Every once in a while I get an email from a sales rep from companies like Top Hat. These are invitations to sit through a sales pitch about their latest offer for their software to help improve my classroom teaching. Top Hat's features are supposed to allow me to make our students’ classroom experience more interactive by incorporating real-time digital quizzes into my lectures. These features sometimes pique my curiosity but they most often disappoint for a number of worrying reasons. The first is most often their business model. For example, Top Hat essentially works on a kind of course textbook model on steroids: the instructor can (at least initially) create the course using the Top Hat platform at no costs while the students are required to pay for an individual license to gain access to the instructor’s design. Much like a course textbook, students will have a hard time passing the course without paying for it and in this case there isn’t even the option to buy a used copy. Related to this worry is that, once I commit to the platform, there is the risk of it becoming an all-encompassing system for  me to teach my courses. It is in Top Hat’s interest to become my one-stop shop for everything I need to teach my courses once I start using it and, once I’ve committed myself and my students to using it, it makes little sense for me to use other platforms in addition to this one.

I thought of Top Hat the other day when I read an email exchange between some of my faculty colleagues in our department. They were debating what videoconferencing applications might be best suited for dealing with the current pandemic. From where we currently stand it’s increasingly looking like most — if not all— our teaching may soon take place online meaning we have to start seriously considering what platforms to use. Many of my colleagues expressed concern with our University’s preferred (or at least default) choice: the videoconferencing platform Zoom which has received a lot of attention for their loose approach to privacy and their recent security breaches. The goal then is to find a videoconferencing platform that is best suited to serving the specific pedagogical needs of our department.

Ensuring privacy and security for our students are obviously important concerns but I am also very concerned that in the rush to move our teaching online we are unintentionally moving closer to buying into a “complete instructional system”. This worry is not new. Paul Saettler raised the risk of private, for-profit, complete instructional systems in the late 1960s. Referring specifically to primary and secondary school education, he warned that:

“[…]a series of commercial mergers, principally involving electronics companies and publishing houses, for the purpose of designing complete instructional systems which provide for integrated materials and supporting equipment, for the training of teachers in their use, and for the testing of the learner. School districts purchasing such instructional systems or materials literally “buy” the educational objectives and instructional techniques built into them.” (Saettler 1968, p361)

We’re certainly not there yet; the current discussion is more focused on potential forms of online instruction then on finding content. But the quest for a more secure, integrated, and cost-effective system for online teaching is certainly something that has many potential downsides, not least of which is the kind of vertical integration Saettler warned us against nearly 50 years ago. Universities and governments should be willing to invest in developing their own instructional systems that could provide students with the level of security and privacy they need. In the meantime, the most dangerous decision I think we can make is to commit to any single or complete system for teaching and learning.

Reference: Saettler, L. P. (1968). A history of instructional technology. McGraw-Hill.

‍

‍

We are pleased to announce that after a long process of humming and hawing about what we needed for this project website we were able to hire a team of crackerjack designers to initiate a process of exploration and development to create a newly designed website!

Thanks to the excellent work by Jordyn Taylor and Celia Pankhurst this new design was up and running in no time. Jordyn is a freelance communication designer working in Vancouver. You can find her website here: jordyntaylorrobins.com. Celia is based out of Victoria and her website is here: celiapankhurst.com.

We are very lucky for all of their help with the shift to the new platform.

Stay tuned for more posts and updates about all of our ongoing projects.

‍

As part of our ongoing collaboration with the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, we had the opportunity to update the wonderful work we had initially accomplished on creating an exhaustive bibliography of informational and instructional publications about Adobe Photoshop published in English between 1991 and the end of 2015.

The original bibliographic research was based mainly on the database WorldCat (see earlier blog post about bibliographies). We used the key world “photoshop” and the specific time window she was interested in (between January 1991 and January 2016). To proceed with the research, she used the “Advanced research” option to specify English as the only language and printed books as format. Every single title given back by the database was then opened to double check that it was appropriate (there was no way to exclude multi-software publications for example). It was then saved on Zotero folders. The limitation of this original research is that it does not cover unique ISBNs (for example, there may have been multiple runs of some of the titles or additional editions such as “Pro” or “Gold”). By tracking unique ISBNs, we would be able to get a better sense of how many manuals were published rather than just the number of unique titles.

In this updated and technically more sophisticated version of the research, we collected all of the publications references including those editions or runs (based on unique ISBNs). After meeting with DHIL, we realised it would be possible to use certain APIs to access databases of references that would include this information. We then created as extensive and as exhaustive a bibliography of all English-language software instruction manuals that deal with Photoshop published between 1991 and the end of 2015. After cleaning up the data we ended up with 6207 unique ISBNs.

Here is a quick rundown of the information categories collected for each reference to build the bibliography (note, Item type should be limited to “book” and language to “English”:

Item type: Book

Title:

Author:

Place:

Publisher:

Date:

# of pages: *optional*

Language: English

ISBN:

Here a bar graph illustrating what we got in terms of results:

‍