Online Learning and Special Education

The COVID-19 pandemic created a challenge for teachers, parents, and students in special education. It came with all the issues that hit the broader education community, and additional concerns about how the students would handle learning under these new conditions. Students in special education classrooms usually need a structured, consistent schedule, and that was more difficult to maintain while working remotely.

Winn and Behizadeh emphasized a right to education, specifically literacy education, and it is naturally easy to worry about fulfilling those obligations for special education students when they suddenly found themselves in a completely different setting, with a strange new routine none of them were used to.

Open laptop that says online learning, Writing utensils, and a notebook sitting on a desk

By law, schools were still required to provide special education services during remote learning, which included various services in addition to general education curricula like reading and math. The problem is that accessing these services could be difficult. Parents were often at a loss as to what to do. This also came with them having to basically become teachers themselves and try different learning methods till they found something that worked for their child.

IEP assessments became an issue too. The school must evaluate every child’s IEP and determine whether education goals were being met and what needed to be rewritten in light of the student’s current needs. With remote learning however, correctly evaluating these things could prove difficult for special education teachers and the aides who are meant to help students navigate through their time at school.

It was a rough year for special education, but hopefully things will begin to look up from here on out. More schools in Ohio are back in person (whether part-time or full-time) which should mitigate the issues that arose around special education. Being back in a physical classroom can give students the structure and consistency they need to learn.

Wikipedia Changed Over Time and So Has Its Critics

Wikipedia, and concerns over its reliability and accuracy, have been discussed on this blog before. It was also a common mantra among my teachers in public school to warn about the dangers of Wikipedia, because, as they said, anyone can go on there and write anything they want. As my fellow blogger and Pfister showed, however, editing Wikipedia was a much more complicated process than was often claimed. Still, I was curious as to how the perception of Wikipedia has changed over time and the results were rather interesting.

Being an online encyclopedia that is constantly updated and not subject to a single person’s control puts Wikipedia in a unique situation regarding its critics, because Wikipedia has an entry about itself. And since many articles are written by those who have no financial stake in the reputation of the website, Wikipedia’s own Wikipedia page does not shy away from common criticisms that have emerged concerning the site over the years.

The usual suspects are there, such as claims of inaccuracy and unreliability, and how educators often ban it from being cited in student’s papers. Other criticisms are present as well, ones that are not heard as often, such as privacy issues surrounding private citizens that have their own articles. There is also the way Wikipedia allows graphic and explicit content on its pages that could easily be accessed by children. Some of these criticisms could apply to the internet as a whole, and Wikipedia, being one of the world’s most famous websites, is simply a more prominent target.

Google and Wikipedia logos in person's hands

It should be noted that, regardless of what educators and other intellectuals thought of Wikipedia in its early days, it was always popular with the average person. If it wasn’t then it would not have evoked the kind of reaction it did in schools, nor would the site have become as popular as it did. But opinions of Wikipedia among the media have changed since it first went online. It was better received in the 2010s, throwing off the appeal to tradition some of its critics often relied on.

What surprised me the most when reading about this was how Facebook, Google, and YouTube now link to Wikipedia to help people decipher truth from falsehood. While these sites’ opinions of Wikipedia are hardly the be-all-end-all—and some of the criticisms listed above might still be valid—it is ironic to see the site that was once denounced as unreliable now held up as a standard of credibility. Maybe new forms of writing simply take time to be accepted.

With Literacy and Justice For All

In 2020, the state of Michigan settled a case with Detroit school students after a federal appeals court ruled basic education and literacy a fundamental right.  The students claimed they were deprived of access to literacy via lack of books, instruction, and poor building conditions. The settlement agreement could result in around $97 million in funding for literacy initiatives in the Detroit Public School Community District.

 

Protestors advocate for Detroit Students fight for literacy

 

“Low-quality literacy education is a key component of the school-to-prison pipeline.” — Winn et al. (2011).

 

 

 

One of our course readings, Winn & Behizadeh’s The Right to Be Literate, emphasizes literacy as a civil right. They justify literacy as a new frontier of civil rights because of the consequences of denying the right to literacy. Being denied the resources to develop literacies can result in a significant detriment to one’s ability to fully engage with society. Their pedagogy of possibility places importance on creating “hybrid” spaces in which there are multiple means of accessing literate materials. Diverse methodological approaches are necessary to provide inclusive access to literacy.

Agency is an important concept in education, specifically when it comes to acquiring and practicing literacy. In her discussion on disability in the academic writing center, Kerri Rinaldi points out that, “If a student has a disability, we treat the disability as an obstacle or shortcoming instead of a contributor to their agency” (2015). Winn situates agency in engagement with education and thus the ability to act for themselves and critically engage with their communities.

“Reading and writing critically are essential tools for survival in a current educational system in whcih students of color are disproportionately in special education, suspended, and expelled, which all contribute to a higher likelihood of incarceration.”

–Winn, et al.

Disabled students are more likely to be referred to juvenile justice than students without disabilities; these rates are even higher for non-white students. Collaborative efforts with students such as performing their work, conducting research, and having forums where their voices are heard are imperative in efforts to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

To deny literacy is to effectively attempt to prevent the acquisition of justice, equality, and civil rights.

 

Back to the Past: A COVID-Free World

Just when we’ve all barely managed to adjust to this new normal, we are mentally preparing ourselves to get back to some of our old ways. With vaccinations happening all around the world, we have plenty of reason, and hope, to start preparing to re-enter society.

Medical professional administering vaccine to someone

Medical professional administering vaccine to someone

As much as the internet has kept us laughing during these trying times, we are all looking forward to the day where we won’t have to sport a mask. While in-person activities will resume, they will not be without rules and regulations. Even now, as people are getting vaccinated, SOPs continue to be in place. This is because we are still trying to determine how long the vaccines will protect people.

It’s safe to assume that many of us have grown used to working from home, not meeting up with others, and sanitizing our hands (after everything we do). Only one of these things should be held on to in a post-pandemic world. No points for guessing which one.

Jokes aside, it will be strange to once again be in public spaces. The concept of shaking hands and hugging is already in somewhat alien territory. Let’s not even talk about kids who have grown up during this time; they think wearing a mask has always been the norm.

Complain all you must about those never-ending video calls, but the fact is that if it weren’t for them, we would have had zero contact with the outside world. While we’re still on the topic, apparently 30% of us don’t even bother changing into professional attire to take these calls. Don’t Zoom in too close!

Photo of four men dressed in professional shirts but just undergarments on the bottom half of their bodies. It says "Me and the boys ready for Zoom."

Photo of four men dressed in professional shirts but just undergarments on the bottom half of their bodies. It says “Me and the boys ready for Zoom.”

On a more serious note, even the economy seems to have acclimated to the pandemic. One company, in particular, has managed to secure a place in the history books during this unprecedented time. Zoom has been the go-to for all things work-, birthday-, and anniversary-related.

Interestingly, this piece from Colin Lankshear bears testament to the same. Talking about the features of what he calls a ‘new capitalism’, there is one aspect that stands out in particular.

He says, “sources of productivity depend increasingly on the application of science and technology and the quality of information and management in the production process.”

He goes on to state that the greatest innovations during the past thirty years have led the way for improved productivity.

The kicker, if you’d like to know, is that Lankshear wrote this in 1997.

What we can infer from this is that if the economy was so reliant on technology back then, we can only imagine what that means in the present. Two main things to factor in are:

  1. Technology has come a long way since 1997, and
  2. The pandemic has only fueled our dependence on it.

Pandemic or no pandemic, the world was already in the grips of technology. The past year of working and surviving under lockdown has proven that productivity has not only been stable, it has even risen in some cases.

More importantly, this leads us to understand the importance of communication. No matter what the situation, the exchange of information is what will keep us, and the world, going. Ultimately, it is the one thing that will, without a doubt, shape the future.

Commodification of Black Identity

Emojis, memes, and reaction gifs are a form of writing—maybe a bizarre opinion, but it’s a hill I’m willing to die on.

And no doubt, writing is a powerful tool. Certainly it’s a factor in determining and perpetuating both stereotypes and power dynamics. Does this mean, then, that memes (and emojis and reaction gifs and various online behaviors) aren’t just harmless jokes but actually powerful tools for easily spreading dis/information, opinions, and ideas?

Tweet saying, “Is digital blackface a form of policing our freedom of expression? Or does it perpetuate harmful stereotypes?”

Well, yeah.

(If you need more convincing, then don’t miss my upcoming post on memetic warfare.)

Now that we’ve laid some groundwork, I’d like to talk about Digital Blackface. 

You know, when non-Black people use digital spaces to “try on” Black identity. Sometimes people make entire social media profiles; sometimes it’s as seemingly-innocuous as sending a reaction gif. In both cases, Blackness—as in, Black social identity and culture—is performed in an exaggerated, often harmful and stereotypical way.

I won’t rehash the many, many arguments that have been put out there. More appropriate, more experienced people have tackled this subject. So, especially if this is unfamiliar territory, I definitely recommend you check out their articles. (After you’re done here of course!) 

What I do want to do is offer another layer to the conversation. 

Tweet from @BriannaABaker saying, “Why is it that when a Black man expresses emotional vulnerability, he’s made into a meme?? #DigitalBlackface” with Google search results for “crying meme” underneath.

Identity commodification is damaging yet simultaneously unseen and ubiquitous. Safiya Noble shows us in her article on Google’s search engine algorithms why this is such a serious problem:

“Black girls are sexualized or pornified in half (50%) of the first ten results on the keyword search “Black girls”… What these results point to is the commodified nature of Black women’s bodies on the web—and the little agency that Black female children (girls) have had in securing non-pornified narratives and ideations about their identities” 

Both Digital Blackface and Google’s search engine results commodify Blackness. They give control to non-Black people over the construction of Black identity. I’d say that’s a pretty big deal.

Memory in Oral and Literate Cultures

In 1963, Jack Goody and Ian Watt described a high-level overview of humanity’s move from predominantly oral cultures to predominantly literate ones, focusing on the consequences of literacy. One of these consequences was a shift in how we remember.

Oral cultures were almost entirely rote memory-based. The next time you feel discouraged about memorizing the contents of your next closed-book exam, take heart in this knowledge of the human ability for recall: for a very long time, the entirety of a culture was held firmly in someone’s skull. Often these societies made use of mnemonic devices and rituals, and also employed professional remember-ers to maintain their store of knowledge.

Dory from the film Finding Nemo on an ocean background. Text above and below the image reads,

When I first thought about these professional remember-ers, I was immediately launched back to one of my middle school reading classes, The Giver by Lois Lowry nestled in my hands. But the more I thought, the more I started to think about our more contemporary versions of remember-ers: librarians, archivists, and museum curators.

As holders of our cultural heritage, the memory institutions that are libraries, archives, and museums are in a constant state of flux. While from the outside they seem to be the static, foreboding backbone of the academic enterprise, under the hood their workers are abuzz trying to find ways to best preserve, organize, and make accessible the stuff of our humanity. For example, a 2009 study examined how European Union research projects in archives, libraries, and museums communicated memory and provided recommendations for how information workers can balance their technology and information-centric responsibilities with their role as memory communicators.

These institutions also often carry the burden of ensuring diverse representation in their collections and preserving the history of underrepresented and minoritized groups—groups whose memories have often been intentionally targeted for destruction. The book Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums: Preserving Our Language, Memory, and Lifeways describes how memory institutions are working to maintain Indigenous knowledge, tradition, and languages. This requires examining the authority by which certain hierarchies of epistemology are established so that Native voices are prioritized over others when representing their history (a topic also explored in our course by Ellen Cushman’s examination of the Cherokee syllabary).

Oral and literate cultures are very different in the technical processes they employ in remembering, but both employ(ed) professional memory keepers to preserve their cultures. While in oral societies these were people tasked with keeping the glut of culture lodged between their ears, in literate societies they are people with the equally daunting task of collecting, labeling, and organizing the rapidly increasing holdings of our heritage and creating relationships between objects and the mind such that when we engage with these collections, we are not only reading and learning, but also remembering.

Siri the Spy: How Surveillance Capitalists Reinforce Sexist Stereotypes and Harvest Our Data Through Voice Assistants

If you’re comforted by the maternal nature of your smartphone’s voice assistant—good. That means it’s working. You’re falling right into her trap.

Wide research has exposed the blatant sexism that arises from the predominantly “female” voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Just the decision to utilize female voices in the subservient, “pink collar” role of voice assistants reinforces sexist stereotypes of women as unskilled, servile laborers.

Of course, these voices are feminine because society wants them that way; research indicates that people prefer female voice assistants due to their nurturing, submissive responses. Ultimately, tech companies allow societal sexism to shape their products, instead of using their platform as a means of rewiring society’s implicit biases.

But why? Well, the fact that women only make up 12% of A.I researchers and 6% of software developers certainly doesn’t help. But arguably the largest reason behind sexist voice assistants is (as you can probably guess) money.

Sure, having feminine voices in a company’s tech products that satisfy the masses increases sales. But these comforting, maternal figures have an ulterior—yet still overwhelming capitalistic—motive: to pacify us into handing over our sensitive personal data.

Heather Suzanne Woods, in her article “Asking more of Siri and Alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism,” demonstrates how these docile, feminine agents that reinforce gender stereotypes constitute an intentional (and successful) attempt by companies to profit off our data. Siri and Alexa lull us to sleep with their motherly charm, getting us to spill our most personal desires and interests without ever thinking twice.

The tech companies behind these products store this data, using it to display personalized advertisements based on your conversations with your cheery, female helper. Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma details how social media sites already harvest our data for personalized ads, so it’s no surprise that our voice assistants do the same. Moreover, these human-voice assistant conversations train our devices, teaching them how to placate us even more effectively.

And thus, surveillance capitalism is born. The vast amount of data we “willingly” supply to Siri and Alexa is scrutinized by machine learning technology, eventually forming predictions of our future behavior—AKA when we will be most receptive to those personalized advertisements.

But it doesn’t stop there. Shoshana Zuboff, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the term “surveillance capitalism” states how surveillance capitalists “learn to tune, herd, and condition our behavior with subtle and subliminal cues, rewards, and punishments that shunt us toward their most profitable outcomes” (read the full interview with Zuboff in The Harvard Gazette). Every suggestion, every notification from our voice assistants has monetary motivations.

Just when we thought we had the authority over our voice assistants, it turns out they (thanks to surveillance capitalists) were the ones influencing our actions the whole time.

So, the next time you go to ask Siri for pizza recommendations or to pick Alexa’s brain on tropical getaways, you might want to think about just who else is listening.

The image is divided into two halves. On the left, a black background surrounds a spherical speaker, commonly known as an Amazon Alexa device. A blue ring is lit up around the top edge of the device. On the right side of the image, a blue background surrounds the symbol associated with Apple's voice assistant Siri: a bluish-white, disfigured star, with the brightest white in the middle of the shape. The disfigured star is surrounded by an incomplete pink circle.

How “The Algorithm” Builds Toxic Mental Health Echo Chambers

CW: mental health, suicide, eating disorders

If you’re anything like me, you have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with “the algorithm”. On the one hand, I get shown content of the variety I’m partial to on the regular. I’m into houseplants and calligraphy, and the algorithm knows that, so I rather like coming across aesthetically pleasing calligraphy videos on YouTube. On the other hand, I’m a little creeped out that the algorithm knows me so well, and I know that it can serve to perpetuate harmful ideas (as discussed in Noble’s article). On a sillier level, I don’t exactly appreciate getting called out on the regular by other young adults with mental health issues on the internet. 

Actually, interacting (AKA, liking/commenting) with that last type of video can easily trigger another aspect of “the algorithm” that I’m less enthused about: the funneling of impressionable young people into misguided mental health spaces. These are online spaces (comment sections, users’ personal pages, group accounts) wherein often unqualified young adults and teens discuss mental health. Users will make videos prompting others to relate to symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders or mental illnesses, poke fun at their own mental health challenges, and sometimes glamorize the idea of being deeply unhappy— even suicidal.

Right now, this subculture is having a bit of a moment on TikTok, but it’s certainly not anything new. I’m sure my classmates remember 2012-era Eating Disorder Tumblr. 

A mild example of what a search of "thinspo" on Tumblr yields.

A mild example of toxic eating disorder culture on Tumblr.

I’m not trying to say that this side of the internet is all bad, though. Users often also share tips or tricks that help make daily tasks easier to accomplish, or encourage people to seek professional help if they are struggling. Other users are actual medical professionals or therapists doing their best to offer useful advice. It’s also just nice to know that you’re not alone in your problems. I know I’ve also found solace knowing I’m not the only one experiencing feelings I thought were uniquely mine to bear, or that I’m not the only one who worries about [insert silly thing].

All I’m trying to say is that, when “the algorithm” aggressively directs users to these kind of mental health spaces and subsequently feeds them often misguided and toxic information, things can quickly get ugly. Vulnerable young people have been known to develop eating disorders or pick up inadvisable coping mechanisms as a result of interacting in such online spaces. And because they continue to interact with such content, these young people can find it extremely difficult to break out of these toxic bubbles. Instead, they get stuck in this nightmarish echo chamber full of other sad teens who are just trying to feel okay in a confusing, scary world. 

It’s this echo chamber effect created by “the algorithm” that worries me most. It certainly isn’t limited to mental health discourse: social and political echo chambers exist all over the internet. Laquintano and Vee describe how “the algorithm” affected the circulation of political information ahead of the 2016 election in their article. These spaces can similarly serve to promote misguided ideologies (such as glorifying cults).

Echo chamber | Cartoons | postregister.com

A political cartoon showing a modern example of how social media creates echo chambers. Illustration by Robert Ariall on postregister.com.

Generally though, echo chambers of any kind do one thing best: they echo. They repeat the same few ideas and opinions over and over and over again. And when those ideas are harmful, bad things happen. Real-world problems start to occur, and perhaps just as importantly, young people who’ve fallen prey to this algorithmic shepherding are prevented from seeing that there are other parts of life— online and off—  that are better than this. Even beautiful. This isn’t all there is. Some things matter way more important than the circumference of your wrists.

I don’t have a solution to this shepherding problem. Do we need more content censorship so that harmful information never ends up online in the first place? Or is that an infringement upon free speech? Should we “dial back” how aggressively the algorithm picks up on browsing patterns and herds us into groups? I don’t know. But I’m confident that we could all benefit from stepping outside our online bubbles, even if we don’t think we’re in a harmful or hateful space. Perspective is key: your slice of the internet is never all there is. The internet can be a tool for good, if we use it that way.

Fear the Bots…Or Not

Line drawing of connected dots made to look like a human reaching out with the letters "AI" on the palm of its handIn 2014, Stephen Hawking gravely warned against creating Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) devices that could match or surpass human abilities. Hawking’s fears are not unique or new – but are they warranted? Could A.I. ever really replace a living, breathing person?

The short answer is “maybe.” As technology advances, use of A.I. will likely continue to expand across all industries. In classrooms, bots can be used to grade papers, thus potentially freeing up instructors to spend more time with students. Outside of the classroom, students might try to use a bot to write a paper for them. A.I. even beat contestants on Jeopardy!

Personally, it is a little terrifying to consider all of the different ways that A.I. might take over human thought processes. At what point will our world start to look like a real life version of Ex Machina or i,Robot?

The reality is that A.I. is still relatively young in the grand scheme of technological advances. While it is true that A.I. has advanced to mimic human thought processes such as those described above, there are massive limitations in what A.I. can do.

In 2019, an A.I. device, Project Debater, went head-to-head with a human economic consultant to debate whether or not preschools should be subsidized by the public. While Project Debater had all of the same facts and figures as its human opponent, the machine was not able to argue successfully. Multi-Colored Mechanical Gears in the Shape of a Human Brain

A.I. devices mirror humans when it comes to logic and facts. But when it comes to abstract concepts and rhetorical persuasion, A.I. can’t compete. And according to some experts, it never will. Abstract ideas are not easily replicable and often don’t conform to any set patterns or rules, making them nearly impossible to create in the form of a machine. Similarly, the art of rhetorical persuasion requires a certain emotion to be conveyed from speaker or writer to the intended audience.

So, put the fears aside. While A.I. will continue to advance at the simple stuff, it will not be able to replace the core of what makes humans human.

An American Sense of Reality

“To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are.”
                                                                                              – James Baldwin

The singularly most omnipresent entity amongst the American populace is that of mass media. It leaks into every facet of our lives and defines how we perceive others and construct our own identities.

Adult reaching out to baby through phone screen

It has been proven through various studies that mass media is a powerful influence that commonly causes people to undergo an identity shift. An identity shift is defined as “choosing to change your current identity because you want to become a new person and experience a new life.”

The most susceptible group to media influence and identity shifts is adolescents. This is because the adolescent years are the most formative in identity formation for a human.

TikTok is a great example of a mass media venue that constantly encourages impressionable youths to undergo identity shifts. These identity shifts can be relatively tiny, such as a person basing more of their identity around a harmless fandom, or substantial, such as a person adopting an antagonistic language and attitude towards certain groups of people in order to mimic their favorite creator.

Kirkland & Jackson, in their work “‘We Real Cool’: Toward a Theory of Black Masculine Literacies,” offer another great example of the ability of mass media to influence adolescents’ identity. They specifically investigated the role rappers and rap media played in determining the language-in-use by “cool” African American adolescents. In specific, they traced how the group of “cool” children altered their language, social views, and clothing choices in order to align more closely with what rap media portrayed and perpetuated as cool.

Picture showing off a child's drawing that exemplifies Hip-hops's cultural influence on the way children speak

The pair also provide context on why specific mass media have a more significant influence on certain groups over others. In their study’s case, African American children formulated their “cool talk” and identities around African American rap artists and media because the community they inhabited deemed said rap artists as representative of what a “cool black man” and/or “black masculine cultural model” is.

I think moving forward as a society that it will become more and more important to encourage persons to distance themselves from media consistently in order to allow themselves the ability to maintain and reinforce their own personally constructed identity separate from overpowering external influences. Otherwise, I think that events such as the recent uptick in white supremacists specifically targeting racist media at adolescent boys in the hopes they will form their identity around normalized racism will become much more commonplace.