Blurts

I updated my Mac today and found that my favorite tool for screen captures and more importantly for annotating these captures no longer works. This is what my screen capture tool should have grabbed. Instead, I see the second image (the desktop).

The extension I loved was called Skitch and it was developed to feed screen captures to Evernote, but it worked great alone. Evernote claimed it would continue to offer Skitch for the Mac, but it was evidently not ready for the OS update. Time to search for something new.

Educators have always known the importance of the formal (homework) and informal (e.g., casual reading) role of learning in the home. There is plenty of data on the relationship between achievement and books in the home. The importance of technology in the home and how it is used has also received attention. 

One outcome of attempting to educate students at home during the pandemic has been increased awareness of the technology equity gap that exists home to home. The awareness that has resulted from this heightened awareness is what I mean by the pandemic as a stress test. This article from CNET offers insights similar to my way of thinking about what schools learned from the pandemic. 

I think our understanding of tech in the home became more nuanced than before and advanced beyond who had Internet access and who did not. The CNET article suggests that schools now have better data on where specific gaps exist and this is far better than a general map of where broadband is available and where it is not. The article proposes that federal programs such as Biden’s suggested 100 billion to improve broadband as infrastructure might tap into what schools know about how students were able to connect.

You know Zoom exhaustion has become a serious problem when academics start generating questionnaires complete with factor analytically differentiated scales. Why would this be a reasonable activity? I assume the scale would provide a common instrument to be used in other research projects. What variables predict greater exhaustion? Why consequences can be related to score differences on the exhaustion scale.

The pdf containing the questionnaire is available from the following source.

Fauville, Geraldine and Luo, Mufan and Queiroz, Anna C. M. and Bailenson, Jeremy N. and Hancock, Jeff, Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale (February 15, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3786329 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3786329

I have two online conferences on my scheduled and as a retired academic I think it likely this will be the way I continue my own professional development. For me, the online conference is now to some extent a financial matter. When I was still working, I supported the majority of the majority of my professional travel, but at least I was subsidized. Retired academics, emeritus of not, don’t continue to receive this perk. 

I have written about the future of the academic conference before, but the present post was prompted by this post in Tech & Learning. Much of the content that that post focuses on the ISTE conference which is one I have already sent in my money to experience remotely in a few months. I would add one insight to the commentary provided by this author, online access allows a user to take in more presentations. Here is the problem I constantly found with the face to face version of ISTE. ISTE is a very large conference and the interest in many sessions often exceeds the capacity of the room and what is probably a fire code. An ISTE worker is stationed at the door to cut off admission when this capacity has been exceeded. In anticipation of this problem, participants line up outside rooms to gain admission when seats from the preceding session exist the room. This often meant that when you left one session and headed to the next you would arrive too late to be admitted. This resulted in two inefficiencies – staying in a room listening to sessions for which I had only moderate interest in order to listen to a session for which I had high interest or skipping every other session to make certain I would have a set for the sessions I really wanted to watch. No problems of this type exist when you participate online. 

There are clearly disadvantages. I like to ask questions at the end of sessions or after a session. While those software supporting online access have attempted to find ways to provide some type of interaction with speakers or other attendees, these approaches have a long way to go in terms of the technology and the conventions that would make this effective.