I've been reading the awesome "Pwning Tomorrow" speculative fiction anthology published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fantastic stories written by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and many others, exploring the implications of technology policies. They look at biology (hacking genomes etc.), privacy (internet-of-things writ large), communications, surveillance, and many others. Some are subtle. Some, less so. But every story has made me think.

It hit me - we need something like this, to explore issues in educational technology. We have scholarly publications, we have critique and commentary, but we need future-looking explorations of the implications of what this stuff may mean for teaching, learning, and society.

We’re setting up a bunch¹ of “collaboration carts” in the new building. They’ll be used to do a bunch of things (videoconferencing, wireless collaborative displays via Mersive Solstice Pod, Google Docs, Office 365) - when someone plugs one into a floor box, it fires up and asks them what they want it to be. One of the things we want it to be able to become is a digital whiteboard - as much as people love digital stuff, they really love whiteboards.

Babb, S., Stewart, C., & Johnson, R. (2010). Constructing Communication in Blended Learning Environments: Students’ Perceptions of Good Practice in Hybrid Courses. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 6(4), 735–753.

Notes:

p.736: Technology alone cannot create an effective learning community without the support of theory to fortify the course design — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

p.736: Students in hybrid courses also feel a stronger sense of community with their classmates and professor when compared with both traditional and online students (Rovai & Jordan, 2004) — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Roulet, G. (1990). Using the interact system model to analyze computer mediated communication during a small group problem-solving task. Proceedings of the Third Guelph Symposium on Computer Mediated Communication, 168–180.

Notes:

p.170: This model, an outgrowth of general system theory, “treats units of communication, rather than human beings, as components of a small group system” — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

p.170: Each message has two dimensions, a content or task component and a relational factor. — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Garrison, D. R., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Koole, M. (2006). Revisiting methodological issues in transcript analysis: Negotiated coding and reliability. The Internet and Higher ….

Notes:

p.4: While assigning frequencies to the classifications is an aid in understanding patterns, this does not make it a quantitative, inferential statistical procedure. We are in the early stages of understanding and explaining the complexities of online conferencing and educational discourse. The goal is descriptive, not predictive — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Hartshorne, R., & Ajjan, H. (2009). Examining student decisions to adopt Web 2.0 technologies: theory and empirical tests. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 21(3), 183–198. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-009-9023-6

Notes:

p.185: providing settings and opportunities for both social connectivity and collaborative environments, each considered by many constructivist theorists as important elements of effective teaching and learning environments — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

p.185: student publication can result in more positive attitudes toward content areas, increased motivation levels, and increased student achievement — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Levy, K. E. C. (2015). The user as network. First Monday, 20(11), 3257. http://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466446

Notes:

p.3258: conceptualizing users as networks: as constellations of power relations and institutional entanglements, mediated through technologies. — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

p.3258: Most contemporary models of use, then — even as they differentiate among degrees of use and acknowledge the fluidity of use states — still conceptualize the user (or non-user) as a fairly isolated unit with respect to her engagement with the technology in question. Though the spectrum model helps us to acknowledge political power in some ways (e.g., by highlighting that some people do not use a technology because they lack social or economic access to it, rather than because they have voluntarily opted out), I suggest that it obscures a number of other social dynamics, which emerge only when networks of institutional and interpersonal relation are accounted for. An individual use model fails to account for those who are affected by a technology beyond the ostensible user — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Smith, M. A., Rainie, L., & Shneiderman, B. (2014). Mapping twitter topic networks: From polarized crowds to community clusters. Pew Research Internet ….

Notes:

p.5: Social media is increasingly home to civil society, the place where knowledge sharing, public discussions, debates, and disputes are carried out. As the new public square, social media conversations are as important to document as any other large public gathering. Network maps of public social media discussions in services like Twitter can provide insights into the role social media plays in our society. These maps are like aerial photographs of a crowd, showing the rough size and composition of a population. These maps can be augmented with on the ground interviews with crowd participants, , collecting their words and interests . Insights from network analysis and visualization can complement surv vey or focus group research methods and can enhance sentiment analysis of the text of messages like tweets . — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Cronin, K. A., Acheson, D. J., Hernández, P., & Sánchez, A. (2015). Hierarchy is Detrimental for Human Cooperation. Scientific Reports, 5, 18634. http://doi.org/10.1038/srep18634

Notes:

p.18639: achieving cooperation among humans is more difficult when there is an underlying hierarchical structure producing different ranks between people and therefore unequal payoffs for the participants. This result is driven by insufficient contributions from lower ranked individuals who cannot be confident that they will benefit from cooperating. Remarkably, human behavior is consistent with a trend that permeates the rest of the primate order; primates in steeply hierarchical societies have difficulty cooperating for benefits that must be divided1 16,21,42 , whereas primates organized in weakly hierarchical (egalitarian) societies are more successful1 16,37 . — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Cann, A. J., & Badge, J. L. (2011). Reflective Social Portfolios for Feedback and Peer Mentoring.

Notes:

p.6: To facilitate construction of student-owned eportfolios, we initially selected two wiki sites (wetpaint.com, wikispaces.com) and a blogging tool (wordpress.com) as the choices promoted to students, although students were told that they were free to use whatever tools they wish to build their eportfolio as long as they discuss and justify their choice with a member of staff before embarking on the project. The outcome of the preceding evaluation project was to select these tools rather than commercially available e portfolio packages since these are free, and available to students for as long as they wish to use them. In the event, all the the students elected to use the wiki architecture, although they used the sites in different ways. To assist in the construction of eportfolios, students were give exemplars based on a fictional first year student. These were hosted on the Wetpaint/Wikispaces/Wordpress.com sites. Students were also given assessment criteria and a schedule of four assessment deadlines. The assessment criteria were based loosely on the reported e e portfolio assessment criteria from Penn State University (Penn State University, 2006). — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Del Vicario, M., Bessi, A., & Zollo, F. (2016). The spreading of misinformation online (Vol. 113, pp. 201517441–559). Presented at the Proceedings of the …. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517441113

Notes:

p.201517441: Whether a claim (either substantiated or not) is accepted by an individual is strongly influenced by social norms and by the claim’ ’ s coherence with the individual ’ ’s belief system– –– –i.e., con firmation bias (32, 33). Many mechanisms animate the flow of false information that generates false beliefs in an individual, which, once adopted, are rarely corrected (34– – –37). — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Baron, D., Bestbier, A., Case, J. M., & Collier-Reed, B. I. (2016). Investigating the effects of a backchannel on university classroom interactions: A mixed-method case study. Computers & Education, 94, 61–76. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.11.007

Notes:

p.63: than half the class using the backchannel. This study did show that the ‘ like ’ feature had greater take up than the asking of questions, although they found that organizational messages, such as requesting lecture slides or asking for a light to be turned on were ‘ liked ’ the most out of any other type of posting. Messages relating to actual course content were rated less frequently. The study by Du et al. (2012) showed much higher levels of — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016