33 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2021
    1. You grant Turnitin a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes. We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications.

      I wonder how many educators and learners have read Turnitin's T&Cs?

    2. Turnitin actively profits (to the tune of $752 million) from the work of students.

      Does enabling profiteering align with a 'learners-first' or students as partners philosophies / approach?

    3. how their own practices may foster an environment in which students are disenfranchised and relegated to the status of mere consumers in the education process.”

      See: S. Spelic (2017, December 1). Provocation for #TowardsOpenness at #OEB17 Towards Openness (3:16).

      Paraphrase:

      Designing a learning environment which has the aim of suppressing marginalised communities:

      (i) Centre the curriculum and all learning around my needs, what I think is important, what I value, and skip the rest, because I’m not good at them, I don’t really like them, so anyone who is particularly good at those things might not find a lot of success in my class and might not enjoy my class so much

      (ii) Punitive evaluation system to weed out those who do not meet my idea of what a great X looks like and how that person should behave so that means that if there’s someone who is excellent in A, B, C, that person will probably not succeed in my learning environment by design

      (iii) Criteria for success, kept a secret, students like me would get it, other students not not, they’d struggle, find it difficult and unpleasant

    4. Critical analysis is resistance. Questions are our sabots.

      Meyer (1991). Star Trek VI:The Undiscovered Country (video snippet).

      Valeris: Four hundred years ago on the planet Earth, workers, who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes called Sabo into the machines to stop them... hence the word sabotage.

    5. the ways we respond (both actively and passively) in the face of institutional demands we find unethical or pedagogically harmful …
    6. How accessible is the tool? For a blind student? For a hearing-impaired student? For a student with a learning disability? For introverts? For extroverts? Etc. What statements does the company make about accessibility?

      A great companion to Alix (2018). Technical Intuition: Instincts In A Digital World:

      There are four dimensions of technical intuition.

      To Imagine: An imagination equipped with the information and instincts to conceptualise (good and bad) and suggest (good) technical systems even without the skills of implementing the ideas

      To Inquire: An ability to formulate questions that can drive understanding and decision-making, and a clarity on how and where (to what experts) you would need to direct those questions

      To Decide: A clarity of how your politics and preferences (both personal and professional) connect to the decisions you can and should make about — and within — digital systems

      To Demand: An animated impulse of when to be opinionated, active, and targeted if a system is designed in ways that do not align with our politics and morality

    7. Who owns the tool? What is the name of the company, the CEO? What are their politics? What does the tool say it does? What does it actually do?What data are we required to provide in order to use the tool (login, e-mail, birthdate, etc.)? What flexibility do we have to be anonymous, or to protect our data? Where is data housed; who owns the data? What are the implications for in-class use? Will others be able to use/copy/own our work there?How does this tool act or not act as a mediator for our pedagogies? Does the tool attempt to dictate our pedagogies? How is its design pedagogical? Or exactly not pedagogical? Does the tool offer a way that “learning can most deeply and intimately begin”?

      A great companion to Alix (2018). Technical Intuition: Instincts In A Digital World:

      There are four dimensions of technical intuition.

      To Imagine: An imagination equipped with the information and instincts to conceptualise (good and bad) and suggest (good) technical systems even without the skills of implementing the ideas

      To Inquire: An ability to formulate questions that can drive understanding and decision-making, and a clarity on how and where (to what experts) you would need to direct those questions

      To Decide: A clarity of how your politics and preferences (both personal and professional) connect to the decisions you can and should make about — and within — digital systems

      To Demand: An animated impulse of when to be opinionated, active, and targeted if a system is designed in ways that do not align with our politics and morality

    8. Even when a company’s ideology is sound, the execution of that ideology through the platform may be flawed.

      There's ideology, intention, and unimaginable future misappropriation:

      Reply All (2014, December 3). We Know What You Did. Gimlet Media.

      E. Zuckerman (2014, August 14). The Internet's Original Sin. The Atlantic.

    9. operated by others — designers, engineers, technologists, CEOs

      The need for the oppressed to be part of the ownership, leadership, and making

    10. a privately-owned public space

      A greater need for #PublicInterestTech #CivicTech #DesignJustice

    11. the abuse of students

      In a capitalist society

      Would a genuine open pedagogy, a world of open culture, remix, etc. need plagiarism detection software?

    12. the company itself can strip mine and sell student work for profit.

      Can we believe what Turnitin says?:

      Turnitin itself offers a different perspective on its operations.

      “When students engage in writing and submitting assignments via Turnitin’s solutions, students retain the copyright of the submitted papers,” Chris Harrick, vice president of marketing, said in an emailed statement. “We never redistribute student papers, or reveal student information via the service. Because a majority of plagiarism results from student-to-student sharing of work, we do produce matches between submissions in our database and new student papers. Without the ability to compare [a] submission against existing student work, plagiarism detection systems would be ineffective.”

      Source: Roll (2017)

    13. their data scanned and monetized

      Positions students as consumers/clients rather than students as partners

    1. We present a version of that syllabus statement here for reuse and/or remixing: Your personal data is valuable and important, which is why it is often collected by the digital tools you use in your educational activities. To better understand how and why your data is collected, the potential risks of this collection, and how to better protect your personal data, consider asking yourself the following questions: What types of personal data do you think are collected through your use of digital tools for educational activities? What value does your personal data have for different contexts and entities? Consider how your data might be valued by your instructor, the institution, yourself, and companies. Who owns your personal data, who can sell it, and who can use it? Do you have concerns about how your personal data can be used? If so, what are they? Are there aspects of your identity or life that you feel would put you in a place of special vulnerability if certain data were known about you or used against you? If after asking yourself these questions you have concerns, I invite you to reach out to me to discuss them. I may not have easy answers to the questions or concerns that you bring to me (often in these matters no one has these answers), but I will happily explore them further with you or find someone more knowledgeable who can help answer your questions.

      I'd rather see curriculum time dedicated to activities that actively engage and develop learner 'technical intuition' rather than a legalise terms-and-conditions style (lip service?) syllabus statement – enmesh it in the learning ecosystem.

      See: Alix (2018). Technical Intuition: Instincts in a Digital World

      There are four dimensions of technical intuition.

      To Imagine: An imagination equipped with the information and instincts to conceptualise (good and bad) and suggest (good) technical systems even without the skills of implementing the ideas

      To Inquire: An ability to formulate questions that can drive understanding and decision-making, and a clarity on how and where (to what experts) you would need to direct those questions

      To Decide: A clarity of how your politics and preferences (both personal and professional) connect to the decisions you can and should make about — and within — digital systems

      To Demand: An animated impulse of when to be opinionated, active, and targeted if a system is designed in ways that do not align with our politics and morality

      Looking for anyone interested in experimenting with this in their classes.

      It should really be a part of any future-focused inter/trans/cross disciplinary courses.

    2. educators cannot sit on the sidelines when it comes to the issues surrounding students and data privacy

      Informing oneself and taking action required

    1. “There’s a specific reason why you had so many powerful Americans trying to convince white Americans that Black people were inferior,”

      Look at Resmaa Menakem's work in trauma, the concept of 'White Body Supremacy', and the practice of somatic abolitionism

      Somatic abolitionism:

      Somatic Abolitionism is an emergent process, and a form of maturation into a more integrated human experience. It is an embodied anti-racist practice of cultural building. It is a way of being in the world. It is a return to the age-old wisdom of human bodies respecting, honoring, and resonating with other human bodies. Somatic Abolitionism is not a human invention. It is the process of resourcing energies that are always present within one’s body, the collective body, and the world.

      See:

    2. anti-racist

      It is scary to come across SME/academic content that is racist and goes unchecked, uncritiqued, unquestioned in courses. Health sciences are notorious.

      See:

    3. individual change, social change, and policy change

      Think global, act local. – Jane Goodall

    1. to make plans for a decolonized academia, to take care our students, and hold people to account

      Definition of an advocate <3

    2. It is my obligation

      Krznaric (2002)'s The Good Ancestor again

    3. take the extra time to learn how we think, read, and write. Learn from us the ways we see and seek to change this oppressive world. Respect our refusal to write like you, even after you train us well to write like you.

      Brings neurodivergence into the intersectionality equation.

      You may have noticed an exponential number of women across the global self-diagnosing and being formally diagnosed with ADHD (or better termed VAST: Variable Attention Stimulus Trait see ADDitude Magazine) during the pandemic from the dissemination of symptoms and experiences by other women on apps like TikTok. It presents differently from men; and is more socially conditioned / excused in women.

      Recommend all educators (and employers) learn about the way dopamine, and other neurotransmitters, work in neurodivergent brains for stimulation (interest, challenge, urgency, etc.); working memory; etc.

      Learn about:

      • masking
      • rejection sensory dysphoria
      • executive dysfunction
      • object impermanence
      • time blindness
      • auditory processing
      • special interests, hyperfocus, and info dumps
      • frustration intolerance or novelty over routine
      • hyperarousal and the window of tolerance
      • fatigue; etc., to see that:

        "Girls are more likely to compensate for their struggles by relentlessly working extra hours."

      Learn more via Structured Success and ADDitude Magazine

    4. there are more ways to assess work than the research essay

      van Leeuwen (2020). Anti-Thesis:

      ... our most complex thought processes are multimodal and not soley verbal in nature.

      ... not all intelligent thought can be verbalised.

      ... verbal language has been the favoured mode of knowledge acquisition and exchange.

      The emphasis on the written word as the core vehicle for knowledge transfer...

      ... the hegemony of textual education

      see The Social Brain Atlas

    5. inter/multi/anti disciplinary

      This is the future of learning and the future of work

    6. Change your hiring criteria (and your hiring committees)

      For Open Hiring, see J. Bischof (2020, July 20). What Hiring Looks Like Without Resumes, Cover Letters, Or Interviews. Quartz.

      See also: Tweet thread.

    7. This means starting the work that actual decolonizing requires – but those are long term goals and require YOU/ME to do a LOT of work. They also require becoming accomplices (not an ally or spectator) in local indigenous communities and politics as the fight for land and resources continues. There are concrete plans that can be put in place and how to get there (i.e. genuinely support decolonization) in a five-to ten-year period. Do not give up on the vision…just remember, academia is not there yet.

      How can we bring learners into this work?

      Hackathon, in the vein of feminist Wikipedia events, anyone?

    8. citational

      Divesting citational power structures movements include:

      1) (hashtag) bibliodiversity by Leslie Chan

      2) (hashtag) citeherwork by Wendy Belcher after Kishonna Gray (aka The Gray Test)

      3) (hashtag) shutdownacademia by Maha Bali (aka Inclusive Citation)

      4) (hashtag) radicalcitation by Sarah Ahmed (aka Intellectual Geneaology)

      5) (hashtag) citeblackwomen by Cite Black Women

    9. alternative suggestions to talk about the work we are doing now, while thinking of a decolonized sovereign nation future

      Where does 'nothing about us, without us' come into play in these practices?

    10. accommodate teaching/learning structures to different knowledge production sites and ways

      Does this connect with open pedagogy, ungrading, and other critical digital pedagogy ideas?

    11. the troubling paradigm where academic structures and powers co-opt the struggles as their own – but contribute little to the cause

      The lip service and the tokenism

    12. There are a lot of things I do not know, but there are some things I do know

      A common step often overlooked in deconstructing one's cognitive biases is acknowledging your knowledge continuum:

      • What I know
      • What I think I know
      • What I don't know
    1. Adele Vrana and Siko Bouterse

      The big take-aways for me were:

      “...you might be wondering what on earth any of this has to do with Creative Commons. Well, if we’re going to share knowledge and creativity together online, in ways that will be actually useful for the future, we can’t keep repeating the same old colonizer’s mistakes. So many of our stories are still missing, not just our own lives or school books, but also on the internet that we are creating and curating together. Over half of the world is online today, finally. And three-quarters of these digital folks are from the Global South. Nearly half of the world’s women are also online. We know that our kids will learn about the world by searching the internet. Whose knowledge will they find there? The internet knowledge today doesn’t yet reflect the rich diversity of the world. Let’s take Wikipedia, the fifth most visited website in the world as a proxy for the internet’s knowledge. Most of the people who write Wikipedia are still white men from North America and Europe. Only one in 10 of Wikipedia’s editors are women and fewer are trans or non-binary. And because who you are has an impact on what you create, Wikipedia’s content also reflects these gaps. Every episode of the Simpsons has a Wikipedia article, for example. Military history, also pretty good. Coverage of female porn stars, also decent. Yeah, but we’re still missing tons of biographies of Brazilian women scientists or activists. And it’s not just Wikipedia that has this problem. Many of the conversations in the commons about open access research or free and open licensing so far, have been driven by people who don’t look like us. – Adele Vrana & Siko Bouterse (28:15-30:12)

      “After colonization and slavery, can you trust that the knowledge commons will respect you, your image, and history? Would they ask for your consent first? Will they consider changing their open policies to protect and center you? Or, are you the only one who has to change? – Adele Vrana (31:10-31:30)

      “And through colonization, you’ve seen just how many of the things you protect and share or stole from you by the colonizers, time and time again. Do you think you trust the open movement to do something different with your knowledge this time around? Does the idea of public domain, which makes some knowledge suddenly available to everyone everywhere on this planet on a random date make any sense to you and your community at all? Siko Bouterse (31:58-32:29)

      *“How have I benefited from colonization, racism, or simply just maintaining the status quo?

      What from my own past do I choose to carry forward and what should I let die?

      Whose knowledge is still missing and what can I do to support and honour the people who can best fill those gaps and silences?

      What kind of ancestor do I want to be?* – Adele Vrana & Siko Bouterse (33:59-34:21)

    2. Exploring Origins as a Decolonizing Practice

      I transcribed a lot of this presentation when I watched it as part of my DPL2021 prep:

      I couldn’t really locate myself in all those old kings and governors, soldiers, and battles. I wasn’t taught how to place women and girls, like you and me, in those stories. I felt the gaps and the silences. And again, I had this overwhelming sense of dislocation, so I just tuned out.” – Siko Bouterse (13:55-14:18)

    1. students in “active, constructive engagement with content, tools and services in the learning process, and promot[ing] learners’ self-management, creativity and working in teams”

      Authentic students as partners and a foundation for contributing student pedagogy