Hack Education Weekly News

Education Politics

Trump says the Secretary of Education is “highly respected.” Certainly this week’s news really really underscores how much:

“What is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos doing with the rapper Pitbull in Miami?” asks The Washington Post.

What’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother doing in the Seychelles with a friend of Putin?

Also via The Washington Post: “ The cost of Betsy DeVos’s security detail – nearly $8 million over nearly 8 months.”

Betsy DeVos isn’t listening to parents,” according to an op-ed in USA Today. Pretty sure “meet with Pitbull” and “spend millions on protection services from the Federal Marshals” are not on anyone’s list of education priorities.

“2 Education Dept. Picks Raise Fears on Civil Rights Enforcement,” The New York Times reports: “A lawyer who represented Florida State University in an explosive sexual assault case and another lawyer who during the 2016 presidential campaign accused Hillary Clinton of enabling sexual predators have been chosen for key roles in the Department of Education, raising fears that the agency could pull back from enforcing civil rights in schools and on college campuses.”

Via The Wall Street Journal: “Education Department Restores Pell Grant Eligibility for Students Whose Colleges Closed.” That is, shuttered for-profits like ITT Tech.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Congressional Republicans and the Trump White House appear poised to bring back year-round Pell Grant eligibility, which the Obama administration and Congress nixed in 2012 over cost concerns.”

Via NPR: “Education Department Casts Doubts On Public Service Loan Forgiveness.”

The New York Times’ Editorial Board weighs in on the Trump administration’s recent policy shift on student debt: “The Wrong Move on Student Loans.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The Department of Education will end four experimental initiatives launched under the Obama administration granting participating institutions a waiver from certain statutes concerning federal student aid. Those initiatives, known as experimental sites, included a program popular with colleges allowing them to limit the unsubsidized loans a student could take out.”

Via The Atlantic: “The FAFSA’s Midterm Grade.”

In other financial aid news – via Buzzfeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy: “Hackers Had Access To Tax Data For Up To 100,000 FAFSA Users.”

Via Edsurge: “What Federal Education Budget Cuts Mean for Edtech.” (No mention of the FAFSA tool, which is a good reminder than when Edsurge writes about ed-tech they really only mean what corporations can sell to schools.)

Via the US News & World Report: “Melania Trump, Jordan’s Queen Tour Girls-Only Charter School.” (I think this is FLOTUS’s first appearance in the Hack Education Weekly News since the inauguration. Congrats, FLOTUS.)

Via EdWeek’s Market Brief: “New Law Nixing Broadband Privacy Protections Stirs K–12 Fears.”

Via The New York Times: “Trump Completes Repeal of Online Privacy Protections From Obama Era.”

Immigration and Education

Via NPR: “Travel Ban’s ‘Chilling Effect’ Could Cost Universities Hundreds Of Millions.”

Via Bloomberg: “Trump Cracks Down on H–1B Visa Program That Feeds Silicon Valley.”

Via NPR: “Deported Students Find Challenges At School In Tijuana.”

Education in the Courts

Via NPR: “Judge Approves $25 Million Settlement Of Trump University Lawsuit.”

The US has a new Supreme Court justice, (plagiarizer) Neil Gorsuch.

The New York Times on pending legal cases involving trans students: “A Transgender Student Won Her Battle. Now It’s War.”

Having dropped its appeal of the FTC ruling, “Amazon will refund millions of unauthorized in-app purchases made by kids,” Techcrunch reports.

Via The New York Times: “U.K. Court Upholds Fine for Dad Who Took Child From School for Disney Trip.”

Testing, Testing…

Via The NY Daily News: “Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy High School is sitting out the city’s SAT School Day on Wednesday because the test doesn’t include the optional essay portion, a Success spokeswoman said.”

“Free College”

Via Inside Higher Ed: BernieSanders Keeps Focus on Free College.”

The “New” For-Profit Higher Ed

Via The LA Times: “Westech College’s abrupt closure raises questions about training options.”

Via Edsurge: “Student Results From Coding Bootcamp Coalition: 92% On-Time Graduation Rate, $70K Salary.” The results are self-reported based on a survey administered by a private student loan company which offers loans to coding bootcamp enrollees, but I’m sure it’s all on the up-and-up.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Coding Boot Camps Come Into the Fold With Campus Partnerships.”

Via the Santa Fe Reporter: “Planned sale of Santa Fe University of Art and Design is scrapped as school stops enrolling new students.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “With a federal government that now appears sympathetic to for-profit colleges, city officials in Milwaukee seek to block institutions that violate Obama-era regulations.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “In the wake of federal criticism of its accreditation standards, the American Bar Association sanctions another for-profit law school.” That’d be Arizona Summit Law School.

More on Pell Grant eligibility for for-profit students in the education politics section above. And the Trump University fraud case has been settled – more in the courts section above.

Online Education and the Once and Future “MOOC”

Via the Coursera blog: “Coursera now offers free trials for most Specializations.”

There’s some Udacity news in the “business of ed-tech” section below.

Meanwhile on Campus…

Via The Washington Post: “At U-Va., a ‘watch list’ flags VIP applicants for special handling.”

Via The New York Times: “The Ivy League Sweep: Still Rare, but You’re More Likely to Hear About It.”

Via the BBC: “News that a high school student wrote nothing but #BlackLivesMatter on his personal statement in an application to California’s Stanford University – and got in – has been raising some eyebrows.”

Via ANOVA (FdB’s new blog): “Success Academy Charter Schools accepted $550,000 from pro-Trump billionaires.”

Via The Atlantic: “The Alt-Right Curriculum.”

Via Ars Technica: “Libraries have become a broadband lifeline to the cloud for students.”

Bryan Alexander on “Still more American university cuts and mergers.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The Canadian government this week announced that it will provide 117.6 million Canadian dollars (about $87 million) to support universities in recruiting 25 top researchers from outside the country (including Canadian expatriates) to work at Canadian universities.”

Via The New York Times: “Florida Prepares to Apologize for Horrors at Boys’ School.” That’s at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where decades of young boys – mostly African-Americans – suffered from abuse and neglect.

Via eCampus News: “MIT BLOSSOMS enters first-of-its-kind partnership with charter school.”

“Have Silicon Valley Teachers Using Technology Daily Altered Their Classroom Practice?” asks Stanford University’s Larry Cuban.

Via The New York Times: “Digital Detox at Liberty University.”

Accreditation, Certification, and Graduation Requirements

Via The Washington Monthly: “ A Well-Intended Bad Idea: Mayor Emanuel’s Plan for Chicago High Schools.” Honestly, Emanuel gets too much credit in that headline. It’s simply a bad idea. “Public high-school students would have to show a job or college acceptance to get a diploma,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

Here’s a hate-read for you: “Your College Degree is Worthless.” Penned by a guy with multiple degrees who’s running an “apprentice at a startup” startup.

Via Campus Technology: “ASU Students Earn Credits for Spending a Semester in Silicon Valley.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Media Attention at Morehouse College Will Trigger Investigation by Accreditor.”

“Do Preschool Teachers Really Need to Be College Graduates?” asks The New York Times.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Accreditor Proposes Ban on Paying Recruiters of International Students.”

Go, School Sports Team!

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “NCAA Puts North Carolina Back Into Mix After Repeal of ‘Bathroom Bill’.”

Via CBS Sports: “Oregon’s run to 2017 Final Four has disturbing backdrop that can’t be overlooked.”

There was some other basketball news, but I think I missed it.

From the HR Department

Jerks and the Start-Ups They Ruin” by Dan Lyons.

Via Education Week: “California’s Top Superintendent Leaves for Ed-Tech Startup AltSchool.” Actually AltSchool hired more than one exec: Devin Vodicka (from Vista Unified School District in San Diego), Sam Franklin (from Pittsburgh Public Schools), Ben Kornell (from Envision Learning Partners), Colleen Broderick (from ReSchool), and Laura Hughes Modi (from AirBnB). The latter because someone had to go and shred the “Uber for Education” mantra bullshit, perhaps.

Via NPR: “Kansas Student Newspaper’s Fact Check Results In New Principal’s Resignation.”

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Hiring Personalized-Learning Engineers,” says Education Week. Oh yay. “Learning engineers.” Thanks to everyone who promoted that bullshit phrase.

Richard Culatta Named New Chief Executive Officer of ISTE,” Education Week reports. Culatta was the former head of the Office of Education Technology under President Obama.

Via The Register Guard: “UO cutting 31 jobs, including 21 instructors from its largest college.” That’s the University of Oregon.

The Business of Job Training

Via Udacity’s blog: “‘Valuable Skills’ and What This Means For The Future Of Learning.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

Via Bloomberg: “Student Debt Giant Navient to Borrowers: You’re on Your Own.”

Google adds fact-check findings to search and news results,” says The Verge, adding “But it won’t do much about the fake news problem.”

And it’s perfect really. Ad-based sites like Google screw up information and knowledge online. And then more money pours into other technology companies that promise to fix “news literacy.”

Via The New York Times: “A Toy for Toddlers Doubles as Code Bootcamp.” Get them started on for-profit STEM education early, amirite.

“It’s Important for Us to Be Critical of STEM Education Efforts,” says The Pacific Standard. Indeed.

Coding for What?” [asks Stirling University’s Ben Williamson](Coding for What?).

“Herding Blind Cats’: How Do You Lead a Class Full of Students Wearing VR Headsets?” asks Edsurge.

Virtual Reality Could Transform Education as We Know It,” insists Education Week. Oh. I’m. Sure.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Manifold, a hybrid publishing platform created by the U of Minnesota Press and CUNY’s Graduate Center, launches in beta form with features supporting experimental scholarly work.”

Via NPR: “How Two Georgia Tech Students Came Up With The Common App For Internships.”

Robots and Other Ed-Tech SF

Via The New York Times: “Learning to Think Like a Computer.”

Via Edsurge, always ready to repeat the rather ludicrous claims Big Blue makes about its AI brand: “IBM Watson’s Chief Architect Talks Democratizing AI, Starting With Fifth Graders.”

Via Campus Technology: “Report: AI and Cognitive Systems Spending to Hit $12.5 Billion Worldwide This Year.”

Robots Are Changing The World,” says edX, which hopes to sell you on some classes on robots.

Venture Capital and the Business of Ed-Tech

Remember MOOCs? My, how they’ve pivoted. Via Reuters: “Udacity Self-Driving Taxi Spin-Off Voyage Takes Aim at Uber.”

Test-prep company Testbook has raised $4 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners India. The company has raised $4.25 million total.

Blackbaud has acquired AcademicWorks.

Vitalsource has acquired Verba.

According to Crunchbase, Donorschoose.org has received a $5 million grant from the PNC Financial Services Group.

According to Edsurge, “Google, Lemann Foundation Invest $6.4M to Deliver Lessons to Brazilian Teachers’ Phones.”

Via EdWeek’s Market Brief: “Pearson Share Prices Tumble on Worries About Online Ed. Prospects.”

Privacy, Surveillance, and Information Security

Via Edsurge: “Panorama Offers New Platform to Help Teachers Track Student’s SEL Growth.” Among the “social emotional” signals, the company tracks: grit and growth mindset, for which students get a score between 1 to 5. Sounds totally legit.

Via Motherboard: “Phony VPN Services Are Cashing in on America’s War on Privacy.”

“Major internet providers say will not sell customer browsing histories,” Reuters tells us, but let’s not be naive here.

More on privacy legislation (or the end-of-privacy legislation) and federal financial aid privacy screw-ups in the politics section above.

Data and “Research”

Via investment analyst firm CB Insights: “High Marks: Ed Tech Deals Tick Up In Q1’17.” Here are my calculations on VC funding from the same time period, for what it’s worth.

Via Chalkbeat: “‘Harlem diaspora’ sends local children to 176 different public schools, report finds.”

Via The Pacific Standard: “The Lifelong Effects of Music and Arts Classes.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Study finds library directors are moving forward with big reorganizations plans, but they also may be struggling to communicate those plans to administrators and faculty members.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The readability of scientific abstracts is declining, according to the preliminary results of a major study.”

Via EdWeek’s Market Brief: “Brookings Institution Researchers Find Many Countries Lack High-Quality Education Data.”

“More Data on International Applications” via Inside Higher Ed.

Via The New York Times: “Behind the Problem of Student Homelessness.”

“Number of people who owe over $100,000 in student debt has quadrupled in 10 years,” according to MarketWatch.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Federal Reserve Bank of New York study suggests student loans don’t play a major role in limiting borrowers’ ability to buy a home later.”

Daniel Willingham points to “New studies show the cost of student laptop use in lecture classes.”

Via Education Week: “Implementation Woes Undermine Ambitious K–12 Ed-Tech Efforts, Study Finds.”

Via Edsurge: “Survey Ranks 10 Key Trends for K–12 Tech Leaders.” The survey in question: “The fifth annual K–12 IT Leadership Survey conducted by the Consortium for School Networking.”

“Who’s on the List of Most Popular Edtech Organizations and Jobs?” asks Edsurge, which counts those “most popular edtech organizations and jobs” based on those who pay to have their stuff advertised on Edsurge.

Questionable data about coding bootcamps in the “future of for-profit higher ed” section above.

Icon credits: The Noun Project

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‘Education Technology’s Completely Over’

This was the first-half of a joint presentation at Coventry University as part of my visiting fellowship at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab. The better half was delivered by Jim Groom. Our topic, broadly speaking: “a domain of one’s own”

“The Internet’s completely over,” Prince told The Daily Mirror in 2010. People laughed at him. Or many of the digital technorati did. They scoffed at his claims, insisting instead that the Internet was inevitable. The Internet was the future of everything.

When it came to music, the technorati contended, no longer would any of us own record albums. (We wouldn’t own books or movies or cars or houses either. Maybe we wouldn’t even own our university degrees.) We’d just rent. We’d pay for subscription services. We’d stream singles instead. We’d share – well, not really “share,” but few would complain when a post-ownership society got labeled as such. Few would care, of course, except those of us struggling to make money in this “new economy.”

Prince was wrong about the Internet, the technorati insisted. Turns out, Prince was right. The “new economy” sucks. It’s utterly exploitative.

But many technorati would never admit that Prince was right – perhaps until Prince’s death this time last year when everyone hailed him as one of the greatest artists of our day. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example – an organization that, as its name suggests, sees itself as a defender of “Internet freedom,” particularly with regards to copyright and free speech online – had inducted Prince into the Takedown Hall of Shame in 2013, establishing and then awarding him with the “Raspberry Beret Lifetime Aggrievement Award for extraordinary abuses of the takedown process in the name of silencing speech.” Prince was, no doubt, notorious for demanding that bootleg versions of his songs and his performances be removed from the Web. He threatened websites like YouTube with lawsuits; he demanded fans pull photos and lyrics and cellphone videos offline. It was, until recently, almost impossible to find Prince’s music on streaming services like Spotify or video services like YouTube.

And thus Prince was viewed by some as a Luddite. But many of those folks utterly misunderstood Prince’s relationship to technologies – much like many, I’d argue, misconstrue what the Luddites in the early nineteenth century were actually so angry about when they took to smashing looms.

It was never about the loom per se. It’s always about who owns the machines; it’s about who benefits from one’s labor, from one’s craft.

From the outset of his career, Prince was incredibly interested in computers and with technological experimentation – in how computers might affect art and relationships and creativity and love. He released an interactive CD-ROM in 1994, for example, a game that played a lot like another popular video game at the time, Myst. That video game was one of the few ways you could get ahold of the original font file for the symbol that Prince had adopted the previous when he officially changed his name. (His label was forced to mail floppy disks with the font to journalists so they could accurately write about the name change.) You could see Prince’s interest in computer technologies too in songs like “Computer Blue” from the Purple Rain soundtrack (1984) and “My Computer” from the album (his nineteenth) Emancipation (1996). The lyrics in the latter, which some argue presage social media – okay, sure – but perhaps more aptly simply reflect someone who was active in (or at least aware of) the discussion forums and chatrooms of the 1990s:

I scan my computer looking 4 a site

Somebody 2 talk 2, funny and bright

I scan my computer looking 4 a site

Make believe it’s a better world, a better life

The following year, Prince released Crystal Ball, and in what was a novel move at the time, put all the album’s liner notes online, via a fairly new technology called a “Web site.” A few years later, Prince launched a subscription service that promised to give fans exclusive access to new music, again via a site he controlled.

See, Prince didn’t hate the Internet per se, although he certainly had a complicated relationship with what has become an increasingly commodified and exploitative Internet and Web (one actively commodifying and exploiting not just musicians and recording artists). Rather, the problem that Prince identified with the Internet was that it enables – is built on, really – the idea of multiple digital copies, permission-less digital copying. And Prince has always, always fought to retain control of the copies of his work, to retain control of his copyright.

“I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else,” Prince told The Daily Mirror in that 2010 interview.

They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it."

The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.

He later clarified what he meant to The Guardian: “What I meant was that the internet was over for anyone who wants to get paid, and I was right about that. Tell me a musician who’s got rich off digital sales. Apple’s doing pretty good though, right?”

If you’re wondering why I’m talking about Prince today and not education technology, you’re not paying close enough attention to the ways in which the ed-tech industry gets rich off of the creative work (and the mundane work) of students and scholars alike. Indeed, I wanted to invoke Prince today and talk a little bit about how his stance on the Internet – and much more importantly, his stance on the control and the ownership of his creative work – might help us think about the flaws in education technology and how it views ownership and control of data, how it extracts value from us in order to profit from our labor, our intellectual property. And I hope that by retelling the story of Prince and the Internet, by telling a counter-narrative to one that’s simply “Prince hated it,” we can think about what’s wrong with how ed-tech – as an industry and as an institutional practice – treats those doing creative and scholarly work. Not because we hate or resist the Internet, but because we want to build and support technologies that are not exploitative or extractive.

Me, I will gladly echo Prince – I do so with the utmost respect and with a great deal of shock and sadness still to this day that he’s gone – “education technology’s completely over.”

“If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you,” Prince told Rolling Stone in 1996, on the cusp of the release of his album Emancipation. (A master recording is the first, the original recording of a song, from which all subsequent copies are made.) Prince had famously battled with Warner Bros over his contract and his catalog. He’d recorded with the label from 1978 to 1996 – and that included his biggest hit record, Purple Rain. Fighting with Warner Bros had prompted Prince to change his name to the symbol. Born Prince Rogers Nelson, Prince discovered that he didn’t even own his own name, let alone his music. He hoped that by changing his name, he’d be able to get out of his contract – or at least protest its terms. He appeared with the word “slave” written on his cheek at the 1995 BRIT Awards. His ­acceptance speech at the event: “Prince. In concert: ­perfectly free. On record: slave.”

In 2014, Prince signed a deal to get his masters back. He controlled his music. The original copies of his music. He could decide what to release and what not to release and when and how to release it.

Prince fought for a long time with record labels, and arguably that makes his response to the new digital “masters” – Apple, Google, Spotify, and such – more understandable. But his assertions about masters and slaves are perhaps more than a little overstated, overwrought. And as such, I want to be a little cautious about making too much about a connection between the ownership of ideas and the ownership of bodies and how control and exploitation function in academia.

In the US (and I’m not sure how this works in the UK), if you request a copy of your educational records from your university, they send you a transcript. That is, they send you a copy. You can request a copy of your articles from academic publications. Rarely – although hopefully increasingly – do authors retain their rights. Students often find themselves uploading their content – their creative work – into the learning management system (the VLE). Perhaps they retain a copy of the file on their computer; but with learning analytics and plagiarism detection software, they still often find themselves having their data scanned and monetized, often without their knowledge or consent.

So I want us to think about the ways in which students and scholars, like Prince, find themselves without control over their creative work, find themselves signing away their rights to their data, their identity, their future. We sign these rights away all the time. We compel students to do so. We tell them that this is simply how the industry, the institution works. You want a degree, you want a record label, you must use the institutional technology. You must give up your masters.

You needn’t. None of us need to. (Of course, none of us are Prince. Perhaps it seems a little overwhelming to fight the corporate masters like he did. But I believe that “domains” is one small step towards that.)

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@helenwalker7 @Comcultgirl @hamacleod not that I like computer games that much. I just get annoyed when similar arguments get made about pop music. — Daniel Jackson-Yang (@dabjacksonyang) April 7, 2017 {LinkToTweet}

Final Synthesis – Lifestream Reflections

https://youtu.be/W4_sw0trdNc?t=42s

In terms of digital activities, I am now definitely more open to working on other platforms. I tried to make use of a lot of different digital tools to reflect my engagement with the course. Many of them for the first time ever. These have included video, MS paint, note taking web apps (both writing on my own and with others), voice-to-text apps podcasts, and twitter. I told myself it was just as important to critique the various methods used, as it was to make “notes” on the readings. This made me more open to experimentation. If it went wrong I could always write a post saying why it went wrong.

I think I expected the “being public” element of EDC to be more important than it ended up being. Rather than having my every post scrutinised and debated it was only very rarely that I had people other than my tutor comment on my blog. This is perhaps an accurate reflection of present day digital culture. With so many alternatives sources of information and entertainment it is actually far more likely your output will be lost in the datacloud rather than pilloried by keyboard warriors.

Looking back at my lifestream the main thing I that struck me is that I haven’t ever wanted to look at my lifestream. For this post, I found it more useful to re-read my weekly syntheses as they condensed the sprawling morass of the lifestream into something more manageable. The lifestream was worthwhile in so far as it useful to have links to all my posts on various platforms available on my blog’s dashboard. What I think this reflects is that is not enough just to bring data together in one platform, it needs to be processed into useful information and then made easily navigable so it can be connected to more information, either by myself or others, This is a worthwhile principal to embed in my learning processes as it will make it easier to work on larger, more sustained projects such as the dissertation.

One interesting thing about the lifestream though is the fact that, thanks to the RSS feeds from other blogs, it will continue to grow even after I have moved on from writing the blog. The blog will become a sort of strange shifting memorial to my EDC learning.

This will probably be the last time I get to blog as part of my MSc as none of the courses I am planning to take are assessed that way. I will miss the freedom that comes from an absence of word counts limits.

Finally, I would just like to note how much I enjoyed the Nethnography/community culture block as it gave me a chance to link my studies to my interest in drumming and musical education. I thought this would be a bit self-indulgent but I’m beginning to come around to the idea that by looking at Digital Education as a drummer I may have found a unique research angle. This may well end up being how I approach the dissertation.