e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: From the Editors

These posts provide updates about our editorial policies as well as changes to the site itself.

  • The ETV Personalized Learning Series: What We Hope It Contributes

    It seems like there has been an avalanche of high-profile books about the future of education lately—Kevin Carey’s The End of College, Jeff Selingo’s College Unbound, Anya Kamenetz’s The Test, Michael Crow’s Designing the New American University, and Fareed Zacharia’s In Defense of a Liberal Education, to name a few. The fact that so many of these books are being written now by high-profile authors and are getting so much attention indicates that there is a sense in the public consciousness that we may be at some sort of inflection point. But it’s possible to read a bunch of these books—whatever their virtues may be—and still have only a cloudy notion of what is actually happening on the ground in classrooms right now, for several reasons. First, many of these books are written by non-educators. Second, it’s hard to paint a complete picture while also marshalling examples to support a thesis about tectonic cultural change. But maybe most importantly, it’s just hard to convey a visceral sense of what’s going on in the day-to-day educational lives of teachers and students with the written word.

    Which is one reason why we’re pretty excited about the release of the first two case studies in our new e-Literate TV series on the trend of so-called “personalized learning.” We see the series as primarily an exercise in journalism. We tried not to hold onto any hypothesis too tightly going in, and we committed to reporting on whatever we found, good or bad. We did look for schools that were being thoughtful about what they were trying to do and worked with them cooperatively, so it was not the kind of journalism that was likely to result in an exposé. We went in search of the current state of the art as practiced in real classrooms, whatever that turned out to be and however well it is working.

    These first case studies set the tone for the series. One is on Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, and the other is on Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey. The wide differences between these two schools is indicative of the kind of breadth that we have aspired to achieve for the whole series. Each case study is 30 minutes of video, broken into 10- to 15-minute segments, very little of which is us talking. (We will be releasing some analysis episodes that bookend the series, but those were filmed last and will come out after all the case studies.) And as we had hoped, each case study yielded some lessons and surprises for us.

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  • Our Policy on Cookies and Tracking

    In the wake of the Pearson social media monitoring controversy, edubloggers like Audrey Watters and D’arcy Norman have announced their policies regarding code that can potentially track users on their blogs. This is a good idea, so we are following their example.

    We use Google Analytics and WordPress analytics on both e-Literate and e-Literate TV. The main reason we do so is that we believe the information these packages provide help us create more useful content. Even after a decade of blogging, we are still surprised sometimes by which posts earn your attention and which ones don’t. We look at our analytics results fairly regularly to see what we can learn about writing more content that you find to be worth your time. This is by no means the only or even the main way that we decide what we will write, but we think of it as one of relatively few clues we have to understand to which posts and topics will have the most value to you. We do not run ads and have no intention of doing so in the future. In the case of e-Literate TV, where the content is expensive to make, we may also use information regarding the number of viewers of the episodes in the future to demonstrate to sponsors that our content is having an impact. We make no effort to track individuals and, in fact, have always had a policy of letting our readers comment on posts without registering on the site. But Google in particular is likely making more extensive use of the usage data that they gather.

    In addition to the two analytics packages mentioned above, we do embed YouTube videos and use social media buttons, which may carry their own tracking code with them from the companies that supply them. Unfortunately, this is just part of the deal with embedding YouTube videos or adding convenient “Tweet this” links. The tracking code (which usually, but not always, means the same thing as “cookies”) on our site is pretty typical for what you will find for any site that provides these sorts of conveniences.

    But that doesn’t mean that you have to allow yourself to be tracked if you prefer not to be. There are a number of excellent anti-tracking plugins available for the mainstream browsers, including Ghostery and Disconnect. If you are concerned about being tracked (here or anywhere), then we recommend installing one or more of these plugins, and we also recommend spending a little time to learn how they work and what sorts of tracking code are embedded on the different sites you visit so that you can make informed and fine-grained decisions about what information you do and do not want to share. These tools often let you make service-by-service and site-by-site decisions, but they generally start with the default of protecting your privacy by blocking everything.

    To sum up and clarify our privacy policies:

    • We do use Google Analytics and WordPress analytics.
    • We do embed social media tools that in some cases carry their own tracking code.
    • We do not make any effort to track individuals on our sites.
    • We do not use or plan to use analytics for ads or in any way sell the information from our analytics to third parties, including but not limited to ads.
    • We may in the future provide high-level summaries of site traffic and video views to e-Literate TV sponsors.
    • We do support commenting on blog posts without registration. ((Note: We do require an email address from commenters for the sole purpose of providing us with a means of contacting the poster in the event that the person has written something uncivil or marginally inappropriate and we need to discuss the matter with that person privately before deciding what to do about moderation. In the 10-year history of e-Literate, this has happened about three or four times. There are two differences relevant to reader privacy between requiring the email address and requiring registration. First, we allow people to use multiple email addresses or even temporary email addresses if they do not wish that email to be personally identifiable. We only require that the email address be a working address. Second and probably more importantly, without registration, there is no mechanism to link comments to browsing behavior on the site.))
    • We do provide our full posts in our RSS feed, which excludes most (but not all) tracking code.
    • We do provide CC-BY licensing on our content so that it can be used on other sites, including ones that do not have any tracking code .

  • Unsubscribe

    A little while back, e-Literate suddenly got hit by a spammer who was registering for email subscriptions to the site at a rate of dozens of new email addresses every hour. After trying a number of less extreme measures, I ended up removing the subscription widget from the site. Unfortunately, as a few of you have since pointed out to me, by removing the option to subscribe by email, I also inadvertently removed the option to unsubscribe. Once I realized there was a problem (and cleared some time to figure out what to do about it), I investigated a number of other email subscription plugins, hoping that I could find one that is more secure. After some significant research, I came to the conclusion, that there is no alternate solution that I can trust more than the one we already have.

    The good news is that I discovered the plugin we have been using has an option to disable the subscribe feature while leaving on the unsubscribe feature. I have done so. You can now find the unsubscribe capability back near the top of the right-hand sidebar. Please go ahead and unsubscribe yourself if that’s what you’re looking to do. If any of you need help unsubscribing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

    Sorry for the trouble. On a related note, I hope to reactivate the email subscription feature for new subscribers once I can find the right combination of spam plugins to block the spam registrations without getting in the way of actual humans trying to use the site.

  • A Sneak Preview of e-Literate TV at ELI

    Phil and I will be chatting with Malcolm Brown and Veronica Diaz about our upcoming e-Literate TV series on personalized learning in a featured session at ELI tomorrow. We’ll be previewing short segments of video case studies that we’ve done on an elite New England liberal arts college, an urban community college, and large public university. Audience participation in the discussion is definitely encouraged. It will be tomorrow at 11:45 AM in California C for those of you who are here at the conference, and also webcast for those of you registered for the virtual conference.

    We hope to see you there.

  • A 2014 (Personal) Blogging Retrospective

    Unlike many of the bloggers who I enjoy reading the most, I don’t often let my blogging wander into the personal except as a route to making a larger point. For some reason, e-Literate never felt like the right outlet for that. But with the holidays upon us, with some life cycle events in my family causing me to be a bit more introspective than usual, and with the luxury of having discovered Phil’s top 20 posts of the year post showing up in my inbox, I’m in the mood to ruminate about my personal journey in blogging, where it’s taken me so far, and what it means to me. In the process, I’ll also reflect a bit on what we try to do at e-Literate.

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  • A New e-Literate TV Series is in Production

    We have been quiet about e-Literate TV lately, but it doesn’t mean that we have been idle. In fact, we’ve been hard at work filming our next series. In addition to working with our old friends at IN THE TELLING—naturally—we’re also collaborating with EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and getting funding and support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    As we have discussed both here and elsewhere, we think the term “personalized learning” carries a lot of baggage with it that needs to be unpacked, as does the related concept of “adaptive learning.” The field in general is grappling with these broad concepts and approaches; an exploration of specific examples and implementations should sharpen our collective understandings about the promise and risks of these concepts and approaches. The Gates foundation has funded the development of an ETV series and given us a free editorial hand to explore the topics of personalization and adaptive learning.

    The heart of the series will be a series of case studies at a wide range of different schools. Some of these schools will be Gates Foundation grantees, piloting and studying the use of “personalized learning” technology or product, while others will not. (For more info about some of the pilots that Gates is funding in adaptive learning, including which schools are participating and the evaluation process the foundation has set up to ensure an object review of the results, see Phil’s post about the ALMAP program.) Each ETV case study will start by looking at who the students are at a particular school, what they’re trying to accomplish for themselves, and what they need. In other words who are the “persons” for whom we are trying to “personalize” learning? Hearing from the students directly through video interviews will be a central part of this series. We then take a look at how each school is using technology to support the needs of those particular students. We’re not trying to take a pro- or anti- position on any of these approaches. Rather, we’re trying to understand what personalization means to the people in these different contexts and how they are using tools to help them grapple with it.

    Because many Americans have an idealized notion of what a personalized education means that may or may not resemble what “personalized learning” technologies deliver, we wanted to start the series by looking at that ideal. We filmed our first case study at Middlebury College, an elite New England liberal arts college that has an 8-to-1 student/teacher ratio. They do not use the term “personalized learning” at Middlebury, and some stakeholders there expressed the concern that technology, if introduced carelessly, could depersonalize education for Middlebury students. That said, we heard both students and teachers talk about ways in which even an eight-person seminar can support more powerful and personalized learning through the use of technology.

    The second school on our list was Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey, where we are filming as of this writing (but will be finished by publication time). As you might imagine, the students, their needs, and their goals and aspirations are different, and the school’s approach to supporting them is different. Here again, we’ll be asking students and teachers for their stories and their views rather than imposing ours. We intend to visit a diverse handful of schools, with the goal of releasing a few finished case studies by the end of this year and more early next year.

    With the help of the good folks at ELI, we will also be bringing together a panel at the ELI 2015 conference, consisting of the people from the various case studies to have a conversation about what we can learn about the idea of personalized learning by looking across these various contexts and experiences. This will be a “flipped” panel in the sense that the panelists (and the audience) will have had the opportunity to watch the case study videos before sitting down and talking to each other. The discussion will be filmed and included in the ETV series.

    We’re pretty excited about the series and grateful, as always, to the support of our various partners. We’ll have more to say—and show—soon.

    Stay tuned.

  • Full Disclosure

    As you probably know, we run a consulting business (MindWires Consulting) and sometimes work with the companies and schools that we write about here. Consequently, we periodically remind you and update you on our conflict of interest policies. We do our best to avoid or minimize conflicts of interest where we can, but since our system isn’t perfect, we want you to understand how we handle them when they arise so that you can consider our analysis with the full context in mind. We value your trust and don’t take it for granted.

    We talk a lot with each other about how to deal with conflicts of interest because we run into them a lot. On the one hand, we find that working with the vendors and schools that we write about provides us with insight that is helpful to a wide range of clients and readers. There just aren’t too many people who have the benefit of being able to see how all sides of the ed tech relationships work. But along with that perspective comes an inevitable and perpetual tension with objectivity. When we started our business together 18 months ago, we didn’t have a clear idea where these tensions would show up or how big of an issue they might turn out to be. We originally thought that our blogging was going to remain an addiction that was subsidized but somewhat disconnected from our consulting. But it turns out that more than 90% of our business comes from readers of the blog, and a significant portion of it comes out of conversations stimulated by a specific post. Now that we understand that relationship better, we’re getting a better handle on the kinds of conflict of interest that can arise and how best to mitigate them. Our particular approach in any given situation depends on lot on whether the client wants analysis or advice.

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