good to know

this seems like a split in the online learning audience - here, they argue that it's because of experiences of remote learning - but it does present a possible design challenge. Offering occasional, optional live sync, might be the compromise that threads the needle.

that's in line with how we're designing MPA

interesting

with 30 credit degree programs, I wonder if this looks more like, make sure that learning within the courses allows students to pursue their related interests, and also potentially offering micro-credentials that allow a deeper dive into a speciality

points to a need for mobile-responsive design

hoping we can address some of this with the online teaching training course that we're working on, in addition to the insights that folks get during the design process

that's kind of huge!

Super duper important and fits with what we've been saying about being clear and transparent about expectations on the marketing materials. I think also doing things like really clearly telling folks what types of interactions they can expect, with peers and instructors. I also used to have a slide in my welcome video that was "Where is the instructor?" where I talked about how it might seem like I'm not there since they can't see me, but I'm there in the discussion boards, in feedback on assignments, in office hours, etc - just straight up addressing that at the start.

Similar to a finding in last year's version of this report. The persistence of this trend does make me wonder about the idea of allowing up to a certain number of optional live sessions (2? 3?). But here again, I would love to know the undergrad/grad breakdown.

I do wish they'd separate out their findings by grad and undergrad respondents. this finding is clearly undergrad focused.

further support for the idea of separating out the online and on-ground programs. On-ground students may want to take an occasional online course, but online students are not likely to come to campus.

one of the things that I'm reading between the lines is a tension between contexts - for example, contrasting this Backer passage with a line from the next quote: “Such a task is ultimately the work of political education and activism. By definition it takes place outside the [ind. school]” (Kelley). it seems to point to a fundamental question, can school be a site of transformation? (although now I'm noticing that the Backer's quote says "education" and Kelley's says "school," and those are two different things I think. so that's something I need to think about some more.)

wow - yes - love this, understanding space and place as expanding circles that begin with the extra-local and ripple outward

I would love some help unpacking this... it feels really important... how is space different from place, from a digital sociological perspective?

that's interesting - how did this scholarship frame the trajectory of the conversation around the relationship between technology and society? I guess I'm wondering, (how) would the conversation have been different, had digital sociology research been part of the early conversation in a larger way?

When I think about how to change the practice of instructional design, I think about pathways into instructional design. One pathway is via a masters degree in instructional design, and I don't hear this pathway talked about much (maybe because it's a less common pathway). But I think there's lots of possibility there for making inroads toward a critical ID practice, for the primary reason that many (most?) ID graduate programs are housed within Colleges of Education. I was faculty in one of these programs for 10 years, and I was increasingly baffled by how such a traditional, behaviorist-driven program could exist in a COE in which every other teacher training program embraced and taught student-centered, social-justice oriented approaches to teaching and learning. Certainly the fact that faculty in these programs were themselves trained in traditional ID contributes to this. But wouldn't it be amazing if the invisible barrier between graduate ID programs and other programs in colleges of ed was breached, so that ID wasn't artificially isolated from pedagogical theory and practice?

does this sometimes take a level of technical know-how or sophistication that acts as a barrier for some of these instructors? (a great opportunity to talk to your friendly critical ID!)

Just thinking out loud here, but wondering whether it was actually a relic at the time of its birth, or whether it played to the lowest common denominator because that was (is?) in fact the most common type of teaching. In other words, the LMS not so much created a classroom structure, but replicated a typical classroom structure. The implication is that classes taught within its structured landed with a thud not (only, anyway) because of the LMS, but because of the pedagogy and the fact that the LMS allowed teachers to continue to teach in pedagogically unsound ways.

This makes me think about Shulman's attempt to define the core knowledge bases of teaching, which I understand as: teachers need to have both deep knowledge of their subject matter, and deep understanding of pedagogy (teaching as subject matter); and, that teaching is what happens when a teacher draws on those deep understandings to make adjustments - improvise - in the moment and moment to moment.

here, my training in instructional technology is showing :) but - it's interesting to me that instructional design is often conflated with online learning design. As a field, instructional design has been around since the 1950s, with roots in behavioral psych and initially applied to designing military training. As Sean and Audrey Watters and Neil Selwyn and others have written more eloquently elsewhere, I think that piece of historical context is really important to a critical understanding of ed tech today - the tradition of behaviorist training lives on.

in DLINQ @ MIddlebury we've been playing with different ways of framing it for folks as:

• our expertise is primarily pedagogical rather than technical
• we have expertise in teaching and learning, and how it can be transformed by/through the digital

agree that a deeper sense of the issues may take time to develop with students. wondering if one possibility might be to circle back at the end of the semester to revisit the conversation with students and ask them to weigh in on their tool selection if they had to do it again.

even though all the students in this class opted to use ePorts, offering the choice still feels really important from a student agency perspective

not only not actively interested in the topic, but I can imagine some of them were anxious about the idea of building a course from scratch? Curious if this was the case, and how did you help those students transition to this (potentially new-to-them) model of learning?

another practice that relates to your points #2 and #3 is bringing students into the process of creating content for the class

love how you foreground #a11y in the OpenPed conversation

I'm wondering what the institutional context is/was for your extreme makeover? What groundwork existed already that supported (or constrained) your transition to extreme OpenPed? What (if any) tensions did you encounter in pushing your OpenPed to the extreme?

I appreciate the way the authors use Collins' ideas around power to extend Wenger's CoP... Wenger talks about power to a certain extent when talking about roles w/ CoP (like brokers, who operate on the margins of multiple discourses). Reading this section, it's clear that Wenger's CoP alone is insufficient to think through how power operates within communities.

I'm wondering where literature on teacher professional learning via online spaces such as social media fit into the authors' thinking? (e.g. “Together we are better”: Professional learning networks for teachers - note: paywall - or Learning in 140 Characters: English Teachers' Educational Uses of Twitter)

the word "community" here suggests that this model has at least some interest in including participant voices in the way that the experience is shaped and unfolds, no? although certainly that is not always the case in practice.

I appreciate this distinction. I develop university-sponsored professional learning opportunities and am always looking for ways to support learner agency within these formal structures (much as we seek do to for students in our classrooms!); looking forward to learning from these teachers' experiences.

this is really powerful.

sure, lone wolf. I'll just leave this right here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/us/morgan-roof-dylann-roof.html

this makes me think of the NYTimes story post-Charlottesville, about the Nazi sympathizer, and critical pushback against normalizing this person: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/reader-center/readers-accuse-us-of-normalizing-a-nazi-sympathizer-we-respond.html

evident too in the choice of word to describe the events - riot vs. unrest vs. uprising

I was listening to our local (Baltimore) NPR station yesterday and heard a story about a film project happening with 8th graders at a school in the Morrell Park neighborhood. The filmmakers were working with young people to help them tell their stories. The thing that stuck with me, though, was that when the filmmaker was asked about resistance to the project at the school, he told a story about how one of the teachers said that her students don't have any stories to tell. I was so floored by that statement, which is so problematic on multiple levels. Totally discounting their personhood.

what is "the norm of accuracy motivation?" maybe I'm reading too much into this - The Norm instead of the norm...?

ahahaha. Ok, that's the peril of annotating during the first read through. glad to see that they address this concern.

like to know more about what these look like. if this was self-report on the part of the students, did they have guidance as to what constituted a "media literacy learning opportunity" or "exposure to media literacy education?" To take this further, it would be helpful to know more about specific strategies or practices within these learning opportunities that were successfully used to develop skills around accuracy.

is this because educational researchers don't see youth as politically active/interested?

at my university, the library teaches a version of the CRAAP test, which lays out the following criteria for assessing the credibility of a website: currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. I believe that this approach was meant to counter this practice of relying on surface characteristics - a nicely designed website being more likely to be believable - but I can see how the CRAAP test criteria on their face only scratch the surface, and may not in fact go far enough in the age of misinformation.

Likewise, a bit older. If newer research doesn't exist, I wonder why? Seems like an interesting and useful strand to pursue.

this brings to mind that controversial NYT article about brand-name teachers (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/technology/silicon-valley-teachers-tech.html?_r=0), which points to the really important question overarching all this work: who benefits from ed tech?

yes, this. there's no such thing as the "typical learner."

So I think that the culture of high-stakes testing in schools needs to be part of the conversation around understanding why we see these disparate ways of using technology to support learning. Schools that are considered "low performing" have enormous pressure to perform well on the standardized tests.

regarding this phenomenon in MOOCs, I'm wondering what role individual preference for online learning plays in these results? some research in online learning suggests that online learners need to be highly self-directed and motivated. are the authors suggesting that these characteristics have some relationship to wealth?

this is often an argument for having robust technology-supported teaching and learning in schools: because less resourced students may not have access at home to all of the tools and practices valued in a participatory culture, it's imperative that schools offer access to them. I'd highlight that building capacity needs to revolve around tools and practices, right - not just access to technology but knowledge of the ways in which the technologies can be leveraged in ways that are valued in a participatory culture.

a determinist orientation toward technology

see also work by Mark Warschauer and colleagues: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gexxlUYAAAAJ&hl=en

Maha Bali and Autumm Caines wrote a review of this report, and raise some interesting points to consider: http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/equity-in-edtech-a-report-review/64513

Hi everyone, this recent report from Justin Reich and Mimi Ito has a lot of resonance with the Marginal Syllabus topic for this year. Wondering if others might like to annotate with me? Please feel free to join in!

this gets at some of the conversation about earlier parts of the article around the need to connect virtual participation - namely, clicktivism-type participation - with (online and/or f2f action).

wait - but aren't they little p political? and political in the sense that online spaces are created by people, who have ideologies and positions etc?

agree with this, but wondering what implications for educators (if any) who may have little understanding of the cultural practices and norms of these online spaces, and thus may not be able to help students connect the dots (if we're seeing as participate in little p politics as a bridge to discussions of big P politics which...maybe we're not?) (lots of questions!)

One of my former doc students who graduated last year worked with youth at 2 community technology centers to understand the ways in which technology helped to open pathways to civic engagement. When she asked them to define or talk about civic engagement, their responses entirely focused on their local neighborhoods. Civic engagement was, for them, local and contextual.

interestingly, this rich-gets-richer finding is similar in studies of technology in schools...

What does it mean to be a citizen? in what ways does the term overlap with legal status, and in what ways does it not? That's a powerful question!