Individual Post #1 Instructions Your task in this post is to respond to the three topic 1 readings. Let your curiosity be your guide in how you respond, but here are some possible questions you might
Individual Post #1 Instructions
Your task in this post is to respond to the three topic 1 readings.
Let your curiosity be your guide in how you respond, but here are some possible questions you might answer:
what was the muddiest concept in one of the readings?
what did you disagree with?
what was your 'Aha!' moment?
what do you want to learn more about?
...feel free to ask (and answer) your own question.
Many educators, both in public (K-12, higher ed) and private (corporate, non-profit) education systems have found themselves in a situation that requires them to think for the first time about how their learners access learning opportunities. Due to coronavirus and COVID-19, most public spaces have been physically closed, including schools and businesses of all kinds, but required to stay open to continue operations through some sort of technology. This has led to an inevitable question:
What is the best technology for education?
Some might think it is a learning management system, like Moodle, or D2L Brightspace, or maybe Zoom, or MS Teams, or AI. The list could go on for a very long time, as you may have experienced in the spring of 2020. The fact is, none of these technologies can do anything to teach. All of these technologies are completely reliant on the input of a caring and competent person to engage with the people on the other side of the 'screen', who are the learners. And that is a focus of this first topic in EDCI 339.
As you read Stommel (2018), think about ways that we are constrained by the technologies we use. For instance, where is this post displayed in CourseSpaces? Is that an ideal space? How does Moodle (the software that UVic calls CourseSpaces) and the technical infrastructure define how we interact with each other? With the content?
Second...
How can community develop in these remote and technologically mediated learning environments?
One strategy that we are employing in EDCI 339 is to have you work in Learning Pods (groups) so that you can have a smaller group of people with whom we hope you will connect and support during the course. This is a structure based on the practice of cooperative learning, a set of strategies that create the conditions for significant levels of interaction between learners in a course.
To help you get an idea of how this structure is theorized in higher ed, the topic 1 reading from Vaughan, Garrison, and Cleveland-Innes (2013)[chapter 1], (which is a free download!) describes the idea of a Community of Inquiry which consists of three presences:
cognitive
teaching
social
Finally...
How should educators respond to the proliferation of "educational" technologies that are really just ways for corporations to steal learner work and data?
Your third reading this topic, (Regan & Jesse, 2019), explores the ethics of big data in educational environments. Why do we allow, no, why do we pay companies like TurnItIn to scrape learners' work (assignments) through invasive surveillance only to have them profit from your work.
