Category Archives: Evernote

Evernote! Week 9 weekly thoughts

Audio Week 9 weekly thoughts
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The school inspection has taken place. Some data amassing was required, but most of it was conducted by humans interacting with each other in the real world. How long this will remain the case is up for question if our study and discussions about learning analytics this week hail the beginning of an inevitable phenomenon. Inspections in the future might be done remotely with officials tapping in to the school’s metrics, viewing dashboards and delving into detailed individual student action plans, predictions and prescriptions carefully compiled by the code. Even the psychological temperature of the pupils will be available remotely in real time.

I have swithered all week between a reactionary distrust of learning analytics – a concept of learning by numbers and an ambition to instantiate a quantified student measured against coherent mapped knowledge domains – and an acknowledgment of the importance of research and a creeping suspicion that some of it might actually be useful, with a confession, too, that my happiness and motivation indicators do actually nudge up a little each time an automated comment on my lifestream applauds me for a great post. 

I have bundled up all my LA thoughts into one post (not such a heavy call on the algorithmic burden), although I sprinkled a few little comments on infographics, LA reports and modelling the student elsewhere as well as starting to contribute to Dan’s Milanote. I started my tweetorial tweets a bit early with a question which, for me, still hangs in the air.

I feel moocs on behaviourism and neuroscience coming on 🙂

Evernote!

Podcast

Digital Sociologies

POLICY PRESS 2016

February 9, 2017 Dave O’Brien

How do we do sociology in the digital era? In Digital Sociologies (Policy Press, 2016) Jessie DanielsProfessor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNYKaren Gregory a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and Tressie McMillan Cottomassistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, have brought together a wealth of scholarship to explore the challenge of digital. The book engages with a range of theoretical questions, including challenging the digital/traditional sociology binary, the role of institutions, digital’s impact on eduction, the racialized practices of Twitch, the meaning of motherhood, the quantified self, the question of the body, and the digital sociological imagination. The eclectic range of scholars, offering perspectives from across the academic life course and deploying examples from across the world, create an important intervention into our understanding of this emerging, and perhaps as a result of this book, established, field of study. Ultimately the book is a call for a new community of scholars to engage with this most important element of contemporary life.

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February 28, 2017 at 10:55AM
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Evernote! edX Blog post

5 Communication Skills Everyone Needs | edX Blog

communication-skills-catalyst

5 Communication Skills Everyone Needs

How do you start a meaningful dialogue with someone with a different political view, from a different country, or with a religious belief different from your own? What can we possibly have in common? It’s getting harder and harder to talk with people, especially people who are different from you. How can we bridge those divides and start those conversations?

Here are 5 communication tips you can follow today to start a productive conversation, find common ground, and take the first step to building a more inclusive world.

Tip 1: Engage in Dialogue, Not Debate

Tip 2: Be OK With A Little Bit of Discomfort

Acknowledge that sharing different perspectives involves some risk and that it might feel uncomfortable.

Tip 3: Assume Positive Intent

Embrace the idea that talking will lead to something good.

Tip 4: Clarify

Don’t assume. Ask whether you are being understood and whether you understand the other person correctly.

Tip 5: Be Willing to Admit Mistakes

Accept that you won’t always say the right thing. Honest communication is a skill to be developed.

These tips and other conversation ground rules are some of the many things you’ll learn in CatalystX’s new 45-minute course, Communication Skills for Bridging Divides. In under an hour, this skills-intensive course will cover how to create a dialogue instead of a debate, the power of micro-affirmations, and how to be an ally. You will get the nuts and bolts of the skills necessary to bridge differences, and then the opportunity to practice applying those skills. Join us on February 7.

Tags: Mooc, Communities
February 15, 2017 at 03:04PM
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