Caroline Giuliani, the daughter of President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. With less than a month until the election, Giuliani urged her fellow Americans to do the same in order to put an end to what she calls Mr. Trump’s “reign of terror.”
Writing in Vanity Fair, she called on voters to “end this nightmare” and “elect a compassionate and decent president.” She said that she is hesitant to even acknowledge her last name, but explained that, in this election, “none of us can afford to stay silent.”
Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, has been one of the president’s long-standing supporters. His daughter, who publicly supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, opened up about arguments she has had with her father, going back to her childhood, on issues of racism, sexism and gay marriage, among others.
“I may not be able to change my father’s mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office,” Giuliani wrote.
“If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with ‘yes-men’ and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power,” Caroline Giuliani wrote. “We’ve seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants (the ones who weren’t convicted, anyway).”
In the essay, Giuliani, who is bisexual, slammed Mr. Trump’s treatment of the LGBTQ community and other minorities. She also condemned the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and criticized him for nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — comparing him to a villain straight out of a “James Bond” film.
Giuliani voiced her support not only for the former vice president, but for his choice in a running mate, Senator Kamala Harris. She wrote it is inspiring that Biden “is not afraid to surround himself with people who disagree with him.”
She touted the Democratic nominees’ climate change proposals, noting, “it is clear that our planet cannot survive four more years of this administration’s environmental assault.” She also said she believes Biden will incorporate the ideas of more progressive leaders, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, on the topics of universal health care, student debt relief, prison reform and police reform.
Giuliani admitted in the essay that Biden was not her first choice for president, but urged Americans who are considering casting a symbolic vote or abstaining from the process altogether to reconsider.
“If the unrelenting deluge of devastating news makes you think I’m crazy for having hope, please remember that making us feel powerless is a tactic politicians use to make us think our voices and votes don’t matter,” she said. “But they do.”
Republican Senator David Perdue mocked Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s first name at a rally on Friday in Macon, Georgia.
He referred to Kamala Harris as “Kamala? Kamala? Kamala-mala-mala? I don’t know, whatever” while speaking to a crowd of President Donald Trump supporters and was immediately accused of deliberately butchering and mocking her name in a racist appeal.
A spokesperson for Perdue said, “Senator Perdue simply mispronounced Senator Harris’ name, and he didn’t mean anything by it,” but very few seemed to believe this explanation.
“Senator David Perdue has served in the Senate alongside Vice Presidential nominee and Senator Kamala Harris since 2017,” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said in a statement. “He knows her name and he knows how to say it. His disgusting performance today is nothing more than a desperate dog whistle from a losing politician who was already caught running anti-Semitic ads against Jon Ossoff.”
Regardless of whether the name flub was intentional or not, it is still a very costly mistake.
Not even a full day after Georgia Sen. David Perdue mispronounced the name of vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris — a colleague he has served with on the Senate Budget Committee for almost four years — Perdue’s Democratic opponent Jon Ossoff raised over $1 million online after circulating the clip of Perdue speaking at the rally for President Trump.
The race’s most recent polling average from RealClearPolitics shows a tight race with Perdue at 46.0% support and Ossoff at 45.0% support, so it is certainly not in Perdue’s best interest for Ossoff to receive a sudden cash infusion with just over two weeks until Election Day.
Perdue and his kind are disgraces to the country and have no business in the US Senate.
CNN reported yesterday that former White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, told friends that President Donald Trump “is the most flawed person” he’s ever known.
“The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” the retired Marine general has told friends, CNN has learned.
The reporting comes from a new CNN special scheduled to air tonight (Sunday), “The Insiders: A Warning from Former Trump Officials,” in which former senior administration officials — including former national security adviser John Bolton, former Health and Human Services scientist Rick Bright and former Department of Homeland Security general counsel John Mitnick — explain why they think the President is unfit for office.
Kelly’s sentiments about the President’s transactional nature and dishonesty have been shared by other former members of the Trump administration who also appear in the special.
Olivia Troye, a former top adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, has said the President knew about the impact the coronavirus pandemic would have on the US by mid-February, but that “he didn’t want to hear it, because his biggest concern was that we were in an election year.” Miles Taylor, a former DHS chief of staff who now serves as a CNN contributor, has asserted Trump essentially calls individuals within the federal government who disagree with him “deep state.”
Elizabeth Neumann, another former DHS official, had criticized Trump for not condemning White supremacy after the first presidential debate in September.
“The fact that he continues to not be able to just point-blank say, ‘I condemn White supremacy.’ It boggles the mind,” she told CNN at the time.
Trump did say on Thursday during a town hall on NBC that he condemned White supremacy. “I denounce White supremacy, OK?,” Trump told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. “I’ve denounced White supremacy for years.”
The President sometimes is successfully cajoled to condemn White supremacists, but often — such as in the first presidential debate — seems reluctant do so, perhaps so as to not alienate any potential votes.
Kelly, who left the White House under contentious circumstances in January 2019, has occasionally voiced criticisms of the Trump administration since leaving his post.
In June, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police and Trump’s response to the subsequent protests and calls for racial justice, Kelly said he agreed with former Secretary of Defense Gen. Jim Mattis’ stark warning that Trump is “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people.” Kelly said he would have cautioned Trump against the idea of using law enforcement to clear Lafayette Square of protesters ahead of the President’s now infamous photo op in front of a nearby church.
Kelly also defended retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman for raising concerns about the President’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — the call at the heart of the President’s impeachment. And Kelly has said he believes Bolton’s allegation that Trump conditioned US security aid to Ukraine on an investigation into political rivals.
Kelly has said that before he left the White House, he cautioned Trump: “Don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth. … Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”
Since Kelly’s departure, the White House and the President have maintained that the former general wasn’t cut out for his job in the West Wing.
Professor Matthias Scheutz of Tufts University and his team have programmed several robots to read one another’s thoughts. Below is an article describing this development courtesy of Science on Tap – American Association for the Advancement of Science. Here is a link to youtube videos demonstrating Scheutz’s robots.
Tony
Mind Sharing Robots Learn from Each Other
By Suzannah Weiss
Imagine you’re an astronaut aboard a spacecraft orbiting Mars, scouting it out for a colonization mission. But suddenly, there’s a break down. Luckily, two autonomous robots on board each know what the other is doing and perceiving, without any outward communication, and are able to get to work repairing the ship. This special capability is known as “mind sharing.”
Professor Matthias Scheutz of Tufts University and his team created this exact scenario in a virtual reality environment and had humans navigate it under two conditions: when the robots had mind-sharing capabilities and when they didn’t. They discovered that when the robots mind shared, the task was completed more quickly, and more tubes aboard the spacecraft were repaired.
While this Mars mission may exist only in virtual reality, robot mind sharing does not. Scheutz’s team has programmed several real-life robots to essentially read one another’s thoughts, working to coordinate tasks like one giant hive mind.
The technology began with a neural chip that ran on one computer, which multiple robots could access to rapidly process images. “That was how we set up a system that allowed robots to access a joint resource, and it became a way to share anything on the fly on an as-needed basis,” Scheutz recounts.
Scheutz was inspired by a concept in organizational psychology called shared mental models — people’s conceptions of teams they belong to and tasks they’re collaborating on. The more similar people’s mental models tend to be within a group, the greater its success.
“In the case of robots, we can organize and build them so there’s no longer a need to continuously update them,” he explains.
While communication among machines isn’t new, what is unique about this system is that robots can share tasks even if the physical structures performing those tasks are very different. For example, robots with two different types of arms can still share information about how to pour liquid out of a container. In addition, a robot that lacks a certain component can essentially borrow it from another robot; for instance, one that needs to pick up an object, but cannot see, could use visual information from another robot’s camera to obtain the object.
Scheutz sees many applications for this technology, one being the coordination of tasks by household robots.
“If you teach one robot in the kitchen context how to slice a cucumber, then if another robot is being taught how to make salad and you get to the point where you’re trying to explain how to slice a cucumber, it already knows how to do that,” he explains. “It’s very practical because you basically save the effort of retraining every single machine.”
This same setup can also benefit robots in industrial settings, like factories. If each robot is being taught by a human, they all will get smarter and smarter in tandem.
Scheutz is currently in talks with several companies interested in adapting his technology. One of them, Thinking Robots, Inc., is integrating it with office robots so that they can seamlessly delegate tasks within a workplace. A video on the Thinking Robots website shows two robots — a mobile platform and a stationary arm — responding to a person’s command to pick up and deliver an object, each knowing which part of the task to complete. Scheutz expects that these robots will be on the market within a year or so.
We could also soon see these kinds of robots popping up in stores, where they could work together to stock shelves, clean up items that have been dropped or spilled, or fetch staff members when customers need help.
The next step for Scheutz is to figure out how these machines can better accommodate human preferences. For instance, it seems that people don’t like to be left out of robots’ conversations. In Scheutz’s research, if someone told one robot to instruct another to leave the room, participants preferred that the robot did this out loud, even if it did not need to.
“Humans have to do it the hard way by communicating explicitly and giving each other updates, and robots don’t have to do that,” Scheutz explains. Going forward, we’ll have to strike a balance between taking advantage of this capability and allowing it to coexist with our own limited, self-contained minds, Scheutz says.
Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska issued a scathing takedown of President Trump during a telephone town hall with constituents on Wednesday. He accused the president of bungling the response to the coronavirus pandemic, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists, and offending voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate.
Senator Sasse, who is up for re-election on Nov. 3, went public with his concerns at a time when Republicans are increasingly worried that Mr. Trump is careening toward a devastating loss in November’s elections that could also cost them the Senate, handing Democrats, who already hold the House, unified control. After years of tolerating the president’s Twitter bullying and disregard for party orthodoxy and basic American norms, their patience appears to be wearing thin.
In a dire, nine-minute indictment of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy and what Sen. Sasse called his “deficient” values, the senator said the president had mistreated women and alienated important allies around the globe, been a profligate spender, ignored human rights and treated the pandemic like a “P.R. crisis.” He predicted that a loss by Mr. Trump on Election Day, less than three weeks away, “looks likely,” and said that Republicans would face steep repercussions for having backed him so staunchly over four tumultuous years.
“The debate is not going to be, ‘Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump?’” Sen. Sasse said, according to audio obtained by The Washington Examiner and authenticated by The New York Times. “It’s going to be, ‘What the heck were any of us thinking, that selling a TV-obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?’”
“We are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami,” he added.
Better late than never but why hasn’t the Republican leadership spoken out previously about what a disgrace Trump has been for the American presidency.
Below is an audio tape of Sen. Sasse’s comments. An article reporting on his comments follows.
Tony
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New York Times
Slamming Trump, G.O.P. Senator Warns of a ‘Republican Blood Bath’
Nicholas Fandos
October 15, 2020
Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, castigatedPresident Trump in a telephone town hall with constituents on Wednesday, accusing the president of bungling the response to the coronavirus pandemic, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists, and offending voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate.
Mr. Sasse, who is up for re-election on Nov. 3, went public with his concerns at a time when Republicans are increasingly worried that Mr. Trump is careening toward a devastating loss in November’s elections that could also cost them the Senate, handing Democrats, who already hold the House, unified control. After years of tolerating the president’s Twitter bullying and disregard for party orthodoxy and basic American norms, their patience appears to be wearing thin.
In a dire, nine-minute indictment of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy and what Mr. Sasse called his “deficient” values, the senator said the president had mistreated women and alienated important allies around the globe, been a profligate spender, ignored human rights and treated the pandemic like a “P.R. crisis.” He predicted that a loss by Mr. Trump on Election Day, less than three weeks away, “looks likely,” and said that Republicans would face steep repercussions for having backed him so staunchly over four tumultuous years.
“The debate is not going to be, ‘Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump?’” Mr. Sasse said, according to audio obtained by The Washington Examiner and authenticated by The New York Times. “It’s going to be, ‘What the heck were any of us thinking, that selling a TV-obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?’”
“We are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami,” he added.
Mr. Sasse also hinted at more drastic consequences: a “Venezuela style” Supreme Court with dozens of justices installed by ascendant Democrats; an empowered China ruling the Pacific because of Mr. Trump’s “weak” policies; and American allies doubting whether they can “trust in U.S. strength and U.S. will.”
Mr. Sasse, who is up for re-election on Nov. 3, went public with his concerns at a time when Republicans are increasingly worried that Mr. Trump is careening toward a devastating loss in November’s elections that could also cost them the Senate, handing Democrats, who already hold the House, unified control. After years of tolerating the president’s Twitter bullying and disregard for party orthodoxy and basic American norms, their patience appears to be wearing thin.
He spoke to constituents on Wednesday around the same time that senators on the Judiciary Committee were concluding their questioning of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Mr. Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill. Mr. Sasse, a member of the panel, had lavished praise on Judge Barrett, a favorite of conservatives who would tilt the court decidedly to the right.
Rarely has a split screen better encapsulated the trade-offs congressional Republicans have accepted over four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency than a Republican senator exulting over his conservative Supreme Court nominee in one moment and lamenting his norm-shattering behavior — and his party’s willingness to quietly tolerate it — in the next.
Mr. Sasse did not exactly try to keep his criticism quiet. James Wegmann, a spokesman who confirmed his comments, said 17,000 Nebraskans had been invited to participate in the call, though it does not appear to have been open to the general public. Mr. Sasse’s critique played out after someone on the call asked the senator about his previous criticisms of Mr. Trump.
“Like a lot of Nebraskans, I am trying to understand your relationship with the president,” the woman said. “Why do you have to criticize him so much?”
Mr. Sasse, a former university president with a doctorate in American history from Yale who styles himself as a principled conservative, has never made a secret of his distaste for Mr. Trump. During the 2016 campaign, he compared Mr. Trump to David Duke and refused to vote for him. In office, he called Mr. Trump’s signature trade war with China “nuts.”
The remarks on Wednesday were far more scathing than any others he has made recently, and particularly notable given the tight hold Mr. Trump has taken over the Republican Party in his four years as president.
Mr. Sasse, 48, began by saying that he had worked hard to develop a “working relationship” with Mr. Trump, and even prayed for the president because he is one of “our leaders.” He said he was pleased when Mr. Trump adopted traditionally conservative policy stances and nominated conservative judges. And, he added, he understood that some Nebraska voters were “frustrated” with his criticisms of the president.
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But the compliments stopped there.
“I’m not at all apologetic for having fought for my values against his in places where I think his are deficient, not just for a Republican but for an American,” Mr. Sasse said.
He argued that Mr. Trump had “careened from curb to curb” as he sought to respond to a pandemic that has claimed more than 217,000 American lives this year.
“He refused to treat it seriously,” Mr. Sasse said. “For months, he treated it like a news-cycle-by-news-cycle P.R. crisis.”
He added that he did not think Mr. Trump’s leadership through the crisis had been “reasonable or responsible, or right.”
The “deficiencies” added up from there.
“The way he kisses dictators’ butts,” Mr. Sasse said, listing his reservations about Mr. Trump. “I mean, the way he ignores that the Uighurs are in literal concentration camps in Xinjiang right now. He hasn’t lifted a finger on behalf of the Hong Kongers.”
He continued: “The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership, the way he treats women, spends like a drunken sailor.”
Mr. Trump “mocks evangelicals behind closed doors,” he added. “His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He’s flirted with white supremacists.”
Each of these things, Mr. Sasse predicted, would have consequences, for Republicans and the nation. He sounded particularly alarmed about the potential damage Mr. Trump, who supported Democrats for decades as a businessman, could do to the conservative cause in the long term by driving the country “to the left.”
Young people, he said, could “become permanent Democrats because they’ve just been repulsed by the obsessive nature of our politics.” Women, who have abandoned the party in droves, could decide “they need to turn away from this party permanently in the future.”
“I’m now looking at the possibility of a Republican blood bath in the Senate, and that’s why I’ve never been on the Trump train,” he said. “It’s why I didn’t agree to be on his re-election committee, and it’s why I’m not campaigning for him.”
In a statement, Mr. Wegmann did not comment on Mr. Sasse’s remarks. He said the senator would remain focused on Senate races.
“I don’t know how many more times we can shout this,” Mr. Wegmann said. “Even though the Beltway is obsessing exclusively about the presidential race, control of the Senate is 10 times more important.”
Below are five takeaways from last night’s Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s town halls courtesy of NBC News. I saw most of the Biden town hall and thought he handled his questions quite well.
Tony
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NBC News
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and Joe Biden were in different cities for the dueling town halls Thursday that replaced their debate. But they may as well have been in different universes.
Replacing the presidential debate with competing conversations with voters was a fitting symbol of a politically divided and socially distanced America. Instead of speaking to, or even shouting at, each other, Trump and Biden spoke past one another on different networks, allowing Americans to choose a favored candidate to describe reality as they want to see it.
The town halls hosted by NBC in Miami for Trump and ABC in Philadelphia for Biden are unlikely to attract nearly the audience a debate would, history suggests, and even many Republicans were baffled by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the second presidential debate when he’s down in the polls and needs every opportunity possible to try disrupt the race’s status quo.
Going into the town hall, Biden led Trump by 9.2 points in the NBC News national polling average. Most swing-state polls in recent months show the Democrat to be the favorite.
It was not clear the town halls would change the trajectory.
Here are five takeaways from the two events courtesy of NBC News.
Trump gives oxygen to extremists — again
At the first debate, Trump claimed he didn’t know much about the Proud Boys, a violent far-right extremist group, but told them to “stand back and stand by” in a move they heard as an endorsement.
In his NBC town hall, Trump claimed he didn’t know much about QAnon, the groundless conspiracy theory that claims elites run a vast baby-eating satanic cult, but Trump said something they are sure to hear as an endorsement.
“I know nothing about QAnon,” he said. “I do know that they are very much against pedophilia and I agree with that.”
An FBI field office recently warned that “fringe political conspiracy theories” like QAnon “very likely motivate some domestic extremists” (it already has motivated some acts of violence) and social media giants have clamped down on QAnon.
Trump also bristled when Savannah Guthrie asked him to clearly and forcefully condemn white supremacists, but the only reason he keeps getting the question is because he seems so uncomfortable answering what would be a layup for any other politician — including his own vice president.
“I denounced white supremacy,” he said. “What’s your next question?”
Joe Biden says 1994 crime bill was ‘a mistake’
Biden gave his most pointed denunciation yet of the 1994 crime bill that he helped write, which has been linked to the rise of mass incarceration with disproportionate impacts on Black Americans.
Asked if it was a mistake to support it, Biden said: “Yes, it was.”
He elaborated by saying things have “changed drastically” since 1994 and noted that many Black leaders at the time supported it. He pinned a heavy part of the blame on “what the states did locally” and said the goal of the bill was “same time for the same crime.” Still, Biden conceded, “It was a mistake.”
Moments earlier, iden was asked by a young Black man why his demographic should feel motivated enough to vote for him — a question that cut to the heart of one of the former vice president’s weaknesses: A lack of enthusiasm among young voters, including non-white millennial and Gen Z voters, who lean left but tend to be unreliable at the ballot box.
Biden cited numerous policy proposals such as making the criminal justice system more “fair,” boosting funding for historically black colleges and universities, and helping Black Americans accumulate wealth by guaranteeing first-term home buyers a $15,000 down payment.
Biden says his approach on Supreme Court changes ‘depends’
Biden gave his most extensive answer yet on the possibility of expanding the Supreme Court as Republicans move to confirm Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
“It depends on how this turns out,” he said, referring to the confirmation process in the GOP-led Senate and whether it is rushed through before Election Day.
He said he’s still “not a fan” of “court-packing” because it could lead to a tit-for-tat escalation. He expressed more openness to changing rules surrounding lifetime tenure of justices in a way that complies with the Constitution. But he didn’t commit to any course of action, saying that much of it depends on how Republicans approach the Barrett nomination.
“I’m open to considering what happens from that point on,” he said.
Biden criticized Barrett as a nominee who “didn’t answer very many questions at all” and said that LGBTQ Americans have “great reason to be concerned” that she could vote to take away their rights. He added that people should also be concerned about their access to health care with a Republican-led lawsuit to invalidate the Affordable Care Act headed to the Supreme Court.
Trump forgot to attack Biden
The president has one job if he is to turn around his weak standing in the polls: Bring down Biden, just as he brought down Hillary Clinton in the closing days of their 2016 battle.
But over the course of the hour on national television, Trump barely mentioned his rival, let alone in the kind of sustained way necessary to do damage to the frontrunner. When he did mention Biden’s name, it was mostly to attack the news media for not asking the Democrat the questions Trump wanted them to.
Trump’s entire campaign strategy, like that of the other incumbent presidents before him, is built around making the election a choice between him and Biden, instead of a referendum on his presidency, and Trump has been more on-message at his rallies and with friendlier interviewers.
But under Guthrie’s tough, rapid-fire questions, Trump missed opportunities to pivot to Biden and largely gave the former vice president a pass.
Two candidates, two vastly different tones
It was apt that two polar-opposite candidates offered polar-opposite tones as they faced questions from the moderators and voters. Biden spoke in calm and conciliatory tones, calling for listening to scientists on a national coronavirus policy and promising to work with Republicans to achieve bipartisan goals.
“What I will be doing, if I’m elected president — not a joke,” he said. “I’m going to pick up the phone and call them and say, let’s get together.”
He predicted that with Trump and his “vindictiveness” gone, “there’s going to be, I promise you, between four and eight Republican senators who are going to be willing to move on things where there’s bipartisan consensus.” It was a version of a line he used on the campaign trail, often to criticism from progressives who argued he was being naïve about the GOP.
Trump, meanwhile, was often hostile to Guthrie’s questioning. He complained constantly about the media, the IRS, and others treating him unfairly.
He sowed doubt about the science around the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting masks will not protect people despite what nearly all of his advisers say. And he said getting sick from the virus himself had not changed his views on masks, even as his ally Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who helped Trump prepare for the first debate, said Thursday that he was wrong for not wearing a mask after being put into intensive care with the disease himself.
Flower Darby, an instructional designer and the author, with James M. Lang, of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, had an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education with important advice for faculty still coming to grips with teaching remotely. She opens with “People often ask me to name my favorite online teaching tool. My answer is always the same: Hands down, it’s online discussion forums.” As someone who has been teaching online since 1996, I agree with her fully. The article proceeds to suggest 6 ways to lead meaningful class discussions in an asynchronous online forum.
If you are still struggling with teaching online, her advice and suggestions are worth the read.
The Secret Weapon of Good Online Teaching – Discussion Forums
By Flower Darby
People often ask me to name my favorite online teaching tool. My answer is always the same: Hands down, it’s online discussion forums.
As a veteran online teacher, I view discussion forums as the meat and potatoes of my online courses. They are where my teaching happens — where I interact with students, guide their learning, and get to know them as people. The joy I’ve come to find in online teaching stems directly from those interactions.
Covid-19 has all of us preparing for a fall semester unlike any we’ve ever seen. Online teaching is front and center again, but remains underexplored terrain for many faculty members. Learning how to use online class-discussion forums to their best advantage is probably the smartest, and easiest, thing you can do to improve your online teaching and your students’ learning.
Why? First, they reinforce what we’re all hearing from teaching experts: Lean into asynchronous teaching, and do more with your campus Learning Management System (LMS). That’s been my focus in this online teaching series (with previous installments on how to connect with students and be more inclusive).
Second, online discussions are the equitable and inclusive workhorse of online teaching. Using assistive technology, students with disabilities can use an LMS forum more easily than a Zoom discussion. And the low-tech nature of the forums can diminish inequities in other important ways:
Students can submit discussion posts at any time of the day or night, and they don’t need a fast internet connection to do so.
They’re not required to show their physical surroundings to participate.
Forums get students to interact with one another, which is crucial to helping them feel connected and engaged in virtual classrooms.
Leading an effective discussion in an online forum is a skill you can learn, much as you learned how to lead class discussions in person. A forum discussion just seems harder to oversee because it’s so unfamiliar — you probably never participated in one yourself as a student. To that end, here are six simple ways to foster meaningful conversations in an online forum:
Take part in the discussion. Full disclosure: There is a school of thought that suggests only students should comment in your course’s online discussion forum, and not you, the instructor. But I’m in the school that argues just the opposite. Would you announce a discussion in your brick-and-mortar classroom, and then walk out the door? If not, don’t do it online.
Stay in the (virtual) room. Post clarifying questions. Praise positive contributions. Probe for more detail. Clear up misconceptions. Guide and shape the learning — just as you would in person — to help students get to where you want them to go. I tell my students that if I post in the discussion forum, they should read it, because I’m communicating something they need to know. Basically, when I post, I’m teaching. My students pay attention, and feel more engaged with me, as a result.
Another reason to pay close attention is to make sure incivility doesn’t intrude into your class forums because of different cultural values and perspectives. A good example comes from the educator Courtney Plotts: Say a student writes a post mentioning a same-sex partner and gets no replies. That might happen for any number of reasons, but the result is that the student could feel excluded, become disengaged, and struggle to finish the course.
Scour the discussion forums for emerging trouble spots and for clues that reveal how students are doing. Are they confused about something and drifting off? Are they energized and fascinated by a particular unit? The course forum is a valuable source of information to guide your teaching, but you can benefit from it only if you stay in the room.
But be strategic about your participation. It’s possible to spend too much time interacting with students in a class-discussion forum — especially if you enjoy the interactions, as I do — to the point that it becomes a major drain on your time and energy.
Good time-management strategies can help. Block off times in your weekly calendar to post on the discussion board. Short blocks of 20 to 30 minutes will suffice. All you really want to do is be visible in the conversation so that students know you’re there and engaged. If you’re teaching a 16-week course, posting a few days a week should do the trick. (For a condensed term of five or eight weeks, I might post for 20 minutes, twice a day, four to six days a week.)
The point is to use your written contributions to facilitate learning, just as you do verbally in your face-to-face teaching.
Some instructors keep a spreadsheet and intentionally rotate which students they respond to each week. Others are more like me: After doing this for 12 years, I go by gut instinct, deciding where I can have the most impact with a quick comment or question, while informally making an effort to write to all students at various times. Just be intentional in choosing where you can get the most bang for your discussion-posting buck.
The better the question, the better the debate. The tried-and-true method of sparking good in-person discussions is to ask open-ended questions and avoid the yes-or-no kind. Yet too often in the online realm, I’ve seen faculty members post discussion questions so black-and-white that there was no room for nuance. Nothing to talk about. Students’ answers were right or wrong, with no way to sustain a meaningful conversation.
In a recent article about transitioning to online teaching, Laura Otten, an associate professor who teaches nonprofit-leadership courses at La Salle University, wrote about the importance of provocative questions in online forums: “I often ask my students this question: ‘Do nonprofits, regardless of their mission, have an obligation to work for social justice?’” That’s a perfect example of the kind of question that gives students something to talk about.
Ask students to write about something they find naturally interesting — like themselves. Engaging students in discussion doesn’t always require a controversial or sensitive topic. Instead, ask students to apply course content or concepts to their own lives and experiences.
An easy way to do that is to adapt James M. Lang’s recommendation on connection questions. The idea is brilliant in its simplicity: Take a concept you’re teaching, and ask students to post about where else they’ve seen or learned about it. Maybe they first heard about it in high school, in the workplace, in a movie, or in another class they’re taking right now. Get them to post about that first encounter, or other instances when they’ve interacted with the concept.
Having students discuss what they know, based on personal experience, helps them learn from one another, too. The resulting kaleidoscope of perspectives can offer students a rich web of connections.
Structure the online conversation. Without any structure, you end up with a lot of students pulling a “post and run” — an industry term for posting an obligatory comment in a forum, and then never returning to engage with others. It’s amusingly illustrated in a video, “Teacherless Online Classroom – Discussion Bored,” and clearly doesn’t lead to meaningful, sustained conversations.
So establish a few simple ground rules:
Set two deadlines a week — the first for an initial post and the second for a minimum number of replies (usually at least two) to other students’ comments.
Provide a rubric or a checklist (try using the rubric tool in your campus LMS; it really speeds up grading) to clearly communicate the criteria for success: How long should a post be? Can the style be informal and conversational? Is a scholarly citation needed?
Discourage students — explicitly — from posting “Yeah, I agree” kinds of replies.
In some learning-management systems, you can enable a setting that requires students to post their initial comment before they can read what other students have shared. That setting has pros and cons: It can encourage academic integrity and originality, but it can also hinder less-confident students and raise barriers to their success. Think through the purpose of your discussion to determine whether this feature aligns with your pedagogical goals.
Aim for organic, authentic conversation. Critics of online discussion forums assert that the dialogue is stilted, dry, tedious. And it certainly can be, especially if you insist on stilted, formal dialogue. It doesn’t help that many faculty members have never seen an invigorating online discussion in action.
But think about what happens in a good in-person discussion: You try to foster a stimulating dialogue that keeps students’ attention and furthers their learning. Here’s what doesn’t happen: You don’t require each student in an in-person discussion to say one original thing and respond twice to other students; you don’t require them to speak formally and include citations. Why, then, expect students to be so formal in your online discussion forum?
Instead, try to foster the kind of natural dialogue you would actually want to join. Maybe you don’t have to require citations in every discussion post. Maybe you can take a cue from how people regularly communicate in digital spaces, and invite students to use emoji, GIFs, memes, videos, and the like in their posts. We routinely rely on such visual tools when we text on smartphones or post on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. While I don’t advocate that every instructor start using social media in class, I do argue that we can use communication strategies from those platforms to create closer connections in an online course.
So encourage your students to use emoji in their discussion posts. Ask them to post a GIF that depicts how they are feeling about a particular topic or task. Have students create and share a meme that represents how their semester is going. We can communicate powerfully and connect meaningfully online. Let’s learn from our texting and social-media habits to help us do so in class-discussion forums.
We have a difficult semester ahead. Don’t overlook the potential of online forums to enhance your teaching and even ease your workload. Once you get comfortable with these tips and tricks, I think you’ll find they really work. You may well decide to keep online forums in your teaching toolbox even when Covid-19 is a thing of the past.
The Associated Press is reporting that Melania Trump said yesterday that her and the president’s teenage son, Barron, tested positive for the coronavirus not long after his parents, but had no symptoms. She made the revelation in a lengthy note chronicling her personal experience with COVID-19, including being hit with a “roller coaster” of symptoms that she treated naturally with vitamins and healthy food.
Mrs. Trump said she is now negative and hopes to resume her duties soon.
After she and President Donald Trump tested positive earlier this month, the White House said 14-year-old Barron had tested negative. Barron later tested positive for the virus but had no symptoms, she said Wednesday, adding that he has since tested negative again.
Mrs. Trump shared that after she and her husband first received their positive results, “naturally, my mind went immediately to our son.” She said she was relieved when he tested negative at first, but kept thinking about what would happen in the days to come.
“My fear came true when he was tested again and it came up positive,” the first lady wrote in a statement released to social media.
She said she was “glad the three of us went through this at the same time so we could take care of one another and spend time together.”
President Trump has called his bout with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, a “ blessing in disguise.” He was hospitalized for three days and treated with various therapies and drugs, including steroids, supplemental oxygen and an experimental antibody treatment.
Mrs. Trump did not explain why Barron’s positive diagnosis was not made public earlier, but she has fiercely protected the ninth-grader’s privacy.
As for her own trials with the disease, the first lady said she was “fortunate” to have had minimal symptoms, “though they hit me all at once and it seemed to be a roller coaster of symptoms in the days after.”
She described body aches, a cough and headaches and said she felt extremely tired most of the time.
To treat it, “I chose to go a more natural route in terms of medicine, opting more for vitamins and healthy food,” she said.
The first lady praised the care provided by Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, and his team, and said it was an “unfamiliar feeling” to be the patient.
“It was me being taken care of now, and getting first-hand experience with all that COVID-19 can do,” she said. The disease has killed more than 216,000 people in the U.S. and caused nearly 7.9 million infections here, according to the latest count from Johns Hopkins University.
Democrat Joe Biden has made President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic an issue in the presidential campaign.
National Student Clearinghouse as of September 24, 20202
Dear Commons Community,
According to the latest report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, freshman enrollment is down nationwide by 16.1 percent. The data also show a continuation of downward trends in undergraduate enrollment (see figure above) and among various demographic groups that the research organization reported last month.
But its findings about freshmen were both new and striking, including that the population of first-time community-college students dropped 22.7 percent from a year ago. The latest report reflects data on 9.2 million students at 54 percent of the postsecondary institutions reporting to the research center, and is current as of September 24. Among the report’s other findings:
Undergraduate enrollment for the fall is 4 percent lower than it was a year ago, which is steeper than the 2.5-percent drop in undergraduates recorded last month.
Decreases across all racial and ethnic groups are steeper than those described a month ago.
Undergraduate male enrollment fell at nearly triple the rate of the drop in female enrollment (6.4 percent versus 2.2 percent).
Undergraduate enrollment was down across all types of institutions, except at four-year for-profit colleges, where it increased by 3 percent over last fall.
Graduate enrollment increased, but at a lower rate — 2.7 percent — than the 3.9 percent observed last month.
These data are cause for concern.
Tony
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