Leveraging Technology Effectively: Part 2
This is the second article in a series about the Leveraging Technology student competency. In this article, we’ll explore terms that are used a lot, but many people don’t know their meaning.
By Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and LearningAs you support learners to meet the Leveraging Technology competency, it will be important that they and you can recognize and apply terms related to it. Often, technology terms get tossed around without the intended audience knowing what those words mean. This article will explore some of those terms and how they relate to work being done at USask.
General
There are some terms that relate to all or most learning technologies currently used at USask. In this section, we’ll define those terms.
Data Centre – Anything in “the cloud” is stored on one or more servers. For most technologies used at USask, those servers are not on campus. A data centre is where servers are located, but also provides the means to operate those servers, including the technology needed to power and cool those servers.
Digital Footprint - There are many memes on social media about how good it is that those who grew up before Facebook, etc. are lucky that none of what they did when younger got posted to such sites. Your digital footprint includes what information about you can be found online (e.g., social media, Google searches, work and school websites, publications, etc.) and how much of an impact your digital activities have on energy consumption, water usage, and other environmental aspects. See Digital Sustainability later in this article for more information on that.
Ethical Use of Learning Technologies
In the first article in this series, we talked about ethical considerations for choosing and using learning technologies. In this section, we’ll define terms important to making those decisions.
Bias – Some tools, due to their design (whether intentional or not) may be biased towards different groups of people. This is of particular concern with tools that are or use AI to function. Proctoring tools that watch students who are completing an online assessment have been shown to be biased against people of colour. GenAI sometimes shows bias in its outputs based on how it was trained and/or the information that was used to train it.
Credibility – It’s vital that students learn about and practice determining whether information they’re reading (online and off) is correct. Bias, inaccuracies, or intentional deception can lead to learners being misinformed about information related to the discipline or society. A source is credible when it either contains no bias, or acknowledges the bias and is factually correct. Students need to learn how to determine what is or isn’t a credible source, check the credibility of a source, and make sure that they’re own work is correct before sharing it with others.
Digital Sustainability – As noted previously, a Digital Footprint includes the environmental impact of your use of technologies. This includes how many emails you keep, how many videos your stream, how much you use AI, etc. Digital Sustainability deals with how to reduce your digital environmental footprint. You can learn more about this and how to reduce your footprint in the article A Guide to Digital Spring Cleaning.
Intellectual Property – Intellectual property includes a wide variety of rights connected to works created. Work created by students and instructors as part of the teaching and learning process generally belongs to the individual who created the work. See the USask Copyright Office's web page on Intellectual Property for more information.
Flexible Learning
Flexible Learning – The terms in this section relate to flexible learning, but what is flexible learning? Flexible learning aims to provide students with choices in how, where, and when they engage in learning, enabling more personalized pathways into and through a program. Read more about flexible learning at USask.
Blended Learning – (or Multimode Blended) "an instructional unit in which the instructor teaches between 1/3 and 1/2 of the instructional hours face to face and the remaining instructional hours online asynchronous." – USask Governance website
Hybrid Class - A hybrid class may also include some learners meeting face-to-face and individuals joining virtually from wherever they are. It may also include students meeting face-to-face in two or more locations, with each group connected to the others by audio or video during class time.
Generative AI
Generative AI seems to be everywhere, but what is it and what do some of the words related to it mean?
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) – “GenAI is a category of technology that creates new content in response to prompts. Content can be in the form of text, image, audio, video and software code, depending on the tool. The content that is produced can be very difficult to distinguish from that produced by humans. Where human brains learn based on relatively few examples, these tools have been trained on massive data sets of human-created content. GenAI tools, such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, work by predicting what a human would produce in response to an input.” – USask LTE Toolkit: GenAI Overview
Hallucinations/Mirages – These are terms used to describe outputs from GenAI, including text and images, that may contain references that aren’t real, such as citing a journal article that doesn’t exist. While hallucination is the most common term to describe this, mirage is also used.
Prompt – Prompts are the questions or requests users provide to GenAI to obtain the desired information or creation.
Open Educational Practices
Open educational practices (OEP) at USask include several practices that allow people both at the university and beyond to access learning materials and resources for free. The terms below are all related to this work at USask.
Open Access – Open access publications are journals or articles that are available for anyone to read and are released with licenses that allow them to be printed and shared. Learn all about the different types of open access publishing on the Library website.
Open Educational Resources (OER) – Like open-access publications, OER are freely available and shareable, but OER usually also include the right to modify the materials to fit local needs. Open textbooks are the most well-known of OER, but OER may include images, sound files, lesson plans, etc.
Open Pedagogy - Open pedagogy involves students as creators of learning materials, instead of just consumers. It involves learners engaging authentic learning activities to create or contribute to open resources including books, websites, print materials for community organizations, and other such activities.
Open Research – Open research is sharing data and findings publicly outside of journal publications, for others to use in their research.
Open Teaching – When educators share their research and reflections about their teaching, other educators are able to learn from those experiences. Open teaching may be informal and involve keeping a blog or a more formal approach like the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).
If there are terms related to learning technologies or other aspects of teaching and learning you need help with, connect to the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL).
In the next article in this series, we’ll look at considerations and conversations you and learners need to have around learning technologies, around things such as costs and privacy, and how they should go about choosing technologies for different purposes.
Title image credit: flazingo_photos on Flickr