Development and Implementation of the Curriculum in Digital Learning Contexts
Overview: Digital Citizenship: Developing & Designing for Safe Learning Spaces
Outline:
How does a safe learning space influence student learning?
How can educators ensure student privacy and safety is considered in digital environments?
How does your project consider individual student digital identity, safety and choice while encouraging individual cultures and perspectives?
Tech of the week
How does a safe learning space influence student learning?
Kral and Schwab note in Design Principles in Indigenous Learning Spaces that a library, or similar community center, offer indigenous folks a safe place to go for all ages. It offers a place for kids to go and play games and on computers, a place for students and adults to read and research, and place for child minders and mothers to bring kids to learn and play. Libraries also offer a weather-controlled atmosphere where there are set rules that everyone follows to keep the place clean and safe (2012). Furthermore, libraries and community centers offer technology that some indigenous communities may not have access to at home.
Online tech has made access to some technologies more readily available to indigenous communities where there use to be gatekeepers in the past, creating a level of empowerment. For example, movie editing equipment being used by indigenous youth to tell stories and music recording and editing tech to create music and express themselves through it
These resources offer indigenous people an opportunity to try things out that they could not in the past and “muck around” as Kral and Schwab refer to it (2012), effectively working through the design process to create something through trial and error and learning from their mistakes as they go.
Some indigenous community centers, as outlined by Kral and Schwab, have taken to allowing the users to make the rules. This has given them a greater ownership of the building and its contents and made it their space rather than a space they can be in (2012).
Having personalized digital methods of communications allows students a safe way to communicate with friends and peers in a new way using text, image, and video (Kral and Schwab, 2012). This allows for a quick way to share information with others in a personalized manner that is fun and engaging. Furthermore, the combination of text, image, and video offers a way for indigenous youth to share their culture and fight prejudices by making their own or riffing on materials/messages.
Indigenous youth are offered a place to work between old cultural knowledge and marrying it with current technologies to expand culture and address it in a new contemporary lens (Kral and Schwab, 2012). This affords them the opportunity to tell their story rather than have it told by others.
How can educators ensure student privacy and safety is considered in digital environments?
Privacy and limiting the acquirement of student data and information is extremely important in public education. It can potentially lead to many concerning ends, such as opening a student to racism, bigotry, and other forms of discrimination. Furthermore, it can potentially rob a student of their autonomy if the gathered information is used to guide an individual’s education as asserted by Regan and Jesse in Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking (2019).
Use district approved edtech
Parents and students need to know what information is being taken by websites and programs.
Follow Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) Guidelines. FOIPPA governs how public bodies, such as schools, collect and use personal information and holds them accountable. This means that as educators we need to know where our students’ information is being stored and make sure it is not in danger of being collected by other, potentially harmful, entities (FOIPPA, 2020).
Projects can be shared in class, instead of online, in order to allow all students to participate with the community of the project, giving feedback and receiving critiques. Also, a teacher could provide students with multiple options for both public (Twitter) and private (closed Facebook group or FreshGrade) online interactions which will afford students the opportunity to become more comfortable with online interactions and allow them to practice online networking/interactions before sharing with a wider open audience (Couros and Hildebrandt, 2016).
How does your project consider individual student digital identity, safety and choice while encouraging individual cultures and perspectives?
Students are given the chance to record themselves as they see fit to document their progress in their project. This offers them an autonomy to talk about whatever they would like to and present it in a way that is relevant and personal to them.
Students will be provided with websites, apps / software, and other digital tools that have been cleared that meet FOIPPA standards and have been “okayed” with by parents and administration. Alternative methods would be provided for students who wish for them.
Lessons will be given discussing students’ online footprint and how a young student should share and behave online. Personal information should be shared with heavy limits and any online interactions with strangers should be kept to a minimum.
Tech of the Week:
Eraser
Security & Privacy Software
Completely removes sensitive data from your computer
Mainly Windows applicable
Outro
Music: Canada by Picture of the Floating World
References & Readings:
Couros, A., & Hildebrandt, K. (2016). Designing for open and social learning. In G. Veletsianos (Ed.), Emergence and innovation in digital learning: Foundations and applications. Edmonton, Canada: AU Press. Retrieved from: http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120258
Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. (1996). Retrieved March 21, 2020, from http://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96165_00
Kral, I. & Schwab, R.G. (2012). Chapter 4: Design Principles for Indigenous Learning Spaces. Safe Learning Spaces. Youth, Literacy and New Media in Remote Indigenous Australia. ANU Press.http://doi.org/10.22459/LS.08.2012Â Retrieved from: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/learning-spaces%EF%BB%BF
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. DOI: 10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2 Retrieved from: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10094/8152
Audio:
Musical Intro/outro is Canada by Picture of the Floating World found at freemusicarchive.org
Development and Implementation of the Curriculum in Digital Learning Contexts
Overview: Stories and Perspectives: How to Search for and Find Different Stories and Perspectives.
Outline:
How can our digital bubble as educators filter the stories we hear and believe?
What kinds of digital tools expand filter bubbles in your learning context?
What types of filter bubbles are influencing your digital project?
What are you doing to ensure students are using a wide variety of digital resources?
Tech of the week
How can our digital bubble as educators filter the stories we hear and believe?
Website algorithm
Sites, like Google and Facebook, note links you click on and then edit what you see based on those choices. This in turn creates a filter bubble that only shows you things you have proven interested in and pushes all other things out, including differing opinions (Pariser, 2011).
Eli Pariser suggests we find things that are not only relevant to us but also uncomfortable and challenging to help burst the filter bubble (2011).
Feedback loop – same information repeated, exaggerated, etc.
Rheingold suggest we find people whose intelligence and honesty we respect but disagree with on things (2020).
Search engines and other websites may endorse paying advertises over other options and information.
Avoid paid advertisements at top of search
Search passed the first page of results
Find out who is the author and then research their reliability and their sources (Rheingold, 2012).
What kinds of digital tools expand filter bubbles in your learning context?
Demonstrate research and information literacy as outlined in the BC digital literacy framework (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2016)
find, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and use information ethically from a variety of sources and media
Use Rheingold’s (2012) suggestion to “triangulate” sources and information.
Markhal Nolan demonstrates in his TED Talk, How to Separate Fact and Fiction Online, how he used human sources and the internet (using google maps) to find that a video that was posted online of bodies being dumped off a bridge in Hama was not accurate and took place in a different location, possibly at a different time (2012).
What types of filter bubbles are influencing your digital project?
The apps and tech suggested by classmates
The readings provided my prof (one side of the story?)
My own biases and beliefs
Website algorithms
What are you doing to ensure students are using a wide variety of digital resources?
Provide places to start their search:
Instructables website and Other woodworking related websites
Multiple search engines
Rheingold (2012) talks to Googles “search anthropologist” Dan Russell who suggests Wikipedia as a place to start your search.
Students need to provide multiple sources and cite them properly
Have students find counter narratives and compare and contrast
Tech of the Week:
freesound.org
Collection of sound effects
Creative Commons
Outro Music
Music by Canada by Picture of the Floating World
References:
British Columbia. Ministry of Education. (2016). BC’s digital literacy framework. Victoria, B.C.: Ministry of Education.
Nolan, M. (2012). Retrieved March 18, 2020, from https://www.ted.com/talks/markham_nolan_how_to_separate_fact_and_fiction_online
Pariser, E. (2011). Retrieved March 18, 2020, from https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles
Rheingold, H. (2012). Chapter 2 Crap Detection 101: How to Find What you Need to Know, and Decide if It’s True. In Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. (pp. 77-111). Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.
Rheingold, H. (Producer). (2020). Interview about Chapter 2 Crap Detection 101 [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RkfP8XeIxKaRmBMmLzkevv3DMSH1zqyR
Audio:
Musical Intro/outro is Canada by Picture of the Floating World found at freemusicarchive.org
Doppler Horn sounds effect by Mullumbimby found at freesound.org