What does it mean to educate toward civic engagement in a society in which progress occurs not inevitably or in a straight line but instead in stops, starts, and retreats?

The best way to decrease educational attainment for people of color and minorities is to take them out of traditional courses and place them in online classes, Newfield said.

apply research skills and disciplinary knowledge

To evaluate literary, scientific, or historical evidence, scholars and researchers must first marshal that evidence.

some sort of curating function

streams

where building a Website that would display equally well in all versions of all browsers was almost impossible.

It should also greatly increase the human oversight of ad targeting systems — specifically, oversee algorithmically generated categories (rather than basing them solely on user-inputted interests). Political and interest-based advertising should be under much stricter scrutiny than, say, the advertising of T-shirts or hair products.

Facebook should allow users to sort their news feed chronologically by default on all platforms, rather than rely on an algorithmically sorted News Feed.

It would be interesting if Facebook offered a “vintage Facebook” setting that users could toggle to, without News Feed ads and “like” buttons.

The key is for Facebook to be upfront about technical challenges, open about its mistakes and willing to answer the tough questions honestly. If it does that, it will continue to earn the public’s trust.

Companies would need additional levels of verification, and should have a label and scrutiny different from those of people. (Whistle-blowers and dissidents might need to use a different platform.)

What if there were a “trust emoji”? Or respect-based emojis?

keep us addicted to the social network.

At Reddit, I was able to effect positive, lasting change (at least according to this research) to content quality and interaction quality by building a diverse executive team.

“two masters” dilemma,

Instead of measuring clicks and likes, what if Facebook optimized for how much value an article or video or game gave us weeks or months afterward?

Worthy, beautiful goals, but easier said than done when Facebook is also stuck delivering ever-increasing profits and making its platform serve the needs of advertisers.

The single most important thing Facebook must do is come clean. Tell us what you know. Tell us what you know but can’t share. Tell us what you don’t know. And tell us what you don’t know that you don’t know

We must critique these environments at a level deeper than “Facebook is a corporation and therefore bad.”

stream-based reading behaviors,

They have engineered a card, using the smartest data scientists in the world, that encourages you to read a headline and a description and never-ever click through to check the source or see the full story.

analyzing the claim, not the article.

The web we know is an information fabric woven of linked resources. By increasing the thread count of that fabric, the annotated web enables a new class of application for which selections in documents are first-class resources.

Ofcourse,amorecynicalreadermightclaimthatthisiswellandgoodbut,really,doesn’tallthisjustrepresentjobtrainingforthecognitariat,aninitiationintothecasualized,creative,collaborativeworkvaluedbycontemporarycapitalism.

RandyBass

Tosolvethisproblem,acoupleofstudentsandIhackedtogetherourfirstplatform,asimplebuteffectiveGoogleformanddatabasetocollect,share,andanalyzepopularandacademicwritingonUber.

Inageneraledcourse,moststudentsarealreadyunfamiliarwithdisciplinarywaysofreading,talking,andwritingaboutliterature.And,ifanything,theTransmissionUberprojectmadevisiblethecomplexliteraciesweoftenassumeinthehumanitiesclassroom.

studentauthoredbook

Wikipediaspawnsplagiarismandfakeknowledge

thesuburbsofSiliconValley

league

Finally, despite a growing air of suspicion surrounding capitalist digital technologies, there is still no clear consensus on where exactly to place responsibility or how one might meaningfully resist these technologies in ways worth the personal and professional sacrifice.

a recognition that the way digital technology is shaping our collective existence is one of the most pressing humanistic issues of the day

somewhat paradoxically,

The fact is institutions already spend millions on digital infrastructure with estimates that global ed tech spending will reach $252 billion by 2020 (EdTechXGlobal).

a radically egalitarian pedagogy in which knowledge and mastery are produced laterally among players rather than distributed radially from experts to students.

in ways that unfold within the often-ignored middle spaces between 200-level close reading skills and 400-level journal article-like engagement in ongoing critical debates.

If the narrow goal is to improve the scaffolding that guides English majors from elementary exegesis to professional-grade literary research, the broader aim is to promote more horizontal, rhizomatic relationships among students, between students and instructors, and between students and the texts they read.

his very essay

included critics like Lewis Mumford,

The sheer distance between my students and the highly professionalized and specialized discourse they are attempting to enter is manifest in their adoption of a strange “elevated” voice, rich in obfuscation, slightly misused Latinate words, and malapropisms; the dutiful summary of several extant arguments in the literature with no original argument; the joyless pursuit of acrude but original argument with a few near-random cites from often irrelevant articles to fulfill the requirement to include X number of cites; and/orthe exaggerated reverence for the text, accompanied by superlatives applauding authors’ creativity and skill (“Melville did a fantastic job creating vivid characters in Billy Budd!”).

vendors tend to be selling a product as opposed to selling a process or an idea.

MIT, ASU, Porter & Chester Institute, and Musicians Institute, acquire a reputation for being willing to experiment with new technology and are often invited by EdTech vendors to participate in beta testing for a product.

For academic software, unless a department-level decision is made by a committee, it is often faculty members individually identifying tools useful for their teaching. Faculty members are hard for vendors to reach. Sometimes they ask for pilots which are expensive for the vendor and often lead to nothing.

Move away from simply asking whether EdTech is helpful or unhelpful.It’s here to stay, so focus on what pedagogical strategies it can support and how to use it better to improve student learning and other outcomes.

In a few cases, a vendor and an institution in our study collaborated to conduct and co-publish research on an edtech product. The outcome can be a win-win: faculty members are able to fulfil their need to publish, and vendors can provide prospective customers with rigorous evidence of product effectiveness.

“None of us, as far as I know, systemically looks at whether the vendor does indeed curate, manage, and protect data that well. I think that is a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

sell products as opposed to a process or an idea

Vendors serve as an invaluable source of knowledge on edtech products and trends for higher education decision-makers, cited as an information source in 80 percent of our interviews. That ranks second only to learning by word-of-mouth from colleagues (96 percent)

quality of partner relationships.

rather than develop their own tools.

a writing space in which traces of authority persist only as local and contingent effects, the social equivalent of the deconstructed author-function

The magnitude of the change implied here is enormous. But what about the politics of that change? What community of interpretation-- and beyond that, what social order--does this intertextual world presume? With the conviction of a true Enlightenment man, Nelson envisions "a new populitism that can make the deeper understandings of the few at last available to the many" ("How Hypertext (Un)does the Canon" 6).

His "grand hope" lies in "a return to literacy, a cure for television stupor, a new Renaissance of ideas and generalist understanding, a grand posterity that does not lose the details which are the final substance of everything" ("How Hypertext (Un)does the Canon" 4)

Hypertext systems exploit the interactive potential of computers to reconstruct text not as a fixed series of symbols, but as a variable-access database in which any discursive unit may possess multiple vectors of association (see Conklin; Joyce; Slatin)

With Xanadu, Nelson invalidates technological abjection, advancing an unabashedly millenarian vision of technological renaissance in which the system shall set us free.

Of course, this pessimistic or defeatist attitude is hardly universal. We are far more likely to hear technology described as an instrumentality of change or a tool for liberation.

new Xanadu(TM), the universal hypertext system proposed by Theodor Holm Nelson

realization of Jean-Francois Lyotard's "game of perfect information"

the ultimate wetware dream of the clerisy: discourse converted with 100 percent efficiency into capital,

abandoning bits in favor of atoms.

the coupling of human biology to mechanical movement. The feet, legs, heart, lungs, pedals, chains, and gears work together to push the bike forward.

“There’s a comfortable speed for perceiving the world in motion, and it’s about 18 miles per hour.”

I am a computer!”

experience became subordinated to purpose.

Analog devices represent information with a continuously variable portrayal of that information. They create an analogous depiction of a source signal in physical form. A mechanical watch, for example, measures the passage of time with a set of hands, driven by a loaded spring, that traverse the watch face. In the case of a bicycle, as Newman suggests, the crankcase moves the bike analogously to the rider’s physical exertion.

But is a big screen that can display anything really minimalist? It is harder and riskier to commit to specific information from the start.

That deliberateness would eventually show up in the Omata, which promises a “deeper connection to the ride itself.”

Today, computers wrest people from activities outside the computer to work or play back inside them. But the Omata is pushing me toward something else. It’s nudging me to to focus on the non-computational activity I’m participating in, rather than reminding me of all the other, digital ones I might choose instead. What if more computers had that same ambition?

Among all programs and players, few sources play a greater role in mitigating these divides than public libraries.

these digital divides,

Although the Android and iOS ecosystems presently offer a rich range of apps, mobile phones are nonetheless constrained in comparison with laptops and desktops. Screen size limits some functions. Entering text without a keyboard is not a viable option for everyone. Some applications are cramped or stripped down. Meanwhile, mobile phone Internet access can be severely limited by data plans — again a greater problem for the poorest than for the affluent.

With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner,

COMPETENCY-BASED LEARNING

Students working in waysthat best leverage their individual learning styles

“What did you do? What did you observe? What did you revise as a result? How did you test your revision? What did you learn?”

electronic journals as a way to reflect on their learning and “make their thinking visible.”

Motivation and persistence. Because learning is more relevant and relationship-based, students are motivated to complete tasks and learn

students “own” their learning

Students encouraging and supporting eachother to work through diicult challenges

Students constructivelycritiquing eachother’s work

Assessment feedback focused on what students can do to improve

no single “right answer”?

Are students required to defend and revise their work, creating multiple drafts?

Teachers talking less, students talking more

Are students constantly revising and improving their work? How often? How explicit and central is this expectation?

Are students regularly asked to present, explain, and defend their ideas orally and in writing?

And outside the classroom, meetings with public oicials, nonprofits, and other community members, where students are given a chance to present their findings and recommendations on an issue they’ve researched

Communications skills being explicitly taught

Multimedia portfolios of student work

Listening

review and critique each other’s work.

Public presentations of their work. Students routinely have to describe and defend their thinking with peers, teachers, and the community. Students say that such public presentations reinforce their sense of accountability and make them be more careful with their work.

learning how to conduct their own research, often on the Internet.

more engaging

peer-to-peer conversations about big issues that defy yes/no answers and ask students to think more analytically

embedding communications skills into everything they do in all of their courses: speaking, listening, reading, and writing?

working with members of the community

holding themselves accountable

build relationships through mechanisms

egularly working on teams

constructive feedback

Lots of talking and listening; a constant exchange of ideas

Inter- and intra-personal skills. Character and culture are important values that are emphasized as much as academic subjects

listen well—to be a good “critical friend.”

learn as much from their peers as from their teachers or a textbook

EVIDENCE OF THINKING, NOT JUST GROUP WORK

key skills they then can apply to other situations beyond this specific course or assessment

Teachers stepping into conversations or stopping work from time to time for “teachable moments” to supplement knowledge

reading original sources

providing teachers and students with real-time, actionable feedback.

go beyond basic math and English skills.

While one could manually “count” references across a novel or ouvre, or attempt to estimate relative occurrence, a text analysis tool like Voyant can more easily provide textual evidence necessary to support an essay’s claim, or, if the evidence proves the writer “wrong,” help the writer re-evaluate her argument accordingly.

The second phase of this project, now in progress, will replace all copyrighted materials with original objects and will be released as an open access textbook.

Network graphs that connect characters are fun to explore for a similar reason.

One of the main ways computers are changing the textual humanities is by mediating new connections to social science. The statistical models that help sociologists understand social stratification and social change haven’t in the past contributed much to the humanities, because it’s been difficult to connect quantitative models to the richer, looser sort of evidence provided by written documents.

I recognize that much of what provoked me to turn to literature in the first place—vital, daring, and meditative expressions of human experience—is there. It is there in the naked lyric of a blog post celebrating or mourning some personal or public event. It is there in the classical drama of a brawling, controversial Wikipedia article whose behind-the-scenes “talk” page stages the chorus of the “rule of many” or “wisdom of crowds.”16 And it is there in the epic of all the social-news, shared-bookmark, or similar sites that build a portrait of collective life from constantly reshuffled excerpts, links, and tags from that life akin to Homeric formulae. Above all, as a literature professor, I recognize that—viral YouTube videos aside—the vast preponderance of Web 2.0 is an up-close and personal experience of language.

In this class, we will both make and critique digital objects as we consider how our research methods should shift in the waning days of print.

In the words of rhetorician Richard Lanham, we will learn to look both "at" and "through" digital tools.

about

a tool and our central object of study.

continually rethink both the process and products of the graduate seminar

I do not ask students to become expert graphic designers or filmmakers. While I have taught courses in which students design web pages, create audio and video compositions, and write computer code, I see these assignments as an opportunity to experiment with such technologies. Students are free to tinker with these technologies and to explore their possibilities.

a system of evaluation called the Learning Record (LR). This system asks students to make an argument for their grade (at the mid-term and at the end of the course) that is based upon the evidence they have compiled throughout the semester.

How do argument, rhetoric, and writing change in the age of the Internet. Greg Ulmer argues that we are experiencing a shift from literacy to "electracy." Electracy is a "new apparatus" that calls for new practices and new ways of thinking and writing. What are the new compositional and rhetorical practices necessary to navigate electracy? Who will invent these new practices?

When we talk about OERs, we bring two things into focus: that access is critically important to conversations about academic success, and that faculty and other instructional staff can play a critical role in the process of making learning accessible. If a central gift that OERs bring to students is that they make college more affordable, one of the central gifts that they bring to faculty is that of agency, and how this can help us rethink our pedagogies in ways that center on access.

Recently, Wiley has revised his language to focus on “OER-Enabled Pedagogy”[8], with an explicit commitment to foregrounding the 5R permissions and the ways that they transform teaching and learning.

I tend to think of it as a way to "re-webify" a web that has increasingly moved away from the hypertext dreams of its founders towards something that feels more networked and less centralized, more serendipitous and less engineered. 

Students get the same content but more time on task

on-track assessments to develop targeted interventions

Align high school curriculum to first-year college courses

adopt and implement the new Common Core State Standards in reading, writing, and math.

embedded tutoring.

redesigned first-year classes with built-in, just-in-time tutoring and support.

Start in college courses with support.

better alignment with K-12 graduation standards,

accelerate efforts already under way in higher education

enterprise-wide systems that gather and analyze data to help institutions improve their performance and student outcomes.

increase graduation rates

tailored to their needs

1291.Identify key ideas, representative authors and works, significant historical or cultural events, and characteristic perspectives or attitudes expressed in the literature of different periods or regions.2.Analyze literary works as expressions of individual or communal values within the social, political, cultural, or religious contexts of different literary periods.3.Demonstrate knowledge of the development of characteristic forms or styles of expression during different historical periods or in different regions.4.Articulate the aesthetic principles that guide the scope and variety of works in the arts and humanities

synthesize primary and secondary sources within focused academic arguments, including one or more research-based essays

Analyze, interpret, and evaluate a variety of texts for the ethical and logical uses of evidence

ENGL (English)

Identify key ideas, representative authors and works, significant historical or cultural events, and characteristic perspectives or attitudes expressed in the literature of different periods or regions.2.Analyze literary works as expressions of individual or communal values within the social, political, cultural, or religious contexts of different literary periods.3.Demonstrate knowledge of the development of characteristic forms or styles of expression during different historical periods or in different regions.4.Articulate the aesthetic principles that guide the scope and variety of works in the arts and humanities

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s investments in Meta and bioRxiv are also said to carry with them a strong preference for open source solutions.

we must routinely and explicitly give them structured practice opportunities to critically examine their own thinking.

Let’s assume, though, that we all have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers. We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It’s not an either/or situation – being “anti-technology” is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly “pro-technology” – but a question of balance that our lives hang upon.

Each step “forward” has made it easier – just a little – to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

It’s easier to make a phone call than to make the effort to see someone in person.

These inventions were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

because Apple was more interested in harnessing and inflecting the affective resonances of its technology and in restricting a smaller coterie of elites to guard and guide these affects so as to create a distinctive ecosystem.

But technologies are not only effective at achieving or thwarting the aims of those who encounter them, but are affective.

My father was not present for his children’s births – it was customary, then, for men to be in the waiting room. I witnessed my sons being born. My experience was richer, deeper, more memorable and fulfilling than my father’s. Being physically present allowed me to be emotionally present.

a novel demands putting everything else aside.

Novels demand many things of readers, but the most obvious is attention.

Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”

only about the time we spend with each.

The technology has also been used, though, to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy – because of deformity, because the parent wants a child of a certain sex.

means less reading.

consumed, not read

Pearson,

A new copy of Glenn Hubbard and Tony O’Brien’s widely used introductory economics textbook costs more than some smartphones. The phone can send you to any part of the web and holds access to the sum of human knowledge. The book is about 800 heavy pages of static text.

In 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, announced they will eventually give 99% of their Facebook shares to—among a few other causes—transforming education through technology.

teachers merely looking over their shoulders

the US market for education technology is predicted to bloom to $21 billion by 2020.

universities can hire fewer professors and teaching assistants after all

Pearson stresses its tools aren’t intended to replace professors or teaching assistants. They’ll simply do away with the most tedious aspects of teaching.

Based on this experiment, the evidence suggests adaptive learning did not improve grades or rates of course completion. The tech is still too new to make a definitive judgment.

Often, that’s useful; professors will benefit from seeing which of their students are struggling, and why—but that could be a slippery slope of knowing far too much.

consuming personalized software instead of reading textbooks

“read”

Textbook maker Pearson is also getting in on the action by developing adaptive learning software and launching virtual tutors for students as they “read” through digital textbook resources.

The president of the university requested the list of 26 names be on his desk the next day so he could take direct action to make sure they stay, Bell says. There it is. Instead of a helping hand for struggling students, imagine the outstretched fingers of a—better, faster, arguably more engaged—machine.

We took the gut reaction of the advisor out of the equation. Not that it wasn’t accurate. But sometimes gut is gut, it’s more anecdotal.