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.
