutilized textbooks (M = 52.20, SE = 1.38) than those assigned a traditional textbook (M = 48.44, SE = 1.21)

And they have largely moved beyond the mental model of universal design (UD) in the physical environment, which is static, bounded, and predictable—instead designing interactions according to UDL, which sees interactions as dynamic, open, and emergent.

They typically chop off the end of the word "accessibility," focusing their efforts on expanding access, regardless of the ability profiles of their learners

independent scholars

The internet is fundamentally participatory.

Calling them “emotional labor,” as Julie Beck points out, has the curiously sexist implication that all work performed by women is somehow about feelings.

The original meaning was the labor involved in regulating, evoking and suppressing certain feelings while you’re at work — as Hochschild puts it, it’s “trying to feel the right feeling for the job.” It described work for which you are paid (although not always adequately compensated) and didn’t only apply to labor performed by women.

Bloggers can bundle, but making Tweets look like Tweets is actually pretty difficult for normal people and even for geeks like me.

Now, how does that mother build an online scrapbook of all the items that were poured into the system?

phonetic signs, introduced to transcribe the name of individuals, marked the turning point when writing started emulating spoken language

Writing was used exclusively for accounting until the third millennium BC, when the Sumerian concern for the afterlife paved the way to literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions

We expect authentic writing from our students, yet we do not write authentic assignments for them.

The fact that many of them are working long hours at outside jobs only exacerbates the problem.

It has to be punished.

hence, it appears that the Internet is encouraging bad morals

Actually, a whole gotcha industry has sprung up.

I want to tell this kid that they’re awesome for being weird. I decide to keep my mouth shut because this kid doesn’t care what an old man thinks, and neither do I, it turns out.

Two concepts that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately are guilt and responsibility. When it comes to racism in America, I think that guilt and responsibility tend to be seen as more or less the same thing. But I’m beginning to understand how there’s a real difference. As white people, are we guilty for the sins of our forefathers? No, I don’t think so. But are we responsible for them? Yes, I believe we are.

Two commonly used change strategies are clearly not effective: developing and testing “best practice” curricular materials and then making these materials available to other faculty and “top‐down” policy‐making meant to influence instructional practices.

Collecting followers and likes authenticates and quantifies our existence without the need for deconstruction. We will not move any closer to the horizon of self if our sense of identity is based on validation through acknowledgement rather than engaging in dialogue and deconstruction.

As with justice and the law what becomes crucial within this conception of self and identity is the willingness to deconstruct or interpet. Damaging essentialization based on shoring-up (sure-ing up?) well worn binaries such as real/virtual, authentic/fake falls away as the ‘work’ of identity becomes interpretation, questioning and negotiation.

It’s about the student and his or her feelings and thoughts, though often articulated clumsily and from an as yet unthought through position.

For example, when discussing how women’s remarks are often ignored in business settings, the class or the instructor may be ignoring the remarks of women in the class. Seeing this and talking about it in the moment can enhance people’s understanding of the issue.

In extreme cases, urge them to see a counselor

perhaps particularly the student(s) who has generated the hot moment.

to manage ourselves

For some instructors, hot moments are the very stuff of classroom life. They thrive on such moments, encourage them, and use them for pointed learning. Others abhor hot moments and do everything possible to prevent or stifle them. For them, conflict prevents learning.

Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don't have the expertise to audit?

These outcomes and estimated effect sizes bring us back to a key applied question: Which method—longhand (on paper or eWriter) or laptop—should students use to take notes? At this point, we would argue that the available evidence does not provide a definitive answer to this question.

Our students have an unprecedented breadth of information resources at their fingertips, yet there is a significant danger that they will miss the opportunity to engage with those voices that hold the greatest prospects for growth. Collecting confirmations of one’s existing views is a poor substitute for meaningful learning.

Recent discussions of “trigger warnings” in higher education, notifications that teachers are supposed to provide if class material might provoke a strong emotional response

For example, an individual who believes that knowledge in a certain domain consists of a set of discrete, relatively static facts will likely achieve a sense of certainty on a research question much more quickly than someone who views knowledge as provisional, relative, and evolving.

Nyhan and Reifler also found that presenting challenging information in a chart or graph tends to reduce disconfirmation bias. The researchers concluded that the decreased ambiguity of graphical information (as opposed to text) makes it harder for test subjects to question or argue against the content of the chart.

A study by Nyhan and Reifler showed that having test subjects engage in a self-affirmation exercise significantly reduced their level of defensive processing when faced with counter-attitudinal information on policy issues.

Likewise, merely telling students that motivated reasoning has an impact on their information processing is apt to yield mixed results because students who view themselves as intelligent, fair-minded people will likely meet this revelation with a level of disconfirmation bias.

additional motivation for test subjects to process information accurately made the impact of early preferences less prominent, though the influence did not disappear entirely

For a review of such research, see Daniel T. Willingham, “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?” American Educator 31, 2 (2007): 13, http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thinking.pdf.

Is it safe to assume that we give each bit of information a “fair hearing,” always adjusting our beliefs to conform to compelling evidence? Or do our backgrounds and preferences inhibit our ability to be objective when evaluating information that challenges our beliefs?

By examining information as a product of people’s contingent choices, rather than as an impartial recording of unchanging truths, the critically information-literate student develops an outlook toward information characterized by a robust sense of agency and a heightened concern for justice.

Active-learning techniques — like sharing the responsibility for leading discussions or framing classroom expectations with our students — show them they indeed belong in this "scholarly space" and give them the confidence to engage with the course and one another.

That’s true not just within the classroom environment, but in the web of interactions students experience

More specifically

Am I having my students read a bunch of monographs, all authored by white males, for example?

Or you can ask them to take 1-5 minutes in class before you start discussion.

It is important for the instructor to determine what the problem is for each particular class.

They

and purposefully

a tendency, developed over the last five years, that I’ve come to call “errand paralysis.”

the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better

For me, personally, empathy does not come from responding to a situation en masse, and trusting strangers, but from getting close to people different from myself online, getting to know them enough that I can (however partially) see a different worldview, and then also trust what they say in a 140-character tweet and can engage with them deeply, through layers of context.

It is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other.

Years of traditional education teaches students that what really matters is their grades, not their learning. Students know that while teachers might give lipspeak to “learning,” in the end, the grade is what everyone — teachers, parents, administrators, other students, and society at large — cares about.