Hack Education blog

As teachers we often put our students into reading groups with a limited choice of books and then try to create artificial conversations. In contrast, the act of creating the book commercial together pushes students to have deep discussions as they negotiate creative decisions about what to include and how to communicate the strengths of the book.

Now it’s time for an audience. My students watch each commercial and comment about what they liked, and then the creator tells us what they might do differently next time.

s Adobe Spark Video.

The act of creating a commercial gets students thinking about elements of story such as character, setting, and plot.

The library is constantly expanding and keeps student interest in books and reading growing.

we don’t want to fund teachers and manageable class sizes, so we outsource the plagiarism problem to a for-profit company that has a side gig of promoting the importance of the problem it promises to solve.

First, when teachers get access to new technologies, they typically use them to extend existing practices.

we provide him as much help as possible in making a plan of action. Then we give him as much help as we can in carrying it out. But we also have to allow him to change his mind at almost any point, and to want to modify his plans.

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.

Both afford us the op-portunity to learn with others, but they are very different environments with different po-tential risks and benefits.

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Re-lease

My engineering courses were pushed to use Matlab and Mathematica by the companies selling them, who have then successfully set themselves up for market dominance outcompeting literally free, equivalent tools despite ludicrous cost and abhorrent business models. Changing our practices and what tools we use is the first part of escaping that.

A Rubric for Evaluating E-Learning Tools in Higher Education

The year of the MOOC, the death of the MOOC

Classroom

Meanwhile, IT organizations are often defined by what's necessary rather than what's possible, and the cumulative weight of an increasingly complex communications infrastructure weighs ever heavier.

In our main article, we argue that those of us in higher education, rather than offloading our vision to venture capital-inspired "solutions" for education, should be using open architecture, through open-source applications, to reinvest in creative people, processes, and possibilities-that is, to reclaim innovation.

I imagine it is possible that personalized and adaptive learning could well preserve that which is sacred in the faculty-student relationship, freeing faculty to focus on what matters most. After all, what I cherish most about the colleges and universities I have attended are the human connections.

Growing up as an immigrant to this world of technology-enabled possibility filled me with a sense of endless wonder that may come less easily to natives.

Can Education Keep Up with Technology?

More recently, Brad and University of Michigan's Dean of Libraries James Hilton codified what they consider to be the contrasts between open source and Community Source in their essay "The Marketecture of Community," and which Brad elaborates on in his piece "Speeding Up On Curves." They represent different models of procuring software in a two-by-two matrix, where the dimensions are "authority" and "influence":

For all the talk about data and learning, Essa offered this blunt assessment: “Pretty much all edtech sucks. And machine learning is not going to improve edtech.” So what’s missing? “It’s not about the data, but how do we apply it. The reason why this technology sucks is because we don’t do good design. We need good design people to understand how this works.”

Use of Technology in Teaching and Learning

In releasing the study results, Campus Technology reported that some teachers had expressed mixed feelings about the use of technology. These opinions came in the form of open-ended questions answered directly by educators. The educators were not identified. One noted that the learning process can suffer if students depend too much on their devices. “People can easily get addicted to their devices, and using technology can change the way the brain develops - not always in a good way,” the teacher wrote. Another educator wrote: “Technology is accidentally increasing students' weakness in reading and figuring things out (or critical thinking). They confuse clicking with learning.”

The study also looked at how technology helped teaching effectiveness. A large majority of educators, 87 percent, said technology had positively affected their ability to teach. Eleven percent said they felt technology had no effect on the quality of their teaching. Just two percent said technology had a negative effect on teaching.

developed on an evidence-based foundation that draws from the learning sciences and is implemented using effective strategies that focus on improving the quality of learning experiences and improving the outcomes for all students.

enable everywhere, all-the-time learning and ensure greater equity and accessibility to learning opportunities over the course of a learner’s lifetime

Digital Fluency

OER initiative

an institutional rather than a user focus

e-portfolios did not become the standard form of assessment as proposed

for many students owning their own domain and blog remains a better route to establishing a lifelong digital identity

e-portfolios

What has changed, what remains the same, and what general patterns can be discerned from the past twenty years in the fast-changing field of edtech?

2008: E-Portfolios

The video offers HAX as the future of online course development because it simplifies the technology requirements of users in exchange for quality content and ease of access. At a recent conference in Nashville, Ollendyke and Kaufman used Lego pieces to explain HAX as being like the gridplate of a Lego board that allow for Open Source modular content to work together to create easy, multimedia integration.

Rapid changes in digital communication provide facilities for reading and writing to be combined with various and often quite complex aspects of images, music, sound, graphics, photography and film

This paper describes my investigation of technology integration in social studies instruction to build an understanding of why technology is being used to teach social studies content. Given the nature of social studies instruction and the need to engagestudents in the learning process, I selected motivational theory as a theoretical frame for this research.

Data Re-Use. Contractor agrees that any and all Institutional Data exchanged shall be used expressly and solely for the purposes enumerated in the Agreement. UH Institutional Data shall not be distributed, repurposed or shared across other applications, environments, or business units of the Contractor. The Contractor further agrees that no Institutional Data of any kind shall be revealed, transmitted, exchanged or otherwise passed to other vendors or interested parties except on a case-by-case basis as specifically agreed to in writing by a University officer with designated data, security, or signature authority.

Raspberry Pi, Scratch, and HTML and CSS

The learning was further extended through becoming part of the Association for Learning Technology where I have increased my technical and theoretical perspectives in learning technology. 

I had been an early adopter of learning technologies and when I returned to Warwick I was able to complete further learning including an e-learning award and a Masters in Post Compulsory Education which had provided lots of opportunities to reflect through blogging

This serendipitous meeting on Steve Wheeler's blog back then was the spark that led to the creation of connected network at a point when I had recently developed an online space using moodle for supporting the teaching of languages at Warwick's Language Centre. The opportunity therefore to connect our student cohorts meant that we could set about creating a shared, large scale virtual exchange. 

“It seems like there’s less introducing of brand-new technology in teaching and learning, as opposed to really thinking more about how do you teach well with it.”

Decision-making criteria

Teaching, Learning, and IT Issues: Points of Intersection

The IT and the T&L visions are thus fairly congruent: integrating disparate applications so that they offer our communities a consolidated environment and more customizable functionality. These are invigorating and also daunting challenges.

with more data comes more responsibility

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Key Issues in Teaching and Learning surveys

EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues

"I think we’re solving a problem the wrong way," Siemens said. "Student engagement requires greater human involvement, not greater technology involvement."

Adding Some TEC-VARIETY

Top 10 IT Issues, 2018: The Remaking of Higher Education

IT organizations will be focusing on four areas this year: Institutional adaptiveness IT adaptiveness Improved student outcomes Improved decision-making

competency-based education and new methods of assessment (from #5 to #16)

See how the results of the latest ELI Key Issues in Teaching and Learning Survey stack up against responses from years past.

Key Issues in Teaching and Learning

appear.in

“The technology should not be driving what you do in instruction. We should look at them as resources,” Moskal said. “What is the problem or the issue or what you are trying to achieve in your instruction, and then go look for appropriate technologies that can help you most efficiently and with the highest level of instruction achieve some of those improvements.”

Educational technologists who thrive will do so by adroitly blending local culture with the global platforms.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have become the poster child of innovation in higher education over the last two to three years

"it's not about the technology" because "the technology is neutral."

they commercialized and monetized the course (as opposed to the education) which meant that progressively less and less of the course experience was freely accessible.

Group work/study groups

Welcome message/introductions.

Critically Evaluating Digital Tools

holistic, in which the skilled crafts-person could make almost every tool needed, and had much creative control over the entire process, and prescriptive, in which the control is shifted to a hierarchy of managers, and the human is part of a larger machinery. It is the latter meaning of technology that we probably most often encounter, and in my estimation, one that needs to be balanced with the holistic meaning.

This is what a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment is all about.

Note that Speak the Words only works in Chrome. 

The things they learn to do in WordPress are generalizable to other systems and other online spaces

Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

“The notion that adaptive technology is the reason why one school should choose one company’s content over OER (open educational resources) or other options” has become a staple of many publisher’s marketing claims, says Trace Urdan, an education market analyst.

Pearson is “investing heavily in product development and is developing its own in-house adaptive learning capability,”

broadband and ICTs also increase the ability of individuals to choose and arrange learning that is appropriate to their particular circumstances and needs

technology is widely perceived to support and enhance how individuals learn

I think a lot of faculty are still at the point where they need a stack of papers and red pen.

Is this just-in-time support or something else?

Current  UBC  Learning  Technology  Ecosystem  Snapshot,  as  viewed  by  LT  Users

A Googler's Would-Be Manifesto Reveals Tech's Rotten Core

which is a new term for me

I need to change my study habits

There is also correlation, the students are learning, between perception and success.

students could easily game the highlighting or note-taking functions. Or a student might improve his score by leaving his textbook open and doing something else.

data

“It knows more than my mother.”

they

CourseSmart said it knew of no problems with its software

they know the books are watching them

notes on paper

manager needed better data

reams of data

they decline to say what, if anything, they will do with it

help prepare new editions.

expressions on their faces

It’s all haystack and no needle.

the world of educational research is a control group wasteland

There’s always a danger in nostalgia, when one invents a romanticized past

what if, to borrow from Ian Bogost, “progressive education technology” – the work of Seymour Papert, for example – was a historical aberration, an accident between broadcast models, not an ideal that was won then lost?

rubric for the exercise

And instead of putting our resources and skills into imagining what those spaces could become for teaching and learning, we began spending a lot of money on learning managements systems and other educational technologies.

I’m not so sure it does, or at least that it does in the same way as Bush's vision of an “ownership society”. It seems, rather, that the rest of ed-tech – the LMS, adaptive learning software, predictive analytics, surveillance tech through and through – is built on an ideology of data extraction, outsourcing, and neoliberalism. But the Web – and here I mean the Web as an ideal, to be sure, and less the Web in reality – has a stake in public scholarship and public infrastructure.

. Since ePortfolio practice is inherently eclectic, it deserves an equally eclectic learning foundation. In the DLL program, we developed the COVA (choice, ownership, voice, and authenticity) learning approach to give our learners the freedom to choose (C) how they wish to organize, structure and present their experiences and evidences of learning. We give them ownership (O) over the selection of their authentic projects and the entire ePortfolio process—including selection of their portfolio tools. We use the ePortfolio experiences to give our learners the opportunity to use their own voice (V) to revise and restructure theirwork and ideas. Finally, we use authentic (A) or real world learning experiences that enable students to make a difference in their own learning environments (Harapnuik, 2016)

. 141 former graduate students completed

former educational technology students in a graduate program

digital collections of student-generated authentic content that include resources and multimedia elements contained in a person

The rise of educational technology is part of a larger shift in political thought, from favoring government oversight to asserting free-market principles, as well as a response to the increasing costs of higher education. The technocentric view that technology can solve these challenges combines with a vision of education as a product that can be packaged, automated, and delivered to students. Unless greater collaborative efforts take place between edtech developers and the greater academic community, as well as more informed deep understandings of how learning and teaching actually occur, any efforts to make edtech education's silver bullet are doomed to fail.

What are the risks in assuming that we start from a place of shared values and goals?

fostering authentic relationships

whose values are aligned with ours

we are all students of digital and media literacy

we think of it as like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out where your strengths and weaknesses are down to the percentile.

A high school student in Brian Boone’s economics class at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, CA made the millionth Hypothesis annotation as a part of a class assignment

These are positive, incremental improvements in the quality and flexibility of our classrooms, but are nowhere near being transformational (Laurillard, 2007). This is not the use of technology that I’m interested in

One of the “hot new trends” in education technology is “learning analytics” – this idea that if you collect enough data about students that you can analyze it and in turn algorithmically direct students towards more efficient and productive behaviors, institutions towards more efficient and productive outcomes. Command. Control. Intelligence.

Ed-Tech in a Time of Trump

To support their employment and other objectives, people will create open learning resources. These resources are direct evidence of their own learning. Often these resources will be produced cooperatively.

The purpose of the course isn’t to create a thread of instruction, but rather to help people interested in a topic discover and recommend resources to each other, creating a local and temporary network linking events, groups and communities, and videos and activities.

Formal learning will be less and less focused on resources, which will be available to everyone, and much more focused on activities.

The traditional approach suggests that open online learning will consist of courses. While courses may well persist (there are occasions where a linear, focused, and deep study of a subject continues to be a good idea), they are occupying a smaller and smaller space in open online learning.

And all the while, the math teachers get essentially relegated to “managing the [Teach to One] program rather than to providing direct instruction” themselves.

Those schools that work best socialize the next generation into thinking, feeling, and acting beings who work in communities, thrive in workplaces, and learn to live fully in a digital world.

Each of these professionals is immensely aided by new technologies they use daily yet their work depends upon human interaction and unfolding relationships.

figuring out what’s important in living a life fully in a world that has become increasingly digital.

Fantastic Tool for Untangling Timelines

I believe that education is a process of offering people tools – conceptual as well as technical – to understand their identities and possibilities and those of others within a structural framework that points to various paths of possible agency.

Imagine if we trained students of digital media and culture not just to criticize but to intervene in the development of emergent technologies