CYCI's EDCI 339 Student Blog

I chose to participate in the twitter chat again because I had a good time last time, and I enjoyed the social aspects of the learning that the activity emphasized, with the constructivist and connectivist aspects being quite a big draw. Here are my responses to the questions that I participated in for the twitter chat for the 5th module:

Q1: How has technology changed education in your lifetime?

A1 For the most part, it has changed the way that I am able to supplement my formal learning through sources online, as well as facilitated a change in the way that formal education has been delivered to me, i.e. moving from in person lectures to prerecorded video. These changes have their pros and cons, as I (the learner) am more able to select what pace I want to do my learning at, and from whom/how I will learn, but it can certainly lack the personal touch that interacting face to face with the educators can have.

Q2: Continuing on the theme of technology… How will technology shape education into the future?

A2 I think technology will continue to empower distance learning to teach more learners and cover more subjects, and there is potential for new innovative methods of education that can only be achieved through the use of modern technology like MOOCs, however I think that if we continue to allow markets and tech conglomerates to decide what good education looks like, we’ll end up in a situation where learners are treated as an object to be used for profit, as consumers or as commodities to be traded, ie their personal data.

Q3: Who do you think controls the future of education?

A3 As much as I would like to say that it’s the learners, I feel like in our society we have organized so that education’s place in the world is more controlled by business; many people I know have selected their majors/degrees based on what makes them most “hireable” while there are some amazing people are resources that are available for free, most institutions/EdTech corps. are still trying to run a business, so they will cater towards the demand from both learners and businesses for education that makes a person “hireable.”

Q4 is a follow-up to Q3: Who do you think SHOULD control the future of education? Why?

A4 A joint effort from both learners and educators, with the learners advocating for their needs/wants out of the learning experience, and the educator shaping the pedagogy to meet those needs; an ongoing process throughout the learning experience unique to each experience, with edtech developed with the express purpose of facilitating that shaping of the experience, rather than supplanting the process entirely; it would be made only to be used as a tool for the people  involved, even if the experience is autodidactic

Q5 asks us to reflect on the negative possibilites. What should be our biggest fear or concern with possible/plausible futures for education based on emerging trends/technologies/models?

A5 The worst that could happen is the streamlining of education as a pipeline for the commodification/alienation of the learner, a curious kid goes in, and a “perfect worker” comes out; systematic shaping of learners into cogs to produce profit for their future employers

Q6 : How do we avoid the futures we fear in education?

A6 Put more power in the hands of the learners to control how they learn, set livable minimum wages so people aren’t forced to pick their education based on their careers, and encourage an approach of lifelong learning, so learning doesn’t conclude after university/hs

Q7 : Let’s reconsider the future with a hopeful lens hope. What would an ideal educational system look like in the future? Consider any aspect of education that you think is important for the future.

A7 I’m partial to constructivist/connectivist models as I think that knowledge comes about socially, and that all of us should be able to participate in that process. A system focused on learner autonomy and free participation is something that I would be excited to see furthermore, that system should be actively made as accessible as possible, making use of technology as an enabling (rather than oppressing) tool, with its use and development being socially guided and funded.

Q8: Using a GIF or an image, end with a visual explaining what you think the future will hold for education (good or bad). Remember to include alt text!

A8 //screenshot of an online math assignment. I did well, but still felt it was frustrating and convoluted due to its machine-made nature. It left me feeling more like I was being tested on if I could rotely apply the techniques from the textbook rather than understand the concepts.

I feel like most of my responses speak for themselves, but I will expand upon some of them, as well as some interesting interactions that I had with my peers that I want to reflect on in the upcoming section.

I had an interaction that I found to be interesting regarding plagiarism. A peer mentioned technology’s ability to enable students’ plagiarism, which they were asked to expand on about what motivates students to plagiarize. They went on to say that it was mostly time constraints, disinterest, and general ease of access to the process of plagiarism that lead to its occurrence. I thought that this analysis was missing a crucial aspect of the socioeconomic factor in students cheating. A student might cheat so that they could maintain a grade due to social pressure or to keep a scholarship, despite having adequate time and interest. While what my peer wrote regarding academic dishonesty is certainly true, it is also a matter of fact that in our world, grades do matter, and so unless we are able to de-emphasize the grade, we continue to externally incentivise cheating. 

Another interesting interaction that I had was regarding the role that parents/guardians should play in regards to determining their dependants’ education. My peer expressed a desire to have parents play a role in shaping the education process for their child, which is something that I disagree with. It may be a personal bias of mine, but I have seen parents project their beliefs onto their children in educational settings in a way which is likely to harm them in the future. Namely, growing up in Alberta, parents are able to pull their children out of the sex ed classes in elementary/middle school, without being required to actually supplement that education in any way. According to Action Canada for Sexual Health Rights, without receiving adequate sex ed, youth are put at additional risk of pregnancy, disease, intimate partner violence, and other obviously bad outcomes (read more here.) As such, while I can understand the reasons why some may believe that parents ought to have influence in their child’s education, in practice I have seen it go wrong. Also, axiomatically, I believe that it is not a good thing for one individual to have that level of control over what another individual can learn, whether they be strangers or parent-child. 

Overall, I had a lot of fun in the twitter chat, and would love to see more activities like this in my future classes. I was able to reflect more on what I think the future of education would look like, as well as what I want it to look like, which helped to shape my speculative futures assignment later on. As such, many of the ideas that I ended up considering during this chat made their way into my speculative futures assignment. A list of the readings that I was considering over the course of the chat can be found below.

References:

Action Canada for Sexual Health Rights (2019). Sex-ed: Preventing violence and increasing safety. Sexual Health Information Hub

https://www.actioncanadashr.org/resources/sexual-health-info/sex-ed/sex-ed-preventing-violence-and-increasing-safety

Gilliard, C. (2016). Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy. https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/digital-redlining-access-and-privacy

Morris, S. & Stommel, J. (2017) A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin. Hybrid Pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/resisting-edtech/

Regan, P. & Jesse, J. (2019). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167-179. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2

Selwyn, N., Hillman, T., Eynon, R., Ferreira, G., Knox, J., Macgilchrist, F., & Sancho-Gil, J. M. (2019). What’s next for Ed-Tech? Critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–6. https://edtechuvic.ca/edci339/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2020/03/What-s-next-for-Ed-Tech-Critical-hopes-and-concerns-for-the-2020s.pdf

Rheingold, H. (2014) “Technology 101: What Do We Need To Know About The Future We’re Creating?” from Critical Digital Pedagogy https://cdpcollection.pressbooks.com/chapter/technology-101-what-do-we-need-to-know-about-the-future-were-creating/

Watters, A. (2014) “The Future of Ed Tech is a Reclamation Project” in The Monsters of Education Technology. https://s3.amazonaws.com/audreywatters/the-monsters-of-education-technology.pdf

Krutka, G., Caines, A., Heath, K., Willet, K. (2021) “Black Mirror Pedagogy: Dystopian Stories for Technoskeptical Imaginations” from The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/black-mirror-pedagogy-dystopian-stories-for-technoskeptical-imaginations/ 

Module 4 Twitter Discussion

I chose to participate in the twitter chat because I wanted to get the chance to engage with my peers in the class that were outside of my discussion group and engage with others in a connectivist manner. Another driving force for me to select this was mentioned in the reading by Koseoglu, a quote from bell hooks: “Throughout my academic career I have sought the spaces of openness, fixing my attention less on the ways colleagues are closed and more and searching for the place of possibility” [for positive change]. I thought that those participating in the twitter chat may be students that are looking not only to learn about open education but to practice it as well, and that is something that I wanted to explore as bell hooks recommends. A transcript of my exchanges follows: 

Q1: What does ‘Open Education’ mean to you?

A1: To me, Open Education means that the educational experience in question is one that can be experienced to the fullest extent by anyone who wants to, regardless of their class, location, NT/ND, culture, body, etc, although that experience may be different for everyone

Q2: Expanding on Q1, if you had to characterised #OpenEd with just 1 word, what word would you use?

A2: “Welcoming.” I was torn between ‘inclusive’ and ‘accessible,’ but I think that welcoming covers what I find important about both of those. My interpretation is more about the spirit of OpenEd than its execution in EdTech, which can be less “welcoming”

Q3: What common misconceptions exist about open education?

A3: In my conversations with friends, they seem to believe that OpenEd is inherently slipshod, and necessarily of a lower quality than a more rigid educational pedagogy, even though they have made use of “open” resources, like MIT’s OCW and found it very well done.

Q3b: Why do you think that they think that? Is there something about OpenEd that makes people question the quality?

A3b: From our conversations, the digital/online/distance learning aspects that are often part of OpenEd learning design reminded them of poorly planned and executed courses during the pandemic when everything went online, and their gut reaction was that it was ALL like that. However, after some discussion, and I had pointed out that they were often making use of open resources to some degree(khan academy, youtube writing tutorials, MIT’s OCW as mentioned), they came around. I do think that the pandemic may have given digital/OpEd a bit of a bad rep.

Q3c: Hmm very interesting. I think like anything new, people are skeptical to change and adapt to it. Humans are creature of habit and when something new is introduced we often reject it. I think open education is definitely one of those things where people are still not sure about.

A3c: I also think that OpenEd suffers from that more as a result of its volatility, ie every few years there seems to be a new DEFINITIVE solution/system of EdTech for open ed curricula to work with, only for it to be forgotten or supplanted by something new a few years later.

Q4: How are the roles of the students and the instructor(s) (and the content!) impacted by #openEd?

A4: Something that I like about most open ed design I have seen is that it flattens the hierarchy of the classroom somewhat, allowing students and instructors to interact more as equals than in traditional pedagogy. It’s less restrictive and leads to more fun learning!

Q5: As a learner, would you like to see more openness in your courses?

A5: I certainly would. As a CS student I would love the opportunity to work/code collaboratively more often. Working on collaborative projects in my free time is fun, & makes me a better coder. Explaining my logic to others or synthesizing a solution to something together.

Q6: What one piece of advice would you give to an instructor wanting to implement more open educational practices in their teaching?

A6: In a word, collaboration is not your enemy. There is valuable learning to be done when people work together to solve something, even if it so happens that one person solves 90% of the issue and the other 10%. For everyone involved, there is something being learned.

I had a good time with the twitter chat, and felt that the format was able to help me craft more streamlined or insightful answers to the questions, but I feel like I could have used some extra characters to relate my answers more directly to course readings. I also would have liked to have more peer to peer interactions during the discussion. I was worried that I may come off as combative or found that I was bumping up against the character limit too much for my reply or question to say exactly what I’m trying to ask them. I was also somewhat anxious to have the possibility of interacting with others in the open education space that would likely know more than me, and I was worried about maybe using language that would be harmful or accidentally expose myself as an ignorant student that had failed to truly understand the material I was speaking about. Another thing that I was considering was the privacy aspect. I think that I have a personal twitter account that I have followed some musicians I like and friends I know, but I was worried about having this educational experience permanently tied to my personal account, as well as providing even more data, specifically about my academics, to a tech conglomerate like twitter. This brought me to create a new account, still in my real name so that I could maintain a genuine and good faith engagement with the topic, but so that I had at least some small degree of separation between this and my personal life. To relate this to the reading by Cronin, I was attempting to strike a balance on the VIsitor/Resident spectrum, so that I could meaningfully engage with the material, but still maintain at least some anonymity and “vistitorship” on the whole.

References: 

Koseoglu, S. (2020) “Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley” in Bali, B., Cronin, C., Czerniewicz, L., DeRosa, R. & Jhangiani, R. (2020) Open at the Margins. Rebus Community Pressbooks. https://press.rebus.community/openatthemargins/chapter/open-pedagogy-a-response-to-david-wiley/ 

Cronin. C. (2019). Open education: Walking a critical path. In D. Conrad, & P. Prinsloo (Eds.), Open(ing) Education: Theory and Practice. Leiden: Brill. Open Access Version – http://eprints.teachingandlearning.ie/4345/ 

For this learning activity I will be reflecting upon my use of YouTube as a learning resource and the ways that my behaviors and the education that I receive from it as a resource are affected by its design as a digital space as well as the design of the systems that manage it. I am choosing to analyze YouTube because I think that it is (or at least it has the potential to be) a valuable educational resource, and it is one that I access often, as I have discussed previously on this blog. It is also unique as a digital learning resource in that it is not intentionally designed as a learning resource; this means that it has unique issues when it comes to its design when it is used as a learning resource. 

Before launching into a full analysis of what I am able to do and what I am prevented from doing, I think that regarding this particular resource it is a good idea to analyze what the resource intends for the user to do. YouTube at its most basic is a platform for sharing videos that anyone can post, and then anyone can see and watch. However, as it is a business that is designed to be profitable, between every video and even during longer videos the platform serves the user advertisements. Since the platform wants to maximize the amount of ads served to the user, they have an algorithm that recommends videos for the user to watch next in order to keep them on the platform for longer and therefore generate more ad revenue for YouTube. Recommendations are based on a dataset that the company has collected from the user based on what they have watched previously, how long they watched any given video for, and which content other users that watched those videos also like to watch, what is popular on the platform at the time, etc. 

Due to YouTube’s user base being skewed fairly young, and how longer watchtime equates to more ads served, the platform serves mainly videos of long form that are designed expressly or exclusively with entertainment of this young user base as the goal. This means that as a new user it is very unlikely that they will see any quality educational content served to them. However, as this algorithm designed to cater to the individual user’s tastes gathers more data on the user, it can begin to direct that user into niches and subcultures that exist on the platform. It is here that YouTube can become its own truly useful educational tool, distinct from simply its video hosting capacity. 

Once a user has displayed interest in using YouTube to consume content designed to be in some way educational, whether that be in a more traditional academic sense, or the more “edutainment” style that is popular on the platform, the algorithm will naturally begin to serve the user more of what they like. The platform typically sticks to serving videos in the same general subject; watching a video meant to help a student develop a better visual intuition for how calculus works will lead the algorithm to recommend more videos on the topic of mathematics, calculus, or physics. Similarly, watching a video of media analysis about a work of art like a film will bring more film analysis recommendations. As such, communities, both of creators and consumers, form around these educational topics. 

The creation of these communities encourages people to share the content that they create and consume in the space with other members of the community. For example, Grant Sanderson, better known as 3Blue1Brown on YouTube, is a well-known creator in the mathematics educational community on the platform. Recently, he has held an event organized entirely without the help of anybody at YouTube meant to encourage people to try their hand at creating educational content relating to math, statistics, physics, computer science, logic, etc. You can read more about it here. Similarly, the teacher-student relation, or in this case the creator-watcher relation, can be as open or as one-way as the creator of the lessons wishes. On smaller videos, I have seen the creator answering dozens of questions in their comment section, and participating in discussion for weeks, months, or years after a video has been posted. Even on the larger videos, where there are simply too many comments for the original creator to keep up with, it is likely that other members of the community will help answer questions or engage in discussion in a peer-to-peer manner.

All this to say that the communities that the algorithm fosters are a force to be reckoned with on their own, even if the platform doesn’t incentivise all forms of educational content; it is this that I want to explore next. As a result of how algorithms select what to recommend users, it is often the case that very well made, innovative, creative educational videos on the platform simply never reach an audience. If the algorithm determines a topic is too advanced or niche for the relative mainstream of the particular subcommunity, or if the channel has poor search engine optimization, or if the account that posted it was created in the wrong geographic region, or etc etc etc… the platform will simply never serve that video to its users, and lessons of quality made for free by passionate people will be lost in the sea of data on the platform, with the creators left discouraged and frustrated. 

That being said, there are also cases where the algorithm will rightly keep a video away from users; as a platform that anyone can upload to, there will necessarily be a great many educational videos uploaded that just aren’t very good. There is no regulatory body fact checking things, aside from the platform itself attempting to regulate the most blatant misinformation, such as widespread global conspiracies or the recent covid denialism. The algorithm is meant to keep bad videos away from its users, and bring good ones to them, but again it doesn’t do this perfectly. What exactly “good” and “bad” mean are often highly contextual to the specific user, but the algorithm always has a rule #1: keep the user on the platform so that they can be served more ads. Most of the time, this means that when the platform is presenting educational content it values well made, engaging content that a user is unlikely to click away from. There is then what I like to call the “educational sweet spot;” a video that’s not too long, so as not to bore viewers, but not too short, so that the algorithm disincentivizes it since it cannot play midroll ads on it, and is solidly well made and engaging start to finish so as to keep viewers from clicking off. Thus, by the algorithmic nature of YouTube as a platform, it shapes the educational content held within it into 15-30 minute snappy presentations of concepts or ideas made to be accessible and digestible by the wider public. 

It is precisely the algorithmic nature of the platform that is both its greatest strength as an educational tool, and its greatest weakness. Lessons in subjects that I had never heard of or considered myself interested in have popped up in my feed on the platform for me to learn from that I have benefited greatly from. I have been able to competently hold conversations with linguistics, film, and philosophy students on campus using knowledge gained in part or entirely from these passion projects shared on the platform and brought to my attention by the algorithm. I have learned aspects of music theory, sound design, kinesiology, chemistry, English literature analysis, film analysis, physics, game design, political science, electrical engineering, data analysis, as well as less academic topics, such as sewing, woodworking, cooking, painting, and much more. But for every wonderful lesson that the platform and its algorithms brings to me, the user, there are a dozen more that are just as competent and capable of inspiring that moment of “Aha!” clarity in the learner that the algorithm has swept under a digital rug, having been deemed unsuitable to be shared with the general user base. 

Something that I have not touched on much is the ethics of YouTubes data collection, but this is due mostly to how open-and-shut this consideration is. YouTube is clear about how they use your data; to serve targeted advertisements to you, and to keep you on the platform to serve you more advertisements. This data is then sold on to others to further build the data profile of the user to sell to other advertising firms, etc. In this way, YouTube acts similarly to the EdTech companies mentioned by Regan, P. & Jesse, J. (2019) and Morris, S. & Stommel, J. (2017).

Overall, the learning experience in YouTube is a strange one; it is difficult to begin to access, it can have varying degrees of quality due to its nature as an platform open for any users to host any kind of video, and it can force creators to make their lessons around the whims of the algorithm rather than the benefit of the learner. But that is not to say that it isn’t a viable and valuable educational tool. I have learned a lot from the educational creators that I have found on YouTube, and I hope to continue to learn much more in the future.

References:

Regan, P. & Jesse, J. (2019). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167-179. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2

Morris, S. & Stommel, J. (2017) A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin. Hybrid Pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/resisting-edtech/ 
Sanderson, G. (2021) The Summer of Math Exposition. 3blue1brown.com https://www.3blue1brown.com/blog/some1

A fairly simple representation of my learning network. To elaborate on some things: since the whiteboard I chose to work on was not very big, I grouped all my lectures, labs, assignments, textbooks & readings, etc together. I think the thing that maybe doesn’t show through on this map is the degree to which Youtube acts as an educational resource for me. Not only is Youtube my go-to for tutorials for how to solve specific questions in math or computer science that I cannot figure out, but I watch videos about cool applications of math when I’m cooking, or interesting algorithms in coding when I’m doing my laundry, or film analysis when I exercise, or political video essays when I’m unwinding and getting ready for bed. As a rule of thumb, if I have any downtime in a day, I spend it on Youtube learning new things about the subjects that I’m passionate about, and discovering new subjects for me to learn about later. I can then watch more videos about on Youtube to expand my understanding of these new subjects, or I can take to my Professor’s office hours to learn about, or read the Wikipedia article(s) to find other related fields that may interest me, as well as more formal in-depth resources, like scientific papers. 

Another observation of the map is that all roads seem to lead to the “practice” node at some point. This makes sense; I’m studying computer science and math, and the only way to get better at those things once you’ve grasped the concepts is to just practice applying them until you’ve got the hang of it. Something that surprised me is how little I talk to my peers about my classes; once I really thought about it I realized I talk with a peer about once a week per class. This is because I have some pre-existing friends in all the in-person classes I’m taking, so more often than not when I talk to them we tend to drift from discussing academics towards a more casual, “just-hanging-out” type of conversation, which I chose not to really count. When we do feel the need or the want to discuss the class seriously, we do that, but it’s not very often. My connections are relatively in ratio to how high the class is on my priority list, although its hard to see that in this format. I spend the most time in office hours with my CS prof, and very little with my health class prof, mostly just an email from time to time. Similarly, while I draw on the same resources (Youtube, the recommended textbook, lecture, office hours, etc) for most classes, I simply spend more time on certain classes, and thus the strength of the connection is stronger.

I chose to give this learning activity a shot because I wanted to explore how I have set up my learning network; since most of the nodes I have listed I am either a (mostly) inactive participant, like watching a video on Youtube or a lecture, or I am working (mostly) on my own, like in a lab, or doing an assignment, or practicing, I had an initial impression that my network was rather small. However, while I think that while the number of different overall nodes might be small, the value of the learning that I can glean from a well crafted lecture, or video, or textbook is quite high. This also attests to how valuable open learning is. I have Youtube as my primary learning resource for a reason, and that is because all the educational content that I view on Youtube is designed in a way that it is meant to be accessible and open, and focuses on the learning for the sake of the learning, with these new concepts or expanded knowledge bases meant to fit right in to the understanding of any given viewer. I don’t think I learned as much as I could have about my learning network, mostly on account of the limited size of my medium disallowing for an exceptionally expansive or detailed map, but I did gain some insight, as discussed above. If I were to do it again, I think I would try to zero in on the nitty gritty details, since I already have the “big picture” map here.

While I am currently trying to make my way into the computer science program, along the way I have had to and will have to take a plethora of mathematics classes. Math is a subject that I have very mixed feelings about, and the way in which math is taught and my experiences in learning math throughout my life will be the basis of this reflection.

I went to a charter school from grades four through nine, which for the unfamiliar reader is a school that has been given permission by the provincial government to deviate from the standard curriculum in a specific way, designated by that school’s charter (hence the name). The school I was lucky enough to spend my early education in was chartered by the concept of “inquisition based learning;” the students were encouraged to cover the learning outcomes described by the curriculum, but were offered vast arrays of different pathways that they could choose to reach the destination that is the understanding of the content. If a student wanted to construct a space shuttle in Kerbal Space Program, (a space flight simulator game in which players construct their own shuttles and program flight paths into them,) to demonstrate their understanding of both elementary physics like acceleration, gravity, mass, parabolic and rotational motion, etc they could. Students were able to practice argumentative writing by selecting a current event they felt passionate about and argue something relating to it. One of my friends once proved a probability model by writing code that modeled the event, letting the simulation run for a few million iterations, and showing that the resulting data fit the algebraic theory; this was submitted for grades as a final project for the probability unit of our math class.

Beyond the choices for the ways in which they were able to model their understanding, students were also given incredibly free reign over how to build that understanding. There was, of course, the standard lectures and lessons given to the students by the wonderful staff of the school, but beyond that, once the students were turned free to work in whatever method they chose, they were allowed and even encouraged to do everything that they could or wanted to do to build their understanding. Naturally, this resulted in a lot of students taking interest in others’ work, and so a highly collaborative space of learning emerged. I helped debug the code for the probability modeling I spoke of before, and that friend of mine helped to give my further insight to what the algebra that I had chosen to work with actually meant in reference to the real world. I got a deeper understanding of parabolic motion as it relates to rotational/periodic motion when my classmate explained what their space shuttle simulation was doing mathematically when it broke through escape velocity and made the change from parabolic motion of “rocket goes up, rocket falls down,” and into the periodic motion of orbit around the earth. It was not uncommon to see students teaching other students mini lessons, in which they might go over what the teacher had said in lecture 30 minutes earlier from another viewpoint, for a small collection of other students that hadn’t quite grasped the concept from the handful of examples and explanations from the structured content. If a teacher saw or overheard a particularly potent example or way of phrasing the material that we were supposed to be covering, they might briefly interrupt to class to have the student elaborate for the whole group, or might come interact with the smaller group to further build on what the students were discussing, and incorporate that method of explaining the concept into future material.

Furthermore, the teachers were also very keen on fostering that sense of inquiry in the students; I have had conversations with my math teacher about generalizing pythagorean theorem beyond the third dimension, into the fourth, fifth, nth, concepts that I am just starting to work with more formally now, in a 200 level math course; I have had conversations with my physics teacher about how electrical circuits can form logic gates; my english teacher personally lent me half a dozen books on philosophy ranging from aesthetics to existentialism to morality to logic; the list goes on. The teachers were always approachable about topics of interest for the students even if they were only remotely related to the material that the course covered.

As I’m sure the astute reader has now realized, this educational experience that I am describing is one that, whether intentionally or not, has an exceptionally contectivist coloured tint to it. Participants were encouraged to aggregate from all resources that they could find relevant, with the staff, books, online resources, other students, even video games as approachable avenues of knowledge to be considered. By giving students the ability to express their understanding in whatever way they most wish to, students are inherently incentivised to relate the material to their own understanding of the world and their previous experiences in it. In turn, students go on to create real, tangible artifacts of learning, ones that are far more personal and meaningful for them than any worksheet. And finally, the culture of collaboration had learners sharing their work at all stages of its development with the other students in the classes as well as the educators that were in charge of those classes, i.e. the entire spectrum of the network. Most importantly for the purposes of this post/essay/reflection/whatever you want to call it, let it be known that this method worked and worked WELL for both math and the sciences, subjects which in my later experience I have found people do not think that connectivist or other similar educational methods, are optimum for teaching.

However, once I left that school, things took a turn. In higher education, there is a problem with education for STEM. Most classes seem to be set up in a way that minimizes both real understanding, the building of that understanding, and most importantly, collaboration. They focus on weekly worksheets, highly weighted and stressful standardized tests, brief covering of the concepts to make room for exhaustive covering of poorly selected examples, in order to drill into students the methods that are applied to these concepts, but leave vague the concepts themselves. In university math in particular, it feels like the entire course is set up in a way where it is you, the student, versus the content, and there is no-one around to help you, and no second chances. This is disastrous for so many reasons. Firstly, and most importantly from a perspective of student understanding, this method does not actually grant any meaningful understanding to the students. Students are taught only to do math. They are taught how to recognize when the method that they have been drilled on in their weekly worksheets and copious examples in lecture is the correct method to apply from this standardized question, and then apply it unthinkingly. Any understanding of what the math is actually doing and why this method works, what  all the terms are referencing in the algebraic expansion that the student autopilots through is all coincidental at best. 

But unfortunately, with the way that the courses are currently planned out, and how assessment is done, this is really the best way to have the maximum number of people do the best in the course. Since the outcome of whether a student is said to have done well in a course or note is handled mostly by standardized tests, midterms and finals, and students only get one shot at these, then it makes sense that instructors do their best to teach students to pass these tests, rather than teach them the material. If the assessment were different, like midterms or finals were 2 day long take-homes, where students could have time to think about the questions, apply their understanding, and get feedback, (even if that feedback is just “yes, that’s right” or “no, try again”), then this method of teaching is no longer required, as the summative assessment wouldn’t be a question of if a student is able to rotely apply a method for solving a question that fits the pattern of other questions with which to apply this method, and doing that thirty times in an hour, but rather if they have the actual understanding to take a look at a problem, and apply the concepts to solve the problem, and do so iteratively until it works, more like how these things work in the real world. Worksheets could be done away with and replaced with collaborative assignments mean to actually build understanding of the concepts that the courses currently merely feign to teach, and instead of every single lecture and tutorial being about going through as many examples as can fit into the timeslot, we could have lectures that actually work to truly teach the concepts and build understanding in the students. Beyond that, a more project based approach, as implemented in my earlier schooling discussed above, could also be put to great use in terms of allowing for students to iterate on their knowledge and learn mastery in both understanding and applying the concepts.

I think that mathematics gets a bad rap among students not because it is truly a difficult or grueling subject, but rather that the chosen assessment dictates that its instruction makes it so. As my own personal experience attests, a collectivist style of education for mathematics and other STEM fields is certainly possible, and I would argue preferable to what we have now. In the real world, scientists often work as a team over an iterative process to design and implement a solution to a problem, or to gather and analyze data in meaningful ways. They are not on a 50-minute timer with their career relying on them being able to answer questions about calculations; nowadays, computers handle most of that. They are being tasked to apply the concepts, to know how to collect the data, which programs to apply to that data on the computer, and if they forget something like a formula, they can look it up in the blink of an eye on the internet. But what they cannot simply google or hand off to a piece of software is how to actually apply the concepts in new, innovative, or novel ways. While both are certainly important, in the modern world the ability to apply concepts outweighs the ability to do calculations. However, our current system teaches primarily the latter. With some changes to make the education more accurately reflect the needs of people living in a digitally connected world, with connectivist learning being an excellent model to lean on, I think that education in math could be overhauled into one that fits the modern era and gives students the conceptual tools and understanding that they need. 

Why I chose this reflection:

If it wasn’t obvious from my post already, I have strong feelings on the way that math is taught in higher ed, stemming from how wonderful I found it when I was experiencing it in a more connectivist model. In doing this learning activity, I developed my understanding of how connectivist models can work in more formalized, in person environments, as I hadn’t really considered that portion of my education as it relates to connectivism until writing this piece. As my learning profile mentions, I am an advocate of open learning, and I think that the current method of teaching mathematics is one that goes against the principles of education being collaborative and open for all students to engage in, since the current method of teaching mathematics can be quite painful, especially for students who may be neurodivergent and don’t do well in standardized test environments.

Brief summary of OERs:

OERs (open education resources) are educational resources available online, physically, or otherwise, that are in the public domain and are available for free use by anyone who want to use them. They are intended to be modified, built upon, and/or integrated into curricula, but are also often accessed by individuals without any kind of (non)formal educational structure surrounding the content.

OERs were helped into the mainstream of edtech by David Wiley, who worked to create and legitimize the licensing of the content, namely under the open publication license (OPL). The OPL went on to influence the creation of the Creative Commons license, which is still in use by some OERs such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare program today. Licenses for content exist for the legal protections for ownership of the content, primarily to provide a vector of legal claims for when the producer of some form of content found other people using or profiting from that content without permission. The OPL and similar licenses are unique in that they eschew the restrictive nature of most licenses, and instead allow and encourage people to use the material as they wish, and to proliferate throughout the educational sphere without the red tape that the licensing of content usually entails.

Weller describes OERs as an example of a success story in edtech, as they have managed to stick around and have meaningful impact, although they still have not lived up to their full conceptual potential. OERs such as OpenCourseWare still provide many students, particularly those who cannot access higher education due to issues of cost or proximity, a valuable avenue of education and exploration.

I chose to cover OERs because I am currently making use of one of them, and found Weller’s claims that the impact of OERs were minimal to be contrary to my own personal experiences, and wanted to explore what made Weller make those claims, as well as to expand on and explore my own initial reaction towards OERs. I am using MIT OpenCourseWare’s course on linear algebra taught by Gilbert Strang as a supplemental material to my own course at UVic on the same topic. I have been struggling with the lectures and explanations offered by the professor here at the institution that I am attending, and having an additional angle for the information to be presented has been very helpful. It is also nice to be able to go back and watch the video lectures on OpenCourseWare again, since my professor elects not to keep recordings of his lectures.

With my personal experience, though it is positive, I can imagine how OERs and their focus on content over everything can be unhelpful in many instances. While it is very helpful in mathematics, and likely other STEM topics, in more “fluid” studies like sociology, arts, english, etc, I can see the drawbacks of the lacking in communication with peers and educators that most OERs are missing. In these cases, I can certainly see how the implementation of OERs is subpar, and missing out on the potential of the resource, as Weller articulates in their book. While institutionally backed OERs such as OpenCourseWare, and OER resources such as Khan Academy and TED as Weller mentions may provided beneficial as a resource for students of the more autodidactic variety, its current lack of implementations and integrations by most accredited institutions represents a path forwards for OERs to further expand their influence in the educational sphere, which I believe to be a good thing.

Hello all! My name is Callum Carroll-Ireton (he/him). I am 20 years old, and currently living in Victoria, BC.

I am taking this course as a step towards the competition of an education minor in my degree. I chose this course specifically out of the options available since the concepts of open learning and accessibility of information are interesting to me, and I look forward to learning about both them and related topics in this class. I am working towards the completion of a computer science degree, and I hope to go on to study library science in graduate school with the ultimate goal of working in digital archival.

Outside of class, I enjoy playing video games, particularly puzzle and coding games, as well as more casual games with friends. I have been building computers since I was about 13 as a way to earn a little money and I love electronic music, everything from nu disco and chillout to riddim and dnb.

In group work, I tend to work best when I am not in charge of coordinating the group. I do my best work when I am given or am able to select a chunk of the overall project and work solo until I am satisfied, then work collaboratively to polish it off. 

I look forward to getting to know my peers and deepening my understanding of learning as we progress through this course!