22 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2019
    1. However, if psychology is truly going to help insight change in education or itself, it needs to get over its distaste for qualitative methods and desire to distance itself from sociology.

      This!

  2. Mar 2019
    1. 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.

      Yet another example of a misdirected "solution" to a manufactured problem that ends up being more costly - in terms of monetary expense AND student learning AND faculty engagement - than it would have been to invest in human interaction and learner-centered pedagogies.

  3. Jan 2019
    1. 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.

      Let's go. This gets at the heart of the point I wanted to make last week about the necessity of interrogating these practices -- or at least raising awareness around alternatives to them. Thank you!

    1. Turnitin’s practices have been ruled as fair use in federal court. But to Morris and Stommel, the ceding of control of students' work -- and their ownership over that work -- to a corporation is a moral issue, even if it's legally sound. Time spent on checking plagiarism reports is time that would be better spent teaching students how to become better writers in the first place, they argue. “This is ethical, activist work. While not exactly the Luddism of the 19th century, we must ask ourselves, when we’re choosing ed-tech tools, who profits and from what?” they wrote in the essay. “The gist: when you upload work to Turnitin, your property is, in no reasonable sense, your property. Every essay students submit -- representing hours, days or even years of work -- becomes part of the Turnitin database, which is then sold to universities.”

      This is key issue for me - and we talked about this last week in GEDI when someone brought up the case of wide-scale cheating on the quizz / test that students took online.

      I'd like teachers to focus on teaching and helping students learn. And I think the question about who profits and who benefits from ed-tech tools like TurnitIn need to be asked.

  4. Feb 2018
  5. Oct 2017
    1. The internet was invented to empower collaboration and augment human intellect. The web has made these possibilities available to a staggeringly diverse global citizenry. Let's shutter our "learning management systems" and build "understanding augmentation networks" instead, moving away from educational assembly lines toward intellectual ecosystems of interest and curiosity.

      This kind of thinking is something we need a lot more of these days.

  6. Mar 2017
  7. Feb 2017
    1. and reflect on its purposes — individually and as a class. 

      Metacognitive work on what the assessment is and how it works. Nice.

    2. Drier’s final grades are based on students’ written self-assessments, which, in turn, are based on their review of items in their portfolios. 

      Really appreciate modalities like this one where students are asked to show us what they've learned and to interact with the instructor and other students.

    3. “When school is seen as a test, rather than an adventure in ideas,” teachers may persuade themselves they’re being fair “if they specify, in listlike fashion, exactly what must be learned to gain a satisfactory grade…[but] such schooling is unfair in the wider sense that it prepares students to pass other people’s tests without strengthening their capacity to set their own assignments in collaboration with their fellows” (Nicholls and Hazzard, 1993, p. 77).

      While it is the "adventure in ideas" that should be the focus.

    4. Extrinsic motivation, which includes a desire to get better grades, is not only different from, but often undermines, intrinsic motivation, a desire to learn for its own sake (Kohn 1999a). 

      Focusing on grades as a / the measure of achievement also seems to undermine the kind of curiosity that is essential to authentic learning.

    5. There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006).  In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.

      This goes back to responsible use of technology in a way. Just because we are able to post grades late at night doesn't mean that we should and that it is beneficial to students. Particularly when these grades are just numbers without any constructive feedback.

  8. Feb 2016
    1. n an outcomes-based regime, outcomes become central and crowd out other considerations.

      It's the crowding out that concerns me. Clearly there are competencies that need and should be measured in this way. It's privileging them at the expense and even exclusion of the equally essential but messier contextual kinds of learning that's a problem.

    2. For GEDIVT: Why does Donna Riley argue against a "paradigm of evidence-based practice.?

    1. For GEDIVT: Some questions to think about while reading Lombardi: What are the differences between "traditional" grading and "authentic" assessment methods? What is the difference between formative and summative assessment? What would authentic assessment look like in your discipline?

    1. For GEDIVT: I wonder if the emphasis on grading, GPA's and traditional assessments in higher ed encourage undergraduates to see college as a "test" rather than an "adventure in ideas"? It seems that the exploratory, adventurous aspect of education is too important to lose. So what can we do?

    2. For GEDIVT: How do the arguments made here (and by Daniel Pink) align with or challenge our assumptions about grading and assessment?

  9. Dec 2015
    1. Don’t squash their academic freedom unless they’re being a bigot – bigotry is not a freedom, it’s a character defect.