In this paper, the authors define Open Educational Resources (OER)-enabled pedagogy as a set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions that are characteristic of OER. The authors propose criteria to evaluate whether a form of teaching qualifies as OER-enabled pedagogy. The 5R activities are retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. Retain is the right to make, own and control copies of the content. Reuse is the right to use the content in a wide variety of ways. Revise is the right to adapt, adjust, modify or alter the content. Remix is the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new. Redistribute is the right to share copies of the original content, and its revisions or remixes with others. As the authors describe in the beginning, the term “open pedagogy” has been used in a variety of ways over a very long time. This wide range of competing definitions creates a lot of inconsistency which makes it more difficult to conduct research on the topic. Therefore, having a clear and consistent definition and an associated set of guidelines to act as a qualifier will bring a lot of clarity and consistency to the subject. Some examples from my own education that pass the test for OER-enabled pedagogy include a comic strip that I created for an assignment where the objective was to use the medium of comics as a way to inform and educate someone on a topic, and my topic was to educate people about the myths regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. Another example was a whiteboard animation that I created to teach people about the COVID-19 virus. Another example was a trivia game that I created to help elementary school students learn basic geography. When it comes to the research questions, the very first one catches my attention. It asks whether students assigned to create, revise or remix artifacts find these assignments more valuable, interesting, motivating or rewarding than other forms of assessments, and the reason as to why or why not. When I created educational resources as I mentioned previously, I personally found it very rewarding, interesting and motivating to have completed that work and I’m curious to see whether this truly a universal phenomena. This research question studies what I’m curious about, and my hypothesis based on my own experience would be that the answer to the research question is a “yes”, but it’s more difficult to predict the reasons as to why.
Month: August 2021 (Page 2 of 2)
The article on digital redlining by Gilliard and Culik was truly one of the most eye-opening things I have read in a while. The article gives a very in-depth explanation of what digital redlining is and its harmful effects that exacerbate the social and economic inequality in our society. Redlining as a concept found its origins during the 1930’s in the US, when people of certain racial and ethnic groups were prevented from accessing financial resources like mortgages. Digital redlining is essentially a 21st century resurrection of this phenomena, where students of certain socioeconomic groups are prevented from having equal access to information, which can ultimately put them at a big disadvantage in life. This primarily occurs when students at community colleges have a lot of restrictions placed on their access to information through the web when using computers on campus to do their research. Such restrictions often don’t exist in universities. By placing such restrictions on their computer use, community colleges severely limit students’ exposure to the world, and prevent them from having equal access to the opportunities that follow. Throughout my education, I have come across such restrictions placed on computers that I used in school, although I found this to be much more prevalent in grade school than in university. This is a very important subject that deserves much more serious attention than it gets. However, this article is also very US-centered. This really makes me wonder, is digital redlining as prevalent in Canada as it is in the US? This is something that should be investigated. But prior to transferring to UVic, I have personally attended some of the colleges here in BC. I’ve had a chance to use the computers in those campuses. Based on my experiences, I did not notice any additional restrictions placed on my access to information, compared to what I can access at UVic. Furthermore, the article describes how there is a deep class divide between community colleges and universities in the US. I believe this is not really the case in Canada. When I took classes in college, most of the people that I met were on a path to transferring to a university to finish their studies. Even if that wasn’t the case, I never felt there was a social divide between the students at colleges and universities here. So I believe Canada has a much more equitable higher education system, with much less of a socioeconomic divide between students attending colleges and universities. This further diminishes the harmful impact of digital redlining on people from any particular socioeconomic group in this country, compared to that of the US. But as stated before, these are just my anecdotal experiences. This is a question that warrants investigation in the Canadian context as well.
“25 Years of Ed Tech” by Martin Weller was a very intriguing read. The notion that the education system is fundamentally outdated and ripe for disruption is one that is widespread, particularly in the tech industry where I hope to begin my career. In this reading, Weller challenges this notion by claiming that there has already been a breadth of change and innovation that has been occurring under the radar in higher education over the past couple of decades. Much of the book is dedicated to illustrating this point with a variety of examples. He also remarks that the field of Ed tech has done a poor job of recording this rich history of innovation and reflecting on it in a meaningful way. He keenly illustrates by comparing the field of Ed tech to the discipline of art history during the post-war years. Art history was originally just a collection of the history of some notable and influential artists. As the discipline matured, it evolved to the point where it was no longer centered on individual artists, but on the art itself as a whole and how it has changed over time. Weller asserts that Ed tech history has similarly focused on innovative things done by certain individuals or companies, rather than being about the field as a whole and its progress over time. This book is Weller’s answer to address all of these concerns that he had about the field, to provide a truly comprehensive repository that documents the innovations that have occurred in Ed tech in the past couple of decades and to provide relevant and meaningful reflection on them. Being a Computer Science student, I personally found this to be very fascinating, as this resource also provides a glimpse into how technology itself has evolved over time and the rate at which it has been utilized in education, and how it compares relative to other fields that have adopted technology for better outcomes like e-commerce, healthcare and so on. I agree with much of what Weller has to say about the history of Ed tech. The education system has not been shy to embrace technology. But based on my personal experiences, I still believe that Ed tech still has not reached its potential in terms of its impact. For example, the advent of streaming services such as Netflix has made physical media such as DVD’s completely obsolete, allowing consumers to watch an endless amount of content for a flat monthly subscription fee. I’m not aware of any instances in Ed tech where technology has fundamentally transformed education to the point of producing vastly improved outcomes than before, bringing about big irreversible changes. Any improvements that have been made with Ed tech seems to be more or less marginal. Although, that is not to say that it’s not possible for this to occur in the years to come.
I found that the “Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking” paper by Regan and Jesse proposes some very interesting ideas and revelations on a very important and surprisingly nuanced topic. They argue that the conventional wisdom regarding challenges in edtech revolve around the broad category of privacy, and that they are a gross oversimplification. The current laws and regulations that apply to edtech mostly have to do with privacy. They do not do enough to effectively provide adequate safeguards for students against potential harm. Rather than simply looking through a privacy lens, the paper suggests that it is necessary to really open up the black box of what the edtech applications do, how they work, how they collect information and how their algorithms operate on that information. They provide a very interesting suggestion to address the challenges that come with adopting edtech, where they propose that a neutral, third-party software be used to review the algorithms of the edtech application to ensure an unbiased evaluation. In my personal opinion, this is definitely a step in the right direction. However, how can you ensure that this third-party reviewing software is truly neutral and unbiased? Just like the edtech applications, they can also have their own biases. Furthermore, such software based evaluation tools really only make sense where automating away the labour of doing such an evaluation provides such massive savings that its benefits outweighs the potential harm of anything the software may have overlooked due to some inherent flaw that it has. In such situations, since such technologies are usually evaluated and adopted by a whole school district at once or some higher level educational authority, it is possibly more prudent to have a committee consisting of a diverse set of expert and stakeholder representatives to manually evaluate it and come to a collective conclusion. This makes it much easier to have an evaluation of the edtech platform that is much more thorough and balanced. Or such an approach can even be used in conjunction with third-party reviewing software. less
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