BY HANK REICHMAN If you weren’t familiar with Zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic, you must be now. Everyone is using it — for faculty and staff meetings, seminar talks and panels, political and union organizing, socializing with friends and family, holding remote weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, and, of course, teaching online classes. And, yes, we’re…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week John Wilson posted on this blog a piece about how “an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it.” If you have not read John’s post, please do so now; this is an incredibly important issue. As John…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it was led by a large number of pro-Israel groups. It is an example of the growing power of conservative cancel culture, and this censorship reveals the threat to academic freedom…
BY DAVID EIFLER AND MARGARET PHILLIPS When universities abruptly shut down in-person instruction in the spring, academic libraries followed suit. Librarians and other university front line workers applauded these decisions that prioritized the health and safety of staff during this unprecedented public health crisis. And libraries continued to fulfill many of their service missions in…
BY HANK REICHMAN Regular readers of this blog may recall that on March 14 I posted an entry entitled “Online Proctoring and Student Privacy Rights at UCSB.” That post reproduced a letter from the University of California at Santa Barbara Faculty Association (UCSBFA) to campus administrators raising concerns that ProctorU, an online test monitoring service…
BY AARON BARLOW When I told my students on Wednesday that we would indeed be moving all of our activities online for the rest of the semester, they groaned. I was a little surprised. I thought they would like the idea that they could finish their classes from home. I believed that they would imagine…
BY TERRY CARTER High-quality academic scholarship often goes unpublished due to lack of space and increased competition for peer-reviewed and other traditional print publications. Would clear and highly visible higher education guidelines encourage institutions to accept digital scholarship? I argued for such guidelines in a presentation entitled “Academic Freedom in the Digital Technology Age: Exploring…
BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past decade Audrey Watters has proven to be one of our most knowledgeable, insightful, critical, and, well, just plain entertaining commentators on educational technology. Her Hack Education blog is a must-read for anyone who cares about teaching and learning at any level. One terrific feature of that blog has been…
BY AARON BARLOW At the “OEB Global, incorporating Learning Technologies” (once Online Educa Berlin) conference in Berlin today, Audrey Watters, one of the most perceptive thinkers on education that I know of, spoke on “Ed-Tech Agitprop.” Though her primary purpose was to debunk some of the bits of received “wisdom” about the future, ones we…