I really enjoyed the first two readings this week for topic 3 since I feel like they really connected and built off of week 2’s ideas. I think the ideas of incorporating students in the textbook creation phase as well as digital redlining were both topics that really got me thinking about how these could have or have affected me.

In the textbook related reading, there were some eye-opening points brought up throughout the first chapter. The idea about how “even though 67% of college students in Florida and 54% in British Columbia cannot afford to purchase at least one of their required course textbooks, we more readily attribute their inability to complete assigned readings to laziness and entitlement than to unaffordability” (cite, 2000). I actually had to stop and think about what I had just read after reading this point. I personally have had the thought cross my mind that people don’t purchase their textbooks because they don’t want to stand in line for hours or would rather spend that money on a night out. It never really occurred to me that they genuinely might not have the funds to purchase one $200 textbook for a course that lasts three months. This fact made me immediately think about last week’s readings on the case studies from successful open and distributed online classes, and how those types of classes could help lessen the financial burden that the majority of students face. I would love to get further clarification about numbers for all across Canada and see how that percentage changes across provinces. I think this struggle is something a lot of students face and so gaining more clarification and insight into real cases would be really interesting to see.

From the second reading about digital redlining, I feel like I’ve learned about an area that I never really knew existed, specifically about the amount of filtering that is done by our universities. I have used UVic’s services pretty frequently throughout my degree, and digital redlining was never something that crossed my mind every time I searched for something on a UVic computer. I knew back in elementary and high school that all the school computers had a great deal of protection and security in place to prevent students from accessing malicious or inappropriate websites, but you would think at the University level the “childproofing” would be removed. Just reading about the scenario that is mentioned in the article about how the student finds nothing about revenge porn because of this filtering and redlining, she is essentially denied her freedom of learning about whatever she wants to know. Her inability to find what she was searching for makes me want to ensure that any topics I find interesting in this course, I’m able to do as much or as little investigating and learning as I want without any persuasion or alterations from these lurking filters.

I think these first two readings were really eye-opening for me and helped me connect the information from previous weeks together by continuing these concepts of security and privacy as well as making learning a process that involves the people who are doing the learning. These readings have inspired me to do more investigating into how I might be being redlined, as well as how I as a student can encourage professors to involve students in student-related issues such as textbooks and syllabuses. I’m looking forward to learning more about related topics throughout the remainder of the course.

 

References

Claire Howell Major. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 88-105)

Gilliard, C. (2019, November 06). Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy. Retrieved July 19, 2020, from https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/digital-redlining-access-and-privacy

Mays, E., & DeRosa, R. (2017). A guide to making open textbooks with students. Montreal: The Rebus Community for Open Textbook Creation.