I’ve been thinking a lot recently about product as praxis. Without putting too much conceptual weight behind the term ‘praxis,’ what I mean is merely that educational technologies are not just developed in order to change behavior. Ed tech embodies values and beliefs (often latent) about what humans are and should be, about what teaching…
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Five Must-See Analytics Sessions at EDUCAUSE 2016
EDUCAUSE is big. Really big. With so much to take in, conference-goers (myself included) are easily faced with the paradox of choice: a sense of paralysis in the face of too many options. To help myself and others, I have scanned this year’s conference agenda and selected five presentations that I think will be individually…
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Lines in the Sand: Putting Family First
Nana passed away last week. Nana was my wife’s grandmother. After battling cancer, and finally beating it with the removal of a kidney, she eventually succumbed to infection — a side-effect of her immune system having been decimated by chemotherapy. I am fortunate that I have not had to deal with death in my…
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Four-Star Horse Husband Shares His Philosophy on Life, Love and HorseHubby.com
Story by Susan Friedland-Smith for Sidelines Magazine Dr. Timothy Harfield, eventer Elisa Wallace’s horse husband of three years, documents a behind-the-scenes look at the life of United States Olympic Eventing Team reserve rider and Mustang advocate from Jasper, Georgia, via weekly Wallace Eventing vlogs. In addition, Timothy has fully-embraced his horse hubby role by cleaning stalls,…
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Learning analytics and interoperability—a new standard
Learning analytics can be like shining a flashlight into a deep cave. In an instant, access to data about teaching and learning practices illuminates facts about actual behavior that would otherwise be left to speculation and anecdote. But just as we need multiple light sources to shed light into the many caverns that connect to…
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Student Success and Liberal Democracy
The political environment in the United States has increasingly highlighted huge problems in our education system. These problems, I would argue, are not unrelated to how we as a country conceptualize student success. From the perspective of the student, success is about finding a high-paying job that provides a strong sense of personal fulfillment. From…
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Data Dread: An Intractable Problem of Personal Identity in the Digital Age?
Public concern about ‘big data’ frequently comes down to a vague and ill-defined sense of ‘ickiness.’ I’d like to briefly suggest a way to provides structure to this vague sentiment — let’s call it data dread. Provisionally, I would argue that public distrust of ‘big data’ comes down to major tension between two promises of…
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