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Pinned to #mscedc on Pinterest

We have discussed, shared and debated the pros and cons of all things digital in today’s world but over the last week technology has allowed me to connect with someone that I had no physical access to. This link, simultaneously fragile and strong, was nothing short of miraculous at the centre of an extremely difficult time.

Just Pinned to #mscedc: Close Up Photography of Spider Web · Free Stock Photo
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Books, gardens and streams

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A really great bunch of Edtech women have done a lot of work  with very little visibility from which femedtech is emerging – slowly. We have created connections with each other and explored how we can make space for people in education and technology to support each other.

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Tweets Deleted

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I’m deleting all my old tweets. I’m deleting all my old tweets and will delete them on an ongoing basis – every tweet older than three months.

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This blog post by Audrey Watters caught my eye after seeing her Edinburgh talk and it really brought home just how serious people are beginning to take having their data out on the open web. The reason for the deletion activity given by Audrey is:

I am growing increasingly uncomfortable about the way in which our historical data is weaponized online. Tweets are particularly susceptible to this – they’re particularly easy to decontextualize.

This is a perfect example of the necessity of context and made me wonder how all of the items in my Lifestream would look in isolation.

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Tweet: Personalised Learning, Gardner Campbell interview

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Having come across this video by chance, it really spoke to me regarding my themes of connections and student data. During the first section of this interview Gardner Campbell speaks of how personalised learning is when your teacher really knows you. The difficulty being how to scale this ‘thick, rich experience‘ up to hundreds of students.

One possible answer is to ’empower the individuals to scale their own meetings on the network’ and here the meaning of ‘meeting’ is ‘spaces in which humans encounter each other in particularly rich meaningful ways‘.

This desire for connection is something that the web was built for. Yet Gardner asks ‘Is higher ed ready to tap in, in very meaningful, deep ways to students dispositions to connect?‘.

So why the continued resistance? Why the avoidance to teach and integrate communication processes effectively online? Again and again the response to blended or distance learning is to create resources, put them online and let the students work through. The culture mountain is tall and we are still near the bottom as a sector.

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Tweet

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This Tweet caught my eye as it was by someone who is going to delivering a keynote at an institutional event in April and the Tweet prompting the comment is added below. This is relevant for my human thread in that it isn’t the technology that is the worry it is our implementation of it, and whether or not it is for the good of the people.

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TAGSExplorer: Interactive archive of twitter conversations from a Google Spreadsheet for

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I really enjoy creating these visual representations of social networks – I try to focus on the connections and not the ‘top’ quantitative data. Knowing that the software is open and free for all to use also highlights the community feel to the process and Martin Hawksey, the creator, always welcomes interaction. A true example of online community.

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Leaders and Monitors: The best and the worst of education technology

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Last week I attended the Holyrood Connect Learning Through Technology event where I saw a rather jawdropping demonstration of the very best and very worst that education technology has to offer.

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I posted this blog post in the Tweetorial as well as embedding it here as it highlights the grave need to call out software providers to consider the ethics around people’s data and stop privileging the surveillance as a selling point. It is yet again a ‘because we can’ function and Lorna Campbell demonstrates that the voice of reason may be a small voice in the dark. This all seems to resonate with the general direction of our discussions this week and the reality of a surveillance society, framed to us a method of keeping us safe.

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What happens when algorithms go ‘evil’?

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Algorithms are the powerful mathematical tools which shape so much of modern life, from the news which appears in our timelines to the adverts which pop up on our computer.

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This short excerpt from the BBC considers large scale data driven algorithms as a parallel with legal systems in that there is no perfect solution and it is a system of smaller parts coming together as one.

Considers the concept of ‘algorithmic discrimination’ and refers to the Microsoft Tay (bot) taken offline after only 16 hours due to rasicist output.

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Pinned to #mscedc on Pinterest

Just Pinned to #mscedc: http://ift.tt/1xkIKIq | Sensemaking with Learning Analytics @gsiemens #apereo14 keynote | I’m connecting the dots and hoping the apereo community gets on board with a full scale development of learning analytics open platform as an LMS plug-in.