Southern New Hampshire University’s efforts with generative AI

Much of the work around generative AI happening in higher education to date focuses on individuals, centering on policies, workshops, exploration of  how individual faculty and students can/should/ought to use generative AI in teaching, learning, and research. Explorations at the system level are rarer, which is why SNHU’s efforts to explore what higher education looks like with AI as a feature rather than an add-on is unique. We need such explorations because a higher education system that serves its citizens well and addresses the kinds of complex societal challenges that we face today requires experimenting with different approaches, questions solutionism, and engages with the possibility that education futures aren’t prescribed.

I’m interested to see the results of this effort. SNHU is generally considered to be successful in answering the question “what does a university built for the digital age look like” while others have treated the digital as an add-on to operations they considered central. This is not to say that every institution should try to be a SHNU, in the same way that not every institution should try to be an Ivy. But we can all learn from a case study like this.

January 2024: Month ahead

It’s a new year, and I thought I’d try something new: posting a beginning-of-the-month broad and incomplete “to do” list, and revisiting it at the end of the month.

I expect this month to be one where I am going to be trying to find my new rhythms since it’s going to be my first full month at the Learning Technologies program at the University of Minnesota: https://lt.umn.edu/. This month, I plan to

  • Finalize the class I will be teaching (Foundations of Distance Education)
  • Start teaching.
  • Establish a tentative work from office/home pattern.
  • Establish a (3 x week) exercise pattern that works
  • Finalize my parts of “paper 3” which is a survey of the education futures that youth find hopeful (with Shandell)
  • Co-develop a survey instrument around education futures (with Shandell)
  • Finalize my parts of the ER paper, which is an analysis of the degree to which research is publicly available (with Josh).
  • Continue work on the special issue colleagues and I are co-editing
  • Begin work on a new online learning project (more on this soon)
  • Keep on top of all the things that need to happen during this month (webinars, trainings, admissions decisions, setting up my home and work office, connecting with people, figuring out how new workplace systems work, etc etc). I suspect that this will take up a lot of time.

Open rank search: Faculty, School of Education and Technology, Royal Roads University

Original job posting at https://royalroads.mua.hrdepartment.com/hr/ats/Posting/view/1922 

Closing Date: 2/12/2024
Job Description

Royal Roads University (RRU) invites your interest in a faculty appointment at the rank of assistant, associate, or full professor within our School of Education and Technology in the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences.  As a full-time core faculty member, you will play a key role in the development and delivery of the school’s academic programming which includes the MA in Higher Education Administration and the MA in Learning and Technology, and program related graduate certificates.

Our ideal candidate is passionate about helping others achieve their academic pursuits and will have demonstrated teaching experience at the graduate level in the field of education, an ability to work as a team member within an interdisciplinary outcome-based curriculum, and administrative experience and abilities, preferably in a university academic setting.

In recognition of the anticipated rank of the role, preference will be given to early and mid-career scholars whose research and teaching contribute to the fields of education.

RRU is committed to appreciating and celebrating the diversity of students, faculty, and staff.  We strive to increase understanding and acceptance of each other, thereby making us more compassionate human beings and strengthening the fabric of our communities. Preference given to candidates who are members of minority or underrepresented populations and/or with experience in decolonizing practices in education and/or an emphasis on social justice issues, equity, diversity, and inclusion in their practice.

Job Requirements

To be considered, candidates will possess:
•    Doctorate in education or related field (I.e., adult education, higher education, leadership, education, and technology)
•    Demonstrated teaching excellence, in person and virtual, at the graduate level (employing adult learning and applied learning principles) in the field of education.
•    Experience with applied research methods
•    Graduate student supervision experience and an understanding of the ethical requirements of graduate research
•    Familiarity with online and face-to-face course design and delivery
•    Experience in the education sector, and ability to develop networks in the field, both locally and globally
•    Proven track record in research with an emphasis on practical application and impact
•    Demonstrated ability to work collegially as a team member with a variety of teams and stakeholder groups across the university (faculty, sessional faculty, practitioners, university staff and management)
•    Demonstrated experience in an outcomes-based and interdisciplinary learning environment (preferred)
•    Evidence of community engaged scholarship or practice.

CFP: Equitable Educational Systems that Cultivate Thriving (in RRE)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:  Equitable Educational Systems that Cultivate Thriving Review of Research in Education (RRE) Volume 49 (2025)

A plethora of evidence has demonstrated that education contributes in substantive ways
to the well-being and advancement of nations, communities, and individuals. Indeed,
researchers have documented for decades education’s remarkable benefits on a host
of metrics, including equity indicators (e.g., poverty reduction, social mobility, national
development). At the same time, however, scholars have documented a complicated
paradox; that is, just as educational systems can be designed to advance equity, schooling
policies and practices can also perpetuate inequalities (Carter & Welner, 2013; DiPrete &
Fox-Williams, 2021), leading to and reinforcing social stratification, cultural and linguistic
assimilation, and the erasure of Indigenous peoples (Lomawaima, 1999; Wiley, 2000).

A critical lesson from this historical tension is that educational systems must be intentional
in designing and implementing practices and structures with an explicit and ongoing focus
on equity and achieving social justice, which is, at a minimum, concerned with questions of
redistribution, recognition, and participation. Although this reasoning reflects a seemingly
straightforward logic, it represents a monumental challenge due in part to the intricacies
embedded in complex concepts such as justice. For instance, some conceptions of justice
emphasize individual rights while others focus on collective rights, and distinctions have
also been made between corrective and distributive justice. The latter has had a major
influence in deliberations and efforts to advance justice through the allocation of resources
among groups—i.e., the “morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens
among society’s members” (Young, 1990, p. 16). The focus is on the ways resources and
opportunities are distributed to determine the most equitable allocation patterns (e.g.,
high-quality teachers, rigorous curricular materials or course offerings, adequate facilities,
funding, extracurricular opportunities) (Carter & Welner, 2013; Darling-Hammond &
Darling-Hammond, 2022). Framing equity in relation to access is necessary, but it alone is
insufficient for achieving just educational systems that contribute to collective well-being
and equitable societies. Distributive models concentrate on end-state patterns (e.g., school
racial segregation) often at the expense of attention to the precursors that formed such
inequities (e.g., structural determinants, unconscious biases, organizational contexts,
administrative processes) (Artiles, 2011, 2019; Young, 1990).

In this volume, we are interested in scholarship that wrestles with these and other
ambiguities, paradoxes, and tensions of educational equity. We are interested in
scholarly work that provides critical perspectives on educational equity, wrestling with
the ambiguities, paradoxes, and tensions associated with its conceptualization and its
historical and everyday applications. We aim to explore how education systems might move
to create policies and paradigms that support thriving and justice during formal schooling
and other learning spaces across the lifespan and across domains, with attention to both
individual and collective well-being and thriving. Such exploration includes raising questions
about the characteristics of equitable humanizing systems that cultivate collective thriving,
and interrogates theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of justice and its potential
tensions and ambiguities, including how we understand community, equity, and potential,
and do so to craft new directions forward.

Increasingly, research in education and in the health sciences has focused on thriving
(Cantor & Osher, 2021; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine,
2019; Shonkoff, 2017). This work has called attention to embedded systemic inequities
(Bornstein et al., 2003; Huston & Bentley, 2009; Osher et al., 2018; Spencer et al., 2019)
and to persistent structural barriers and dilemmas faced by children, youth, and families
in marginalized communities (Gadsden, 2017). Thriving is especially difficult to achieve
within educational, social, and legal systems, and this challenge is exacerbated by lack of
adequate attention to the continued harm created by institutionalized racism, colonialism,
ecological precarity, and systemic fragmentation. New and expansive frameworks and
research are needed that move past individualistic definitions of thriving and highlight
the possibilities for youth, families, and communities. We need to embrace our collective
imagination to create equitable systems that honor the whole person as well as community
needs, values, and desires (Tuck, 2009).

Our focus in this volume is on the ways that systems and practices can be used to promote
and ensure pathways for thriving. Whether and how youth thrive relies at least on how
education systems structure access to learning opportunities and meaningful participation
(e.g., Horsford et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2021; Malin et al., 2020 ); how community and family
knowledge and resources are respected and engaged (e.g., Baker at al., 2016; Ishimaru,
2019;) and how multiple ways of knowing, thinking, and being are nurtured (e.g., Bang &
Medin, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2021;). This requires understanding and addressing, at a
minimum, the embedded nature of racial inequality in the everyday lives of students and
families and its mediating influence in the creation of educational inequalities (Darling-
Hammond et al., 2019; Nasir, Lee, Pea, & McKinney de Royston, 2020). In short, we are
interested in equity paradigms that push the traditional boundaries of justice visions and
have the potential to promote a more rigorous notion of thriving, one that takes seriously
the foundational paradigms that have created generational inequalities but are more than
critical responses to them.

For this volume, we invite papers that focus on the different ways in which we
conceptualize equity to formulate a robust multifaceted definition and advance policies
and practices that build capacities of the institutions, families, and communities in which
children and youth are located. While we expect proposed papers might focus on a range
of topics, we are asking each paper to wrestle with what we view as enduring tensions,
described below, that have challenged scholarship on equity and justice:
• The first is the tension between “good intentions” or the impulse to promote positive change and solutions alongside the longstanding persistence of theoretical and empirical frames that narrowly emphasize “broken” children, families, and communities. This tension requires us to move beyond deficit frames that still permeate theories and methods in our disciplines; to view young people, families, and communities as whole and fully human; and then to consider how to address their needs by building on the strengths, resilience, and values that are already
there in order to create systems that support thriving within and across communities.
The challenge here is to hold ourselves accountable not just for our intentions but also
for the ultimate impact of our work, both with respect to how systems use our work
and in relation to how our work disrupts or perpetuates deficit ideologies that feed
problematic constructions of communities.

• The second is the tension between a view of justice that is rooted in an
individualistic sensibility in contrast to a focus on collective well-being or
thriving. Rogoff (2003) has written about how our scholarship often serves to bring
into view only one of many possible lenses one could view a situation or learning
environment with. This tension highlights the tradition in education research that sees
equity or justice as equivalent to each child having their rights honored, rather than
all of the young people and their communities thriving collectively. When we shift the
lens, the tenor of the conversation and the possible solutions also shift. Addressing this
tension asks us to consider how we see the collective as more than just a collection of
individuals, and how we build the structures and systems to attend to collective well-
being.

• The third tension, which builds from the first two, refers to intervention
efforts targeting individual students and families, as opposed to intervening
in systems that promote unwellness by utilizing policy levers, reconstructing
systems, or pursuing other theories and practices of change. The historical
tendency to focus on “fixing” individuals and families also has the unintended
consequence of reifying deficit orientations, and failing to intervene in the systems that
keep inequities in place. We invite authors to lean in on the kinds of policy levers and
systems (re)design that would support collective thriving, and the frameworks and ways
of knowing that might get us there.

• And finally, the fourth tension is the tendency to uphold disciplinary divides
versus engaging in expansive and deep interdisciplinarity. We too often
acknowledge the need for and value of interdisciplinarity in equity-driven scholarship,
and yet fail to engage systematically in interdisciplinary theorizing coupled with robust
methodological alignments. And yet, achieving robust interdisciplinarity is necessary
for the kinds of rethinking of equity problems and their potential solutions that match
the scale of challenges that we are facing (e.g., Warren et al., 2020). Engaging this
tension requires a clear understanding of what counts as interdisciplinarity, a critical
engagement with the genealogy of ideas that are integrated in interdisciplinary
frameworks, and an awareness of the implications of interdisciplinary ideas for
methodologies, as well as the ethical and historical demands of interdisciplinary work.

These tensions sit at the heart of scholarship on equity and justice in education, and
we must wrestle with them in order to make true progress toward building systems that
cultivate collective thriving. We name them explicitly because when we do not, we fall into
default ways of thinking, analyzing, and conceptualizing new possibilities with respect to
equitable and just systems in education. Generating fresh perspectives, with the potential
to support deep system transformation, will require us to take up these tensions, perhaps
reframe them in alternative or novel ways to gain clarity and push beyond our current
boundaries of thought and action. The complexities raised by these tensions are and will
remain central to the work of creating equitable education systems. The invitation in this
call is thus for us to think together at the edges of the education field. In other words, there
is no new brand of equity work that will provide a short-cut out of doing the hard work of
interrogating our field, our past, and our complicity in reproducing inequities again and
again.

We invite papers that directly address one or more of these tensions, and that do so while
taking up a historical or contemporary research problem in policy or practice that has
implications for creating equitable education and learning systems that foster thriving.
Examples might include interdisciplinary conceptual or empirical manuscripts addressing
urgent and complex topics such as:

• Taking up our very definitions of equity, and tracing them over time, examining the
philosophical underpinnings of the ways we conceptualize, measure, and imagine equity
to inform solutions or reforms;
• Examining work on the future of ability differences and racial justice and utilizing an
interdisciplinary lens to explore the tensions between individual rights and collective
thriving, and offering a model to guide future research and systems design;
• Considering equity in education in the context of a changing climate, highlighting the
ways in which our deficit notions of families and communities have led to environmental
injustice, and offering a way to re-conceptualize the intertwined fate of communities to
achieve collective thriving;
• Exploring the role of big data and/or data science to support new lines of research on
equitable systems for thriving, examining the ways in which the current wave of attention
to setting up massive data systems runs the risk of leaning into reductive paradigms
and reproducing past inequities, and considering the properties of expansive new data
systems that provide a different possible directions forward;
• Reconsidering the “reading or other curricular wars” through an equity lens that puts
the public debates into historical context, that offers evidence about what we have
learned, and crafting a direction forward that reimagines the kinds of readers or learners
we want to have, and how we might get there;
• Employing a comparative lens to explore the nature of inequities and the building of
equity systems for thriving across geographic contexts and developmental domains.
These are just examples—we invite scholars to bring their creativity, and expansive and
interdisciplinary thinking, to reimagine new kinds of education and learning systems
that cultivate thriving within and across communities.

The focus of the volume both calls upon existing paradigms of equity and urges new
theoretical and analytic perspectives on transformative approaches to learning and
development in schools and other educational contexts. The present is an especially
important historical moment—i.e., within the mounting challenges to equity, learning,
and schooling—in which to address these longstanding issues and direct energies toward
change. Authors are encouraged to draw on conceptualizations of equity that
embrace the potential for transformation in the present moment, and to engage
our collective imaginations towards more ambitious futures. We invite teams
that can draw on knowledge across disciplines, that embrace the challenges of building
critical epistemic cultures in education, that weigh the possibilities of different types of
methodologies, that propose dynamic models and analytical methods, and that integrate
the voices of children, youth, families, and communities.

The editorial team will review proposals and invite authors to prepare manuscripts based
on the overall objectives of the volume and the promise of each proposed work. Proposals
are due by January 15, 2024. The authors who are invited to submit manuscripts will
be notified by March 28, 2024, and will be expected to submit final manuscripts for peer
review no later than August 15, 2024, to allow for publication in the spring of 2025.
Invited manuscripts will be subject to blind review.

Proposals for manuscripts should not exceed 1,000 words and should be submitted to
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rre. All inquiries should be directed to RREeditor@aera.
net. Final manuscripts may not exceed 10,000 words (exclusive of references and figures).
Authors will also be expected to include in the AERA-RRE repository a detailed description
of the methods and procedures underlying their literature searches and a specification of
the relevant literatures that forms the basis for the analysis in the article.

Editors:
Vivian Gadsden (General Editor)
David Osher (General Editor)
Megan Bang (Editor, Volume 2025)
Alfredo J. Artiles (Editor, Volume 2025)
Na’ilah Suad Nasir (Editor, Volume 2025)

References

Artiles, A. J. (2011). The Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture—Toward an
interdisciplinary understanding of educational equity and difference: The case of the
racialization of ability. Educational Researcher, 40(9), 431–445.
Artiles, A. J. (2019). 14th annual Brown Lecture in Education Research—Re-envisioning
equity research: Disability identification disparities as a case in point. Educational
Researcher, 48(6), 325–335.
Baker, T. L., Wise, J., Kelley, G., & Skiba, R. J. (2016). Identifying barriers: Creating solutions
to improve family engagement. School Community Journal, 26(2), 161–184.
Bang, M., & Medin, D. (2010). Cultural processes in science education: Supporting the
navigation of multiple epistemologies. Science Education, 94(6), 1008–1026.
Bornstein, M. H., Davidson, L., Keyes, C. L., & Moore, K. A. (Eds.). (2003). Well-being:
Positive development across the life course. Psychology Press.
Carter & Welner (2013). Closing the opportunity gap: What America must do to give every
child an even chance. Oxford University Press.
Cantor, P., & Osher, D. (Eds.). (2021). The science of learning and development: Enhancing
the lives of all young people. Routledge.
Darling-Hammond, K., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2022). The civil rights road to deeper
learning: Five essentials for equity. Teachers College Press.
Darling-Hammond, L., & Podolsky, A. (2019). Breaking the cycle of teacher shortages: What
kind of policies can make a difference?. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27, 34–34.
DiPrete, T. A., & Fox-Williams, B. N. (2021). The relevance of inequality research in sociology
for inequality reduction. Socius, 7, 1–30.
Gadsden, V. L. (2017). Gender, race, class, and the politics of schooling in the inner city.
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 673(1), 12–31.
Huston, A. C., & Bentley, A. C. (2010). Human development in societal context. Annual
review of psychology, 61, 411–437.
Ishimaru, A. M. (2019). Just schools: Building equitable collaborations with families and
communities. Teachers College Press.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2021). Culturally relevant pedagogy: Asking a different question.
Teachers College Press.
Lee, C. D., White, G., & Dong, D. (2021). Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse.
National Academy of Education.
Lomawaima, K. T. (1999). The unnatural history of American Indian education. In K. Gayton
Swisher & J. W. Tippeconnic III (Eds.), Next steps: Research and practice to advance
Indian education (pp. 3–31). ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools.
Malin, J. R., Brown, C., Ion, G., van Ackeren, I., Bremm, N., Luzmore, R., … & Rind, G. M.
(2020). World-wide barriers and enablers to achieving evidence-informed practice in
education: what can be learnt from Spain, England, the United States, and Germany?
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7(1), 1–14.
Nasir, N., Lee, C., Pea, R., & McKinney de Royston, M. (2020). Handbook of the cultural
foundations of learning. Routledge.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2019). The promise of
adolescence: Realizing opportunity for all youth. Author.
Osher, D., Moroney, D., & Williamson, S. (2018). Creating Safe, Equitable, Engaging
Schools: A Comprehensive, Evidence-Based Approach to Supporting Students. Harvard
Education Press.
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press.
Shonkoff, J. P. (2017). Breakthrough impacts: What science tells us about supporting early
childhood development. YC Young Children, 72(2), 8–16.
Spencer, M. B., Fegley, S. G., & Harpalani, V. (2019). A theoretical and empirical
examination of identity as coping: Linking coping resources to the self processes of
African American youth. Applied Developmental Science, 7(3), 181–188.
Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review,
79(3), 409–428.
Warren, B., Vossoughi, S., Rosebery, A. S., Bang, M., & Taylor, E. V. (2020). Multiple ways of
knowing*: Re-imagining disciplinary learning. In Handbook of the cultural foundations of
learning (pp. 277–294). Routledge.
Wiley, T. G. (2000). Continuity and change in the function of language ideologies in the
United States. In T. Ricento (Ed). Ideology, politics, and language policies: Focus on
English, pp. 67–85.
Young, I.M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press.

Invitation for a TechTrends Editor

We all owe gratitude to Dr. Chuck Hodges for the impressive job he has done over the last ten years (!) in nurturing and elevating the status of TechTrends, which I consider to be one of two flagship AECT journals. Dr. Hodges  has recently decided to resign his position as editor-in-chief, and AECT is inviting applicants to fill in those big boots. The application for that role appears below.

Thank you for considering being a candidate for the position of TechTrends Editor-in-Chief. This position is a three (3) year term that is renewable upon recommendation by the AECT CEO and ratification by the AECT Board of Directors. AECT is seeking candidates with good reputations and networks at the international level for this flagship journal. A full description of TechTrends and the role of the Editor-in-Chief can be seen on the last page of this application.

Role and Responsibility of the TechTrends Editor-in-Chief

Housed under the Center of Excellence for Publishing, and reporting to the AECT CEO or (at CEO discretion) his/her designee, The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for the overall content of the journal, including soliciting and selecting manuscripts; editing or supervising the editing of manuscripts; developing, adding, or removing standard features, including columns and departments; securing, appointing, supervising, and terminating staff and contract workers; directing and approving the layout and design of the journal; managing the peer-review process; completion of the annual end-of-year report; addressing the fiscal health of the journal; and other responsibilities consistent with the position or assigned by the AECT Board (See full description on last page of this application).

The responses to the application items below need to be returned to the AECT CEO, Nolan Gruver by December 6, 2023. Please submit your application as an attached MS-Word Document to the AECT CEO at ceo@aect.org.  The Search Committee will review all applications and recommend a candidate for TechTrends Editor-in-Chief to begin January 22, 2024. The recommended candidate will be ratified by the AECT CEO and the AECT Board of Directors.

Please respond to these application items:

  1. Brief description of your education and professional background.
  2. Your experience with TechTrends and other editing experiences which highlight your international presence or network.
  3. Your vision for TechTrends as a growing international journal based with a U.S. Organization.
  4. A plan for recruiting papers
  5. Statement of support from your department chair or next level administrator 

TECHTRENDS

TechTrends is a peer-reviewed publication, and submitted manuscripts are reviewed without bias by a panel of consulting editors and other professionals with expertise in the topics presented in the manuscripts. Any manuscript considered appropriate is reviewed anonymously. Reviewers are asked to provide detailed comments for the author(s), and these comments are reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief before the final review is sent to the author(s).

You will find this information online here under “Instructions for Authors”:

https://www.springer.com/education+%26+language/learning+%26+instruction/journal/11528

Editorial Policies

Purposes: As AECT’s flagship practitioner journal, the bimonthly TechTrends embodies its

tagline philosophy: “Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning.” The journal addresses the informational needs of multiple, often interconnected audiences of members, prospective members, and interested readers in the United States and elsewhere–particularly where AECT has international affiliates, K-12 and university educators, readers interested in personal knowledge acquisition and professional development, teachers of teachers and trainers of trainers, and education and training supervisors. Thus the purposes of this professional journal are:

  1. To publish research- and experience-based information that has been peer reviewed and adds to the knowledge base within the broad field of communications and technology for teaching and learning;
  2. To provide a forum for the exchange of peer reviewed views and expert opinion regarding principles and practices related to communications and technology for teaching and learning; and
  3. To ensure that AECT members and other interested readers have access to up-to-date information about emerging ideas and new technology in the field of communications and technology for teaching and learning.

Content: To achieve its stated purposes, TechTrends will include the following types of content:

  1. Reports of innovative or exemplary practices related to instructional design for technology- mediated teaching and learning;
  2. Discussions of prominent or important topics and issues of concern to practitioners;
  3. Reviews of new literature, such as studies, reports, and books germane to the field;
  4. Summaries of research applications to practice;
  5. Reviews of new or emerging technology;
  6. Discussions of policy related to educational communications and technology;
  7. Reports of national or international trends in the field;
  8. Discussions and reports of topics related to management and supervision in the field; and
  9. Items for marketing and communications for the

 

Annually, at the conclusion of each volume year, the Editor-in-Chief will compile a reflective review of the content in the issues that year, using the above lists to evaluate the extent to which the journal has achieved its purposes. This review shall be provided to the AECT Board and the Executive Director prior to the end of the first month of the following volume year.

Organization and Administration: Management of TechTrends is structured as follows:

 

  1. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for the overall content of the journal, including soliciting and selecting manuscripts; editing or supervising the editing of manuscripts; developing, adding, or removing standard features, including columns and departments; securing, appointing, supervising, and terminating staff and contract workers; directing and approving the layout and design of the journal; managing the peer-review process; completion of the annual end-of-year report; addressing the fiscal health of the journal; and other responsibilities consistent with the position or assigned by the AECT Board.
    1. One or more Associate Editors may be approved by the AECT Board for the purpose of assisting the Editor-in-Chief in carrying out the responsibilities of the position. Associate Editors may be secured and appointed by the AECT Board, or the responsibility may be shared with the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief shall supervise the work of the Associate Editor(s).
    2. One or more Assistant Editors may be appointed by the Editor-in-Chief to write or otherwise provide, and edit, designated material on a regular basis, for example, for columns or other recurring features. Assistant Editors may report to the Editor-in- Chief or to an Associate Editor as designated by the Editor-in-Chief.
  2. The Design Director may be appointed by the Editor-in-Chief to be responsible for the format and appearance of the journal; creating or soliciting, with the approval of the Editor-in-Chief, graphic or photographic materials to be published in the journal; preparing each issue of the journal for publication and distribution. Any additional personal request will need to first be approved by the Board of Directors and Executive Director based on the budget impact. Effective January of 2016, design responsibilities have been transferred to Springer Publishing.
  3. The Editorial Board is composed of one representative of each AECT Division and other individuals as deemed necessary by the Editor-in-Chief. The AECT Board shall appoint one individual as its representative on the Editorial Board. The Editor-in-Chief chairs the Editorial Board, which advises the Editor-in-Chief on editorial policy and journal content, assists in the solicitation of manuscripts, and evaluates the effectiveness of the journal.
    1. Meetings of the Editorial Board may be scheduled at the discretion of the Editor-in- Chief, and at minimum the Board shall meet annually at the AECT International
    2. In policy disputes between the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board, the decision of the Editorial Board shall prevail. In policy disputes between the Editorial Board and the AECT Board, the decision of the AECT Board shall prevail.
    3. Every third year, the Editorial Board will review these editorial policies and provide a summary report, in particular bringing any resulting issues and concerns to the attention of the Executive Director [now CEO] and the AECT Board. The CEO or the AECT Board may request such a review more often, as necessitated by the ever- changing field of education technology or for other reasons.
  4. The AECT CEO serves as Executive Publisher and, through appropriate staff, administers the business and financial aspects of the journal.
  5. The Consulting Reviewers group is composed of a minimum of twelve individuals appointed by the Editor-in-Chief for staggered three-year terms. As criteria for appointment, the candidate should:
    1. be a practicing educational technology professional;
    2. be familiar with issues germane to his or her Division, area of professional expertise, or geographic region and be broadly interested in educational communications and technology;
    3. have a wide range of professional contacts among programs and personnel both within and outside the Association;
    4. be reliable, have sufficient time to devote to journal review activities, and be able to complete assignments on time; and
    5. be willing to serve voluntarily (no remuneration is provided).

Approved by the AECT Board of Directors on July 16, 2012

  1. …design responsibilities to Springer… p.5

Approved by the AECT Board of Directors on November 7, 2015

Change of AECT Executive Director language to AECT CEO ratified in March 2023 Bylaws

(Subject to Review & Updated by the Center of Excellence for Publishing Advisory Board Nov. 2023)

GPTs and one student’s custom version of ChatGPT

A few days ago OpenAI released GPTs, which are “custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose” (announcement here: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts), meaning that one could produce a GPT that is dedicated to a specific set of tasks. I’ve seen a few of these so far, including Mike Sharples’ chatbot that uses his book to offer teaching advice https://chat.openai.com/g/g-RCHNUwnD1-teachsmart, Mairéad Pratschke’s expert in digital education and learning design https://chat.openai.com/g/g-hrPUmXB5X-digital-professor, and this degree builder I came across https://chat.openai.com/g/g-KVB8vSaAJ-degree-designer.

One of the more interesting use cases I saw was one student’s Reddit post titled “I just replaced my chemistry professor with AI:” https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/17slpti/i_just_replaced_my_chemistry_professor_with_ai/ 

 “I gave it the prompt: you are a college professor teaching inorganic chemistry 2 thermodynamics. The scope of your class is covered in the uploaded documents.

I then uploaded my professors PowerPoint slides and copied and pasted the chapter from the book. All the exercises, extra problems, and a thermodynamics properties table. I also included a summary of the topics covered.

I had to double prompt it to only teach from the documents and upload pdfs seemed to work a lot better than .txt files.”

Lots of areas to reflect on here, including student creativity, privacy, and ethics.

Google scholar alerts on citations

Email is a productivity killer. But, one kind of email I like to receive is from Google Scholar, alerting me of newly published research that is in conversation with my research, aka papers that cite my work.

a screenshot of emails from google scholar showing new citations to the author's research

I love this feature because it quickly allows me to

  • get a sense of how others are reacting to my work
  • track some of the literature surrounding my research interests (emphasis on some)
  • discover new authors
  • keep my never-ending “to read” list full

I’d love it even more if Google Scholar also

  • delivered all available papers in that same email (e.g., if there was a way that it would connect to my institutional library and retrieve them or just give me the open access ones)
  • kept an up-to-date spreadsheet of all citations that I could use for different purposes

It ought not need clarification, but to be clear: 1) citations don’t necessarily mean that one’s work is impactful or significant. What if they are all critical of the work?. 2) lack of citations doesn’t necessarily mean that a paper isn’t worthwhile or significant, as areas unrelated to the quality of the work often influence citations (e.g., timing)

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