Get the Sexism out of EdTech

To my fellow EdTech colleagues,

As you begin to formulate your next blog post or article, I'd like to make a suggestion.  The voices of women contribute valuable ideas to the future of teaching and learning innovations. As such, it is my hope that we can all work together to foster a culture in EdTech that encourages women to be active participants in this evolving space.  

Here are a few ideas.

What not to do.

1. Don't correlate educational technology with the sale and exchange of women's bodies for sex.  If you aren't sure what I mean, please see Perry Samson's "Pimp your LMS" post on LinkedIn for an example.  The glorification of pimp culture undercuts the severity sex trafficking, which is a reality for millions of women around the world.  Hopefully, you can be a bit more creative than this and come up with a reference that doesn't alienate your female readers or make them never want to use your product (Echo360 in this case).
2. Don't associate texting in class with male masturbation, as Stephen t. Ziliak did in today's issue of Inside Higher Ed:

"Texting off in class means just as it sounds. It begins when a texter-offer has the urge to text off or when he feels in his pants the vibration of incoming text or data, which might, in fact, have been delivered by a classmate seated close by to him. Even in courses strictly prohibiting texting during class, today’s texter-offer can hardly resist, and many give in to the temptation."

We've seen enough products be deemed "sexy" through the media and pop culture (guns and cars come to mind).  We don't need to sexify educational technology too.  It's not witty. It's offensive.

What to do:

1. Focus on the issues.  
2. Contribute thought-provoking conversations that foster inclusivity.
3. Discuss and recognize the achievements of women that are often overshadowed by those of men. For an example, see this post by Michael Berman, "Who is Sharla P. Boehm?"

That is all. 

Sincerely,

Michelle Pacansky-Brock

@brocansky

Launch Pad Participants Revealed for #ET4Online!

Next week, innovative online educators will comingle with some of the hottest entrepreneurial minds in educational technology to foster an additional bridge between the world of business and formalized education.  Fostering more formative feedback loops between these frequently silo'd sectors of society is becoming more and more critical as technology continues to present compelling solutions to old teaching and learning problems and paint exciting visions for the future.  Ensuring today's entrepreneurs are in dialogue with today's educators is critical to the success of teaching and learning.  And that is the objective of the Launch Pad, the brand new program included in next week's Sloan-C/MERLOT ET4Online Conference in Las Vegas, which I have had the honor of chairing this year.

Eight outstanding startups have been selected to participate in this year's inaugural Launch Pad. They are listed below.  A representative group of the participants will participate in a plenary panel at the conference on Thursday, moderated by EdSurge's Tony Wan.  If you are attending the conference, please be sure to come by the Launch Pad, explore the creative genius of these products, converse with the creators themselves, share your feedback about their products, and attend the plenary on Thursday morning which will commence immediately following a stimulating presentation by James Byers, co-founder of Wikispaces!

• BuzzMath: a mathematical mission that leads middle school students to proficiency through supported practice. The student-centered and user-inspired design makes BuzzMath practical and motivational for students and teachers.

• Ginkgotree: puts the power of curriculum curation back in the hands of the faculty who teach it, to lower students’ costs and improve their learning outcomes. The platform allows instructors to assemble online curricula from any resource, complete with automated copyright clearance and digital content sourcing.

• HireArt: HireArt is a new type of jobs marketplace that uses online challenge-based interviews to vet job applicants. HireArt screens and sources candidates through work samples and video interviews that simulate what a candidate would do at the real job. 
  
  
• The Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework: a multi-institutional data-mining project, managed by WCET. It brings together 2 year, 4 year, public, proprietary, traditional, and progressive institutions to collaborate on identifying points of student loss and to find effective practices that improve student retention in U.S. higher education.
  
  
• scrible: a tool that lives in your browser that allows a user to seamlessly annotate and comment directly on webpages and save, share and manage them with others. Scrible makes online information usable and manageable.
  
  
• Skyepack: a content-focused educational software environment that is designed to facilitate the delivery of learn-anywhere mobile content as an alternative to texts, course packs, and class handouts. Skyepack enables instructors to easily build mobile-ready learning content from a variety of media and resources, delivering video, audio, documents, self-assessments, and HTML5 applications.
  
  
• STEMscopes: a K-12 comprehensive online science curriculum housed in Rice University's Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship. STEMscopes provides hands-on inquiry activities, assessments, problem-based-learning, intervention tools, acceleration materials, and teacher support resources. Our program is 100% aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and meets the rigor and depth of both the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR™) and high school End-of-Course (EOC) assessments.
  
  
• ValuePulse: Social learning platform that harnesses the power of social media to provides one-click access to a credible, curated news library to fuel discussions in a course.  Empowers students to achieve learning objectives by engaging current industry news as opposed to textbooks and understand how to effectively apply social media to their professional lives.

First Day of School

My boys started school this week.  On the first day, I spent a few moments in my son's third grade classroom with him, hoping to engage him in a conversation about his new "learning space."  My son was born in 2002.  He loves selecting his favorite songs on iTunes and listening to them on his shiny green (his favorite color) iPod Nano.  His Nano fits in the tiniest of pockets.  It includes his favorite songs, a few movies I've added for him, video games and a video camera that he uses to capture silly moments or his latest bicycle trick. 

As we stood there in his classroom, I looked around at the perfectly aligned desks and colorful posters on the wall.  I asked him, "What's your favorite part about your new classroom?"  He paused and thought for a moment.  Then he proceeded to walk to the front of the room and place both of his arms around the big, gray, rickety overhead projector -- "This.  This, Mommy, is my favorite thing."

It was not a cool, new doc camera.  It is a basic, old overhead projector -- complete with a transparency lying on its surface and dry erase markers nearby.  My son knows that I too had overhead projectors in MY classrooms when I was his age.  He didn't have to say one more word to me to convey his message.

Teacher, professor, grad student, principal, instructional designer, dean, president, instructional assistant, librarian, chancellor -- it doesn't matter what your title is.  We are all educators.  Our end goal is to educate.  A 21st century education demands 21st century tools to engage 21st century learners.

Painting, Power and Pedagogy: Reframing the Classroom

On May 19th, I had the pleasure of presenting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, as the keynote for the EduSoCal10 conference.  The event was a creative venture to substitute the Educause regional conference that did not take place on the west coast this year.  I'd like to thank Crista Copp, Director of Academic Technology at LMU, and Michael Berman, CIO of CSU Channel Islands, for this speaking opportunity.  LMU has shared this presentation, in addition to many other of the day's sessions, as videos on their iTunes U site.  I have embedded my presentation below, with permission from LMU. 





My presentation explores the art historical role of innovation and risk-taking in western society, highlighting the potential of creativity in teaching to unhinge higher education from its lecture-based traditions. The presentation showcases a specific case study in teaching innovation from my community college History of Women in Art class that examines the learning effects of an instructional model that embraces active learning in the classroom, rather than passive delivery of lecture. Student feedback and survey results are included. This case study was also shared last September, 2009, as an Educause Learning Initiative webinar titled, "Teaching Without Walls."

I'd like to take this opportunity to respond more deeply and thoughtfully to one question I received from the audience.  My presentation criticizes the effectiveness of lectures as a learning activity.  I was asked (not verbatim), "Given your perspective of lectures, why, then, did you select to deliver your content via lecture?" I had considered the contradiction embedded in my lecture style as I was preparing my content but, truly, hadn't worked through it entirely.  In my response to the question, I acknowledged that contradiction but didn't have a clear answer as to why I delivered my presentation via lecture.  Now I can lucidly explain this, as I've spent some time thinking about it.

Lectures do have value in learning and I believe my case study demonstrates this fact. However, if I'm given 16-weeks with a group and my goal is to facilitate they their learning of a variety of concepts and ideas, lecture alone is not an ideal activity, especially to fill my precious face-to-face time with my learners.  Lecture has an important role in learning but it's not only piece of how we should be facilitating deep learning.  As facilitators of learning, we need to engage our audience actively in critique, debate, and discussion to promote higher levels of learning, as well as meet the "offline" expectations of our digital generation of students who are deeply informed by YouTube and TiVo who are most likely to say, "If it's passive content like a lecture is, share it with me digitally so I can watch it when and where it's convenient for me,  I can rewind and forward the content, and learn at my own pace."

When teaching a class on a campus,  I believe this moment in higher education is our moment, as "teachers"-- not deliverers of information -- to implement technology into our instruction (via web-based tools outside the classroom) to enable us to have more time to work directly with our students in a live setting -- without technology -- resulting in more dynamic, relevant, and enriching learning for our students.  "The World is Open," as Curtis Bonk has demonstrated, and our Googled, YouTubed, mobile society has capsized the relevance of a learning model that is based on showing up at a specific time and place, twice a week, for sixteen weeks to hear a professor deliver information that is available in the pocket of most students.  It is time for our classroom model to be transformed by technology, just as the rest of the world has been.

Enjoy the video (56 minutes). I'd love to hear your thoughts.