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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This is a test.
Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:
- Do you want to be online vs. offline?
- Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
- Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
- Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.
First tasks you might explore with your new blog:
- Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
- Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “edci335” category).
- See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the the edci335 category assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
- Add pages, if you like.
- Include hyperlinks in your posts (select text and click on the link icon in the post toolbar)
- Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works). To embed a YouTube video, simply paste the URL on its own line.
- Under Dashboard/Appearance,
- Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, new header image, etc.)
- Customize menus & navigation
- Use widgets to customize blog content and features
- Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep it for reference)
Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to rename the label of the course category in menus (e.g., as we did where it shows “Learning Design” as the label for the “edci335” category menu. This will enable readers not familiar with university course numbers to understand what to expect in the contents.
Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.
Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:
- WordPress resources
- Using RSS feeds to read blog posts from your networks (e.g., Feedly)
- Privacy resources
- Copyright resources
- Finding images you can use
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