Some #StrawBan arguments are calls for mediating rights and accessibility by diagnosis, something familiar to disabled and neurodivergent people.
The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by a diagnosis.
#SuckItAbleism
Every classroom that penalizes students for distributed modes of attention organizes learning according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that sees the moving body as the distracted body is organized according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that teaches predominantly for one mode of perception is organizing its learning according to a norm. Every classroom that knows in advance what knowledge looks and sounds like is working to a norm.
Source: Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm – Los Angeles Review of Books
Along with critical pedagogy, I follow critical psychiatry. The critical psychiatry perspective is an important one when evaluating ed-tech behaviorism.
https://boren.blog/tag/critical-psychiatry/
Critical pedagogy and critical psychiatry have lots of common ground: structural ideology, equity literacy, and fixing injustice instead of people.
Equity literacy and psychological safety, not behaviorism and mindset marketing.
On Twitter, that’s one line standing alone. On a blog, a reductionist aphorism can show its work.
If I had a desert island EdTech, it would be blogging, and that is not just in a nostalgic sense. No other educational technology has continued to develop, as the proliferation of WordPress sites attests, and also remain so full of potential. I’ve waxed lyrical about academic blogging many times before, but for almost every ed tech that comes along, I find myself thinking that a blog version would be better: e-portfolios, VLEs, MOOCs, OERs, social networks. Sometimes it’s like Jim Groom and Alan Levine have taken over my brain, and I don’t even mind. I still harbour dreams of making students effective bloggers will be a prime aspect of graduateness. Nothing develops and anchors your online identity quite like a blog.
Source: 25 Years of EdTech – 2003: Blogs – The Ed Techie
No other edtech has continued to develop and solidify (as the proliferation of WordPress sites attests) and also remain so full of potential. For almost every edtech that comes along—e-portfolios, VLEs, MOOCs, OER, social media—I find myself thinking that a blog version would be better. Nothing develops and anchors an online identity quite like a blog.
Source: Twenty Years of Edtech | EDUCAUSE
Blogging is durable, open, and democratic indie ed-tech.
https://rnbn.blog/tag/blogging/
https://boren.blog/tag/blogging/
As Ryan indicates, the planet-like features that OPML subscriptions provide are immensely valuable in general, but also solves a tough problem that some of the best minds in the educational tech space have found perennially problematic.
Source: Reply to Ryan Boren et al on the WordPress Link Manager, Calypso, and Indie Blogging
Indie ed-tech link bomb:
Bringing Safety to the Serendipity in Digital Pedagogy
http://hackeducation.com/2017/11/30/top-ed-tech-trends-intro
Communication is oxygen. Build a districtwide collaboration infrastructure and an open by default culture.
Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology
Default to Open: Open Education, Open Government, Open Data, Open Web, and Open Source
Hyperlinks and Education in the Disinformation Age
Feed Readers, Micro.blog, and Digital Pedagogy
Bring the backchannel forward. Written communication is the great social equalizer.
We also believe the path to becoming a better reader relies on becoming a writer. Children excel in production based literacy environments. The critical evaluation of online sources is no different. Any classroom exercise around sourcing must involve readers reflecting on their process and interacting in social spaces for reading. We believe the best way to do have students understand how the web shapes meaning is to use the web to make meaning. Part of any intervention should embrace students publishing on their own domain with parents and students in control of their privacy.
We also believe teachers should be central in educational research. Part of any intervention must encourage educators to build, share and remix resources while reflecting on their learning in the open. We can not tackle critical evaluation alone. Furthermore we must recognize that our teaching corps requires a basic understanding of how you read and write on the web and the lack of skills in our teachers is a national crisis. Students will never be ready for computer science classes in middle school and high school if they are taught by educators who can’t add a link in an email let alone build a web page. By encouraging teachers to network through the use of OER sharing we can address the lack of skills.
Source: Can the #IndieWeb Improve Better Readers and Writers Online? – INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION
And one of the things I came away with from that talk was that there was a counter cultural ethos to the ways things were being done more broadly in ed-tech, and that was often linked to blogging and personal spaces on the web. We wanted faculty and students to own their work, and by extension their data, and we wanted that work to be connected in some real ways to both the web and the institutions we supported. So rather than the great purging of personal university webspace and re-branding efforts of Web Communication departments that gentrified the EDU web, we kept alive the spirit of the university as a space where the personal web mattered and was valued. Not sure if this is just more retrospective self-congratulation on my part-it very well could be, and I certainly have a unique tolerance for such reasoning-but it does resist my own tendency to remember that everyone in ed-tech from 2004-2016 was simply caught up uncritically in the social media orgy that was Web 2.0.
Source: Uncanny EdTech | bavatuesdays
When people location trackers are marketed as ‘smart badges’ by trusted brands (like ISTE), when their operations are not explained, and when the technology is obfuscated, people become de-sensitized to practices they may otherwise object to.
Did the people in these pictures know they were socializing and learning in an environment where each of their movements were tracked within a meter of accuracy? Did they understand how these data will be used, how it is secured, and with whom it will be shared? Do they each think the cost-benefit of sharing these location data are worth the yet-to-be-sent conference summary emails? Did the surveillance system actually allow ISTE to make adjustments in real-time to popular sessions that were turning away participants?
Yet, despite the email and the physical signs at the registration desk, many people asserted to me that they never received notice of the use of the ‘smart badge’. Of those that did, many had no idea how it worked. They thought it was just a QR code for vendors to scan. Many didn’t understand that it was a battery-powered transmitter without an off-switch. Not a one was happy upon learning what I discovered.
Did ISTE offer enough information to participants so they could make an informed judgment about the value of wearing the badge vs. the potential risks? Should wearing the badges have been an opt-in vs. opt-out decision for participants? For educators trying to manage the privacy and security risks of edtech in their own classrooms, what lesson does this incident impart about best practices and informed consent?
As ISTE and its members collectively mull through these questions, I look forward to hearing about the reactions to the after-conference reports that participants are slated to receive about their movements and presumed interests. Will folks feel like it added value? I bet for some segment of participants receiving that email will trigger concerns they didn’t even know enough to worry about in the first place. It will be the first time they realized their movements have been tracked.
Source: Hacking the ISTE18 Smart Badge, Part II – K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center
My greatest objection to being tagged like livestock was that it would only be a short matter of time before some bonehead referred to the fantabulous “Smart Badges” as educational technology. When I mentioned this to my friend Chris Lehmann, he told me that it already had.
Q: Why is ISTE using smart badges?
A: ISTE recognizes the value of personalized learning and wants to do all we can to create custom and individualized educational experiences for each of our attendees. Smart badges will allow us to provide you with your own “ISTE 2018 Journey” post conference. The journey will detail the sessions you attended and the resources you collected. It’s like taking notes with your feet! Additionally, this data will allow the ISTE team to further personalize the conference experience now and in the future. This aggregate data, combined with registration information, will provide more comprehensive insights into attendee patterns and activities.Therein lies the problem. Tracking students legs, bums, or corneas is not education. It is not personalization, a fantasy that after decades has produced little more than dispensing a multiple-choice question based on how well you answered another multiple-choice question. Personalized learning is at best machine-based testing. It has little to do with teaching beyond automation and nothing to do with learning. Yet, ISTE’s largest corporate sponsors profit greatly by this hideous handful of magic beans.
The greatest threat of the ISTE “Smart Badges” is the denaturing of educational computing’s powerful potential and the organization’s misanthropic service of corporate sponsors, often in ways detrimental to its members – the ones who justify its tax-exempt status.
The fact that an organization that should be leading the effective, thoughtful, responsible use of technology in education implemented such a fad at an event for educators is troubling. The ISTE Expo Halls were a frenzy of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others creating demand for their “learning opportunities” and giveaways with massive lines of early morning attendees hoping for tickets, invites, tokens. The whole time, throughout the Convention Centre, the Big Players deployed troops to frantically scan the QR codes of individuals waiting in line. So what exactly does this evidence tell us about personalized learning and how instructive will it be to ISTE’s sponsors when they receive this data? How will this data shape education? What does it tell us about learning, about institutional deprivation in the teaching profession? Is this about improving learning or the relentless drive of the ed tech industry?
At one expo stand we spoke with a thoughtful educator who asked if we were interested in the “monitor” function of the software on display. We asked what this did. “It allows you to monitor the activities of your students while they use the software. You can see if they are on-task.” We groaned. “Well, you are clearly not American,” came the reaction. Is the mindless use of personal data really going to result in such unfortunate generalisations? As we were leaving the booth the attempt to scan our badges failed. The blank spaces on our badges were noted gravely. Knowing glances were exchanged. We were part of The Others.
Everyone involved in education needs to take a stand against this kind of “personalized learning”. Forego the tee-shirt, the exclusive “hands-on” session invitation, offers to see the School of the Future, the stickbait badges, the free chargers.
Remember who schools are for. Before it’s too late.
Source: ISTE, Digital Tracking, and the Myth of Personalized Learning – maelstrom
Prohibiting students from cheating on traditional assessments using expensive tech tools to perform very basic 20th century tasks is the new transformation.
EdTech as we currently know it is dead, it’s over. We should retire the phrase right now. If education is to be the target of an industry that has grown increasingly obsessed with standardization, control, automation, and delivery efficiencies, then we must opt out. This is not to say that we should abandon digital tools in the classroom. Far from it. I am very much an advocate for learning environments that provide learners with opportunities to do things that will enhance deep learning and provide students with the potential to do real, meaningful work, not simply mimic it. But this approach to learning needs to reside with the individual learner in mind, not with an industrial mindset that is driven by a desire to impose efficiency and control solutions on all. This is what EdTech has increasingly become now and it’s dead to me after ISTE. Let’s imagine what learning can be, not how we can run it to scale with organizational and industry needs driving the agenda.
Forget EdTech. Learning is about learners and this includes learning with digital and other possibilities, not solutions. Learning should be by design, not product. Learners first.
rnbn 