produce some false accusations

may become

bugs built this city on rot and mold

Second Life

phallogocentrism

As COVID-19 was forcing me to reinvent so many facets of my teaching and my life, I was glad of this one thing I did not have to rethink on the fly, did not have to leave up to emergency thinking. I already had a grading system meant to maximize student engagement while minimizing stress. Perhaps more importantly, partly because I had been contract grading all along, I could relate to students in a time of mutual need without that sense, so palpably present when I used to put As, Bs, and Cs on individual assignments, that my role as a gatekeeper or judge was always there in the background—a hat I couldn’t remove.

This is a perfect example of how pedagogical decisions can be baked into administrative structures at an institution. This is, in my view, a direct threat to academic freedom.

mastery

By relying less on lectures and more on activities that you can assess

Ask yourself: Is my grading scheme allowing students to grow?

You can downplay high-stakes work by: (1) allowing students to drop one or two of their worst scores on exams, assignments, or quizzes; (2) letting students replace an earlier score with a cumulative final grade; and (3) replacing some of the weight of high-stakes work with smaller, more frequent assessments.

When assignments are optional, compliance will vary and you risk exacerbating differences in study skills, background knowledge, and the like.

Reach out to those who didn’t do so well and express your willingness to help them. Check in with students who have missed a class or two.

Think-pair-share

minimize inequities

Traditional teaching methods do not serve all students well.

trust was a vital part of creating the circumstances under which learning could happen

students as antagonists, always trying to get one over on their instructors

constructive yet still controversial would be fair game for one of these punchy handouts

We shouldn’t persist with a given practice just because it seemed appealing at one time or has come to feel comfortable to us. (Even progressive approaches can harden into traditions.)

The sheets would be made available free of charge, uncopyrighted, and accompanied by an invitation to distribute them promiscuously.

Either way, having to keep explaining the rationale for student-centered teaching takes time and energy. It also takes a certain skill set that even some brilliant teachers may lack, with the result that they struggle to offer a satisfactory response even to questions they have heard many times.

And sometimes they’re challenged by people on a mission to root out everything nontraditional.

open-minded parents

I found solace in how many other readers and twitter users were quick to call the headline out

To describe the “stranger,” words such as “home-invader,” “sex offender,” “trespasser,” or “intruder” without pants and growling in a child’s room, would have painted a more accurate picture. Furthermore, words like “hero,” “home-owner,” law abiding family man” or “good guy with a gun” would have better described this man protecting his daughter, in his own home.

However, his pointers assume citizens are doing the bare minimum in reading the articles they cite.

(Women in Stem=Steminism!)

I had not previously considered it, but in walking through the halls I feel there are more male professors that female.

One comment stood out to me and pushed my buttons a little more. To paraphrase, the comment went something along the same lines as “when will we have an article that discusses the challenges women face without tearing down men?”

they refrained from including the specifics of race

I find it hard to believe that while many Americans and American institutions suggest it is economically sustainable, so many other countries can provide freely to its citizens something we have denoted a privilege, rather than a right. The crux of the problem seems to lie less with whether free access to the best information is economically feasible, but whether we can truly change stratified system which inherently chooses who is and is not worthy of including.

This bothers me in many ways because it is another example of the rich becoming richer. With the access gap for information, people less fortunate do not have the ability to learn from near as many sources as students like us get to. That being said, because so much money is spent on these resources, I wish I was better taught to take advantage of them. There is so much that remains untouched just because many of us students don't even know how to go about accessing the information.

While I believe access should be free to everyone, I do believe that researchers and writers should be compensated for their work, just not to the multimillion dollar extent which most schools are paying.

I think it is a matter of publication journals using research as a way to make money rather than a way to promote knowledge.

I have always had access to research articles when I have needed them, and I have never thought about how the production of information can be altered based on where that information is coming from. This is such an important part of learning that I am very surprised that I have never thought or have never been encouraged to think about these things before. I can not imagine what I would do without access to research journals, as I am a biology major. Furthermore, what even is knowledge if it can't be accessed and shared with everyone. 

This week I have also enjoyed making connections from previous readings, specifically the one about the grading system, with this weeks readings. I feel as though information privilege and how students strive for certain grades are very much correlated. I wonder if eliminating grades would help with the issue of information privilege in the fact that students may actually continue to explore their research topics after the completion of a class.

When thinking of this in terms of government research, it seems completely ludicrous for the public to have to pay to read these works when their tax dollars paid for it in the first place. The purpose of publishing research is for scientists to share their discoveries with the world and with the convenience of digital copies, this should be easier than ever. Yet, there is still another obstacle in the way.

We plan to accomplish our goal of increasing resources for students hoping to go to graduate school through creating a pamphlet of some sort. The pamphlet would include why we are doing the project in the first place, how we think the current resources are being used, and give ideas on how to elevate and add resources for students wanting to go to graduate school. Finally, we intend to show this pamphlet to the OPCD and potentially department heads of all subjects in order to raise awareness of what needs to be done, as well as to make more known the resources that are available to students.

We are hoping to start this discussion by creating a powerpoint or pamphlet that directly states solutions to this problem. Creating a presentation or a pamphlet will directly show the OPCD and administration what changes need to be made to help develop programs for students wanting to seek higher education.

lack of resources/guidance for those wishing to attend a graduate program after Wake Forest

The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that what I am passionate about is helping studentsto understand and utilize the various levers of social change available to them as well as the essential role ofcitizen activism in a democracy.

Although I generally do notpromoteWikipedia

learning management system

Suddenly all the joy was taken away.

Furthermore, the functions are familiar to our digital-native learners and don’t pose a steep learning curve to nontraditional students.

private university as those at community

We propose a different motivation structure for OER adoption. Our plan is to give some of the estimated yearly savings from OER use to the department, our teaching and learning center, and our library (5 percent/2.5 percent/2.5 percent, respectively). As an example, if a biology course enrolls 1,000 students per year, and the typical text savings would be $100 per student, adoption might save students $100,000 per year. Providing even 5 percent of the projected savings from OER adoption directly to the department as flexible money would be highly motivating to many departments; the teaching center and library are incentivized to support adoption and access. Although the savings from such a plan would accrue to the students, the retention of even one or two additional students due to better textbook usage by the students would, from an institutional perspective, pay for such an initiative. And, particularly for public universities, controlling cost, increasing access and enhancing success align with our mission.

In fact, negative reactions to this proposal (“It’s unrealistic!”) point up how grades function as a mechanism for controlling students rather than as a necessary or constructive way to report information about their performance.

how their performance compares to others’

grades (whether or not accompanied by comments) promote a fear of failure even in high-achieving students (Pulfrey et al., 2011)

Institutions shouldn’t outsource online learning to Coursera, Pearson, or the like, as a substitute for developing internal expertise in and discussion about online learning. What we need is to gather together experts in digital pedagogy willing to turn their attention toward solving the problem of online learning, toward innovating new methodologies, and toward rebuilding what we value most about education in digital space.

Online learning programs fail because they’ve been told, and they believe, they must operate within the same paradigm of learning and teaching that on-ground programs obey. This is a falsehood, a misconception, and at times a deception. More and different types of learning and teaching are available in the digital environment. We must convince ourselves that we don’t yet understand digital education so we may open the doors more broadly to play and creativity. At the expense of regimentation and bureaucracy.

If I'm going to give the responsibility of grading over to students, I have to let go of my attachment to the accuracy of that process. Instead, I give feedback, and the need for objectivity or accuracy gives way to a dialogue—one that is necessarily emergent and subjective.

I have written that:

Traditional online pedagogy, following principles laid out by instructional design, generally assumes that all students are duplicates of one another. Despite any stubborn claims to the contrary, instructional design assigns learners to a single seat, a single set of characteristics. This is for efficiency. But it enacts an erasure that, taken to the extreme—say, to the massive—is unconscionable.

Most practically, critical digital pedagogy looks askance at the tools we use, the tools we are asked to use, the tools that are sold to us. From this lens, we are not only enabled to but we must ask after the promises that digital technology offers. Promises of efficiency, time savings, greater engagement, higher test scores, increased retention, and even deeper relationships with our students through the mediation of algorithms and digital clickers.

For if we don’t allow that what we’re doing with digital teaching and learning now is elementary, still even rudimentary, we fall into the trap of thinking first that it’s always already successful (given that we follow the right rubrics and best practices), and second that we no longer need to learn.

What is needed, what has always been needed—since the early days of videotaped lectures to the primordial ooze of the invention of the LMS—is an effective digital pedagogy that lets us span the interface, cross the digital, and find one another where we are.

In her experience—which she describes again and again as solitary, as lonely—she lacks a sense of presence. The presence of other students, but particularly the presence of a guide, a teacher, someone who could be there to help make sense of out of what she was learning.

But it would be a mistake to think that what I do is digital, because what I really do is human.

And worse, the LMS convinced us that teaching online was not only possible, it was easy—that digital pedagogy was a mere work of relocation. Take your lectures and your assignments, create a slideshow or a video or a piece of audio, load it all up, and there you have it: online learning.

In other words, if our syllabus is full of requirements, rules, expectations, if we outline how we will be grading, how students will be evaluated, the specifics for how students should participate, we cannot expect that our attempts to be more flexible, to be personal, to relate to students will succeed later in the term.

When people are seeking the truth, facts help. But when people are selectively reasoning about their political identity, the facts can backfire.

If you’re addicted to a product, and many scientists tell you it’s deadly, but the tobacco lobby tells you that more research is needed, what would you like to believe?

If a content provider could build a single interface that seamlessly provided for the full discovery, access, reading, and citation experience, that would not only go a long way to combating piracy.  It would also provide many of the most widely appreciated functions of the academic library.

Why am I excited about the New York Times? Because I’m a godless liberal? No, I’m excited because the NY Times pays a price for getting things like this wrong, whereas the Breitbarts of the world suffer no consequences for error. That’s the main difference. The same would be true of the Wall Street Journal, which leans right, or USA Today. which is striaght down the middle. We’re not looking for an ideology match here. We’re looking for someone with incentives to not publish hoaxes.