{"id":1337,"date":"2018-09-05T10:33:38","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T17:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/?p=1337"},"modified":"2020-04-21T06:26:34","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T13:26:34","slug":"digital-skills-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/digital-skills-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Skills Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your posts in response to this week’s activities. It seems that hypothes.is is a tool that has resonated with at least one of you, and for good reason! There are some significant advantages to having students annotate in situ<\/em> on the web.<\/p>\n

There are, as you might imagine, people who have concerns about hypothes.is. Audrey Watters is one of the most important voices in educational technology right now<\/a> and she recently blocked annotation tools on her sites<\/a>. For Audrey, who, as a woman in edtech, disabled comments on her site as a result of receiving countless threats of violence, disabling comments was a matter of her being able to preserve her own wellness, and for people to get around that desire by using hypothes.is to comment on her work in situ, <\/em>was enough for her to actively take steps to block those tools.<\/p>\n

One thing that I hope you will take from this course is that ‘technology’ will not ever ‘fix’ education. There are certainly good things enabled by technology when it is used well, but technology in general, and educational technology in particular, does not exist in a moral vacuum.<\/p>\n

It matters which tools you use.<\/p>\n

It matters what you as a student are doing<\/em> online.<\/p>\n

It matters whether or not you can control your privacy and data.<\/p>\n

On a related note, you likely have some comments on your own site waiting for approval. In your dashboard, click ‘Comments’ to see what is going on there. You may have some that are spam, but you also likely have some that are either pingbacks from this post, or actual comments from your colleagues…or if you are like me, your mother-in-law. It is a good idea to check that regularly and clean out the spam.<\/p>\n

Alternately, and this is what I have done with my own blog, you can disallow comments altogether by going to ‘Settings’ > ‘Discussion’ in your dashboard and refining the settings there.<\/p>\n

As you continue to post, I encourage you to reply to your colleague’s posts with a post on your own site and link back to your colleagues post, like this one to Matt’s post about hypothes.is<\/a>, and this one to Daneen’s post on Narrating U<\/a>, and this one to Brittni’s post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you put a link to another blog on its own line, you should get a preview embedded in your post, like this:<\/p>\n

Narrating U<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n