In response to a special call for papers from Information and Learning Sciences, a team of us rallied and wrote a review article about Using Social Annotation in Online Classes ( see preprint). It was an interesting challenge given the short timeframe. But we eventually pulled this off as a team thanks to Xinran Zhu’s strong leadership and everyone’s dedication to this work. In this blog post, I won’t talk about what we wrote.
In a chapter to be included in the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Learning Analytis, Dr. Stephanie Teasley and I tried to write about Collaboration Analytics in a way that integrate ideas from CSCL, CSCW, learning sciences, and learning analytics. Below is a draft abstract of the chapter. In this post, I am sharing a key message from this chapter – a map of collaboration analytics – and invite you to provide me feedback and suggestions.
Following advice from a fantastic leadership coach from my university, I drafted a statement of advising philosophy in the past summer (yes the summer has already passed in MN). Here it is! Please feel free to leave suggestions via Hypothesis annotations. The other project that I haven’t accomplished this summer is to create a Résumé of Failures. Hope I don’t need to wait for the next summer because that will be a big failure :).
[Disclaimer: It’s summer time, meaning time for some bold statements.] “Any educational intervention, for the obvious, common-sense reasons mentioned above, can do harm… ignoring side effects is one of the main reasons for the perpetual wars and pendulum swings in education.” — Yong Zhao (2018) Education often turns to other disciplines for inspirations. In medicine, precision medicine “takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person” when treating diseases.
I have been working at a large public R1 university long enough – 4 years – to witness steady changes with technology installed in public restrooms. Below is a newly installed automatic paper towel dispenser in our office building. As someone who tends to use 1 paper towel, I was very frustrated by the design that doesn’t keep me – a user – in the loop and forces me to use that much paper.