I was reading this post from Jonathan Wylie describing note taking apps for the iPad and encountered an app that was new to me. The app was CollaNote and I now recommend it to anyone exploring note taking apps. The app is quite powerful and surprisingly FREE. I don’t usually trust free apps as tools I want to spend time learning because I worry they may disappear. In this case as in the case of other apps that allow handwriting and drawing, it is more my manual dexterity that is the issue. The keyboard entry works fine so if you are not committed to another product, I would give CollaNote a try.
The University of North Dakota is starting an esports BA. It looks to me like the program is mostly a combination of existing courses with a few new specialized courses. I worked at UND for many years before my retirement and I have mixed feelings. I understand the logic and the business of esports, but it seems the institution has limited resources and I would have rather the focused more on a struggling program in Instructional Design. I think a better long-term case can be made for IDT.
My biases aside, I do not esports is being offered as a club activity in many high schools and understand that argument for a different kind of high school club.
This research summary from Hechinger is likely to get a lot of attention and a lot of different interpretations. The review of multiple studies asked the question what was the value of educators reviewing data from standardized tests evaluating student academic performance. Did student performance improve as a consequence? The composite answer from the studies investigating this question was no. This same conclusion was even evident in controlled studies that compared the results from experimental studies with a treatment and control group (exposure to data on student performance was assigned).
Here is my prediction. Some will argue this outcome shows that standardized testing has no benefit and should be abandoned. The researchers offer a different interpretation concluding that while educators did learn more about the struggles of their students they made no changes in how these students were being taught. Why adjustments are not made was not investigated and would now seem to be the next target for researchers. Does the classroom environment lack flexibility? Are teachers lacking strategies that could be used as alternatives to existing approaches?
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Following my most recent post, I was doing a little reading about Google Reader. Among other things, I learned that supporters have attempted to launch a very similar product and called it Old Reader. I have been giving it a try and as advertised it offers a very similar and satisfactory experience. The one downside is that this service appears not to have a phone option so those who want to use their phone for going through the results of their RSS feed are presently out of luck.
The cost for Old Reader is free up to the point you want to follow more than 100 sites. This seems very generous. It is easy to use. You enter the address for a blog or site you want to follow and it will do the work of finding the feed for that site (see red box in upper left hand corner of image shown below). Like Reader, you simply scroll through your feed and unless you mark a hit as something you want to retain the information it is removed from what appears in your feed.
If you want to use RSS from a laptop or desktop machine, Old Reader seems a great way to go.
I recommend your attention to the first 45 minutes or so of this This Week in Tech podcast. The episode begins with comments on several major “music” sites paying for exclusive rights to popular podcasts and then focuses on these same services purchasing RSS sites. RSS feeds allow the collection of new content from several media types, but an RSS feed is necessary for the distribution of podcasts. The core concern was that users would have to go through fewer and fewer services to access content.
The conversation then moved on to the entire consolidation process moving audiences toward accessing fewer and fewer points of access for information and entertainment. Obviously the popularity of Facebook as replaced how many offered their content and to a lesser extent the same is true of Twitter. Along with this consolidation come the algorithms that exercise poorly understood control over the content that is actually consumed.
If you are not an RSS user, I recommend Feedly. Google’s termination of the Google Reader did a lot of harm in limiting the use of RSS but there are still some good readers out there.
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I stumbled into a heated Twitter discussion last night. Thinking back, after some of the political interactions I have had over the past year or so, the interaction was kind of cute. I am trying to reconstruct the interactions this morning, but I am having to guess at some of the details because those participating have removed some of their tweets. I do know that some of the participants are aligned with different online services so this situation was similar to Democrats and Republicans arguing over a given issue.
My guess is that the interaction began with a reference to this article from The Georgetown Voice titled Welcome to Surveillance University. The focus of the article was on technology services allowing the behavior of students to be monitored. Examples included test monitoring services for distance students, questions regarding the use of the camera on a student’s computer to monitor their presence while in a remote learning class, and more to my personal interests software that allows the educator to determine whether or not a student has read the assigned material.
This final topic targeted a service, Perusall, I had reviewed as part of my interest in what I call layering services. Without getting into the details of what I mean by layering, such services allow a teacher or learner to add elements to existing digital content. Elements include questions, notes, highlights, discussion prompts, etc. Some systems include a way to evaluate learner responses to prompts (questions) or the use of some elements (highlighting). Perusall also tracks student reading of the assigned material. Other services I have reviewed may do so as well. This was just not a capability I paid much attention to.
Several of the Twitter participants labeled tracking whether a student had completed a reading assignment as surveillance which appeared to set off someone associated with Perusall. The phrase “surveillance capitalism” was thrown around. This is an inappropriate use of Sashona Zuboff’s concept which is focused on service providers harvesting user data to target ads and profit from the display and the sale of targeted ads to companies willing to pay. It is the reason you get many online services without paying money for them. You pay with your attention and your data. A teacher using the capability of a service to monitor student completion of assignments is not involved in surveillance capitalism.
W
hat about monitoring student completion of assignments? Obviously, educators require students to hand in assignments that have been given without necessarily grading them. Handing in the assignment obviously involves determining if the task had been done. Maybe this is simply what the teacher wants to know. Does this involve surveillance and show a lack of trust? Technology that is used to deliver content can easily enough be adapted to track whether or not someone who must sign in to view that content spends time on the material. My position in the Twitter interaction was that as an educator I might want to know this information. It would have an influence on my understanding of other student behaviors. If a student was struggling to grasp assigned material, knowing whether the student had attempted to study the material and struggled or not read the material would be an important distinction. This just seems obvious to me.
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