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.
I write and delete before publishing so many social media comments because of this feeling.
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.
Would this be predicted by the Cynefin framework? Teaching problems are rarely obvious enough for "best" practices; "better" practices may be the best we can hope for.
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.
I'd love to explore this more. I think my reaction is that all "likes" are not equal (and therefore the search for them as goods in their own right is fruitless). But acknowledgement by other members (or potential members) of a genuine community is sustaining to dialogue. So the "right" likes and followers do help us make communal progress toward self, even as the "wrong" acknowledgements can frustrate it.
(See next paragraph for a good caveat about identity work - or the lack thereof - in static homogenous groups.)
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.
Thinking of identity as contextual, interpretive, work-in-process, instead of as a static output, seems really positive and potentially integrative.
It’s about the student and his or her feelings and thoughts, though often articulated clumsily and from an as yet unthought through position.
The advice to separate self from role is good... but let's think about this as a reaction to the student above who says they feel like the instructor doesn't allow equal opportunities to contribute in the class. Sometimes, despite all best efforts, the faculty member may be wrong, and deep listening and learning has to allow for that possibility. Don't take it personally, but model the kind of leadership which recognizes the need for personal change.
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.
True, but how does this interact with the power differential in the classroom? Can students really be expected to productively call out faculty members' biased behavior? It seems like an option not discussed in this paper is finding external facilitators to help navigate some of these issues.
In extreme cases, urge them to see a counselor
I quibble with the use of the word "extreme" here. The examples in this article seem more like issues of strong beliefs or unthinking comments, but hot moments also include deeply personal disclosures. Reserving counseling for "extreme" cases is stigmatizing, especially as we see more students in higher ed who have experience of mental health treatment. Many students involved in "hot moments" might benefit from being referred to the resources available in student life offices and/or counseling and faculty should be aware enough of these resources to suggest them with comfort.
perhaps particularly the student(s) who has generated the hot moment.
This too is a challenging statement, especially in this moment of "call-out" and "cancel" culture. I'm not even entirely sure what's meant by "generated" - the person who gives offense, or the person who takes it? I think this is fundamentally about preserving the class as a learning community, with the knowledge that means action on an individual level.
to manage ourselves
Good point - it's tempting to think that hot moments are in the student domain, but that's not entirely true. Faculty have reactions too.
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.
One presumes the same is true of students. But how does a student know which style a faculty member prefers, and vice versa?
Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don't have the expertise to audit?
A corollary question might be, if the legal system and code of laws have gotten so highly specialized that they require specialists to navigate them, are you trusting a "human" system or a technology? (With the answer including the fact that humans being involved at all is different from a machine-implemented algorithm, even if human decisions are constrained by the legal "algorithms.")
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
This definition is wrong. "Trigger warnings" are notifications that content may provoke post-traumatic responses. (What constitutes "trauma", of course, is up for debate.) The colloquial sense that "anything difficult is triggering" should be eschewed in professional writing.
That does not invalidate the rest of the sentence.
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.
But when curricula reinforce the confusion of speed and intelligence, that time may be precious.
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.
Amazingly important double-edged finding for discussions of data visualization!
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.
Relation to stereotype threat?
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.
Students and faculty both. Many disciplines are reluctant to introduce critical perspectives on disciplinary publishing too early, feeling that students need grounding in accepted information flows before branching out into active debates.
additional motivation for test subjects to process information accurately made the impact of early preferences less prominent, though the influence did not disappear entirely
Interesting implications for assignment design.
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?
What interests me here is how we might rethink the concept of "political" information. Most if not all information can be situated in a polis. How can we show the risk of motivated reasoning in "scientific" disciplines without falling into both-sidesism?
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.
It seems like there's still a transfer problem here, though. There seems to be an assertion that criticality will be inherently cross-domain, but I'm not clear why that should be true. Why would the critical outlook not remain domain-specific. (To say "if it does, then it isn't critical", seems like a tautology.)
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.
The ProfHacker article by Maha Bali and Steve Greenlaw explores this more concretely. Active learning for inclusion needs to be scaffolded in such a way that it does not reinforce the privilege of dominant cultures and personalities.
That’s true not just within the classroom environment, but in the web of interactions students experience
Subtle call for more cross-campus collaborations between faculty and administration. A productive form of shared governance.
More specifically
Inclusive pedagogy as an element of things faculty are probably already doing.
Am I having my students read a bunch of monographs, all authored by white males, for example?
We need better ways to incentivize the finding and sharing of these more diverse arrays of knowledge forms and knowledge producers, particularly I think at introductory levels. When faculty balk at the labor of finding appropriate and diverse readings, we need resources to show that some of the work has already been done.
Or you can ask them to take 1-5 minutes in class before you start discussion.
We can also think of this pre-writing or even free writing as a mindfulness exercise which helps students reflect and potentially manage stress (beyond the stress of having to speak in public).
It is important for the instructor to determine what the problem is for each particular class.
This feels like one of the big issues in "inclusive pedagogy" - the desire for one-size-fits-all solutions necessarily opposes the goal of treating each person as an equal individual. (That said, "one size fits most" solutions are important steps forward.)
They
This kind of generalization always worries me. "They" as a whole or as a statistically identifiable majority? Or "they" as a memory, where intense experiences stand out with no regard to their probability?
and purposefully
Fascinating how the author understands that the process is designed by professionals to beat the customer out of their money, and yet internalizes it as a personal failure.
a tendency, developed over the last five years, that I’ve come to call “errand paralysis.”
I'm solidly Gen X, but I certainly recognize this tendency in myself. What forces are at play which lead people to treat this as a generational trait? Who benefits?
the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better
High priority = job and work.
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.
Seems like this is a critical assumption to examine for current media literacy/misinformation discussions. As networks become very large and very flat, does this assumption of reciprocity and good faith hold? (I'm thinking, here, of people whose expertise I trust in one domain but perhaps not in another, or the fact that sometimes I'm talking to one part of my network and not really "actively seeking information" for other parts.)
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.
Working hard requires opportunity and encouragement in addition to intrinsic desire — indeed, opportunity and encouragement can often spark that intrinsic desire.
This is crucial. Too often we talk about "intrinsic motivation" (and "grit" and "resilience"...) is if they were solely the province of the student, as if we don't bear any responsibility for the environment in which these qualities are expressed (or are not).
But the reason I wanted to go back in that moment was the same reason students want to stick with familiar grading systems: I know how it works, I know how to communicate about it, I know how to get the best results from it, and it sticks within the letter-grading system I’ve used for 20 years as a teacher and longer as a student. I can recite all the dangers and disadvantages of letter grading, but because it’s the system I’ve known for pretty much my entire life, there’s still a certain comfort to it, and whenever things get weird or challenging or unpredictable, I get an atavistic desire to go back to what is familiar.
This is beautiful - acknowledging discomfort on the part of both teacher and student.
At Clark, we established networked communities to help professors from different disciplines share innovative pedagogies and ideas for leading student work on group projects.
Specifically how is "networked communities" being used in this context? "Networked" how (technically, practically, and organizationally)?
Individuals are most creative when provided space to follow their interests without sanction, when support and guidance are readily available, and when social community is fostered.
"Support and guidance" is tricky. They're not binaries that are or are not available; they're large matrices of forms and degrees.
My work, rooted in both theory and practice, reveals three things that are essential to bringing individuals into the circle of change: autonomy, guidance, and a sense of social community, or working toward a larger meaningful goal.
Does the widespread and routine collection of student data in ever new and potentially more-invasive forms risk normalizing and numbing students to the potential privacy and security risks?
What happens if we turn this around - given a widespread and routine data collection culture which normalizes and numbs students to risk as early as K-8, what are our responsibilities (and strategies) to educate around this culture? And how do our institutional practices relate to that educational mission?
how do we help students navigate privacy issues in learning spaces augmented with social/digital media. There was a specific request for examples to walk students through this. Here is what I do.
I'm a little unnerved by the semi-legal nature of the "Interactive Project Release Form" but I think it's a great model (whether really legally enforceable or just a class constitution-type document).
Inclusion: The active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity—in the curriculum, in the co-curriculum, and in communities (intellectual, social, cultural, geographical) with which individuals might connect—in ways that increase awareness, content knowledge, cognitive sophistication, and empathic understanding of the complex ways individuals interact within systems and institutions
In other words, a student may have decided that they want to remain a peripheral member.
Interesting shift in perspective here. From a non-choice, the student is given some space to make an active choice. (A choice which may disappoint and impoverish others who do choose to fully engage the community, but their choice to make nonetheless.)
It is amazing what calling someone by their name can do for a community and a feeling of belonging.
I've been impressed in the past by faculty members who use this as a way to get to real class discussion and past serial dialogue between the professor an individual students in a Q&A. Saying "what she said" simply isn't acceptable; when you refer to another person's comment, you use their name,
“I say class is like a snack and when you really eat is at home, doing your homework. That’s where you get your nutrients.”
in the forum, we talk about what we decide to talk about, but in the blog, each student can talk about whatever he or she individually wants to talk about.
This is really worth thinking about. Which virtual spaces are "my space" and which are "our space?" How do they relate and affect group dialogue and individual learning?
I wish I had a better sense how a multiauthor "class blog" fits into this framework.
The forum was the voice of the group.
They have less patience for being bored.
Is there an assumption here that it's good to be bored?
efficiency has come to mean accomplishing a task with the least possible human intervention—a goal that often turns out to be self-defeating, particularly when efficiency becomes almost an end in itself. Recall Thomas Edison’s famous line that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration and contrast it with our contemporary enthusiasm for machine-like efficiency
Interesting connection here between the efficiency mandate and the "talent means no effort required" attitude we see in many school settings.
In most universities, alumni relations is a function that is kept distinct from academics and has fund-raising as its primary focus. For alumni/lifelong learners to become an integral part of a university community, we need to better integrate them with all parts of the university.
This is an immense challenge. Not an unsolvable one. There's a very tricky balance to be struck between encouraging in-kind donations without accidentally decreasing in-cash donations. (The sky is not the limit; there's some maximum amount of combined time and money that donors will donate. But in fairness, most donors are not at that level yet...)
At the graduate professional education level, however, many universities seem to forget that we are in the relationship business and behave as if we are simple content/knowledge providers
This is consonant with my experience.
half of what we learn today will become obsolete five years from now
Where "what we learn" is defined rather narrowly as the specifics of a "skill" and not the framework which allows us to integrate new skills/knowledge.
We ought to be able to celebrate both our highly public teams of scholars and our quiet hermits, and we ought to be flexible enough to allow one to become the other.
This is a really complicated assertion. How is it possible to celebrate work which is not released to some public? How do we make sure we have hermits and not shut-ins? And yet, yes, finding ways to celebrate the small work as well as the big is important.
the internet may not be the most effective means of bringing work to an audience, particularly if you don’t already have some sort of access to an audience that will allow your work to be discovered
Traditional scholarly publishing has a huge benefit of momentum - everyone is already there.
How public do you want to be? and How do you want to be public?
Seems like a good pair of guiding questions.
In a strong school culture, leaders communicate directly with teachers, administrators, counselors, and families, who also all communicate directly with each other.
Big challenge in higher ed. Should units communicate directly with families, alums, other units? Where is the place for student voice?
In a strong culture, there are many, overlapping, and cohesive interactions among all members of the organization.
Important for faculty development centers - being a site where interactions can happen. But how to ensure they're "cohesive" interactions?
We’re asking faculty to play “Icky Thump” when they haven’t mastered “Love Me Do.” We’re asking them to knit complex cables when they haven’t even combined knits and purls. We’re asking them to bomb down a black diamond run when they haven’t figured out how to stay upright on the green run.
This is a grand, grand, grand piece of writing. Perhaps somewhere there's an open educator - rocker - knitter - skier who's not thrown by any of these terms, but for the rest of us at least one of these examples should be disorienting.
Digital Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship
Testing annotations against a password-protected Moodle page...
They are often composed of a blend of traditional scholarly articles, short-form blog posts, and practical advice, sometimes separated into distinct content areas and sometimes all in one place.
I find this fascinating - the idea that the very concept of "scholarship" needs to expand to recognize other forms (public intellectualism, opinion articles, etc.)
I think not including links (which a surprising number of web writers still don’t) is in many cases a sign of intellectual cowardice. What it says is that the writer is unprepared to have his or her ideas tested by comparing them to anyone else’s, and is hoping that no one will notice. In other cases, it’s a sign of intellectual arrogance
It seems like there's some correlation between cowardice and arrogance...
Taken together, these somewhat equivocal results lead to a short discussion of the limitations of the data, which are available in anonymized form via Deep Blue
Open data
OA articles may have been previously available in working paper or pre-print versions that differ from their final published form. The resulting final publications may benefit from that early availability
Open access and open scholarship
Remember that although many movies are not as good from an academic perspective as the literature they are based on, one of your objectives is to get them interested in that literature.
The conflation of scripts and novels in this article is close to malpractice. Plays should ALWAYS be studied in performance. Most scripts are not meant to be read; they are meant to be produced. (There are, of course, many ways to study plays in production, including but not limited to watching a movie, and they all involve reading the script.)
It would seem that radio might be the most appropriate delivery for educational audio in developing regions, except for this surprising fact: Some developing nations are going wireless.
The pure costs of maintaining wiring are also higher in some of these environments than Americans and Europeans may be aware of.
most podcasters work for free
Vocation and avocation again...
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that although podcasting is much like radio, in that it is a one-way medium, most podcasters consider it as two-way communication because their podcasts are available on websites and they have either accompanying blogs to which listeners add comments, or provide email addresses for listeners to write to them.
But is this just an interaction with a group of fans, or a site for conversation within an affinity group?
gathering around the radio to listen is still a common group or community activity.
DigPINS collaborative annotation Summer 2018
Let’s instead design games that help strangers form positive pro-social relationships.
Implications for non-game virtual environments as well...
Attitudes towards looking like you’re working when you aren’t are akin to school policies that require students to perform attention, as though the performance of attention may be linked to actual attention, or even learning. The pretending takes precedence over the actual doing.
Amazing parallel here.
Can't annotate stupid JSTOR page images. But: "When we read for typos, letters constitute the field of attention; content becomes virtually inaccessible. When we read for content, semantic structures constitute the field of attention; letters - for the most part - recede from our consciousness."
I’m thinking about video games, and how I learn playing them.
Important anecdote for thinking about "gamification". The idea that games produce their own learning, without social structures or personal reflection processes, is over-simplistic.
(Sidebar: a colleague once said to me "Gamification means making a (crummy) game. I want to make good games with my students.")
Except that if the written assessment is such that it can be graded accurately by software, that’s probably not very good assessment. If what’s important are the facts and key concepts, won’t multiple-choice do?
Terrific thought here. We don't teach good test design well enough and I suspect many faculty members, being people who test well, mistakenly conflate "multiple choice" with "easy" and "open ended" with "complex."
On the other hand, computers cannot read.
This is entirely too complex an assertion to be made without support. It seems easy to understand, and yet it is not.
Automated grading is supposed to “free” the instructor for other tasks, except there is no more important task.
Absolutely vital for our understanding of grading and faculty work.
My hunch is that it’s not that screen reading or digital notetaking are worse for learning, but that we don’t talk enough about what the digital texts enable that might be quite different from what is enabled by print.
I continue to believe/hope that these will be generational effects which will be erased as we get better at (and more committed to) teaching the skill of notetaking, on all levels of education, in all genres, and on all formats.
Why can’t Statler and Waldorf annotate?
I love it! What a great idea! It's groundbreaking! Well, it's new anyway. Eh, not that new, we're from the '70s. It'll never work. It's too much work! Boo! Get off the stage you crazy bear... er, dog.
;-)
(Serious comment - I do like this idea. But I think "heckling" only works on websites where people know they're playing a game. Statler and Waldorf stay in their box for a reason. A more alchemical approach might work, though, if there were a game culture of the characters being relatively respectful to the original writer.)
I began collecting information on educational soap operas – serial dramas whose purpose is education or social transformation. They were mostly played in developing countries, and mostly played on the radio.
We can no longer use the expression “in real life” or IRL, as your online self is your real, off-line self
Say it louder for the people in the back!
When in Resident mode the individual is going online to connect to, or to be with, other people. This mode is about social presence.
So the difference is in intentionality. How might it be useful to separate that for people?
In Visitor mode individuals do not leave any social trace online.
Well, that's an unfortunate assertion in the age of GDPR and Cambridge Analytica. The difference between an intentional "social trace" and an "unintentional data tracking trace" is getting more important.
In hindsight, I read these acts as cries for help, a kind of academic self-medication. I was bored, not because I’d mastered the required material – I got more than my share of non-A grades – but because the things I was asked to do were generally uninspiring. Perhaps nothing was more uninspiring than preparing for an AP exam.
But what makes the story in places like Toledo and the region around it hard for many politicians and even economists to understand is that the anxiety goes well beyond automation and the number of jobs. For many people, your job defines your life.
I had a learning disability when I was in school. But I could do factory work. Factory work is what we did. Now robots do that job. What happens to people like me?
“Tribes of affection matter,” Kaptur says. “Whether it’s work-related, or a vets’ organization, or church, neighborhood, neighborhood businesses—they’re all evaporating. It’s the disappearance of everything they’ve worked for. Their identity, really.”
Shades of Putnam here - what's the relationship between civic organizations as places which make connection happen (and improve work opportunities for some) and work as the thing which provides the money for civic organizations?
People have come to believe that they, their jobs, their communities, and the social contract that binds them to work and place and each other are under threat. And they’re not wrong.
I have a lot of criticisms of the self-occupation link. But this is really interesting connecting self-occupation-community-social contract.
How-ever, grit is not a panacea to deflect all of the arrows or some of the slings. It is a single trait with weak to moderate predictive power of certain outcome variables.
Good counterpoint to a lot of the breathless popular reporting on grit.
Have multiple writing, research, conference, and grant activities in process and review to keep you on track to attain your long-term career target.
Interesting - switching gears on small projects actually shows large-goal "grittiness."
Grit 2.0: A Review with Strategies to Deal with Disappointment, Rejection, and Failure
One common denominator of virtually all academic positions is the peer review and feedback process. It is also a primary source for “taking a licking” from the disappointment, rejection, and feelings of failure experienced by faculty and ad-ministrators. Peer review is deeply ingrained in the academic culture. It provides the credibility to our ideas, teaching effectiveness, research contribu-tions, and publications (Kreuter, 2014).
Fascinating paragraph. Peer review is a distinctive, valued feature in academia and one of its major sources of stress.