Academic work for EDCI 339

Tag: Blog

Blog 4

Towards the open education

 

Been reading through this unit, two interesting aspects have stood out to me from the open education that pushes me to investigate more. They are Open Pedagogy and Open Platforms. The fact that I did not prefer to discuss more on the rest of the topics is that they are quite self-explanatory. Open Participation: literally means everyone could get involved in the open learning courses or workshops; Open Permission: refers to a set of rules allowing people to reuse teaching materials; Open Policies: describes all open education areas to be justified and empowered. 

 

Though, in the Open Pedagogy section, it is vague that if there are no restrictions on the selection of teaching materials. Open pedagogy refers to a set of openly licensed materials available on the market which are free to use and revise for teaching aspects. Different lecturers, or different institutions, would, of course, use different materials to educate their students. With that being said, does it really helps students obtain knowledge? Students who lectured by different professors may learn and perceive knowledge differently, which would possibly create a knowledge gap. It would also undermine the intellectual property rights of the original authors of textbooks and contributors. In the article, Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs), are questioned by their effectiveness on teaching using open materials, “… Participation tends to be restricted to accessing freely accessible pre-packaged materials; although called OER, they generally cannot be re-purposed and redistributed. Also, participation in social networked communities of learners is not always a component of the learning design; therefore, the xMOOC pedagogy is considered dubious and not always of high quality, and it does not appear to be compliant with many aspects of an open pedagogy…”. In other words, it may turn out a dilemma to use open materials, since if professors use OERs, they do not have full access to change the content of the materials; and if they do, it would harm to the intellectual property and the academic credentials of the scholars. 

 

Second of all, Open Platforms, such as Wikipedia, WordPress, open API, are available for everyone to use without any restrictions. However, those platforms are not academic professional due to the nature that everyone on the internet could revise the contents online. Those platforms execute the 5Rs, which are retained, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. If teachers do use those materials, they have to verify everything on the materials or the content might be biased, incorrect, outdated, fraudulent, or hostile. In the article, Ehlers has claimed that “OEP can change learning environments so that “knowledge is co-created and facilitated through mutual interaction and reflection” by teachers and students.” However, the gathered knowledge might not be accurate and academically defended. Students could not fully confide the materials, which would lead to a deficiency and discouragement in the learning behaviors.

 

To conclude, it is undoubted that open education has lowered the barriers to learning and stimulated innovations. Notwithstanding the openness of learning, there are some factors, not only the ones I illustrated above, would, intrinsically, impact the effectiveness of learning in turn. 

 

References 

Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of Open Pedagogy: A Model for Using Open Educational Resources. Educational Technology, 55(4), 3-13. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/44430383

 

Blog 3

 

The relationship between social media live streams and learners

People in the old days could only learn new knowledge or skills in school, which has greatly restricted the overall level of learning in the past. Though, the internet today allows us to look for and understand anything and anywhere if we prefer. In other words, anyone who desires for knowledge could find something useful online to learn and study. Specifically, the University of British Columbia would consistently invite scholars, successful entrepreneurs, and alumni to give speeches in school. While not everyone could attend the section and not a single classroom could fit all the audiences, UBC Sauder School of Business decided to put on live-streaming on social media, i.e. Facebook, Instagram. Learners who would like to know more from those kinds of webinars would receive notification and they can watch it during the Livestream or review them afterward. Therefore, they will not miss anything important even if they do not physically attend the event. Some people may argue that live-streaming on social media would distract learners and even lead to a deficiency of learning. However, according to the American Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) annual teacher survey on media and technology, the majority of teachers believe that video and live streaming are actually effective learning tools in which 68% of teachers believe that video stimulates discussions; 66% of teachers believe that video increases student motivation, and 41% of teachers believe that video increases student achievement. 

Technically, with live streaming, students will be able to watch the scholars or profs or experts to solve problems and answer their questions in real-time, which is more productive when it comes to learning. Therefore, studies have shown that students would learn more when they are able to visualize the materials. Livecode.com, for instance, is an online platform that lets thousands of online users learn to code every day by watching programmers to create codings and applications. 

Live-streaming is just one of the features of social media has nowadays, social networking could even offer online interviews, job training, meetings on social media platforms, and other online collaborations. 

 

References

Managuelod, P. (2019, May 07). 5 Tools For Live Education Broadcasting. Retrieved from https://www.dacast.com/blog/5-tools-for-live-education-broadcasting/

 

 

Blog 2-Internet Security and Privacy

Question:

You've read and viewed a lot about data and privacy in technology in general and educational technology specifically. What stands out to you? Use one or more of the activities you explored to inspire Blog Post #2.

 

My response:

Turnitin is an online tool that has a plagiarism detection service to evaluate whether a piece of work is similar to other works in its database. I have personally used this platform several times before. I found it is a very useful tool to validate my academic integrity. However, after I have finished reading “A guide for resisting edtech: the case against turnitin”, I realized that how turnitin uses our work is indeed very critical to us. Privacy on academic performance is an issue that I have never thought of before, assuming a trusted platform would not use my work in other usages. In the article, the authors have illustrated the dilemma of submitting work online through turnitin. Turnitin has been renowned to cooperate with educational institutions to ensure students’ works are original and non-plagiarized. However, according to Turnitin’s terms of services, “If You submit a paper or other content in connection with the Services, You hereby grant to Turnitin, its affiliates, vendors, service providers, and licensors a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license to use such papers, as well as feedback and results, for the limited purposes of a) providing the Services, and b) for improving the quality of the Services generally.” (Morris & Stommel, 2018), we, turnitin users, do not possess the full right of our own work. The authors have criticized that Turnitin has “create a hostile environment” in classrooms, “undermine students’ authority” over their own work, and violate student privacy”(Morris & Stommel, 2018). I am not saying that we should stop using turnitin immediately, but rather, we should suggest turnitin to amendment their TOS, in order to take away the confusion from users and other stakeholders.

In fact, apart from the privacy on academic integrity, the privacy on personal info is also utmost important to society. Take Facebook as an example, there was a personal information leak happened in 2018. Since Facebook requested all Facebook users the authority to exploit their private information, Facebook has the rights to sell or reuse all personal info that Facebook has collected, without notice to users. That is a possible reason why Facebook ads were successful: they exploited users’ info to generate possible products and services that may appeal to a specific group of people using Facebook algorithm. However, while Facebook is making profits from users, it has failed to protect their users. A software glitch in Facebook system was found and attacked by hackers in 2018.  According to The New York Times, this incident has exposed more than 50 millions users’ info, including the top executives, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, on the internet (Isaac & Frenkel, 2018). To avoid the same pitfall in the future, Facebook has changed their TOS, explicitly stating that “We don’t sell your personal data to advertisers, and we don’t share information that directly identifies you (such as your name, email address or other contact information) with advertisers unless you give us specific permission.”(Facebook, 2019). In addition, Facebook has improved their security system to minimize the eventuality in the future.

To summarize, Turnitin, as a trusted platform that has been used internationally, should take extra caution in the TOS.

 

Reference:

Facebook official website(2019). Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Isaac,M., & Frenkel, S. (2018). Facebook Security Breach Exposes Accounts of 50 Million Users. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html

Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2018). A Guide for Resisting Edtech: The Case Against Turnitin. An Urgency of Teachers. Retrieved from: https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/a-guide-for-resisting-edtech-the-case-against-turnitin/

First Blog EVER

Question:

After reading Claire Major's chapter, find examples of digital web tools that support different modalities of online learning as described in Major's five headings and describe two or three tools and how they support different modalities. If you have personal experience with a particular tool for learning, even informally, please share that as well along with your own reflections.

 

 

My response:

There are tons of modules or tools online to allow individuals to obtain knowledge and skills on the virtual web. Though, I found two interesting methods in Claire Major’s “Teaching Online Theory, Research, and Practice”, Virtual Meeting on VoiceThread and Social Media Involvement. In my opinion, online learning could better help students to learn efficiently and effectively.

 

Virtual Meeting on VoiceThread

Simple putting virtual before meeting, it means that individuals do not have to attend to the lectures physically but virtually. Lecturers or professors could regularly upload study materials, such as e-textbook, powerpoint slides, notes, and visual/audio supports, such as recording of lectures, pictures, external links to academic sources, on the learning platform. Specifically, there is a tool called VoiceThread, which is a tool that could let users to leave audio and visual comments towards a topic. Students could therefore “review resources, construct responses, extend the conversation by commenting on each others’ contributions, and then come to class to engage in small group work and a whole class seminar.” (Major, 2015, p.97). So in that way, students are not required to meet physically but all contributing to achieve a higher performance online. 

 

Social Media Involvement 

It would always be pleasured by students if they can study and have fun at the same time. That is why Mr. J Patrick Biddix has introduced a more interactive and engaging method to online learning. He found the previous online learning materials and infrastructures are “unwieldy and unintuitive for new online learners”(Major, 2015, p.93). He later turned the online learning platform into fun, engaging modules that including an updatable schedule calendar, course syllabus, class readings and even assignment alerts. Though this platform is hundred percent online for students, students are required to complete a set of assignments online, such as discussion, presentation, analysis. Everything is scheduled by Professor Biddix so as to make sure each student follows the weekly routine and to abreast with the course progress. Moreover, he also allows students to pick the presentation tools that they prefer. Since the course is highly cooperative and magnificent, students are more encouraged to put effort in this course. Dr. Biddix has pointed out that “students took the discussions seriously and frequently used links to outside material to substantiate their perspectives or point out a related trend.” (Major, 2015, p.93). Undoubtedly, this method has turned into a great success, according to the feedback from students. 

 

At the end of the day, it is all about enhancing students’ experience of short term learning and stimulating for the continuing studies by offering new and useful tools. As internet is growing bigger and wider, online learning is getting more and more practical and achievable.

 

Reference 

Johns, Hopkins University Press. Teaching Online : A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874.

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching online: A guide to theory, research, and practice. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

 

 

 

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