A frequent pain point with technology in the classroom, for me at least, is not being able to see clearly what students see when they use an edtech tool. It's fairly standard that there is a teacher or control interface and then a student interface. Where I might, if I were in control of a server or most other services, be able to create/manipulate/pose as a user of another type, that functionality to masquerade as a student seems always curtailed and limited in edtech products.

There are technical reasons why there are two views and often two divergent interfaces, but I wonder how much of this is driven by design assumptions as well and, more crucially, how much those design assumptions from outside the classroom are at odds with good pedagogical practices. Whether it is in exposing a minimal amount of control directly to teachers or in the seemingly innocuous (but actually quite mistaken and problematic) assumption that students need a different user experience than teachers, the dichotomy between what teachers see and what students causes all manner of grief.

Those griefs might include not being able to see at a glance that something is missing in the student view (e.g. in Canvas, when a module hasn't been published even though all the assignments have nice green checks next to them; hence students can't work on the module). Or it might be when some element of a page renders for me but doesn't render for them. Sometimes it's the way the grade displays, as when my view puts a clear letter grade but theirs displays numbers first even though I set the damn thing to do it the other way. And don't even get started on what does or doesn't show up in calendars or through LTI integrations and 3rd party apps plugged into an LMS.

Again, there are technical reasons for the dichotomized view of a class through the lens of educational technologies. Nothing is perfect and labor is involved in making all these things work. But in the case of student view vs. teacher view, there's a set of design assumptions and value judgements too. Consider, by contrast, something like googledocs (or etherpad or hedgedocs or draftin — any sort of collaborative writing platform). One of the killer features of those tools is that you can work in real time and, crucially, see more or less the same thing. It feels like you are in a common space, a shared space for the most part where we are all having the same conversation. (Sidenote: there are of course features which fragment the common experience as well, e.g. individual chats that people might have in that platform.) In a classroom, the typical use case of presentation software or the like still revolves around something like a shared experience. Yes, the teacher might have notes in the slides and see a different set of things surrounding the slides, but knowing what students are seeing is both in my control and fairly clear as an instructor.

I think that I tend to like educational technology in direct proportion to the distance between student view and teacher view. That is, the easier it is to see a shared space, where what I can clearly visualize both what students see and maybe a little more that I need to see, the easier it is to use that technology effectively. The more divergence between the student view and the teacher view, the more I get uneasy, feeling like control rests in the software and in systems that are not entirely manageable. Even when it is possible to set up or use a 'test student' account, I am often surprised to see behaviors on the student side that were not predictable from the teacher side.

My biggest pet peeve are the various automatic grade calculations which you have to hunt through menus to turn off and kill, but it happens on most platforms that students will bring me their view of something and it invariably looks very different. Submission buttons that for me are at the bottom are now at the top. What I see first and sorted is now sorted differently for them. Selections possible on my side are not possible on theirs, and so forth.

This is before we get to the case of phone apps. Again, I recognize the technical problem here, having to serve multiple platforms and devices. There are important issues of accessibility that need to be addressed in design as well. This is not a simple problem.

But we can't have better edtech if the starting assumption is that student and teacher views are naturally divergent. Or that it just makes sense, by default, to have a sort of teacher control panel and then something that feeds out to students. This strikes me as a constant misreading of the classroom. Cynically and aggressively I might characterize it as a way that non-teachers, marketers or others who have only ever experienced a classroom as a student might remember the classroom: an intensely hierarchical space where what the teacher does is a form of control: mysterious, opaque, and wholly cut off from what students see. More charitably, I think there is some of the value system of admin/user being transposed from tech architecture, without much filter, to a classroom space.

But classrooms, in all their diversity, are shared spaces. Edtech that works against this ethic is edtech that cuts against the grain of good pedagogy.

I would really like to see more edtech that works or aims for a principle of a single space. This seems missing, as an orientation and philosophy of pedagogy baked into educational tech. There are some hints here and there, spurred in particular by the past year or so (e.g. some design choices in Class for Zoom seem to react against Zoom's inherent fracturing of views by reasserting a “classroom”-y format which resizes teacher, TAs, and students in some sort of hierarchy.) But there should be more awareness of this, and more clarity about why it is needed.

What to do in the meantime? Perhaps the easiest thing, where possible, is to seek out tools that right now do a better job of providing a single space for working together. Maybe it's just a preference for tools that don't make a huge distinction between a sort of teacher/administrator view and a user/student view. Most of that will be software built around the idea of teams or collaboration generally. File sharing, collaborative editing, wikis, and the like — I suppose that's all fairly old school (i.e. more than 5 years old) at the present time.

And maybe some awareness of these design choices can help. If it is nagging you why this tool feels “right” and something else just doesn't click, is it because of that distance between what you see and what the students experience? Have you entered different worlds of user experience and are you, in some sense, working in a separate classroom from your students?

#minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #teacherrant

Interrupting my otherwise pleasant pre-New Years holiday, I made the mistake of reading this piece, headlined “More info is available about which college majors pay off, but students aren’t using it”. The gist is that data tying specific majors to earning potential is now available but (sacre bleu!) students aren't using this data in order to select majors as much as the people making said data think they should.

I have a lot of objections to this piece, including the way that it jams together quotations in ways that demolish all nuance. But the biggest problem is in the way it makes you think that it somehow makes sense for students to see education solely as a pathway to a job and, further, that that job should be measured on the singular metric of salary.

I've taught thousands of students at this point. I can tell you why they don't just use this data and flock to majors that pay more. It's because they're not automatons whose sole concern is how much money they'll make down the road. It's because they have pressures and wants, desires, or needs that vary from person to person and at different times in their education. It's because a job is not a career is not a life and, for the most part, students have some awareness and even a touch of wisdom about this. Most of them have some pressure from parents, from themselves, from communities at large to have a “viable” career path. Some make that a priority; others not so much. Some balance needs and wants in complex ways with multiple majors or delayed gratification. Some may want to rebel from what people expect (that was me, though in the very nerdy sort of rebellion which involves a Ph.D. in an unexpected subject). Some of them think that there are rewards that aren't just monetary. And maybe some of them just make choices that make sense to them at the time but don't prove great in the long run (shocking! shocking that people would not always make the most rational data-driven choices for their life based on data given to them by someone else...).

There are some things which aggregate data like that being peddled in this piece can actively obscure, particularly when the story is likely to be one about lots of individual variation.

The article is really sloppy in its quest to find a clean narrative here:

“Consumer preferences have changed considerably since covid,” said Carol D’Amico, an executive vice president at Strada and former assistant U.S. secretary of education. Now more than in the past, she said, education “has to be relevant to a career path.”

Even before this year, D’Amico said, people were changing the way they viewed college. A few years ago, “no one was even talking about students as consumers. Consumer information wasn’t part of the lingo. It has moved a lot.”

Not sure if this is being presented as a good thing or not so good thing. I strongly suspect this was a much more subtle point in that quotation before it went through the wash of becoming an article:

Two years after the groundbreaking collaboration began, however, students haven’t seemed to alter course, said David Troutman, the system’s associate vice chancellor, who oversees the project.

“What we find is that they’re not changing their majors,” Troutman said. “They’re following their passions.”

He and other advocates stress that they want students to continue following their passions. But they also want them to be aware that earnings vary widely among graduates, even when they have identical majors, from different universities and colleges, affecting not only their quality of life but their ability to repay their student loans.

That's a pretty artful use of quotation to lead into a bunch of other quotes where the line seems to be all about how there's an obvious choice of choosing a better major.

Debate over the language of students as consumers is of course nothing new. It's one cornerstone of the construction and subsequent critique of the neoliberal university, among other things. And there are plenty of folks advocating for the good of treating students as consumers or stating, correctly, the ways in which education is a market and should be treated as such. I get all that.

But the issue here isn't data or in fact whether students are consumers. It's what happens when you characterize students as consumers. I suspect that students themselves, at some level, both embrace and, at times, push back about being identified as consumers. For that reason, because it is as much about identity as anything else — whether students identify with being consumers or not — I think the data-driven outcome will never come to pass as this article presupposes it, inevitably, must.

#consumerism #minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #teacherrant

I wrote about this a bit with a slightly different perspective a month or so ago: https://minimalistedtech.com/students-consumers-and-growth.