Monthly Archives: October 2018

Oct 30 2018
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332wednesday12

Redlining- Past and Present

Attached is my sketch reflecting the article Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy by Chris Gilliard and Hugh Culik. On the left is a sketch resembling redlining in a popular and modern aspect (digital redlining). This sketch examples the effect of censorship when browsing the internet on a protected network (schools etc). Sites that are commonly blocked by educational institutions and even governments (China, Iran etc.) are social media websites (Facebook, Twitter etc.), pornographic websites, gambling websites and violent websites.  From my own personal experience I remember being in high school and having Facebook being blocked. I remember finding this very annoying and I used a Proxy to get around this censorship.

The sketch on the right reflects redlining in a more serious “hands on” manner. Back as early as just 40 years ago redlining was very prominent hurting inner city and “high risk” communities. Detroit Michigan was a city that was very targeted by redlining.  A literal “red line” could drawn around areas on a map which would show the areas targeted by financial institutions such as insurance companies preventing the people that live inside the red line from receiving affordable coverage. In my image it shows a family who has home insurance compared to one who lives in Detroit who does not.

While it is very easy to agree with some types of censorship it is very important to understand what affect this has the people being censored. It is hard to argue a school restricting their internet users from using gambling websites or watching pornography. An issue occurs when students are researching those sites for educational purposes and the students are restricted from their research. I think that is very sad that financial institutions redlined marginalized communities as little as 40 years ago. I think that this type of organized discrimination is still prevalent to this day throughout Aboriginal communities.  It is important for us a society to realize the impacts of redlining both digitally and physically.

Personally, I am not a fan of censorship of almost any regard when it can have any negative impact towards education. Any student should have access to ANY information if it is for an educational purpose. While reading this article and the author pointed out that schools are censoring students from potential information it really bothered me as it conflicted with my personal beliefs. “At the community college where we teach — as at many community colleges nationwide — where digital resources are scarce and the students and faculty are embedded in working class realities, digital redlining imposes losses that directly limit the futures of our students”. After reading this point in the article I firmly agreed with Prof. Gillard and as many of you may know reading an article that your views align with is really enjoyable.

Link of the article:

https://www.commonsense.org/education/privacy/blog/digital-redlining-access-privacy

 

 

I hope to encourage discussion and look forward to communicating with you all.

 

Adam

Oct 30 2018
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332wednesday12

The Red Scare: How Digital Redlining Has Infiltrated Our Society

For this week’s multimedia reflection I decided to tackle Chris Gilliard’s article Digital Redlining Access Privacy

https://www.commonsense.org/education/privacy/blog/digital-redlining-access-privacy

Overall, I found Gilliard’s article quite fascinating. Though I had been previously aware of the traditional concept of redlining, the notion of digital redlining was a new discovery.

As a student in the Greater Essex County District School Board, I often complained about the internet restrictions preventing me from reaching websites hosting video games. Not once had I stopped to think that there would be other limitations, aside from the safe search function. After attending what Gilliard considers a higher-level institution, I once again complained about my access to internet resources. I can recall, on many occasions, being blocked by a paywall on academic hosting sites but had not considered the notion of their existence being scrubbed from my search results. Gilliard’s exposition on the fact that digital redlining attempts to limit working class students, seeking an education, from discovering new ideas and pathways in life.

To cover the ideas represented in Gilliard’s article, I decided to create a twitter thread incorporating gifs to highlight important concepts.

Oct 30 2018
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332wednesday12 Image

Technology: New Face of Education

For my second multimedia reflection, it was based on the Jacobsen article, Teaching in a Participatory Digital World, and the Jenkins video, The Influence of Participatory Culture on Education, I focused on the true importance of why technology is important in education.

Not only does the classroom become a place where the use of social media becomes much safer when teachers are showing students how to use it in a positive way, but the classroom also becomes a space where teachers and students begin to share their knowledge, making a more valuable learning experience for everyone.

The digital world is changing mindsets in regards to schooling, teaching, learning, and assessing. Technology and inquiring (both students and teaching) creates a new door to powerful teaching and assessment. Schools must begin to give way and accept these more active, engaged, and collaborative learning and teaching relationship…which is all thanks to educational technologies.

The great thing about technology is most students nowadays have an always available and connected mobile device. It is time we teach our students in what ways they can use this in a positive manner. For example, having these available and connected mobile devices enables communication between people from all over the world to share experiences, ideas, reflections, and insight. Using social networking in both schools and workplaces, changes how everyone works, learns, and plays. We are creating a new approach to both school and workplace, as to how they are conceived, conducted, and completed.

During my practicum, I have noticed that technology has already begun to be implemented in current classes. Although when I was younger, there was little to no technology being used. Many teachers and students use a program called Edsby- this is a program where teachers can post information about course content for all the student’s parents to see. Furthermore, it has become a means to take attendance in all classes. Edsby seems like a great way for students to keep track of their student’s attendance, assignments, progress, and overall school content…especially for those parents who have children who don’t share what they have been doing in school. Creating this multimedia has really given me the opportunity to reflect on further benefits of the use of technology in classes. I never once would have thought that the use of technology gave way for students to create networks with other students from all over the world. It also never occurred to me that social media can be used in the classroom, which can be conducted in a safe and fun manner, with the assistance of the teacher. When I was in school, phones were banned. There were firewalls against social platforms such as Twitter, MSN, Instagram, etc. Although there are still firewalls against many of these social platforms in all of today’s schools, there will soon be a shift in how we use these platforms. Teachers will have the necessary tools to educate students on how to safely use these platforms in a positive manner- in turn, students will become in touch with others which will result in sharing knowledge, insight, ideas, etc.

There are certain steps we must follow to ensure that teachers can teach students how to make use of technology in a positive manner- we need to make the tools and practices readily available for teachers, we need support in this major shift in practice, and we need our mentors to be engaged and skilled. Teachers have a greater effect on students than the school itself, that’s why it is so important that we have proper leaders and mentors who model the students of the 21st-century using technology in their teaching practices.

 

Below is a sketchnote I had fun creating. I’ve also created a video which examines my sketchnote more closely. You can see it by clicking here.

-Kirsti Willson

#Uwindig

 

Oct 30 2018
2 Comments
332wednesday12

BOMBARDED BY BOUNDARIES

 

Chris Gilliard and Hugh Culik’s article, “Digital Redlining, Access and Privacy” brought forward issues we as postsecondary students experience on a daily basis but don’t recognize as problems. Digital redlining is when institutions and policy makers enforce boundaries and/or use technology policies, practises and teachings to discriminate against specific groups (Culik & Gilliard, 2016). If you are unfamiliar with digital redlining, a prominent example outside of a classroom setting could be Facebook. When you sign up for Facebook you don’t identify your ethnicity, however advertisers can target certain populations based on your previous likes, shares and groups joined. They can also choose who they want to exclude from seeing their advertisements. This is invisible redlining because  we as consumers are unable to see this happening. Doesn’t it spike your curiosity to how much information is circulating the world that you have no knowledge about?

 

Digital Redlining affects the way we learn as students and teach as educators. Students are limited to the amount of information we can learn about and community colleges and lower income institutions suffer these consequences to a greater extent. These schools are unable to access information that is available to higher educated schools and programs. Imagine attending a school that had restrictions on majority of the websites you were trying to research information on? I can relate to this in the sense when researching journal articles to provide support to arguments for a research paper and being unable to access them because I have to pay for it. It’s extremely frustrating and discouraging to have a limited amount of information to use for a topic. Another issue is feeling less qualified while applying for a job because you weren’t exposed to/ blocked from the same resources and educational tools your competitor was allowed to access. Redlining poses many restrictions to our learning as students.

 

How are we as future educators supposed to promote creativity and exploration in undiscovered topics if the information surrounding these topics aren’t readily available to us? We are setting students up to fail if we expect them to gather enough information to build on topics that are restricted to the public. We are also unable to know what policies will shape what our students will see and not see which is where the problem begins. Policy makers need to ask themselves who and why their target population is and whether these filters, available access, and policies are restricting a student’s learning or promoting the openness students require to achieve their goals. I personally believe after reading this article, the only students that set up to succeed are the ones privileged enough to attend higher education institutions, so how do we change this? This is the pending issue that needs to be made aware of and addressed. I react to this issue the way I do because it directly affects me as a students and a future educator. With my knowledge about this topic now as I teach, I will be aware and take into considerations the issues redlining causes. I hope you enjoy my twitter essay addressing many of the concerns and issues associated with digital redlining.

 

 

Brittany Rocheleau

Oct 30 2018
4 Comments
332wednesday12

Say goodbye to old and hello to the new

For the second multimedia, I decided to focus on the Henry Jenkins video along with the Michele Jacobson article. I was really excited and eager to try out a different platform beside the mind map. I decided to try out the Piktochart in the beginning, I found a few things such as how to properly get images and pictures. It was something that I quickly grasped and began to find was fairly easy and straightforward. It remained me a lot of the PowerPoint platform on how you can add text and add pictures.

The reason I decided to choose the Henry Jenkins video and the Jacobson article because personally I am more drawn to visually seeing something being taught to me rather than having to read articles. I like to break up articles with the use of videos I find it helps me learn better and understand a topic. When first watching the Jenkins video I really noticed how teachers of today’s teaching are not like they were 5-10 years ago.  When I was in elementary school the use of technology was very minimal and if it used it was never used very well. Technology is constantly changing into bigger and better things, the most important thing I think we as teachers need to malleable in the sense of being flexible and being subject to change in with the use of technology. This can be related back to our course that we were taught ways to be flexible and being able to use multiple platforms to allow students to succeed in the classroom.

During my first practicum, I noticed many new things that a classroom has to offer now since I’ve been out of high school. Many of these things are beneficial now to student learning, I’ve seen teachers use technology to help students with their English, such as having this new program called Alexa that allows students to work on English homework to better them as students. Along with Alexa, my associate was heavily into using YouTube videos in his lessons which gave students another viewpoint for them to learn that lesson. All these technological applications used in our digital media class can be applied to our second practicum in many ways, one being using a twitter hashtag that we did last week to spark students interest in a topic. We can also use the Mentimeter application to better understand our students and see what areas they need help in. This all can be tied back into the readings for this assignment by teachers and students working together to better the use of technology and helping each other out.

 

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Oct 30 2018
4 Comments
332wednesday12

Undercover Classism In Our Schools!

Visual Explanation:

For my multimedia assignment I focused on Chris Gilliard’s article “Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy.” The numbers in each box illustrate the order in which the information should be read. I first start by exploring what ‘redlining’ means, and the history of redlining in Detroit. The next box explains how the Gilliard uses the term ‘digital redlining’ to explain the boundaries that surround researching on the school’s internet. In the background of this is the Detroit redlining map to further the analogy. The third box explains how racism and classism is prevalent in secondary schools. This discrimination takes subtle form in digital redlining and by not acknowledging it is to not acknowledge forms of racism and classism in our educational system. The last box illustrates how educators can combat these issues in their schools.

Reflection:

As someone who has always had unrestricted internet access in my own house, I have never thought about policies blocking web searches as an unfair boundary that some students face. Before reading this article I thought that the only digital boundary that some students face is not having a computer at home, and having to complete their assignments at school. It had never occurred to me that school policies restrict access to some websites and therefore limits the student’s research. If the student’s research is limited and they do not necessarily realize that there is a lot more information out there, then their research will be lacking without the student realizing. Because I never realized that this was an issue, this demonstrates my privilege. Going forward, I will be sensitive in my classroom and be aware that some of my students may experience this. I will also explore what types of web searches my own school flags and see how I can challenge these policies to ensure my student’s research is not limited because they do not have access to internet in their homes. This issue will be especially relevant to me as a teacher because I will be a secondary school teacher, teaching history and social sciences. These two content areas are research heavy and I know my students will be needing to do web searches to complete their projects. Furthermore, some social sciences research may challenge school web search policies, so I will have be mindful moving forward. I will ensure my students know that there may be more information out there than can be seen on the school internet. To think critically about the information available will help to combat digital redlining.

Article: https://www.commonsense.org/education/privacy/blog/digital-redlining-access-privacy

Enjoy!

Caroline Voyer

Oct 30 2018
2 Comments
332wednesday12

MIA: Equity in Access

For my second multimedia reflection I choose the article “Digital Redlining, Access and Privacy” by Chris Gilliard and Hugh Culik. This article was very interesting to me because I did not know how far IT policies went to hide information from us. In high school I was aware that they blocked websites like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and You tube; but was completely unaware that resourceful information was also being blocked. Digital redlining is essentially policies that are put in place by colleges and universities to regulate what information students can have access to. This can be positive because it can stop things like viruses and malware, but the problem arises when resourceful information is being blocked because of the socioeconomic status of the institution. Smaller community colleges that are considered to be mostly a working class demographic are being penalized from the consequences of differential access. These situations need to be further evaluated and changes need to be implemented so that access to knowledge is equal for everyone looking to explore open-ended inquiry.

I have a strong belief in equality for all individuals no matter your ethnicity or what school you decide to go to. This is why I feel so strongly that redlining needs to be reevaluated by software developers in order to eliminate these bias. Before I read this article I have never heard of redlining before, it was a completely different concept to me. The history of redlining completely shocked me, I know that people of colour have had to deal with a lot of adversity, but I did not know it went as far as federal government regulations. The fact that a developer had a wall built in order to separate what they believed to be valuable and non-valuable land is appalling to me. I also thought it was very interesting to know that certain institutions have more resources then others depending on how much they want to spend to give access to their students.

To reflect on this article, I choose to do a twitter essay. This was a very new experience for me because I do not use twitter very often and am fairly new to it. Twitter is a very good way to get your message across, even over a series of tweets. I really enjoyed using memes as a way to bring in more interest to your tweet, it also brings in humour which makes any serious conversation better. As a future teacher I would love to implement twitter essays in the classroom. Not only does it bring in a platform that most high school students will understand, but it has them connecting to other students in their classes and hearing opinions they would not get to see if they were simply just writing an essay and handing it in to the teacher. During my first practicum my associate teacher was not very tech-savy, which I believe is an issue a lot of teachers have with the increasing popularity of electronics in the classroom. They did not have the opportunity to have classes like this one to prepare them for all the possibilities that it can create. This class has already taught me so much about different technologies that I have never heard of before, and also has brought to light different opportunities for evaluation and connectedness that I can use as a future teacher. I am very happy I stepped out of my comfort zone this reflection by completing this twitter essay because I truly enjoyed the process and cannot wait to try it out in my own classroom one day!

 

***** Click the link or the tweet above to see the rest of my thread 🙂 *****

Oct 30 2018
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332thursday10

Trying to Get 100%? Why Participatory Learning is the new A+

Within the Jacobsen article, Teaching in a Participatory Digital World, and the Jenkins video, The Influence of Participatory Culture on Education,  focus was placed on utilizing participatory learning environments within the classroom.

Though many educators fear bringing these environments into the classroom, due to the issues that can arise, allowing students to explore safe digital practice provides them with lifelong skills they will integrate into their futures. Digital learning in the classroom allows students to expand their critical thinking and digital literacy, both essential skills in the modern workforce. Please watch my Powtoon below for a more in depth summary of the video and article, as well as more on how the topic of exploratory learning relates to my life!

As I mentioned in the video, as a student I always feared exploratory learning environments. I excelled in math and science courses, so preferred work where there was a clear end goal that I could achieve. Due to my logical tendencies, prior to this course and article, I did not participate in participatory learning environments because it was not integrated into my classes and I did not seek out these resources because I thought I was a stronger analog learner. This course has already helped me adapt to participatory learning environments, but as I stated in the video, this is an ongoing journey that I will never view as complete because I hope to constantly improve based on the knowledge I gain throughout the process.

Within my future classroom, I hope to introduce my students to participatory learning environments to allow them to escape from the mastery learning mindset. By making students aware of the questions they need to ask while exploring online resources, I will aim to help their digital literacy and assist them in gaining critical thinking skills that will last them a lifetime.  Within the text, I learned about Galileo as a teaching resource, and I look forward to exploring this resource in the future!

As I concluded in the video, I would love to hear about more participatory learning environments you have explored or plan to explore in the future! Also, how do you plan to incorporate these learning environments into your classrooms?

Happy Halloween!

Kate

Oct 30 2018
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332wednesday12, Uncategorized

Technology Isn’t So Scary After All

For my second Multimedia reflection I decided to respond to Michele Jacobson’s Article, Teaching in a Participatory Digital World . In this article, the author gives an in depth analysis on how the evolution of technology is affecting the education system and how teachers play an important role in providing students with the tools they require to succeed in this new digital world.

I decided to attempt a twitter essay for my response after participating in our class discussion on twitter last week. I decided this because of how the combination of that twitter discussion and reading this article has really changed my view on participatory learning and this new digital education that is increasingly popular. At the beginning of this class I was not comfortable with the thought of sharing my social networking platforms with my peers, and I was terrified of the thought of using these social platforms in a professional way. This was mainly because I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it, however we are now two months into this class ad I have made a tremendous amount of progress when it comes to stepping out of my comfort zone, and attempting things in the digital world that I would have never imagined I’d be capable of. This twitter essay really forced me to step outside of my comfort zone and try something new.

Enjoy.

 

Oct 30 2018
2 Comments
332wednesday12

Hey Technology, thank you!

For my second multimedia assignment, I was really excited to do a Twitter essay. The in-class assignment of the hashtag chat really got me engaged to use Twitter as my multimedia medium! Using the Twitter essay is perfect for this assignment in my eyes because of how recent we used it as a class. I used to be an avid Twitter user for leisure use, but being able to use it for a school assignment really had me enjoy it, rather than stress and dread over completing it on time. This piece by Dr. Michele Jacobsen was an excellent read and very relatable as a student and future (and kind of current) teacher. It really tied in the course material with realistic situations and even backed up by evidence of over 175 studies.

This course has opened up my eyes on how connected we really are, even when we don’t know it. As we discussed some of the negative effects in the hashtag chat in class, this multimedia piece focuses more on the positives. As I started reading the article, it seemed like it was going to go in a negative direction, and that is where my essay was going. It turned around very quickly as I read more and more on the article, truly seeing the positive aspects of the 24/7 connectedness.

Before reading this article, I would honestly say that I was indifferent on the subject. To me, I guess I understood why some teachers would not change their ways in the classroom and remain analogue, but this article has definitely changed my opinion. For some, they might have a “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” attitude towards their ways, and it is understandable. They have been doing something for a long time, and it has worked for the most part, why change it? I had no idea how much students truly benefited from including digital literacies in the classroom. Being at the faculty of Education has really made me see that it’s about the students, not us. My views have definitely changed about adaptation and teaching styles. There is always room for improvement.

I saw a lot of these benefits during my first practicum as my associate teacher always tried her best to stay connected to her students at all times. She used the Google Classroom platform so that she could post all resources and materials used in class, easily accessible to the students. She also used the Remind app to be able to give students updates on whatever she needed to, at all times of the day. The Remind app was also very useful because she turned on the option where students are able to message her back, almost like texting. The article really emphasized how it is up to the teacher to create a positive online learning environment for the students – giving them the best chance to succeed. I could really relate to that because that is how I want to teach when I am teaching full time. I want to be as engaging as she is, always looking to keep the students interested, no matter the lesson. After reading this, it has really encouraged me to be more aware of my technological resources because it can benefit me and my students in both teaching and learning. This course is teaching me a lot of about digital literacies and I am really looking forward to seeing what’s next to come!

Here are a few tweets from my Twitter essay, click on any of them and check out the thread to get the whole meat and potatoes on how I feel about digital literacies making their way into the classroom.

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