During the Reclaim Hackathon at UMW last week, several of us were talking over food and beverages and realized that we had the opportunity to document the current thinking in the “edtech scene”. It’s something that we hadn’t tried to do explicitly before, but we realized that if we don’t do it ourselves we’ll be left with the narratives pushed by the Big Business of Edtech Venture Capital™. So, David Kernohan and I took it on as a project. We recruited Andy Rush to record a series of impromptu interviews with some of the people who were present at the event1, and off we went.
Ed-tech works like this: you sign up for a service and you’re flagged as either “teacher” or “student” or “admin.” Depending on that role, you have different “privileges” — that’s an important word, because it doesn’t simply imply what you can and cannot do with the software. It’s a nod to political power, social power as well.
Many pieces of software, despite their invocation of “personalization,” present you with a very restricted, restrictive set of choices of who you “can be.”
I really don’t know what to say about this. My gut reaction is something like “if they’re tuning out and checking Facebook in class, that’s data about how the class is going, and banning technology would just hide the symptom rather than actually fixing anything.”
Also, the prof still uses her own tech in every class, with laptop and projector etc… fired up. So, it’s not about technology on its own.
When we work with instructors, there are 3 general groupings, in terms of their comfort level and technology integration and innovation in their courses.
Reluctant
There is a small group that doesn’t use much technology, doesn’t integrate much in their teaching, and don’t pursue any strategies that would be considered “innovative.” From the outside, this group is often labelled as Luddites or dismissed as being laggards, but that is definitely not always the case. There are important innovations happening in this group, but they may not be visible to outsiders because they aren’t using the shared language of silicon valley innovation. Not every innovation requires high technology, or even technology at all. We can learn much from the Reluctant adopters, because many of them are reluctant to adopt mainstream technology because it doesn’t do what they need.
I did some googling (DuckDuckGoing? that’s not a thing yet, is it?) on Michael Betzler, who was the director on the previous skateboarding documentary. Looks like he now is/was director at the olympic media consortium. Before that, he was involved in this bit of awesomeness.
I would have been the same age as my son is now, when this footage was shot. Wow. My dad had his insurance agency in the Lougheed Building downtown, so I would have been down there pretty regularly. Amazing, how much the city has changed in just a handful of decades…
I picked up a Swivl robot camera mount to kick off our “tech lending library” here in the EDU. It’s a pretty interesting piece of kit that will let anyone record a session without having to spend $100K retrofitting a classroom with PTZ cameras and switching boards. Slap this thing onto a desk or tripod, drop your iPhone (or iPad, or Android device) into the slot, plug the microphone cable into the mic jack on your device, and hit record. Done. It now automatically tracks the lanyard, which also has a built-in microphone that sends decent audio to the recording device. Nice.
I’ve been noticing this for awhile under iOS7, but had been hoping it was a storage bug that would have been fixed in iOS8. Nope.
I “cheaped out” by only springing for the 16GB iPhone5, which means that I effectively get 12GB of space for stuff like apps, music, photos, etc… Shouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve been hitting the cap pretty regularly now. I’ve resorted to deleting big apps, deleting all of the music that I’d put on the phone (thankfully the train ride is very short now), but still the danged phone reports no free storage.
I didn’t really (fully) articulate my position(s) on in my recent LMS post, either. I kind of ran out of steam at 1600 words. Maybe for the better. (I’m still not fully articulating things yet - more to come later, if I can come up with the energy - but I wanted to respond quickly to Brian)
I am really not a fan of the LMS as an end-state, but it’s a symptom of institutional models, not the illness itself. Unless/until the nature of post-secondary institutions changes pretty radically, the LMS (or something like it) is here to stay. Yeah. I feel it too.
long, rambling post alert. it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, so lots of things have been stewing. bear with me.
It’s fashionable to hate the LMS. It’s the poster child for Enterprise Thinking and lazy (online) pedagogy, so it is easy to rail against the LMS as The Cause of All Educational Evil. The LMS is put into the stocks, and we are expected to stand in the town square and throw rotten fruit at it.
Looks like the Connected Courses open course thing is shaping up to be kind of awesome. This is a placeholder post to let it sniff out the feed for the #connectedcourses tag here on the old blogstead. Here’s hoping my copious free time will be put to good use.
Fall 2014 Block Week kicked off today, meaning we just pushed into the 2014-2015 academic year. Holy. The last one is basically just a blur. But, we did a surprisingly epic number of major things as a team1:
Migrating from Blackboard to D2L in about 8 months, including:
building and testing the integration with Peoplesoft & Elluminate
designing and conducting workshops to support a couple thousand instructors
working to help get the 31,000 FTE student body through the move
