Podcasting is a great idea! I’d love to try that. How would you compare the time investment to other kinds of authorship (papers, blogs, case studies, etc)? It’s definitely a great asset for students.
So many fans of War on the Rocks! Thanks for this.

Welcome aboard! I do think this class (and your blog) will give you a great opportunity to develop and refine your teaching praxis. Check out some of the readings for the week’s topic and see what you are inspired to write about.

Thanks for you post, Brad. And you’ve got some great responses in the comments as well. I also appreciate the way you see networking as being an IRL relationship — digital environments can amplify and reinforce those, as well as bring new ones into being. And we all have to figure out a mode that works for us. I think I would nudge you to track down the conference network people on Twitter if that’s where they hang out. When you aren’t going to physically be in proximity you have to find community where it’s happening.

I think you’re both flying also! And I see no shame in lurking — indeed lurking without tweeting requires considerable restraint and discipline in many cases. Maybe someday you’ll want to opt in, and maybe you won’t. Either way is fine.
And I really laughed at the Boren Ultimatum. Nice.

Thanks Arash! I agree that high-level engineering perspectives are becoming complacent in considering the ethical considerations when deploying new innovative technologies and just marketing their benefits. It would be wrong of me to say the isn’t some consideration going on. So to extend on that thought I think there needs to be greater emphasis on ethics and humanities for students and professionals in engineering to help instill a greater intuitiveness of potential drawbacks when it comes to creating these technologies and how best to mitigate those drawbacks. This is my personal view of course — and I draw upon my own experiences in industry as a software engineer.

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I loved this post and the great conversation in this thread! (very cool that your mom is a Chem prof. also.) I just want to toss in a quick counterpoints re: ed tech tools like “Turn it in”: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/06/19/anti-turnitin-manifesto-calls-resistance-some-technology-digital-age
And try to id a Solomonic line on the issue you are debating with Arash here: Of course integrity is important and teachers need to instill that in students. But I do think it’s a mistake to focus so much time and energy on catching people cheating or making it hard for them to cheat when what we’re here for, supposedly, is to help people learn.

I am assuming that even in those classes, the final grade needs to be calculated in an A-F manner for “GPA purposes” (I might be wrong. this is just pure conjecture). I don’t think the reason why competition is pervasive in our community is because “it is encouraged from a very young age”, instead it is prevalent because of the very nature of life(hence taught from a very young age to prepare the child) — what happens when there are 5 directors seeking for a promotion to VP level ? Competition! I think there needs to be fine balance between teaching competition and collaboration. Teaching ONLY one of them is detrimental to the student in all ways possible.

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Thanks for writing this, Tim! I think you end up in an important place here with the insight about the relentlessness of “middleware” and the observation that we (people) have become the product — or in Shoshana Zuboff’s framing, “behavioral data surplus” has become the driving commodity of surveillance capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism).
P.S. I’m struggling with this sentence: “How can we re approach networked learning personal data constantly being sort for?” can you clarify? Thanks again!

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The way I see it is that cooperation and collaboration help us achieve goals, but competition motivates us to reach those goals. I also think that covering weaknesses always is a good strategy — sometimes it is good to expose them (in a right manner) so that other person can work on improving them — just like airing out wounds.

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I felt the same way when I first began a class that required me to blog. Typically when someone mentioned blogging I looked at them like that’s a waste of time. But after blogging for my last class I come to realize that I enjoy it. It gives me an avenue to share my thoughts with those that opt to and want to read what I have to say. It has become a form of stress relief for me but also gives me a way to put information out into the universe. So to answer your main question…I have converted to blogging. Although not as often as I could, I do find time to blog spontaneously.

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