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?
I love the phrasing of this question. It perfectly captures what @dogrtrax calls the messiness of it all above.
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.
Hmmm. Want to hear more about this argument.
apply research skills and disciplinary knowledge
Or really the stuff of interdisciplinary academic practice. The kind of writing across the curriculum stuff that freshman comp course across the country attempt to nurture.
To evaluate literary, scientific, or historical evidence, scholars and researchers must first marshal that evidence.
I'd say identify and perhaps interpret (or begin to) before what I understand here as "marshaling."
some sort of curating function
Could students do this?
streams
Nice pun,
where building a Website that would display equally well in all versions of all browsers was almost impossible.
Standards like CSS and HTML make it so that any web page will display in any browser.
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.
Should this be done internally to corps or should gov have a hand in the regulation?
Facebook should allow users to sort their news feed chronologically by default on all platforms, rather than rely on an algorithmically sorted News Feed.
Customization again.
It would be interesting if Facebook offered a “vintage Facebook” setting that users could toggle to, without News Feed ads and “like” buttons.
Or just customization in general.
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.
Feel me.
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.)
Great example of the tension between social media as liberating/oppressing. Like Twitter can be used by Black Lives and white supremacists. When, in this case, does anonymity become abused versus liberating?
What if there were a “trust emoji”? Or respect-based emojis?
Love this idea.
keep us addicted to the social network.
Or at least keep us "in the stream."
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.
Very interesting. Need to check this study out.
“two masters” dilemma,
Useful phrase.
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?
Great, but how would you measure that?
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.
Corporate structure at odds with idealist slogans. This is essentially why I left (Rap) Genius: it became increasingly apparent that despite the company's well-intentioned, truly felt aspirations, there were only so many avenues to monetization and all would in some way compromise the stated mission.
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
Transparency.
We must critique these environments at a level deeper than “Facebook is a corporation and therefore bad.”
Yes! Though this is awful nuanced.
stream-based reading behaviors,
Love this phrase. And web annotation, I think, encourages a gardening-like approach to reading.
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.
Can annotation break the stream? Shared links to specific annotations within an article?
analyzing the claim, not the article.
This is Writing 101, right? It's also Annotation 101. Students focus on specific evidence to evaluate an argument/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.
The most powerful and poetic articulation of the power of the annotated web I've read.
Ofcourse,amorecynicalreadermightclaimthatthisiswellandgoodbut,really,doesn’tallthisjustrepresentjobtrainingforthecognitariat,aninitiationintothecasualized,creative,collaborativeworkvaluedbycontemporarycapitalism.
I suppose one question we must ask ourselves as a panel is: what exactly are we each or collectively dissenting from? Erin's paper similarly argues for a dissent from contemporary [insert modifier(s)] capitalism. I read Jeff's (forgive me if I'm wrong, Jeff) as more concerned with dissent from traditional disciplinary protocols--also a concern here for Larry. Generally, how are these two breaks aligned or in tensions?
For me, I see the breaking from discipline here as plenty radical, though perhaps not revolutionary with a (err) capital "R," which I'm okay with.
RandyBass
Was thinking of Bass and this very essay in reading Jeff's paper...
Tosolvethisproblem,acoupleofstudentsandIhackedtogetherourfirstplatform,asimplebuteffectiveGoogleformanddatabasetocollect,share,andanalyzepopularandacademicwritingonUber.
Why not a private Hypothesis group?
Inageneraledcourse,moststudentsarealreadyunfamiliarwithdisciplinarywaysofreading,talking,andwritingaboutliterature.And,ifanything,theTransmissionUberprojectmadevisiblethecomplexliteraciesweoftenassumeinthehumanitiesclassroom.
Connects to Jeff's project for me: alternative, more creative, and better ways to teach traditional humanities literacies.
studentauthoredbook
(This PDF wouldn't allow me to select the text I wanted but anyway...)
Is this a networked form of expression? Using a kind of network to explore the concept of networks?
Wikipediaspawnsplagiarismandfakeknowledge
Why pick on Wikipedia still?
thesuburbsofSiliconValley
Meaning San Francisco?
league
A league? Cool!!
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.
So important to acknowledge that despite our skepticism, there's good work and even pleasure to be had here.
a recognition that the way digital technology is shaping our collective existence is one of the most pressing humanistic issues of the day
Yes! DH really has to be about not just how digital tools can be leveraged in our humanities disciplines as they are but how the traditional study of the humanities bears on the advent of the digital in human culture.
somewhat paradoxically,
I'd like to dig into this supposed paradox a bit...Perhaps we need to focus less on platform and more on user agency and literacy. New platforms free of capitalism sound great. But can't we also train ourselves and students to be more savvy, resistant users of even mainstream technology?
The fact is institutions already spend millions on digital infrastructure with estimates that global ed tech spending will reach $252 billion by 2020 (EdTechXGlobal).
But if a university diverted its edtech budget to developing such a platform, would that budget also provide sustainability for that platform? Perhaps a consortium model would?...
a radically egalitarian pedagogy in which knowledge and mastery are produced laterally among players rather than distributed radially from experts to students.
A large part of me doesn't buy my own provocation here but: wouldn't it be more radical and subversive to do away with expertise entirely? Aren't we still reifying a certain mode of knowledge production here?
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.
I love this phrasing. Here's to further exploring these "middle spaces" (even those that precede close reading 101) through non-traditional assignments.
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.
After reading the essay, I'm thoroughly convinced of the first piece here--this gamified assignment does better than the traditional scholarly essay--but I'd like to hear more about the broader aim: what skills and practices students developed during the course that are less disciplinary-specific or even traditionally academic?
his very essay
included critics like Lewis Mumford,
I wonder if you could design a disciplinary Ivanhoe game around Mumford--or any meme Am Studies text/author? Others in their school of thought...Their critics...authors and figures they studied...
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!”).
I find Randy Bass's channeling of John McClymer and Lucia Knowles helpful here. These are "coping mechanisms"--built into the wrong assignments for the right goals--rather than "genuine learning." See Bass, "Engines of Inquiry" (11).
vendors tend to be selling a product as opposed to selling a process or an idea.
Oversimplification.
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.
Pioneering institutions.
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.
Faculty initiate pilot/purchase of "academic software"--teaching and learning technology.
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.
Refreshing!
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.
Model of partnership
“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.”
Really? There seems to be a hyperawareness of these issues in my experience.
sell products as opposed to a process or an idea
I think it's more complicated than this. Surely most startups begin around an idea. But it's true that they have to productive that idea in order to become sustainable. It's that process of "productizing" I would argue when the original idea can get compromised and corrupted.
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)
These are pretty opposite sources of knowledge, one bottom up, the other top down.
quality of partner relationships.
Meaning the "service"? Nothing in here about privacy policies, terms of service, etc.
rather than develop their own tools.
Why not? Is it not scaleable? sustainable?
a writing space in which traces of authority persist only as local and contingent effects, the social equivalent of the deconstructed author-function
Cool!
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).
The attention to politics of hypertext is so important...
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)
Interactivity of computers vs passivity of TV?
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)
Definition of hypertext.
With Xanadu, Nelson invalidates technological abjection, advancing an unabashedly millenarian vision of technological renaissance in which the system shall set us free.
Hypertext as liberating.
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.
The technology as simulation narrative is far less dominant than the technology as change (transformation) narrative.
new Xanadu(TM), the universal hypertext system proposed by Theodor Holm Nelson
Never realized the cultural history of hypertext was linked to Coleridge so literally.
realization of Jean-Francois Lyotard's "game of perfect information"
Fascinated by this phrase as a way of the thinking through the problem of utopian visions of a data-informed society.
the ultimate wetware dream of the clerisy: discourse converted with 100 percent efficiency into capital,
Nice phrase.
abandoning bits in favor of atoms.
Are "bits" not physical?
the coupling of human biology to mechanical movement. The feet, legs, heart, lungs, pedals, chains, and gears work together to push the bike forward.
Love this description of biking. Remove "gears" and I think you have an even purer experience.
“There’s a comfortable speed for perceiving the world in motion, and it’s about 18 miles per hour.”
New average speed goal. (Seems kind of high.)
I am a computer!”
experience became subordinated to purpose.
Hmmmm
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.
Hadn't thought about this definition of "analog" as parallel to physical reality rather than askance.
But is a big screen that can display anything really minimalist? It is harder and riskier to commit to specific information from the start.
Great point.
That deliberateness would eventually show up in the Omata, which promises a “deeper connection to the ride itself.”
I like the emphasis on "deliberateness" as opposed to, I suppose, automation.
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?
Is it though? You're watching your speed not the sunrise.
Among all programs and players, few sources play a greater role in mitigating these divides than public libraries.
these digital divides,
Including the issue of abuse noted in the paragraph above?
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.
Mobile can't be the future.
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,
I.e. that Trump would get control of himself (or with some help from Kelly et al.) and begin to act "presidential>"
COMPETENCY-BASED LEARNING
Close reading is basically standardized in Common Core--it's referenced in the first ELA anchor standard for reading. Hypothesis is a means to assess competency in that standard by recording, measuring, and allowing feedback on
Students working in waysthat best leverage their individual learning styles
In annotation, each student bringing their style, expertise, experience to the text with the class as a group sharing a more wholistic view of the related issues.
“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?”
Students annotating their own revisions as self-review.
electronic journals as a way to reflect on their learning and “make their thinking visible.”
This could be accomplished in annotation if Hypothesis had the concept of a 1:1 note.
Motivation and persistence. Because learning is more relevant and relationship-based, students are motivated to complete tasks and learn
Collaborative annotation can be used to scaffold self-directed learning, providing a means for a student to explore their own interests and provide evidence of that activity, and enabling teachers to monitor and interact with these knowledge pathways.
students “own” their learning
Student ownership and agency through annotation as an intellectual practice with a record.
Students encouraging and supporting eachother to work through di icult challenges
via annotation made explicit in prompt for assignment
Students constructivelycritiquing eachother’s work
via annotation
Assessment feedback focused on what students can do to improve
Hypothesis needs a 1:1 channel internal to the client. For now, the LMS app allows for this type of feedback.
no single “right answer”?
Social reading is discussion not test-driven knowledge production.
Are students required to defend and revise their work, creating multiple drafts?
The natural thinking processes of a threaded conversation in annotation with comment replies, replies to replies, etc.
Teachers talking less, students talking more
Social reading is active reading. Texts filled with student voices.
Are students constantly revising and improving their work? How often? How explicit and central is this expectation?
Annotation as final product but also as pre-writing, harvested for summative assignments.
Are students regularly asked to present, explain, and defend their ideas orally and in writing?
This is the basic work of a critical annotation.
And outside the classroom, meetings with public o icials, nonprofits, and other community members, where students are given a chance to present their findings and recommendations on an issue they’ve researched
Public annotation of government documents/websites, newspaper articles, etc.
Communications skills being explicitly taught
Again, social annotation/reading provide an opportunity for this kind of instruction: teacher has a view into how students are interacting with each other (and text).
Multimedia portfolios of student work
Profile pages of annotation are a kind of this portfolio or a contribution.
Listening
A big part of social reading: listening to the text and to other readers.
review and critique each other’s work.
This is the process of replying to annotations. But annotation can also be leveraged for peer review of student writing.
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.
Moving annotation from a private practice with little accountability to something shared with the immediate social group of the classroom and finally to the larger public of the annotated web with students making interventions as digital citizens.
learning how to conduct their own research, often on the Internet.
Collaborative annotation and independent inquiry: students reading what they're interested and annotating; teachers following along in the process through activity pages.
more engaging
Because social and interactive, collaborative annotation can make reading more engaging.
peer-to-peer conversations about big issues that defy yes/no answers and ask students to think more analytically
Pretty good definition of social reading in fact!
embedding communications skills into everything they do in all of their courses: speaking, listening, reading, and writing?
Again, socializing reading (and writing) to an extent, makes those skills more real, necessary, part of a relationship, a community, rather than an individual task.
working with members of the community
Public annotation.
holding themselves accountable
Can annotation portfolios/profile be leveraged to this end? Students have an activity page that represents their engagement with reading and with each other. Maybe ask students to reflect on their contributions.
build relationships through mechanisms
Annotation as one such mechanism: learning, reading in community.
egularly working on teams
Social reading makes reading a team sport!
constructive feedback
Via annotation. As a measurable skill.
Lots of talking and listening; a constant exchange of ideas
Live and asynchronously using collaborative annotation.
Inter- and intra-personal skills. Character and culture are important values that are emphasized as much as academic subjects
A student's "social reading" profile provides a window not only into how they interact with text (comprehensively, critically?) but also into how they interact with their classmates (respectfully? discursively?).
listen well—to be a good “critical friend.”
Read classmate's annotations, respond appropriately: respectful, challenging...
learn as much from their peers as from their teachers or a textbook
Or combing all three in a single conversation...
EVIDENCE OF THINKING, NOT JUST GROUP WORK
Students working collaboratively through the meaning of a text in annotation, asking questions, answering others, building off each other's comments and knowledge.
key skills they then can apply to other situations beyond this specific course or assessment
Collaborative annotation as a way to assess skills rather than content mastery. Or in addition to.
Teachers stepping into conversations or stopping work from time to time for “teachable moments” to supplement knowledge
Via annotation in the case of readings/reading discussion.
reading original sources
Primary sources, reading of, key.
providing teachers and students with real-time, actionable feedback.
Via annotation?
go beyond basic math and English skills.
Not content based, but skills based?
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.
Just a tool of efficiency or for noticing unrecognized patterns through a different means of analysis. Both, IMO.
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.
OER creation
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.
DH as moving English more toward the statistical...
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.
Great explanation, for me, of the turn to DH.
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.
Emphasis is always on reflective practice.
In the words of rhetorician Richard Lanham, we will learn to look both "at" and "through" digital tools.
This is great: digital as means but also object of study.
about
And with...
a tool and our central object of study.
Love this too. Learning to use the technology, but also reflecting on its significance.
continually rethink both the process and products of the graduate seminar
I love the process and products here. New research methods and new method of publication.
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.
Great philosophy. Teacher can't be an expert in all those things either.
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.
If I teach again, I'm going to use this.
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?
Love this. Key for students today...
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.
Note that the second statement in each sentence here is more contingent: emphasis on the can. Free or cheaper is by (the broadest) definition the essence of OER. Whether open licensing in fact results in more open pedagogy is a possibility but not always the case.
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.
At the #OpenEd17 session on "OER-Enabled Pedagogy," David Wiley suggested that Open Pedagogy, Open Educational Practices, and OER were a series of nesting circles and asked the group which was the biggest circle.
Not sure I agree with the premise, but for me open pedagogy would be the biggest circle. I'm just not convinced that all OER use is a pedagogically open--especially when it doesn't fully meet the 5Rs test.
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.
This is a great line. To be clear, though, annotation re-webifies the web to make it more networked and serendipitous, right?
Students get the same content but more time on task
Does more robust online and hybrid learning also "lengthen" time on task?
on-track assessments to develop targeted interventions
Could annotation provide this type of assessment?
Align high school curriculum to first-year college courses
And vice versa. Really like this idea.
adopt and implement the new Common Core State Standards in reading, writing, and math.
In colleges, interesting.
embedded tutoring.
Powered by annotation? Needs surfaced by and intervention enacted through?...
redesigned first-year classes with built-in, just-in-time tutoring and support.
Hypothesis can be part of this support system: peer to peer support; teacher intervention.
Start in college courses with support.
Acceleration v remediation?
better alignment with K-12 graduation standards,
Like CCSS. Close reading being the common thread.
accelerate efforts already under way in higher education
What does "under way" mean?
enterprise-wide systems that gather and analyze data to help institutions improve their performance and student outcomes.
With the right data collection and presentation H could certainly help here too.
increase graduation rates
Retention through increased engagement.
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
All potentially tags and subsets of tags to be used in reading/annotating process.
synthesize primary and secondary sources within focused academic arguments, including one or more research-based essays
Ie. close reading.
Harvesting annotation as part of writing process.
Analyze, interpret, and evaluate a variety of texts for the ethical and logical uses of evidence
This could be a series of tags determined by prof.
ENGL (English)
English/comp section is here.
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
Each of these could be sets and then subsets of controlled tags input by teacher as part of course and used by students in their annotations throughout.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s investments in Meta and bioRxiv are also said to carry with them a strong preference for open source solutions.
Respect.
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.
Love.
Each step “forward” has made it easier – just a little – to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.
I'm getting more and more convinced.
It’s easier to make a phone call than to make the effort to see someone in person.
I definitely see this in our tendency to just text rather than call. Actually calling someone these days seems an almost radical human act.
These inventions were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.
Or additional tools in our ever-growing tool kit for communicating with others?
Substitution arguments like this are a slippery slope fallacy in my opinion. Though we should certainly be careful when someone actually argues about obsolescence.
Perhaps the history is an important corollary to consider. The automobile lobby is certainly to blame for problems in highway and urban infrastructure development. But this doesn't mean cities can't build against the fact of the car or that individuals can't choose to walk or bike sometimes.
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.
Damn! Guilty!!
But technologies are not only effective at achieving or thwarting the aims of those who encounter them, but are affective.
Yes!
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.
What about the father today, deployed in Afghanistan, who can be "present" via video at his child's birth?
a novel demands putting everything else aside.
What about a pen?
Novels demand many things of readers, but the most obvious is attention.
Again, though, might we think about the difference between technologies of "attention" and "distraction"? I'm of course thinking here of annotation as a slow, deep technology of attention.
Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”
Love this line.
only about the time we spend with each.
Are there technologies of speed and technologies of slowness? Technologies of distraction and technologies of attention?
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.
Not the best summation of the various positive and negative uses of sonogram technology,.
means less reading.
Whereas, I would argue that annotation is more reading...
consumed, not read
Oh, what an important distinction!
Pearson,
Agghhh!
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.
Great lead!
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
I'd remove merely here.
It's also interesting that this is in line with what some radical educators call for in terms of de-centering the classroom, interesting in that said educators would likely otherwise recoil at this idea here.
the US market for education technology is predicted to bloom to $21 billion by 2020.
Decent size.
universities can hire fewer professors and teaching assistants after all
Isn't that replacing?
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.
Oh, good.
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.
Interesting, the evidence for efficacy is still not there (yet).
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.
One thing I think people forget when making these slippery slope arguments is that slippery slope claims can be fallacious.
If we agree with the first half of this sentence, rather than scrap the idea for fear of the second, let's figure out how to protect against it while benefitting from the first.
consuming personalized software instead of reading textbooks
Perhaps this is why the scare quotes above.
“read”
Why scare quotes?
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.
Ok, here I'm getting a bit more worried. It's not that I don't think this is helpful. But I do think it's skipping some possible better, more human solutions.
One concern: the premise here is that comprehension struggles are mostly questions requiring answers rather than discursive situations requiring more interaction. A second related concern: is the ultimate goal of "learning" to get the answer or to acquire facility with that discursive process? (Answer: the latter.)
I think simple social annotation, perhaps backed by some AI, could go a long way here. Allow students to ask questions, answer each others questions, and surface those questions and answers in a useful way to teachers...
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.
In two adjacent sentences, the authors completely misrepresent the story they're researching. It's not a machine reaching out, it's a human who's been informed by a 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.
Not the best pitch TBH.