Importantly, today’s educators in the digital-era have a range of new teaching methods, activities and resources they can consider when choosing their learning designs. Although the traditional face-to-face lecture is not dead, delivering a monologue for an hour to a passive audience of learners is hardly the gold standard of good teaching in the 21st Century–irrespective of delivery mode. This point should not be overlooked in the rush to replace conventional teaching with live online sessions using platforms like Zoom.
Most importantly, what we want to avoid is using old 19th Century teaching methods on new 21st Century technologies to merely dump large volumes of undigested information down large digital diameter pipes to relatively inactive and passive learners.
ICDE has a series of forthcoming webinars you can join and you will find around a dozen different types of online course offerings available right now for educators on our NIDL Resource Bank.
Whether we use synchronous or asynchronous online sessions, whether we call it distance or virtual learning, we’re all challenged to provide meaningful education experiences at a distance as the education world grapples with the impact of Covid-19.
this faculty group conversation is the result of the Zoom issues lately:
Hi everyone, I’m looking for a video conferencing tool/platform that does not need to be downloaded onto a student device (the way that Zoom does, so no Zoom), and operates through a website or in the cloud. It needs to be safe, student friendly, and can accommodate a group of 20, also needs to be able to be used with an iPad. Thoughts? Much appreciated.
8×8.vc https://8×8.vc/ – doesn’t work on safari but chrome/firefox on laptops. on mobile, you’ll need to download the 8×8 Video Meetings app. I’ve used it with over 60 people and it works just fine. If you pick a sufficiently random room name that will stop anyone from guessing it and jumping in. It has screen sharing, call in ability. You can’t kick anyone and if you mute people, they can unmute themselves… there is no “host” but it works pretty well for what I’ve needed lately.
National Research Council’s (2000) four types of learning environments: assessment-centered, community-centered, knowledge-centered, and learner-centered.
The error I see many beginning to make is forgetting about the diverse needs of our younger students or, worse, pushing tools intended for older students on younger ones. When considering immersive technology resources for our early elementary students, I’ve shared some important, practical areas to keep in mind.
A virtual reality (VR) medical training system built by Oxford Medical Simulation (OMS) is now being offered for free during the COVID-19 pandemic to help hospitals and medical schools bring in badly-needed additional staffers to provide patient care.
Contact pmiltenoff@stcloudstate.edu if you need more info/support, clarifications. E.g. among the great tools in the list is EdPuzzle (https://edpuzzle.com/). EdPuzzle does very much the same as theVideo Quiz in the MinnState MediaSpace (aka Kaltura); we can help you figure out advantages and disadvantages of the tools, their pedagogical application and make final choice.
Algorithmic test proctoring’s settings have discriminatory consequences across multiple identities and serious privacy implications.
While racist technology calibrated for white skin isn’t new (everything from photography to soap dispensers do this), we see it deployed through face detection and facial recognition used by algorithmic proctoring systems.
While some test proctoring companies develop their own facial recognition software, most purchase software developed by other companies, but these technologies generally function similarly and have shown a consistent inability to identify people with darker skin or even tell the difference between Chinese people. Facial recognition literally encodes the invisibility of Black people and the racist stereotype that all Asian people look the same.
As Os Keyes has demonstrated, facial recognition has a terrible history with gender. This means that a software asking students to verify their identity is compromising for students who identify as trans, non-binary, or express their gender in ways counter to cis/heteronormativity.
These features and settings create a system of asymmetric surveillance and lack of accountability, things which have always created a risk for abuse and sexual harassment. Technologies like these have a long history of being abused, largely by heterosexual men at the expense of women’s bodies, privacy, and dignity.
my note: I am repeating this for years
Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel’s ongoing critique of Turnitin, a plagiarism detection software, outlines exactly how this logic operates in ed-tech and higher education: 1) don’t trust students, 2) surveil them, 3) ignore the complexity of writing and citation, and 4) monetize the data.
Technological Solutionism
Cheating is not a technological problem, but a social and pedagogical problem.
Our habit of believing that technology will solve pedagogical problems is endemic to narratives produced by the ed-tech community and, as Audrey Watters writes, is tied to the Silicon Valley culture that often funds it. Scholars have been dismantling the narrative of technological solutionism and neutrality for some time now. In her book “Algorithms of Oppression,” Safiya Umoja Noble demonstrates how the algorithms that are responsible for Google Search amplify and “reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling.”
Anna Lauren Hoffmann, who coined the term “data violence” to describe the impact harmful technological systems have on people and how these systems retain the appearance of objectivity despite the disproportionate harm they inflict on marginalized communities.
This system of measuring bodies and behaviors, associating certain bodies and behaviors with desirability and others with inferiority, engages in what Lennard J. Davis calls the Eugenic Gaze.
Higher education is deeply complicit in the eugenics movement. Nazism borrowed many of its ideas about racial purity from the American school of eugenics, and universities were instrumental in supporting eugenics research by publishing copious literature on it, establishing endowed professorships, institutes, and scholarly societies that spearheaded eugenic research and propaganda.
