2021 Week 23

June 1, 2021

215 unmarked graves of children found at a residential school in Kamloops. 51 were documented in the official reports from the school. That means 164 children died without even being recorded. For someone to be buried without acknowledgement in a hidden and unmarked grave just reeks of contempt for human life. TRC estimates over 4,000 children died at residential schools. I hope the horrific truth of what happened comes to light. The last school closed in 1996. The nearest residential school closed in 1969. This is recent¹. The trauma will take generations to heal, if that’s even possible.

⚙️ Work

online assessment

Online quizzes designed to not allow students to review previous answers as they move through the quiz. Yikes. We can’t outright disable that feature in Brightspace, and some instructors really seem to like using that. But, again, yikes.

Pro “make my students suffer”:

Williamson, M. H. (2018). Online exams: The need for best practices and overcoming challenges. The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology, 10(1), 2.

It’s a “best practice”, even!

Pro “students are people and this is a hostile design pattern that we should avoid inflicting upon them”:

Hillman, J. (2012). The impact of online quizzes on student engagement and learning. Project Report. Penn State University.

I’m sure there are lots of articles on both sides of the argument. But I just can’t even muster the energy to gather resources for this when the basic message is “no, really, it’s probably a good idea to not intentionally design hostile assessments and do you really need an article to tell you that?”

F2021 planning

Looks like we’re aiming for things to be back on campus for fall. I hope it works out more smoothly than people are bracing for.

🤔 PhD

Almost done preparing the ethics application for the “design study” research project. Just working on the marketing and consent forms to be included with the application before submitting for approval.

🗓️ Focus for next week

Planning for F2021. Which will be the theme for the entire summer.

I went to a catholic high school that was proudly named after one of the architects of that program in western canada, and had no idea about the connection until recently. The high school did not have any graves on the grounds, marked or unmarked. ↩︎