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Category : Digital Pedagogy

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ChatGPT, Digital Pedagogy, Open Web, Surveillance

In Defense of “Banning” ChatGPT

The current big news on ChatGPT is around the decisions by K-12 school districts to pause, think, push back and sometimes “ban” ChatGPT. I’ve mostly heard about NYC Department of Ed because they have actually put a “ban” in place but other districts are now considering their approach. What does it mean to “ban” a technology in a school? In this case it means blocking it on their networks and on all school issued devices. Another way of pushing back though is simply spreading the message that this tool is not aligned with the school’s values. 

Responses that I’ve seen are mostly dismissive of the schools who are considering or implementing a ban and often buy into the techno-inevitability frame. This is the future; you can’t fight it? But I’m more sympathetic to these schools’ stance. While I do think that they have set themselves up for a Streisand effect, and I realize that there are other ways to access the tool on cell networks and personal devices, I also feel the need to defend this approach. 

I know little about K-12 education myself; I mostly work in higher ed. But I do know that K-12 schools block parts of the internet all of the time and I’m pretty sure that often they are required to do so here in the US to get federal funding. OpenAI’s own Terms of Use states that their tools should not be used by anyone under 18 and their Privacy Policy says they are not intended for anyone 13 and younger. Additionally, NYC Dept of Ed has provisions for lifting the ban for schools who would like to explore the pedagogical possibilities of the tool, so those who have a plan and intention have a pathway to use. 

I think others who are sympathetic to banning are doing so because of cheating concerns but I’m not so interested in the “cheating” angle. I do think that this tool could be used to assist in critical thinking and in the drafting process. But I’ve worked in edtech for 15 years and if I know anything I know quickly throwing new technology, at scale, into a learning environment is a recipe for disaster. It takes people to develop meaningful curricula around technology use, imagine harms and try to avoid them, and that takes time. I’m all for slowing this bus down.

I wrote about some concerns that good intentioned higher ed instructors, who want to use ChatGPT with their students, might want to think about. There, I mostly cited privacy and larger labor concerns which I think are heightened for K-12. But another concern for both higher ed and K-12 might be that this is a “free for now” product. Some are estimating that it costs $3 million dollars a month to run the thing. They are going to start charging for it at some point. What if it is in the middle of your term? 

I’m okay with some schools considering and even deciding to attempt to throttle ChatGPT usage – especially K-12 schools. OpenAI is pretty open about the fact that this whole thing is a big experiment around the effects of releasing ChatGPT on society. They are quoted as telling CNN:

“A spokesperson for OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab behind the tool, said it made ChatGPT available as a research preview to learn from real-world use. The spokesperson called that step a “critical part of developing and deploying capable, safe AI systems.”

OpenAI says that their mission is “to ensure that artificial intelligence is a benefit to all of humanity” but I’m not sure how that tracks with running experiments on the general public (in higher ed this would never pass IRB) and drawing a line at extending this experiment on kids is okay in my book. 

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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Digital Citizenship, Digital Environments, Digital Pedagogy

Is it possible to ban remote proctoring?

This post is co-authored and jointly published with Sarah Silverman

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The harms of remote proctoring have been so extensively documented that some educational institutions have now instituted formal recommendations or policies against using remote proctoring.

But, is it possible to ban remote proctoring on campus? We have found that even when these decisions are made, the goal of protecting students from the harms of remote proctoring is not completely achievable. This is because directly purchasing a proctoring service from the provider is only one way to make use of proctoring software. Many other educational technology companies offer proctoring services, often for “free” or passing the cost on to the student.

While our own campus has a formal recommendation from the Provost Office against remote proctoring, and no contract with a remote proctoring company, we noted that proctoring was available on our campus for free through McGraw Hill Connect’s partnership with Proctorio. Our experience was that Proctorio became available without the consent or even the knowledge of the instructional technology staff on our campus and we only discovered its availability after learning about the MH-Proctorio partnership through outside professional networks.

Because of these vendor to vendor relationships, students and faculty can easily be exposed to these products without any oversight from educational technology, data privacy, or accessibility professionals. Because many of these proctoring options operate with a “freemium” model, students are potentially required to pay fees in order to complete their assessments.

It is useful to know which educational technology companies have agreements with proctoring companies and integrate their services into their products. After many months of communication we were able to get McGraw Hill to remove the proctoring functions for our campus. However, even those with proctoring in place at their institutions should be aware of these kinds of offerings as the training materials are not always consistent between the provider and the reseller with respect to the product’s functionality. For instance, we found examples in which the company purchasing and reselling the proctoring options was presenting the technology as being able to “detect cheating” while most proctoring companies are very clear that the technology alone cannot determine cheating and that human verification is required to be certain.

The following are some examples of educational technology companies and products that currently offer some form of remote proctoring for free or by charging a fee to students. There are likely to be many more examples, but this list represents ed tech products with which we are familiar in our work. These relationships are also liable to change at any moment, for example a company initiating a new proctoring partnership or ending one. Are you aware of vendor to vendor relationships that bring proctoring into your campus or school?

Primary Product Proctoring Provider Nature of partnership References
McGraw Hill Connect Proctorio Free settings available on all assignments, “Proctorio Plus” settings available for 15$ per course, paid by student https://www.mheducation.com/highered/connect/proctorio.html

https://www.mheducation.com/highered/connect/proctorio/compare.html
TopHat Proctorio Announced that Proctorio protected exams would be available for free on April 2, 2020 – current status of partnership unclear https://tophat.com/press-releases/top-hat-partners-with-proctorio/

https://success.tophat.com/s/article/Teaching-Online-Remotely-Proctored-Tests
McGraw Hill ALEKS Respondus LockDown/Monitor “Secure testing with LockDown Browser, always free. Deter cheating with Respondus Monitor via institutional agreement or $10 per student for the entire term.: https://www.mheducation.com/highered/support/aleks/how-to-move-your-course-online.html

https://web.respondus.com/aleks/
Derivita  Proctorio Lockdown settings available at no extra cost, unclear how payment for additional features works https://www.derivita.com/proctoring

https://www.derivita.com/lockdown-settings?_ga=2.54833771.1798584622.1626192772-1122037571.1621811441
Gradescope Respondus LockDown While currently in Beta, LockDown browser will be available to courses subscribed to Gradescope Complete, their paid product. Instructor or institution can decide to pay for Gradescope Complete https://help.gradescope.com/article/gm5cmcz19k-instructor-assignment-online#additional_security_with_lock_down_browser_beta
Pearson MyLab Respondus LockDown If the university does not have an existing license with Respondus, the instructor can choose for students to be charged $10 per course  https://web.respondus.com/pearson-mylab/
Wiley Online Homework Respondus LockDown Appears lockdown is free for students, but hard to find current information https://wileyplus.gallery.video/instructors/detail/videos/legacy-wileyplus/video/5827956956001/how-to-use-lockdown-browser-with-wileyplus
Cengage WebsAssign Respondus LockDown Lockdown browser available for free https://www.webassign.net/manual/instructor_guide/t_i_installing_webassign_lockdown_browser.htm

Image by succo from Pixabay

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Digital Citizenship, Digital Environments, Digital Identity, Digital Networks, Digital Pedagogy, Digital Scholarship, DigPINS, Open Education, Rhizomatic Learning

#OpenEd18 Lightning Talk: #DigPINS, We are Open … But sometimes closed

I’ve made it to Open Ed 2018 and I’m excited to present a lightning talk on Friday at 3:30 – 3:45 with Sundi Richard and Joe Murphy on our collaborations with #DigPINS. If you are at the conference please consider coming by and if you are not I’m hoping this blog post will give you a glimpse.

If you don’t know, DigPINS is a faculty development experience, much of which happens in the open, where we collaborate with small cohorts of faculty in a fully online experience to discuss issues of Digital (the Dig) Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship (the PINS) over anywhere from 3-5 weeks.

We have released a template of the curriculum as a model that can be found at https://digpins.org so that is one place to get started but that is just content… #DigPINS is really an opportunity for collaboration and community as we will discuss in the talk.

It basically works from a position of someone at an institution deciding that they are going to run #DigPINS with a cohort of faculty – this could be an instructional designer, a librarian, a technologist… but someone interested in faculty development around how we learn in online spaces. This person needs to pick dates, register people, promote it and ultimately design the thing. Like I said a template is available at https://digpins.org but, again, that is just content. One of the big design decisions is about choosing the open digital environments and the backchannel (This is the ‘closed space’ that we are calling out in the title of this talk).

We have found that the backchannel is important for faculty who are just getting started. They have to have a safe space to communicate and collaborate outside of the public eye while considering and challenging themselves with these heavy notions and the very idea of ‘going open’.

The facilitator should have experience with each of the themes (the PINS) in theory and in practice.

This past summer Joe and I ran the first DigPINS cohorts in conjunction with one another creating the first inter-institutional cohorts. We had a total of 17 participants and we had to be flexible with one another. We had our own backchannels and our own open hubs.

There are lots of ways to join – the big one is to run your own iteration at your own school with your own cohort but people can also dip in as individuals with any of the open activities and of course on the #DigPINS tag on Twitter. This January there are plans for all three of us to run it with cohorts from January 2nd till the 28th.

I’m embedding our slides below – if you need more info don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

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Digital Citizenship, Digital Identity, Digital Pedagogy, Digital Scholarship, Domain of One's Own, Open Web, Privacy

Designing for Privacy with DoOO: Reflections after DPL

The thinking for this post comes on the tail end of Digital Pedagogy Lab (DPL) where, despite not being enrolled in any of the data or privacy offerings, concerns of student data and privacy rang loud in my ears. This came from various conversations but I think it really took off after Jade Davis’ keynote and after Chris G and Bill Fitzgerald visited us in Amy Collier’s Design track to talk about designing for privacy. After the Lab I also came across Matthew Cheney’s recent blog post How Public? Why Public? where he advocates for public work that is meaningful because it is done so in conjunction with private work and where students use both public and private as options depending on what meets the needs of varying circumstances.

A big part of what attracts me to Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) is this possibility of increased ownership and agency over technology and a somewhat romantic idea I have that this can transfer to inspire ownership and agency over learning. In considering ideas around privacy in DoOO it occurred to me that one of the most powerful things about DoOO is that is it has the capability of being radically publicly open but that being coerced into the open or even going open without careful thought is the exact opposite of ownership and agency.

In a recent twitter conversation with Kris Schaffer he referred to openness and privacy as two manifestations of agency. This struck me as sort of beautiful and also made me think harder about what we mean by agency, especially in learning and particularly in DoOO. I think that the real possibility of agency in DoOO starts from teaching students what is possible around the capabilities and constraints in digital environments. If we are really concerned about ownership and agency in DoOO then we have to consider how we will design for privacy when using it.

DoOO does allow for various forms and levels of privacy which are affected by deployment choices, technical settings, and pedagogical choices. I hear people talk about these possibilities and even throw out different mixes of these configurations from time to time but I have never seen those listed out as a technical document anywhere.

So, this is my design challenge. How can I look at the possibilities of privacy for DoOO, refine those possibilities for specific audiences (faculty and students), and then maybe make something that is not horribly boring (as technical documents can be) to convey the message. I do want to be clear that this post is not that – this post is my process in trying to build that and a public call for reflections on what it could look like or resources that may already exist. What I have so far is really just a first draft after doing some brainstorming with Tim C during some downtime at DPL.

Setting Some Boundaries
This could go in a lot of different directions so I’m setting some boundaries up front to keep a scope on things. I’d love to grow this idea but right now I’m starting small to get my head around it. I’m looking to create something digestible that outlines the different levels of privacy around a WordPress install on DoOO.  DoOO is so much bigger than just WordPress, I know that but I’m not trying to consider Omeka or other applications – yet. Also, I’m specifically thinking about this in terms of a class or other teaching/learning environment. A personal domain that someone is doing on their own outside of a teaching/learning environment is another matter with different, more personal, concerns.

Designing for Privacy with DoOO
Right now I’m dividing things up into two broad categories that interact with one another. I need better titles for them but what I’m calling Privacy Options are stand alone settings or approaches that can be implemented across any of the Deployments which are design and pedagogical choices that are made at the onset. Each of these also afford for and require different levels of digital skills and I’m also figuring out how to factor that into the mix. I will start with Deployments because I think that is where this starts in practice.

Deployments:
Deployment 1 – Instructor controlled blog: With this deployment an instructor has their own domain where they install WordPress and give the students author accounts (or whatever level privileges make sense for the course). Digital Skills: Instructor needs to be comfortable acting as a WordPress administrator including: theming and account creation. Students gain experience as WordPress authors and collaborating in a single digital space.

Deployment 2 – Instructor controlled multisite: With this deployment an instructor installs a WordPress multisite on their own domain and each student gets their own WordPress site. Digital Skills: Running a multisite is different from running a single install and will require a bit more in the way of a digital skill set including: enabling themes and plugins, setting up subdomains and/or directories. Students can gain the experience of being WordPress administrators rather than just authors but depending on the options chosen this can be diminished.

Deployment 3 – Student owned domains: This is what we often think of as DoOO. Each student does not just get a WordPress account or a WordPress site but their own domain. They can install any number of tools but of course the scope of this document (for now) is just WordPress. Digital Skills: One fear I have is that this kind of deployment can be instituted without the instructor having any digital skills. Support for digital skills will have to come from somewhere but if this is being provided for from some other area then the instructor does not need to have the skills themselves. Students will gain skills in c-panel, installing WordPress, deleting WordPress

Privacy Options
Privacy Options looks at approaches, settings, or plugins that can be used across any of the Deployments:

1 – Visibility settings: WordPress Posts and Pages have visibility settings for public, password protected, and private. These can be used by any author on any post and by admins on posts and pages.

2 – Private site plugin: Though I have not personally used a private site plugin I know that they exist and can be used to make a whole WordPress site private. Tim mentioned that he has used Hide My Site in the past with success.

3 – Pseudonyms: There is no reason that a full legal name needs to be used. How do we convey the importance of naming to students. I took a stab at this for my day job but I’m wondering what else can be done.

4 – Search engine visibility setting: This little tick box is located in WordPress under the reading settings and “discourages search engines from indexing the site” though it does say that it is up to the search engines to honor this request.

5 – Privacy protection at the domain level to obscure your name and address from a WhoIs lookup. Maybe not a concern if your institution is doing subdomains?

6 – An understanding of how posts and sites get promoted. Self promotion and promotion from others. How different audiences might get directed to your post or site.

Some Final Thoughts
There is one approach that I’d actually been leaning toward prior to Digital Pedagogy Lab that raises questions about how to introduce this. I do worry about the technical barrier that comes with learning about these privacy options. All of the privacy options come with some level of digital skill and/or literacy that needs to be in place or acquired. In addition, I think that often the deployments are made before the privacy options are considered; yes yes I know that is not ideal but it is a reality. Because of this, is it maybe just better to tell faculty and students, in the beginning at least, to think of their DoOO or their WordPress as a public space? Mistakes happen and are we muddying the waters by thinking of DoOO or WordPress as private spaces where a simple technical mistake could easily make things public? Most people have so many options for private reflection and drafting; from Google Docs to the LMS, email to private messaging we have so many tools that are not so radically publicly open. Is there something to be said for thinking of the domain space as public space and using it for that – at least while building the skills necessary to make it more private?

I don’t have the answers but I wanted to open the conversation and see what others are thinking. Are there resources that I’m missing and how can this be created in a way that will be easy to understand and digestible? I’m thinking and writing and booking some folks for conversations to keep thinking in this way. Stay tuned and I’ll keep learning transparently.

Big thanks to Tim C and Chris G for giving feedback on a draft of this post.

Photo original by me licensed CC-BY

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Conferences, Digital Identity, Digital Pedagogy, Digital Scholarship, DigPINS, Networks, Presentation

ELI Poster Presentation: DigPINS – A participatory faculty development experience

I’m excited to be presenting a poster at ELI2018 with Sundi Richard on DigPINS – a participatory faculty development experience. Sundi designed DigPINS around the same time that I was designing my first year seminar in digital citizenship – of course we co-founded #DigCiz and digciz.org together so there has been a lot of talk between us about all of these projects.

DigPINS looks at Digital Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship as an online faculty development experience in a cohort model over a set time period. It sort of reminds me of a cMOOC except the focus is not on massive numbers and there is a part of the experience that does not happen in the open – the cohort at the school that is running the course has a backchannel and really they are often closer in physical proximity to one another so they can sometimes just talk to each other on campus.

For our poster we have given a description of each of the defining concepts (the PINS: Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship) on one half and then an interactive description of examples of the activities on the other half. The activities are dynamic and complex – they are not easily put into a box – hence making the poster interactive. How do we make a poster interactive? Well each activity will be printed separately so that during explination they can be placed along two intersecting continuums: Private/Public and Synchronous/Asynchronous. The far extremes of each of these are hard to get at and I’m not sure that anything in DigPINS belongs there but we are hopeful that having these as moveable elements that we will be able to better demonstrate their complexity.

A digital version of the poster is embedded below – it is three slides long as Slide 1 is the poster, Slide 2 are the moveable activities, and on Slide 3 we put a description.

DigPINS Poster

Some of you know I just took a position at St. Norbert and one of the big reasons was because I knew they were not just open to but encouraging really exciting approaches to faculty development like DigPINS. I just finished up running my first implementation of DigPINS at St. Norbert. I had a great group of faculty, staff, and librarians who were really thoughtful about their approaches. We had some serious conversations about the good and bad of technology, social media, mobile access and their effects on pedagogy, scholarship, and ourselves.

I’m excited to be able to present with Sundi on DigPINS – our next move is to open the curriculum so that others can take the skeleton of the defining concepts and activities and make it their own at their institution. That is coming soon so stay tuned!!!

 

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