Education

Tiny Social Reading Activities

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A handout describing a tiny social reading activity, with logos from Pressbooks, Hypothesis and H5P across the bottom.

A simple way to enrich online classes by making up tiny #SocialReading activities to help people practice key skills. Making a new tiny social reading activity is easy, just complete three sentences:

  1. I want people to learn…
  2. Together we’ll be reading…
  3. We’ll share…

This idea started with a poster session Jeremy Dean (@dr_jdean), Steel Wagstaff (@steelwagstaff) and I gave at EDUCAUSE 2019 #EDU19. We used it to show how one can invent simple, but powerful learning activities that could be delivered face-to-face or online, using tools like Pressbooks, Hypothesis and H5P.

I’ve shared some example “tiny social reading activities” from the poster session and the Twitter thread where I reintroduced this idea. Share your own examples, either as annotations or comments here, and/or added on to that Twitter thread. What are simple ways you can imagine learners sharing their engagement with texts to make reading more visible, active and social?

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Education for the Public Good

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Lighthouse over the sea, in the public domain from http://coastguard.dodlive.mil/2016/02/legacy-of-light-worlds-largest-lens-shines-aloha-light/.

A chance encounter led me to want to post about my evolving views on education as essential public infrastructure. Thanks to a tweet by Sara Goldrick-Rab, I was led to an article by someone I’d never read, Corey DeAngelis, Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute: “Is Public Schooling a Public Good? An Analysis of Schooling Externalities”. If I were not already thinking about education as public infrastructure, I probably would have walked away from this article given all its issues (which I’ll end up addressing, like it or not) and the futility of engaging such polemical works. Yet so much sprang out of my reading of DeAngelis and the other works it led me to that I feel compelled to write, if only to set out some thinking on education as public infrastructure to build on later.

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Opening Education: A First Walk Through Campus

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An old one-room schoolhouse in a field under a cloudy sky.

Dist 29 Schoolhouse by Lane Pearman licensed CC BY.

A lot of change is happening in education these days that has me thinking about where it’s coming from and where it’s going. What have been the openings and closures that have shaped and are shaping the social machine of human education?  As I collect research and thoughts, I’ll be posting them here under the general category of Opening Education.

When I want to learn something beyond the obvious about a topic I know very little about, I like to pick a random entry point and just dive in. To start a new exploration on the history of education, I decided to dive in to learn about the built space of schools and after only a short time, I started to connect some rather interesting dots.

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A Little Bird Told Me

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I’ve been working in educational technology for the last 14 years: first at OMSI, then at Portland State, and most recently at rSmart, focused on Sakai open source collaboration and learning technologies. As of February 2013, I have joined former data-journalist Marshall Kirkpatrick‘s startup, Little Bird, here in Portland, Oregon, as Doorman: leading marketing, sales, … Read more

Reporting = Aggregation

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The funniest monkey and driving force behind DrupalEd, Bill Fitzgerald, just posted about a new feed aggregation demo via Drupal:http://groups.drupal.org/node/7271 Bill’s post got me thinking about a problem I’ve been ruminating on from a related arena: the world of academic eportfolios. The issue: How to enable a high degree of independence for individuals in the … Read more