Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Last week I was on a panel at the OLC Innovate Conference. The topic, “Centering Equity Through Blended and Hybrid Teaching Practices,” was well-received by the 180 plus attendees.  Below is a brief review of our discussion that appeared in Fierce Education.

Tony

———————————————————————————————–

Fierce Education

Centering Equity Through Blended and Hybrid Teaching Practices

By Annie Galvin Teich

Apr 11, 2023

Determining how blended and hybrid learning can lead to more equitable student outcomes and how to apply the most effective teaching practices of blended and hybrid learning to both online and face-to-face modalities are central to today’s higher education environment.

This was the central theme to a panel discussion at the recent OLC Innovate virtual event, moderated by Dylan Barth, Assistant Vice President of Learning and a Co-Director of the Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning at the Online Learning Consortium. The panel consisted of:

• Tawnya Means, Assistant Dean for Educational Innovation and Chief Learning Officer in the Case College of Business at the University of Illinois, Urbana.
• Anthony G. Picciano, Professor in Education Leadership at Hunter College, Ph.D. Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
• Matthew Vick, Dean of the School of Graduate Studies and Continuing Education and a Professor of Science Education from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Defining Equitable Outcomes

“When we think about equitable outcomes, it’s very much like what it sounds, which is, we’re designing learning in such a way that, regardless of who comes in that they’re going to be able to address all of their needs in order to learn from that opportunity,” said Means. “So, we’re looking at things like our social, emotional, and academic growth that comes out of these learning experiences and designing intentionally for such activities that will lead to those outcomes.”

Strategies include:

• Good instructional design that supports students in a variety of ways, including fully online or face-to-face.
• Practices that help achieve equitable outcomes, such as devices, internet access, digital tools, and other resources to support student learning.
• Policies that recognize learners coming from different places with different needs needing different types of support.
• Positive and inclusive environments lead to more success for students. Designing instruction so students can connect and feel a sense of belonging.
• A variety of instructional tools that lead to a variety of outcomes.
• Flexible assessments that facilitate students’ ability to demonstrate their learning.
• Professional development for faculty to create awareness of multiple ways to address challenges, such as assessment.

“In thinking about equitable outcomes, a lot of it starts with what’s in the syllabus—in terms of what we’re teaching as well as how we’re teaching,” said Picciano. “The readings in my syllabus, for example, contain a lot more material from authors not in the traditional Western canon, and my students have responded to that very, very well.”

When asked whether there is a rubric to follow when using a wider variety of assessments in blended learning environments, Picciano responded that he no longer uses tests and relies on his students’ writing to evaluate what they’ve learned. “Rather than doing things in a couple of hours in class, I’ve found that giving students time to reflect and deliberate about how they respond to the questions is better,” he said. “Giving students a variety of ways to express themselves, even using sound and video in their presentations, makes it easy for me to experiment with assessment when I can.”

Picciano went on to say, “Whether they’re responding to a question from me or one of their colleagues, the asynchronous part of a blended learning environment is that they have time to respond—it’s easier than in a synchronous environment.”

“If you look at bringing courses into a more community-based mindset, valuing people’s personal and professional knowledge that already exists is also important in blended and hybrid modalities,” said Vick. “Especially in credentialed fields of professions where they’re already working.”

“In trying to look at the different audiences coming to you for learning experiences, it’s important to be intentional about the structure, so that students can be successful regardless of where they come from,” said Means. “We also need to make sure that students can see themselves reflected in what we’re doing.”

For more articles from the OLC Innovate event, see:

Educators Utilizing Ed3, Blockchain, and Metaverse Technologies

Students, Faculty Experiencing Burnout in Colleges, Universities

Retired Chester Fire Department firefighter Robert Sanford is seen in this still from a video taken at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. His “CFD” or Chester Fire Department cap was a major clue that led to his arrest.

Dear Commons Community,

A retired firefighter who went to a “cult deprogramming” expert to figure out how he came to believe Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison yesterday for chucking a fire extinguisher at police officers as they protected the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Robert Sanford, wearing prison orange, told Senior U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman that he was embarrassed, ashamed and disgusted by his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021. Sanford, who worked as a firefighter in Chester, Pennsylvania, was arrested in mid-January 2021 and has already spent roughly eight months in custody, which will be shaved off his 52-month sentence. He will also serve three years of supervised release.  As reported by NBC News.

“Mob mentality is real, and I got caught up in it,” Sanford said, apologizing to the officers he assaulted and to first responders who saw his conduct that day, saying he’d been proud of the work he’d done as a firefighter.

“I never wanted to tarnish that reputation. On Jan. 6, I did,” Sanford said.

Sanford, his attorney said, had worked with a person who specializes in “cult deprogramming” and was “confronted with facts about the ‘stolen election’ conspiracy theory among others and how psychological manipulation is used to indoctrinate the followers of a conspiracy.”

In court, defense attorney Andrew Stewart said that Sanford had “clearly overreacted” to the actions of law enforcement officers as they tried to control the violent mob on Jan. 6 and that he was “totally remorseful” for his conduct.

Stewart said Sanford was willing to sit down and take a hard look at the lies he believed and how he ended up “going down the proverbial rabbit hole,” which set him apart from other Jan. 6 defendants who still can’t acknowledge basic reality, Stewart said.

Judge Friedman said Sanford “should have known better than most” what law enforcement was facing that day and should have known what sort of damage a heavy fire extinguisher could do.

Friedman reiterated that defendants can’t be punished “just because they believe that the election was rigged” or “just because they believe in Donald Trump” or for “their words and their speech.” What they could be punished for are the illegal actions they took that day, he said. Friedman said thousands of people at the Capitol had contributed to the mob mentality.

Friedman also talked about the importance of general deterrence, saying many people still believe in Trump and believe the election was stolen, although he noted that “not many of them showed up” in Manhattan when Trump was arraigned last week. Alluding to the investigation Trump faces by special counsel Jack Smith, Friedman said he suspects people will see what happens at the federal courthouse in Washington “in a few months” if Trump is indicted.\.

About 1,000 people have been arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and around 1,000 cases are expected to be brought forward before the statute of limitations expires in 2026. More than 3,000 people engaged in activity that could result in criminal charges by either entering the Capitol building or engaging in violent or destructive activity outside.

Our judicial system cannot rest until all the insurrectionists including Trump are brought to justice!

Tony

The James Webb Space Telescope recently captured an image of Uranus, showing in great detail the ice giant’s ring system, its brightest moons and its dynamic atmosphere. The observation, made Feb. 6., 2023, follows a similarly stunning photo it captured recently of the solar system’s other ice giant, Neptune.

Dear Commons Community,

The James Webb Space Telescope recently captured an image of Uranus, detailing the ice giant’s ring system, its brightest moons and its zestful atmosphere.

The observation, made Feb. 6,comes on the heels of a similar photo the powerful telescope captured of the solar system’s other ice giant, Neptune.

According to a news release from NASA, the new photograph of Uranus features “dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere.”

“The Webb data demonstrates the observatory’s unprecedented sensitivity for the faintest dusty rings, which have only ever been imaged by two other facilities: the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986, and the Keck Observatory with advanced adaptive optics,” NASA wrote in the Thursday release.

“Uranus has never looked better,” the NASA Webb Telescope tweeted from its social media account on Thursday.

The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope has been capturing images of thousands of galaxies – some of which formed billions of years ago after the Big Bang and some of the faintest objects ever observed.

The telescope was designed to explore every phase of cosmic history, NASA says.

The seventh planet from Sun, Uranus is unique, according to NASA. The planet rotates on its side, at roughly a 90-degree angle from the plane of its orbit. This causes extreme seasons since the planet’s poles experience many years of constant sunlight followed by an equal number of years of complete darkness.

The planet is characterized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior, the space agency said. Most of its mass is thought to be a hot, dense fluid of “icy materials – water, methane, and ammonia – above a small rocky core.”

Uranus has 13 known rings and 11 of them can been seen in the new photograph, NASA reported.

“Some of these rings are so bright with Webb that when they are close together, they appear to merge into a larger ring,” according to NASA. “Nine are classed as the main rings of the planet, and two are the fainter dusty rings (such as the diffuse zeta ring closest to the planet) that weren’t discovered until the 1986 flyby by Voyager 2.”

The powerful telescope also captured many of of Uranus’ 27 known moons, NASA wrote.

“It is just the tip of the iceberg of what Webb can do when observing this mysterious planet.”

Marvelous work!

Tony

Lou Dobbs, via screengrab/Fox Business; Majed Khalil, courtesy Sigmund S. Wissner-Gross

Dear Commons Community,

On Sunday, Fox News reached a settlement with a Venezuelan businessman Majed Khalil, ending a defamation case in which Khalil said he was falsely accused on air of helping to rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election against Donald Trump.

Khalil had filed a defamation suit against the news outlet and former host Lou Dobbs, arguing in filings that they had fabricated claims he and other Venezuelans were involved in “orchestrating a non-existent scheme to rig or fix the election” against the former Republican president.  As reported by Reuters.

A short letter sent to U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in Manhattan on Saturday said the parties had reached a “confidential agreement to resolve this matter” and expected to file a joint stipulation of dismissal next week.

“This matter has been resolved amicably by both sides. We have no further comment,” Fox News said in a statement on Sunday.

Lawyers for Fox News and Dobbs referred Reuters to the statement. Khalil’s lawyer did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Trump has continued to repeat debunked claims of widespread voting fraud as reason for his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election even after they have been roundly rejected by courts, state governments and members of his own former administration.

Jury selection is set to begin on Thursday ahead of a separate trial in Dominion Voting Systems Corp’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp over their coverage of debunked election-rigging claims.

I wonder if this settlement is a portent of things to come with the Fox News Dominion lawsuit!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Thousands of professors, part-time lecturers and graduate student workers at New Jersey’s flagship university went on strike yesterday — the first such job action in the school’s 257-year history.

Classes were still being held at Rutgers as picket lines were set up at the school’s campuses in New Brunswick/Piscataway, Newark and Camden. Union officials had decided Sunday night to go on strike, citing a stalemate in contract talks that have been ongoing since July. Faculty members had voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike last month.

Three unions, which represent about 9,000 Rutgers staff members, were involved in the strike: The Rutgers AAUP-AFT, which represents full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates and some counselors; the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, which represents part-time lecturers; and the AAUP-BHSNJ, which includes faculty in the biomedical and health sciences at Rutgers’ medical, dental, nursing, and public health schools.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Union leaders said faculty members at the medical and other health sciences schools will continue performing essential research and patient care, but will curtail duties that don’t impact patient health and safety.

Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway said Sunday that he believed the two sides are close to an agreement, adding that the university will continue to negotiate. Union officials, though, said an agreement didn’t appear near. Democratic Gov. Gov. Phil Murphy called for both sides to meet yesterday in his office at the Statehouse. But it’s not clear if either side has accepted the offer.

“To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement,” Holloway said.

Union leaders say they’re demanding salary increases, better job security for adjunct faculty and guaranteed funding for grad students, among other requests.

Holloway has said the university has offered to increase salaries for full-time faculty members, teaching assistants and graduate assistants by 12% by 2025. The university offered an additional 3% lump-sum payment to all the faculty unions that would be paid over the first two years of the new contract.

In solidarity!

Tony

Harlon Crow and Clarence Thomas

Dear Commons Community,

Harlan Crow, the Republican billionaire and megadonor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, allegedly has a collection of Adolf Hitler artifacts and Nazi memorabilia on display at his home, according to several media reports.

Crow’s million-dollar estate in Dallas, Texas, houses Adolf Hitler artifacts, including two paintings by Hitler and a signed copy of his book “Mein Kampf,” along with a stockpile of other Nazi mementos such as a swastika medallion, statues of dictators of the 20th century in the backyard and more, according to the Washingtonian.

Inspired by his hatred for communism and fascism, the Washingtonian reports, Crow’s collection faced major backlash in 2015 after he hosted a fundraiser at his estate on the eve of Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday. An anonymous source who attended the fundraiser told the Washingtonian that the house felt like a museum, describing it as “strange” given the assortment of family photos in one room, World War II artifacts in another and a backyard full of dictators.

Researcher Danah Boyd tweeted on Saturday that she was “deeply shaken” by the displayed Nazi memorabilia when she attended a meeting at Crow’s house a few years ago.

“Years later, I still shudder thinking about the Nazi uniform decorations in Harlan Crow’s house. And the painting. And the book. And the statues. And the ‘antebellum’ (pro-slavery) artifacts. I’m glad others are questioning the acceptability of those materials,” Boyd said in a tweet, adding that she left the meeting after seeing the Nazi artifacts.

Boyd pointed out that this topic is not new and that Dallas reporters have been “covering this for years.” 

Crow also has a garden featuring the statues of some of the twentieth century’s worst dictators.

Crow, 74, has said that he collects the statues because he hates communism and fascism, but his habit caused controversy in 2015 when he hosted a fundraiser at his home on the eve of the Yom Kippur holiday.

A year earlier, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News got a peek at the sculptures of Soviet revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito.

In a 2014 home walk-through and interview with the Dallas Morning News, Crow described the home display as “not an art collection, but a historical nod to the facts of man’s inhumanity to man.” He received online backlash about his artifacts but maintained that the motivation behind the display is “based on patriotism and living generations’ debt to the past.”

He added: “We all, collectively — whether we’re a little bit blue or a little bit red, or a lot — owe a huge debt. We need to understand how we all got here and to try to do in our own time what we can do for our future.”

The resurfaced controversy surrounding Crow’s house comes days after a ProPublica report revealed undisclosed ties between the megadonor and Thomas. Democrats and judicial advocates are calling for action after ProPublica found that Thomas failed to report the “lavish trips” he had accepted from Crow for over two decades.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Jim Rutenberg, a writer at large for The New York Times, had  an extensive  review yesterday entitled, “How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole,” which examines the Fox News/Dominion lawsuit that will likely go to trial later this month.  The lawsuit is based on whether or not Fox News knowingly repeated lies about Dominion and voter fraud in the 2020 election in its broadcasts. Rutenberg focuses a good deal on Rupert Murdoch, who built his media empire by giving viewers exactly what they wanted and by doing so, has potentially put that empire in peril. 

Rutenberg comments:

“Murdoch had built the most powerful media empire on the planet by understanding what his audience wanted and giving it to them without fear or judgment. But Trump now appeared to be making a serious bid to overturn a legitimate election, and his chaos agents — his personal lawyer Giuliani chief among them — were creating dangerous new appetites. Now Murdoch was faced with holding the line on reporting the facts or following his audience all the way into the land of false conspiracy theories. Neither choice was necessarily good for business.”

Rutenberg concludes:

“In recent months, Lachlan and Rupert have telegraphed their opposition to Trump and their preference for his leading opponent, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — most substantially by keeping Trump off their network. But the polls in recent weeks have shown Trump surging. The unofficial embargo broke in late March, when Hannity interviewed Trump.

The network says it has installed new editorial oversight across all its platforms. But that system will be up against the network’s very nature. The facts are clear to all. “Trump insisting on the election being stolen and convincing 25% of Americans was a huge disservice to the country,” Murdoch wrote to Scott on Jan. 20, 2021, the day Biden became president. “Pretty much a crime. Inevitable it blew up Jan. 6th.” But what will Murdoch and his employees make of the facts? What will happen when everything is on the line again and that audience wants Trump on Trump’s terms again? Fox could deny them. It could promote the truth, inform its viewers and serve the First Amendment role that the justices in Times v. Sullivan so carefully defined and protected. But that might antagonize Trump and his audience. And, at least as Murdoch had explained to Dominion’s lawyers, doing that would be stupid”

Rutenberg’s analysis is right. Murdoch and Fox News are incapable of walking away from making a buck regardless of whether it puts the company and the country in peril!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Over the decades, The New York Daily News has not always been the kindest of New York’s newspapers to the City University of New York but in today’s editorial, there is well-deserved praise and support for our institution.   Here is the entire editorial.

The New York Daily News

Editorial

April 8, 2023

The CUNY Advantage

“There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about college rankings, with challenges to the dominance of the U.S. News & World Report methodology and all-important list, including spectacular scandals over misreported school data, and universities announcing they will cease participating altogether. That’s before we even get to the ideological battles over everything from a school’s relative free speech tolerance to its emphasis on sports to the detriment of academics.

But some schools are still better than others in different areas, so how to find the right way to examine it and compare? Focus on returning to basics and distilling what exactly makes a school effective. Academic rigor and the ability to get people to think critically and creatively are crucial, but tricky to measure. Where we can absolutely look at cold, hard facts are metrics like cost to attend and economic mobility, and on those metrics our own City University system blows everyone else out of the water.

We can thank our friends and sometimes rivals at The New York Times opinion page for the latest confirmation in the form of a nifty online tool that spits out rankings based on prioritization of different factors; in any combination that emphasizes factors like earnings, mobility, net price and economic diversity, CUNY schools feature multiple times in the top ten, with Baruch, City College and Hunter leading the pack.

On this page, we often cast a skeptical eye at public spending, with a view towards keeping government accountable for what we’re getting for our taxpayer dollar. That means criticizing leaders when that return is low, but also celebrating it when we’re really getting a lot of bang for the buck, and this certainly isn’t the first analysis to determine that CUNY schools are over-performing when it comes to some of the metrics that really count for their students and graduates.

Policymakers should keep this in mind as they ponder the system’s budget. Every dollar in is a dollar that is magnified and keeps New York’s economy humming along.”

Thank you to The New York Daily News editors for their support of CUNY – the people’s university!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning examining the race among big tech companies to develop artificial intelligence applications regardless of whether or not they generate misinformation and dangerous content.  Here is an excerpt.

In March, two Google employees, whose jobs are to review the company’s artificial intelligence products, tried to stop Google from launching an A.I. chatbot. They believed it generated inaccurate and dangerous statements.

Ten months earlier, similar concerns were raised at Microsoft by ethicists and other employees. They wrote in several documents that the A.I. technology behind a planned chatbot could flood Facebook groups with disinformation, degrade critical thinking and erode the factual foundation of modern society.

The companies released their chatbots anyway. Microsoft was first, with an event in February to reveal an A.I. chatbot woven into its Bing search engine. Google followed about six weeks later with its own chatbot, Bard.

The aggressive moves by the normally risk-averse companies were driven by a race to control what could be the tech industry’s next big thing — generative A.I., the powerful new technology that fuels those chatbots.

That competition took on a frantic tone in November when OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up working with Microsoft, released ChatGPT, a chatbot that has captured the public imagination and now has an estimated 100 million monthly users.

The surprising success of ChatGPT has led to a willingness at Microsoft and Google to take greater risks with their ethical guidelines set up over the years to ensure their technology does not cause societal problems, according to 15 current and former employees and internal documents from the companies.

The urgency to build with the new A.I. was crystallized in an internal email sent last month by Sam Schillace, a technology executive at Microsoft. He wrote in the email, which was viewed by The New York Times, that it was an “absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.”

When the tech industry is suddenly shifting toward a new kind of technology, the first company to introduce a product “is the long-term winner just because they got started first,” he wrote. “Sometimes the difference is measured in weeks.”

Last week, tension between the industry’s worriers and risk-takers played out publicly as more than 1,000 researchers and industry leaders, including Elon Musk and Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, called for a six-month pause in the development of powerful A.I. technology. In a public letter, they said it presented “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Regulators are already threatening to intervene. The European Union proposed legislation to regulate A.I., and Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT last week. Regulators are already threatening to intervene. The European Union proposed legislation to regulate A.I., and Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT last week. In the United States, President Biden on Tuesday became the latest official to question the safety of A.I.

“Tech companies have a responsibility to make sure their products are safe before making them public,” he said at the White House. When asked if A.I. was dangerous, he said: “It remains to be seen. Could be.”

“Tech companies have a responsibility to make sure their products are safe before making them public,” he said at the White House. When asked if A.I. was dangerous, he said: “It remains to be seen. Could be.”

The issues being raised now were once the kinds of concerns that prompted some companies to sit on new technology. They had learned that prematurely releasing A.I. could be embarrassing. Five years ago, for example, Microsoft quickly pulled a chatbot called Tay after users nudged it to generate racist responses.

Researchers say Microsoft and Google are taking risks by releasing technology that even its developers don’t entirely understand. But the companies said that they had limited the scope of the initial release of their new chatbots, and that they had built sophisticated filtering systems to weed out hate speech and content that could cause obvious harm.

A.I. is here and we need to understand and control its deployment.  As this article indicates, major tech companies like Microsoft and Google may be too concerned with winning control of the market to do so.

Tony