Month: March 2018

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Technology in the Classroom

Both of these infographics come from reports by the Babson Research Group 

in Massachusetts. I found the first infographic, from a 2013 study on Social Media for Teaching and Learning in an article from Inside Higher Ed. I found the second in an infographic published for 2015 when I was trying to find an updated report on Social Media for Teaching and Learning. While I didn’t find quite the same data for 2015, I think the two infographics are interesting. In 2013, according to the first infographic, most faculty considered online/mobile technology to be detrimental to learning environments, but the second infographic shows that while there were shifts in perspectives between 2013 and 2015, faculty showed similar ideas about blended courses (like our Preparing the Future Professoriate course, with both in class and online components). Specifically, faculty respondents primarily thought that blended courses have the same or better outcomes than only in-class courses, which seems to be in contrast to the data presented in the earlier infographic.

I think as technology continues to grow and develop, faculty will be presented with fewer non-technology/blended options, so it is good that they are starting to get on board and recognize productive ways technology can benefit the classroom and learning outcomes.

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More on Technology in the Classroom

I think technology in the classroom has come up a few times in our class discussions. I have had conversations about with faculty and peers within my department, as well, and in fact it was a topic I had considered for my scholarly essay in this class.

I think as we move forward and technology becomes more advanced, more affordable and more accessible, we, as future instructors, are going to need to give some serious thought to the role of technology in our classrooms and how to balance the line between informational aid and cognitive distraction. Some research has shown that one individual using Facebook in a classroom negatively impacts not only their engagement and performace but also the engagement and performance of other students around them.

I think we’ll see more and more research examining the role of technology in the classroom and hope that faculty moving forward will follow the research and create intentional technology policies for themselves and their students.

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Open Access

It wasn’t necessarily difficult to find an open access in my field (Human Development) but it wasn’t as easy as searching through the databases offered through the library. Before I landed on this article, I found a different article in a journal that “supports Open Access,” but the specific article I chose was not open access.

The article I chose for this post is Personality, Family Correlates and Emotion Regulation as Wellbeing Predictors.  When looking for this article, I went through ScienceDirect’s subject filter option within their Open Access articles and databases. I was struck, but not surprised, that most of the Open Access journals were from other countries than the United States. Many contained articles published in languages other than English.

This specific article came from a university in Romania and is clearly labeled on the digital access page as Open Access. Another article that I considered but didn’t choose specifically noted that funding for Open Access was given by Dutch Universities. The article came from the journal Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, which is copyrighted by Elsevier. This journal is a subset (focusing on the social and behavioral sciences) of the larger Procedia collection, which highlights free access to users and author-retained copyrights as some of its key features. The article itself was clearly labeled as Open Access with direct links to access and rights, as well as information about the Creative Commons license.

The larger/parent ScienceDirect touted its over 250,000 open access articles in a large banner at the bottom of the homepage, so it did seem to want to assert itself as in the Open Access movement, but the specific information about open access seemed to vary by journal/article and was thus nested within specific links rather than openly available from any site I saw.

 

 

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Ethics

It took me a little longer to find the “fun,” hypothetical case studies instead of the relatively more boring academic/research misconduct case studies. I chose this one because I’m really interested in the anti-academic bullying push at our school and this seemed to be a really good example of the type of thing that might happen.

I think the first thing I noticed was that while the case study clearly got the crux of the situation across, the author is by no means a professional writer. But once I got over that, I was struck by the gender distribution of power in this case study. Beyond the mentor/mentee dynamic, there is also the complicated gender dynamics. No racial or ethnicity factors were described, so that additional complicated layer can’t be considered.

The way the questions were framed were also awkward and leaned in the direction of blaming the victim. For example, “Why do you suppose Kara has let things get to this point? Has she been exploited in any way?” Like, why couldn’t the question be “What systems were in place that allowed this advisor to take advantage of the work provided by graduate students for so long that he doesn’t give a second thought to overloading a new student?”