Found Through Twitter

Pedagogy is the dance – Pixabay

The Twitter community of educators is my go-to place for finding current research along with conferences and webinars in my areas of interest. Fellow cMOOC participants and the people they follow curate a rich set of resources for self-directed professional development. In this post I review two articles that relate to educational technology. The first is highly theoretical and the second extremely practical.

In An Entangled Pedagogy: Looking Beyond the Pedagogy—Technology Dichotomy,
Tim Fawns (2022) troubles the determinism implied in an oft-repeated mantra of “pedagogy before technology” that attempted to separate between humanism and tools. Fawns insist the two cannot be separated that cleanly because they are inextricably entangled; neither pedagogy nor technology are the drivers. They shape and reshape each other mutually and are dependent on the context of teachers, students, and the institutional environment. Fawns proposes an aspirational view of the dance where “Purpose, context and values [are] emphasized over methods and tech … enhancing uncertainty, imperfection, openness and honesty” (p. 9). This aspirational dance requires trust and confidence that institutional values support educators who have the required expertise to embrace the complexity. This entanglement, says Fawns, has application both to ethics and research, helping us see deeper than “crude categories (e.g. ‘Zoom’ or ‘lectures’) [and] allows us to contextualise what is actually happening and respond to the diverse and situated needs in front of us” (p. 13).

Full text of the article is downloadable for free at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7.pdf

Fawns, T. (2022). An entangled pedagogy: Looking beyond the pedagogy—technology dichotomy. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7


WhatsApp Chat Logo – Pixabay

Third places: cultivating mobile communities of practice in the global south (Gachago et al., 2021) reports on an early-pandemic study of South African communities of practice formed outside of the institution by black and female professionals whose employment is the most contingent in the “highly conservative and patriarchal structures in both their institutions and society” (p. 340). Third spaces are akin to coffee shops, places neither home nor office, where practitioners can support each other in times of crisis independent of institutional constraints. Their virtual third space in WhatsApp provided a mobile lifeline for “academics across multiple institutions [who] reported an overwhelming need for additional support” (p. 337) triggered by the pivot to online teaching in the Covid crisis. The group shared questions, solutions and new insights to anything from technology (obviously) to student issues to home life as they formed social bonds through shared experiences. The authors cite at least one instance where solidarity through the women’s community of practice enabled them to move final assessments online against their male colleagues’ resistance. The article concludes with suggestions about what such communities might look like after Covid, perhaps with a different focus but retaining “the knowledge that one small group of remarkable and determined women can have a significant impact on how an entire university weathers a period of profound crisis” (p 343).

Full text of the article is free for a limited time at
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1360144X.2021.1955363

Gachago, D., Cruz, L., Belford, C., Livingston, C., Morkel, J., Patnaik, S., & Swartz, B. (2021). Third places: Cultivating mobile communities of practice in the global south. International Journal for Academic Development, 26(3), 335–346. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2021.1955363

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Module one – #Ethics21 MOOC

This post is out of order. I wrote it two weeks ago, but (like the occasional very important email) I found it in my drafts folder after publishing my next two blogposts for this MOOC.

So, around 12 OCT 2021 I wrote:

I’m watching the recording from Stephen‘s intro yesterday to Ethics, Analytics, and the Duty of Care. First thing that really jumps out at me, – I may have missed something earlier because I was making coffee – is at 12:31 where he talks about using analytics “not only … to improve the educational process but to support learning itself.” I think this is going where I hoped it might.

And I am pretty far in the weeds around 34 minutes when Stephen starts talking about the intersections of applications, values, and practices in relation to ethics and literacy. This is going to get challenging.

In the discussion starting at 43 minutes, Bernie remarked on Stephen’s rising to the challenges and refusing to be satisfied with only what exists. Bernie remarks, if you don’t like the tools, you’ll make one. Reminds me of a conversation with Stephen in 2017 about his project for creating an operating system on a flash drive with everything you need to work on any computer in spite of security settings. Stephen said, I don’t know if it’s possible but I’m working on it. That captures a quality that I admire. Even though solving ethics is impossible, it’s something we have to keep working on. And I’ve heard him say several times in this MOOC, ”I’m not sure if this is gonna work but I’m trying it.”

I love his answer at 47:40 to the problem of how do you influence students’ perception of what is right instead of what is forced on them by authority when you are only an infinitesimally tiny part of their world. Stephen says “ The only answer I have is to model and demonstrate.”

To get this posted, I am not going to write a conclusion. These are my scattered random thoughts, mostly observations, dictated into a Google doc and pasted into WordPress. But I will add this totally gratuitous photo of some of some Ubuntu I’m working on with University of Alberta that has me at the edge of my ZPD.

Ubuntu text showing an error on tiny 7 inch monitor
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#Ethics21 MOOC Week Two – Applications of AI

I viewed the module two Ethics, Analytics, and the Duty of Care webpages on Saturday, including the list of applications of analytics. I also watched the live session and the first two videos – where I enjoyed seeing Stephen work through the process. I knew he eventually succeeded because I had already viewed the page that he was still trying to create on Tuesday – weird time warp. I immediately thought of another application that I could add, but I believe I misshandled it the first time. After I added a URL I realized that the application should have some different information. So here’s what I did.

I first added the application as the name of the particular piece of software, Kritik, rather than giving it a descriptive title. For the description, I mainly copied and pasted benefits from the application’s website. Once I saw the difference between submitting an application and adding the URL of a specific example of the application, I realized that I had done my first application submission incorrectly. So I went back to post a new submission calling the application “peer feedback analysis” and writing my own description.

Since I was doing this on Saturday after that part of the MOOC was mainly finished, I don’t suppose any harm was done that Stephen can’t override.

I have a brief but interesting history with Kritik. A colleague asked me to review it, because she was quite excited over its potential for improving students feedback to one another. I tweeted for info on Kritik, remarking that it might not be “my optimum moment to consider an unknown piece of algorithm-driven edTech” having just come from Chris Gilliard, Sean Michael Morris, and Ruha Benjamin’s review of “Coded Bias.” To which Autumm Caines replied “just gonna throw this out there, perhaps it is exactly the optimum moment for you to consider an unknown piece of algo driven edtech. You know. Like the universe lining things up.” My colleague never did find out what Kritik did with student data, and funding for a trial wasn’t approved by her department head, so that’s where that story ended.

As usual, I’m doing this on the weekend after all the interesting activities of the week are over. I am seldom going to be able to join the live sessions, and I usually don’t have time to catch up with the videos until the weekend. However, I am happy to be able to participate even if I’m not right on top of things or able to get my contributions discussed in the live sessions. And this post is composed in the WordPress mobile app. However, it is painstakingly typed rather than dictated. This app hides parts of my dictation, then unexpectedly makes multiple copies of sentences that have to be deleted. Next post I’m going back to dictating into a Google doc, then pasting into WordPress.

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#ethics21 MOOC First Week – What are ethics?

At the outset, ethics, can seem fairly simple. It’s what should be done. That’s normative. Then of course, one immediately runs into both ontological and epistemological questions. First, does there even exist a set of criteria or standards that universally normalize what should be done? And then, if we accept that there might be such a set, where would we find it, and how would we know that this is the set of standards that we could call ethics by which we decide what should be done in any given case.

I’m going to start with the assumption that there are certain things that should be done, that there is a standard by which we can measure what should be done. And I’ll admit a certain agnosticism about our ability to know exactly what that is for each and every situation. In broad strokes, I think most of us know what’s required to be decent people – to show love to our neighbour if we acknowledge a biblical or theological standard. Most of us have some idea of justice, or equity, to use perhaps a more nuanced term. And recent work by Maha Bali has brought that very much to the forefront, both in my mind and in consciousness in educational circles.

But of course, it’s all too easy to propose ethical dilemmas. And these may be less frequent, but they’re often trotted out to demonstrate that there are ethical conflicts. And I know we’re going to run into those in analytics, because on the one hand, there can be some real benefits to students, while on the other hand, there are ways that these can also be harmful, especially, harmful to marginalized students.

Dictated to Otter.ai – a diagnostic application of AI as I learned in week two – this text sat on my phone for a week before I got it posted. I was used to dictating punctuation in other apps, but I found otter just transcribes the punctuation commands. Other than that, I had only three or four transcription errors to edit. I’m not editing content because I’m determined to post my raw thoughts for this course. I can always write a paper later and clean up my thoughts.

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Starting #ethics21

Well, I have resisted delving into learning analytics long enough.

Student data analytics has smacked of math and manipulating people, two things that both fascinate and repel me. Stephen Downs is offering an Analytics MOOC bracketed by ethics, and duty of care in the title. That’s enough to draw me in. And of course, the fact that it is Stephen Downs, who co-facilitated my very first cMOOC (PENK 2010), is also a big draw to me. I had a bit of a fanboy moment with Stephen in Toronto at the ICDE World Conference in 2017 when I finally met one of my cMOOC heroes in person.

Shout out to Matthias Melcher for his X28’s blog post that alerted me to this opportunity.

So over the next couple of months I’ll be muttering my developing thoughts about the justaposition of ethics and analytics into blog posts here, mostly dictating into Google Docs as I mull over what I’m learning from others. It won’t be anything too organized, but it’s my way of participating. Maybe I’ll even figure out how to dictate new posts directly into the WordPress app on my phone. I think I’ll also sign up for the newsletter on mailchimp, since I’m a bit lazy about chasing down an RSS feed harvester. Perhaps that’s something else I’ll learn how to do well in this MOOC.

To close, here’s a totally gratuitous sunrise photo from my morning walk a few weeks ago
to brighten up the bottom of this rather drab WordPress page.

sunrise against overhead clouds above dark road with trees on the skyline
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Micro Fiction Attempt Two

For Laura Gibbs’ #microfiction stream (AKA Critical Pedagogy and Storytelling) at Digital Pedagogy Lab 2021 (DPL), I am documenting my writing process here.

This time I did concoct (is that a term writers use? – I wouldn’t know) an original story. It’s set in the future and is roughly based on a current outdoor project of mine. It also pokes a bit of fun at my wokeness and my embrace of Tuck & Yang’s 2012 article, Decolonizing is not a Metaphor. Instead of writing a draft this time, I turned on the otter.ai app on my phone as I related my story idea to my wife. Below is the unedited text including my “Like that?” question to my wife at the end before I stopped the recording.

Detour Warning: Text to speech can be a powerfully freeing tool for those who struggle with basic writing skills but it might require some creative approaches. Voice recognition has not yet matured enough to embrace most Indigenous Canadian speech patterns. I teach* adult learners for whom the education system failed. They have great stories to tell, but asking them to write chokes any enjoyment or creativity out of it. I started by writing their dictation myself, moved to recording them to make that easier, and finally repeated their stories phrase by phrase while they watched the transcript appear in a Google doc.
*taught – have to keep reminding myself of my recent reassignment to a faculty development role in our new CTL
End of Detour

Ok, the draft:

Walking trees. Why did that white guy plant such a crooked row of trees. Well, now that’s an interesting story. He lived here with us for over 30 years and started going on and on about decolonizing his fence. He figured that if you planted trees that would be a more welcoming marker of the survey boundary than a fence, we kept going on and on about this and he actually took the fence down. Wow. It was rotten and falling over anyhow. Then he planted trees. He said they’d be more, they they acknowledged this survey line, but they’d be more welcoming inviting people to walk between them where the fence, seemed to say keep out. One morning he got up and found that the trees were no longer in a straight row. Oh my goodness, he said I didn’t carry the colonizing decolonizing far enough, and the trees decolonized themselves and rearrange themselves in a more natural pattern. So that’s why his row of trees are crooked. He’s gone now, along with a lot of the people who lived here when he did. I wonder if over there, they ever told him about the night. They quietly dug up his trees and replanted them like that.

Now the 100-word edit

Why did that white guy plant such a crooked row of trees? 
Interesting question. Thirty years he’s with us when he sets about decolonializing his fence. “Trees,” he tells us, “indicate the survey line, but invite walking through it.” 
One morning, those trees are growin’ all over the place. “Ah,” he reckons, “I didn’t carry decolonization far enough, so the trees walked themselves into more natural patterns.”  
He’s buried here in our graveyard beside plenty of our people from that time. I wonder if, over there, they ever told him about the night we quietly replanted his row of trees.

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Micro Fiction Attempts

For Laura Gibbs’ #microfiction stream (AKA Critical Pedagogy and Storytelling) at Digital Pedagogy Lab 2021 (DPL), I’ll attempt to document my writing process here.

I’m thinking of trying to adapt and condense some stories I already know before making up my own. The term “fiction” may be problematic because some regard the myths I’m retelling as historical fact. I’ll deal with it by saying I’m an equal opportunity offender, including both biblical and Indigenous retellings under the microfiction label.

My first attempt at retelling Haman’s story from the Bible is really short because I was looking at the character count on easyWordCount.com instead of the word count. I’ll be able to add more details later.

Haman built a gallows to impale his enemy Mordecai but had to honour him instead. Queen Esther denounced Haman to the king, and he was hoist on his own petard.

I wrote the next one without a word counter after reading a dozen or more of the suggested #100wordstories examples. I overestimated and made it only 64 words long, So I can add another detail or two. It’s adapted from a Tlicho origin story available at TlichoHistory.ca. Tlicho is often translated literally as ribs of a dog, and Indian Affairs called the nation “Dogrib” until the early 2000’s.

She couldn’t regret marrying the handsome stranger.
Sure he had turned out to be a shapeshifter whom her brother killed while he was in dog form.
Still, she loved the puppies she had birthed and cared for them tenderly.
When she discovered they could shift into child form, she trapped three of them in that state.
From them descended all the Tlicho (Dogrib) people

Now to refine it a bit for posting to at DPL

She could never regret marrying the handsome night-hunting stranger.
Sure he had turned out to be a canine shapeshifter, whom her brothers casually killed outside his lodge one night before he could reassume human appearance. And yes, her family banished her saying she smelled like a dog.
Still, she loved the puppies she birthed and played games with them as joyfully and tenderly as any mother.
When footprints around their solitary camp betrayed them shifting into child form in her absences, she cunningly trapped two boys and a girl permanently in that state.
From these descended all the Tlicho people.

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A Hole in the LMS

hole-in-the-LMSDoes your LMS have a hole?  It’s not a leak.  It’s a necessary feature.

In our online class at Royal Roads University this week, Learning Management Systems are under the microscope.  To the question about a favourite LMS, I’m going to say “Any LMS + Open Web”.  Below is what I posted in the closed Moodle forum.

“Learning Management Systems may be unavoidable in institutions, but inevitable does not mean a single story.   I strongly favor the practice of linking outside the LMS for features that are richer than the LMS can provide.  Anything I put into the LMS effectively dies when access is closed, if it isn’t erased outright by the Admin.  But if we discuss a burning issue on my blog, I can keep the conversation for future reference years from now.  And if you or I link it on Facebook, others outside the class can join in giving us an even richer diversity of perspectives.  So I’m going to practice what I preach and copy this to my blog.   For the sake of click-analytics that affect your grade, do comment here of course, but come over to www.wayupnorth.ca/blog and paste your response into a comment there too.  I’d love to have you disagree with me or take the vision farther than I could have imagined it.”

Besides blog discussions, we could talk about preserving images on Flickr, audio recordings on SoundCloud, videos on YouTube, etc.  I’m conflating sharing with preservation.  Those are sharing services, of course, not reliable cloud storage, but for the purpose of escaping from a mandatory LMS, they illustrate my point.

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Convergence

I stepped aside from my struggles with the incredible amount of homework taking six graduate course credits in six weeks entails long enough to look at what I was learning about research.  I’ve a long way to go yet, but here’s a partial list:

  • Theoretical frameworks are hard work, but not guesswork.
  • The difference between a bibliography annotation and a research summary is more than just a word count.
  • Academic critique is not the same as negative criticism.
  • Google Scholar knows where full text articles hide when the university library doesn’t.
  • Reference lists provide more than just APA compliance.

I have discovered that locating sources from the reference list helps me discover practical applications for research findings.  The cognitive load theory research by Wong, Leahy, Marcus, & Sweller (2012) led me to Sweller’s 1994 work on cognitive load theory, a substantial read during which I accomplished very little writing, but a lot to think about that begins to converge with my teaching practice.  Sweller’s “schema”, his word for algorithms or methods we retrieve from long-term memory to solve problems without having to analyze or figure them out from scratch (my interpretation, not paraphrase), require very little working memory, and storing these schema in long-term memory, he claims, is the goal of learning (1994).  This seemed a bit simplistic and behaviourist; “but it was 1994” I typed in a PDF comment.  Then I discovered his “goal-free problems” (Sweller, 1994, p. 301) example where the teacher removes the goal of finding a specific angle in a trigonometry problem and asks students instead to find the value of as many angles as they can.  By removing the specific goal, the students are freed from the cognitive load of determining “the” intermediate steps and, solving what they can, inductively formulate the schema (Sweller, 1994; Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga, 2011).  I have more reading to do, but this promises to transform my developmental math instruction.

References

Sweller, J. (1994). Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design. Learning and Instruction, 4(4), 295–312. http://doi.org/10.1016/0959-4752(94)90003-5

Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive Load Theory. Springer Science & Business Media. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?id=sSAwbd8qOAAC

Wong, A., Leahy, W., Marcus, N., & Sweller, J. (2012). Cognitive load theory, the transient information effect and e-learning. Learning and Instruction, 22(6), 449–457. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2012.05.004

 

 

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The Price of Open

Early in our LRNT 502 Introduction to Research course we received an invitation to visit Academia.edu.  My first impression was not a positive one.  Faced with a login screen, I signed in with my Google account and immediately began receiving unsolicited email.  I searched for reviews and found negative comments on an otherwise positive review (Academia.edu reviews – legit or scam?, 2015) about the service’s practice of data gathering on members, even suggesting that it might be illegal (Jason, 2015; Charles, 2015). Further searches for information on the service identified no more spam issues however, and I realize that the two negative comments posted on the same date may not reflect independent opinions or reliable information.

The remaining information I found focused on the issue discussed in Wecker’s (2014) review about takedown notices from journals objecting to copyrighted materials being posted for free distribution.  While I strongly agree with Stephen Downes that publicly funded research should be open (2016), I also agree with Banchetti’s (2012) comments “Copyright is copyright” and “Publishing is a business” (n.p.) arguing that authors must respect the terms of copyright agreements they sign with a journal. Ever the champion of open access, even Downes recognizes that someone must pay, and argues that open educational resources (OER) require a sustainability model if they are to replace a paid publication and distribution system (2006).  Academia.edu’s data mining still seems invasive (I now have an unsolicited follower), but that may be one sustainability model showing the price of open.

 

References

Academia.edu Reviews – Legit or Scam? (2015). Retrieved August 7, 2016, from http://www.reviewopedia.com/academia-edu-reviews

Banchetti, M. (2012). Re: Should you share your research on academia.edu? [Blog comment] Retrieved August 7, 2016 from https://chroniclevitae.com/news/345-should-you-share-your-research-on-academia-edu

Charles, G. (2015, November 13). Re: Academia.edu reviews – Legit or scam? [Blog comment]. Retrieved August 7, 2016 from http://www.reviewopedia.com/academia-edu-reviews

Downes, S. (2006). Models for sustainable 0pen educational resources. Retrieved August 7, 2016, from http://nparc.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/view/object/?id=dfac7874-dbe9-40f9-8f06-3212ef05ddf8

Downes, S. (2016, June 17). Canada’s new plan on open government 2016-2018. Retrieved from http://www.downes.ca/post/65460

Jason. (2015, November 13). Re: Academia.edu reviews – Legit or scam? [Blog comment]. Retrieved August 7, 2016 from http://www.reviewopedia.com/academia-edu-reviews

Wecker, M. (2014). Should you share your research on Academia.edu? Retrieved from https://chroniclevitae.com/news/345-should-you-share-your-research-on-academia-edu

 

 

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