Study Blog -- EDCI339

People who run their profiles wisely by sharing authentic information and use popular hashtags are those whose voices are amplified. Accounts carrying false information reported and blocked accounts which people create to let others down are blocked by twitter (Carlos Castillo, 2011). Besides, people don’t use popular hashtags. All of their voices are suppressed. Hashtags are influential (Carlos Castillo, 2011). Hashtags are some powerful words used to highlight and to classify a topic or a trend.

There are so many ways to share information. Information is shared on twitter in the form of articles, links, conversations, pictures, lectures, videos, blogs and vlogs. Nowadays, information is shared in every possible way (Carlos Castillo, 2011). Twitter provides information in an open way and distributed way. Open education is without paying tuitions and distributed education which is from non-centralized locations irrespective of time and place. You can also save information for later learning or read about something for your knowledge. It also helps to give information about new inventions being discussed by people, the common social issues which are being discussed by people.

Learners and educators exploit others. Online harassment is very common these days. Learners are mostly into it. They do it without the fear of being caught. Sharing of unethical information is also harmful to students. Students also waste a lot of their time on twitter instead of learning their course. Online sessions are helpful to get an education. Open conversations with the help of TwitterChat are very helpful. Students who attend the class share their point of views and other students gain knowledge through that. Information is shared with the help of videos, pictures and documents (Carlos Castillo, 2011). These live sessions are also being recorded for learners so that they can listen to them or learn from them to clear any confusions.

Open pedagogy is related to open educational resources. Twitter already supports education in an open way and distributed way. Twitter should support by 5R methods. Retaining, reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing (Wiley, 2018). It can make several copies and download them, explore data by trending it by putting the data related to education in trending and by making more hashtags, by using the data in a wide range, translate it into different languages so that more people could understand, and distribute it across the world (Wiley, 2018).

References:

Carlos Castillo, M. M. (2011, March). Information credibility on twitter . Retrieved from Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1963405.1963500

Wiley, D. (2018). Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy. Retrieved from IRRODL: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3601

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According to people’s comments on twitter #edci339, it is obvious that everyone likes it, and they are in favor of it. They have clearly said that it provides support to them, and they will be very happy to help each other through this platform. Open learning provides them to communicate more, gives them freedom of speech, and makes room for them to share their thoughts. Some people added that open learning is better than the previous method. Books and notebooks are outdated. Now, this is a more convenient method as one can get knowledge while sitting home. Students can find whatever they want to because open learning provides a bundle of knowledge within seconds. There are numerous articles on a single topic. People mentioned that they could also learn about anything without even taking permission from their families. Some strict parents don’t allow their child to study the subjects he/she wants to. Someone mentioned that students who do not have internet access or those who live in areas where the internet is a problem could not be privileged from this education system. Some are digital illiterates who do not know how to use technology to find open learning difficult.

Original Post:  https://edci339-mni.opened.ca/individual-post-3/

The redlining concept came from the historical era when redlines were drawn on maps to discriminate poor and black neighborhoods that were considered unsuitable for loans, which created a great difference among people (Chris Gilliard, 2016). It is the process of providing unequal access to people. It is not confined to the education department only, it exists in almost every field working with people: banking, investments, different policymakers, institutions, schools, hospitals, and colleges. Sometimes parents use it to restrict information to their children for child care. It counts in good parenting as parents keep an eye on what their children watch on the internet or allow them to access children according to their age (Chris Gilliard, 2016). Besides age, parents also use digital redlining for religious purposes. As learning institutes, hospitals nowadays are also working on a digital platform. Physicians need an internet connection to access their patients. Slow internet connection is a hurdle in their work. Also, patients suffer a lot as the internet is not provided best in rural areas.

On the contrary, prices are extraordinary. Similarly, redlining also moved to the telephone industry. Poor people were either not connected or were getting inferior services. Sometimes they were last to receive connection. Now federal law has banned digital redlining to some extent (Aaron Glantz, 2017). Banks also deny redlining. Earlier, they only provide loans to certain people. But now it is not the case. Banks provide the facility to everyone now, but some lawyers say that it is still present to some extent in different forms.

Digital redlining is mostly used in schools to limit the amount of information. They ban certain sites for students for their safety. The purpose of digital redlining is that students should not access to adult information. Earlier buzzers were used for this purpose. Now simply sites are banned, and digital redlining is used, which makes the information invisible. Students are manipulated to think that so much thing exists like this. They even don’t know that their information is limited (Saylor, 2017). The drawbacks of digital redlining are that it creates a lack of students and limits their minds by thinking nothing exists like this. Students cannot explore much because it ties human information, and some learners are genius in their imaginations. What they imagine is beyond their learning levels. So to collect information about their fantasies, they need to search more and more. Their never-ending beautiful imaginaries will destroy their mind if they can’t find answers to their queries. They’ll stick themselves in those questions they can’t find answers to. It mostly happens to younger students in their growing age. Not finding answers to what they think, they limit their thinking and end up being ordinary students. Older individuals don’t face such problems because, for them, digital redlining doesn’t exist (Chris Gilliard B. F., 2017). It is time to ask whether these boundaries are rooted for good or a machine creating boundaries and limiting our information is doing good or not. Students are victimized to it without even knowing about it.

References

AARON GLANTZ, E. M. (2017, February 17). Modern-day redlining: How banks block people of color from homeownership. Retrieved from Chicago tribune: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-modern-day-redlining-20180215-story.html

Chris Gilliard, B. F. (2017, january 29). Student Voices: digital redlining and privacy. Retrieved from Edu.con: http://2017.educon.org/conversations/student_voices–digital_redlining_and_privacy

Chris Gilliard, H. C. (2016, May 24). Filtering content is often done with good intent, but filtering can also create equity and privacy issues. Retrieved from Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy: https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/digital-redlining-access-and-privacy

Saylor.org academy. (2017). LiDA100: Learning in a Digital Age. Retrieved from Saylor.org: https://learn.saylor.org/mod/page/view.php?id=19600

I have noticed that these modes of providing education are helpful. All modes are helping equally to provide education to be open learning or distributed learning. Pedagogy is equally helpful. But most importantly, motivation, attention, imitation, the direction of activity, willingness is all basic necessity for learning. Open learning helps in many ways because it provides knowledge that is accessible to everyone (Gilliard, 2019). The author said that youth could perform well as compared to older individuals. They easily find new techniques in different fields and I disagree with that. I think older individuals can perform equally well than young people (Gilliard, 2019). Older individuals have more experience and techniques because they have spent their lives in doing a particular work and have faced every bit of it. No one can master more than a man who spent his whole life doing a particular thing because in the end, experience matters (Gilliard, 2019).

I wonder there should be more easy ways to reach platforms for education because not everyone has these facilities. Some don’t have internet access, and some don’t have computers or laptops, some don’t afford the tuition fee (Coolidge, 2017). Why there isn’t a more easy approach that focuses on collaboration, connection, diversity, and assessments of educational tools. On top of that, poverty is a basic question. How will they focus on their homework when they know they have no place to sleep. No food to eat. How can someone buy books or a laptop when they have no money.

Motivation, willingness, desire to be someone who will be able to help others one day inspires me and keeps me going other than these examples of some good people who work for others, who work hard to make others happy inspires me a lot (Coolidge, 2017). I will try to create spaces for young and older people where they learn, Space for people to hang out, where they can be whatever they want to be. I will make a space where learners learn whatever they want to. Be it music, religion, science, technology, etc. I will make space to grow into new roles and responsibilities (Coolidge, 2017). A space to practice languages so that no one finds it difficult to understand each other. Space where poverty does not affect education at all. And I will make more ways for people to get knowledge from where they want to.

In terms of questions, I do have one is that why open and distributed learning don’t deliver similar results?

References

Coolidge, A., Andrzejewski, A., Ashok, A., Hyde, A., Squires, D., Higginbotham, G., . . . University Teaching Fellow in Open Studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. (2017, August 29). Open Pedagogy. Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/

Gilliard, C. (2019, April 11). Press. Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p197731/html/ch04.html?referer=

According to the Major (2015), faculties are still not sure about using this platform for certain reasons depending on delusions about online education. For instance, some teachers feel like online education is of no use but the fact is that it is providing better results than traditional ones. It is compulsory to make up your mind about having a genuine feeling of the hurdles in encouraging on the online education as we are working on and are very sure to push ahead with the goal that we may discover solid arrangements and set universities, colleges, and schools up for progress.

I assume authors should look at the conclusion of online education as well as the changing trend of life these days which includes advanced online education. They don’t understand that there is an absence of willingness. Substitutes are basically not spurred in online classes. They are normally simple and are time competent; however, student results are not very satisfactory. Essentially, students just complete their work and don’t burn the midnight oil to get good grades. They just go with the flow for passing grades.

I sometimes think how online teaching is not doing well to improve success as compared to traditional ways where the educator teaches the students in person. On the contrary, some teachers are not very happy with this system and are not willing to use this system as they don’t know how to use advanced systems and are not very familiar with technology (Jordan & Weller, 2017). Besides, the number of resources to encourage online education is too less.

With proper planning and strategies for organizing adequate resources, I can effectively and efficiently apply all the techniques and learning in a community. Also, teaching methods should be improved so that students pay more interest in the class, new patterns of teaching should be introduced to engage them in learning.

I would like to find ways to minimize online harassment in the form of cyber-crime and cyber-bulling and will work in every possible way to eliminate this from institutes where online education is very compulsory. According to my opinion, there are numerous reasons why students may indulge themselves in such activities such as fatigue, retaliation, fury, and being the center of attention in fellow students. Moreover, the belief that through this platform no one could reach you physically gives more confidence. Some coward individuals cyberbully others, they might not have the mental bravery to bully anybody in person.

References

Claire, H. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research. Claire Howell Major. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 88-105).

Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017) Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.

Retrieved from https://medium.com/@edtech2/the-ultimate-guide-to-edtech-88b9f984ada0

After reading the first article, I totally agree with Stommel’s idea on education. She mentioned in the article that “stop attempting to distinguish so incessantly between online and on-ground learning, between the virtual and the face-to-face, between digital pedagogy and chalkboard pedagogy”. (Stommel, 2018) Different teaching method has their own pros and cons and there is no right or wrong. The best teaching method is any way that an instructor could deliver the knowledge to the learners effectively and understanding the need of students. Educational technology platforms indeed provide us with better and more convenient ways to access resource from the internet than face-to-face learning. For example, you can download the textbook to your laptop, you can search keywords on the laptop to jump to the part you need in the textbook, whereas using paper copied textbook is harder to locate to certain information. Technology aids students to learning more effectively, however, both learners and instructors should pay close attention to the eight major ethical concerns: information privacy; anonymity; surveillance; autonomy; non-discrimination; and ownership of information while using edtech. (Regan, 2019)It then brings me thinking about the concept of blended teaching strategy in Vaughan’s article. Blended teaching “addresses the educational needs of the course or program through a thoughtful fusion of the best and most appropriate face-to-face and online activities”. (Vaughan, 2013) The purpose of blended teaching strategy is to have the students more engaged in the educational environment and share their understanding. This reminds me of one of my psychology course. The instructor presents pre-recorded mini-lectures and reading assignments for students to complete and then ask us to write online discussion about the materials; this is an example of “the text-based online asynchronous communication” that students share their thoughts, reflective and understanding online based on the assigned reading and videos. My instructor also provides online office hours through Blackboard Collaboration, where she answers the questions that students are concern about and giving feedbacks on assignments. The real-time office hour would be identified as “face-to-face synchronous communication”. In conclusion, I think all three articles are extremely helpful for use to understand the importance of technology in educational context.

Hi there,

This is Millie and I’m a third year psychology student at UVic. I’m an international students from Beijing, China. One important reason I take this course is that I’m hoping to minor education, this is one of the required course. Other than that, I find online course is easier for me to manage my time and I’m able to control my own pace of learning within the due date. Moreover, the online environment provides us with an open learning space for all learner. (For example, anyone can share resource and learn from each other with the Twitter hashtag EDCI339.)

It is essential for everyone to understand the digital privacy and security, FIPPA, and acceptable use policies of educational institutions. It helps students to ensure their privacy are being kept safe. Also, their personal information are only being collected for designated purpose only. Therefore, this is an essential aspect of distributed and open learning.

I’m really excited to be in this course, can’t wait to meet/know you all virtually!!

Best,

Millie