Resources by G. Brooke Lester

“...it’s easy if you try.” In fact, it is not easy for me to imagine no grading. But I’m trying, colleagues. I’m trying really hard. I’m not talking about being finished with this spring term’s grading, though that would be nice, too. When I say, “Imagine there’s no grading,” I mean imagine learning without grades. Okay, wait—don’t go anywhere! How about, imagine learning with fewer grades. Or finally: imagine a learning environment that is designed to encourage learners (and instructors) to focus more on learning, and less on grades. When we put this imagination into practice, we are Ungrading. I’m not doing away with grades and grading. I have invested decades into discovering and sharing grading practices that are more equitable, more just, less biased, and more accurate than many of the grading practices I learned from my own instructors. However, these very discoveries have led me into practices that many describe as ungrading: more formative evaluation and less summative evaluation; peer learning via peer review; more narrative and collaborative evaluation processes; and more openness to surprising demonstrations of learning. This unpredictability of learning is one of two experiences that, today, urgently persuade me to consider more committal practices in Ungrading. Put simply: Learners come from everywhere and are going everywhere. Learners come from everywhere, and therefore, I have very little idea what prior experiences and insights they are pouring into the learning that they mix. (“Constructivism” is a theory of learning holding that learners construct understanding by integrating new information with prior knowledge.) If learners come from everywhere (and bring anything), then how can I be confident in one-size-fits-all grading strategies that presuppose that I already know what “learning” will look like? What is more, learners are going everywhere, and therefore, I have very little idea what an application of learning might look like in their imagined present or future contexts. If learners are going everywhere (and might need anything), then how can I be confident that I already know what a successful application of learning should look like? This is to say: do my evaluation processes have ears? Are they open to challenge? Do they invite surprise? The second experience that today urgently persuades me to evaluate grading more critically is my experience of trustworthiness in learners. This is not a new experience of course, but is fresh on my mind, in part because of a new experience, and in part because of fresh reflection on a frequent experience. This spring, I taught a class that my institution designates as Pass/Fail. Learners responded weekly to a pair of prompts calling on them to engage the readings of the week in particular ways. The rubric for these weekly prompts was unchanging through the semester, and learners got the hang of it all quite early. At that point, I wondered whether student submissions would become minimum-effort, “paint by numbers” exercises in tedium, but things proved otherwise: overwhelmingly, learners engaged the course materials in authentic, often risk-taking ways that showed more than the necessary commitment of time and attention. This was true not only for the habitual overachievers, but also for those learners who had had the most trouble getting the hang of things early in the term. The prior semester, I taught my usual Intro course in my subject matter (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament). This was where I encountered a by-now-familiar phenomenon: the learners became more enthusiastically engaged with the material in the last weeks of the term, once (as an intentional result of course design) most student’s final grades were more or less established. Learners would go on to take low-stakes, short assignments and stretch their creativity, taking provisional ideas out for a spin and testing their own limits freely. Countless times I have reflected, “It’s amazing what’s possible once they feel like their grades are more or less set...” without considering what an indictment that is against the basic presupposition that grading is necessary to coerce performance. Why in the world am I not doing all I can to create those liberating conditions as early in the term as possible? Why am I not doing more to get grades out of the way of learning? This summer, I am once again taking my aspirations as an instructor to the notion of Ungrading. Discover more about Ungrading by reading Susan D. Blum (ed.), Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University (2020). Find active, up-to-date, practice-based discussions about Ungrading by searching Twitter for the hashtag #ungrading.

Developing a more learner-centered course design does not have to mean pulling everything up by the roots. A good start is to examine the activities already happening in your courses, finding where good learner-centered design principles already exist. Here, I look at two versions of an activity that is common in my own course designs: Peer Review. The first example is simple; the second example is more complex. Both are fully asynchronous, allowing learners to manage their time as their lives require. (Honoring learner time and agency is a learner-centered principle.) Along the way, as in the last sentence, I keep an eye out for learner-centered design principles that I can identify and name. Example One: Peer Review and the Short Writing Prompt: In small groups on an online discussion forum, learners write a short weekly post in response to a writing prompt asking them to integrate course readings with their own contexts and insights. (Constructivism is a learner-centered theory.) During the week following a due date, small-group classmates offer each other 2-3 sentences of substantive informal engagement, followed by a peer review embracing three yes-or-no elements: Balance (every element of the prompt receives attention); Engagement (the whole work is engaged substantively with the course and its materials); Mechanics (spelling, grammar, organization, citation). For the first 1/3 of the term, peer reviews are purely diagnostic: no revisions are needed, but learners MAY reach out to the instructor for guidance in response to feedback. (Learners taking responsibility for learning is a learner-centered principle.) For the middle 1/3 of the term, learners getting two or more "No's" from peers must reach out to the instructor. For the final 1/3 of the term, learners getting any "No's" must reach out to the instructor. In practice, my role as instructor is mostly to provide guidance in the early weeks, rewarding (via recognition) social goods like risk-taking and commitment. (Guide-on-the-side-style facilitation is a learner-centered practice.) Example Two: Peer Review and the Final Paper: Bear with me on this one. There's this final research/thesis paper, see? (My course is "Introduction to the Hebrew Bible," and this is the notorious exegesis paper.) But a complete draft is due at the midterm...and by "complete draft" I mean Complete Draft: it's at the full word count and includes all of the expected elements of the final paper. Why? For many reasons, but relevant here: your small-group classmates need something complete to be able to peer-review it! So that's the "bad news" on the draft: it must be complete. What's the "good news"? The draft does not have to be particularly good! Because the Complete Draft does not count toward the student's grade in the class: this peer review is a formative evaluation, not a summative evaluation. (Formative evaluation is a learner-centered practice.) So, learner: in your draft, take risks! Try things! Get out on a limb! Pull out all the stops to try to articulate the things you are trying to say. (Creating conditions for student voice is a learner-centered principle.) In order to promote informed, substantive peer review--something more illuminating than "I liked it; it was good"--students are armed with two (2) rubrics. First, there is the rubric for the final paper itself, made available to learners at the start of the term. (Instructor transparency and accountability in assessment is a learner-centered principle.) If reviewers have so far neglected this document or struggled with it, now they are put in a position to have to get to know it better and work with it constructively and ask for help if needed. The second rubric is the rubric for the peer reviews themselves. (Are the reviews engaged with the draft being reviewed? Are they engaged with the final-paper rubrics? Are they constructive as well as affirming?) Here I include one coercive element: 20% of a student's peer-review grade requires that *their own draft* be complete and on time, and this element is a binary: you get 20 points, or you get zero points. And here's the thing: the evaluation for peer reviews is not formative, but summative. This thing must go smoothly and tightly, or the wheels fall off. (Don't ask of learners more self-motivation than reasonable for their level: scaffolding is a learner-centered principle.) Closing notes: Learner-centered course design principles didn't descend from the sky on stone tablets. Rather, they arose from the reflected-upon experiences of educators like yourself. By joining in this process of reflection and discovery, you join in the construction of applied learner-centered pedagogy. Where can you discover some more of the learner-centered principles that you're ransacking your course designs for? Do a web search for "student centered learning"; "learner centered instruction"; "learner-centered assessment" (or "student-centered assessment"); "learner centered teaching"; and so on. Good luck and have fun.

You know who has a lot of spare time lately? Nobody. You know something that wastes time when you’re a student? Finding yourself in a class that is definitely not a class you want, because no one gave you a heads-up about Dr. Lester. Someone should give them that heads-up, and it should be me. How better to do so than by telling them all of my dearest hopes and dreams... before they sign on the enrollment line. Just because a student wants to take Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, it doesn’t mean they want to take it from me. Better to figure that out before week one, rather than week five or six... agreed? I listen to our admissions director and to our dean of students, and the word I hear over and over is “precarity.” The lives of our students are more precarious than ever. (Yes, so are yours and mine, but let’s keep our focus on the students.) On the first day of the term, a student likely comes into my class with no wiggle room in their life. If my approach is not what they’re after, then this relationship is costing them money and more than that, it’s wasting their time. See, I don’t just have a lot of knowledge about the Hebrew Bible and its study; I also have all these ideas about them. And not just ideas—I have feelings, and passions, and convictions, and reckonings. Many of these are commensurable with those of other instructors at my institution and its partners in cross-registration, but they are not identical. Professor So-and-So and I may agree broadly about the subject matter and its study; we may devour each other’s research about it and may laugh at each other’s jokes about it; we’re sympatico... and a student might find heaven in their course and hell in mine. To put it in terms of course design, I have “big ideas” that animate my course and its units. (For what follows, see Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, Pearson, 2006.) These big ideas are one major source for the understanding, knowledge, and skills that I hope learners will develop in their engagement with the Hebrew Bible. Wiggins and McTighe describe a big idea as a linchpin, and as “conceptual Velcro”: a big idea unifies several pieces of “related content knowledge” in a way that is core to understanding the subject at hand. For example, here are some of the big ideas that animate the units in my Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: Cross-Culture: reading the Bible is always a cross-cultural experience. Competing Claims: biblical texts will disagree with one another about God, God’s ways with the world, and what God wants. Not You: biblical texts are not talking to you—they speak to their own time and place, in order to make specific things happen in their circumstances. History is Storytelling: histories, like any stories, use strategies for reasons: characterization, plot, point-of-view, omission, misdirection, rhetoric of every kind. The Story is not the History: the “world behind the text” is not the “world in the text.” In Understanding by Design terms, these big ideas correspond to “essential questions” that do not call for a single knowable answer, but rather prompt further questions and open-ended inquiry: Can competing claims about God both be true? What makes a claim true? What does it mean for a text to “speak to” a hearer whom the text never imagined? To what is a history accountable? What makes a cross-cultural experience “authentic”? You start to get an idea, don’t you? These overlapping big ideas and essential questions motivate the course design... and, not incidentally, tell you a lot about me and what it might be like to spend thirteen weeks doing my assignments and adapting to my feedback. If this isn’t what a learner expects of an Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, they can ask themselves some questions. Are they surprised and delighted? Are they cautiously curious but wonder what other offerings of this course might look like (at my institution or elsewhere)? Are they repulsed or offended? Would they like to chat? However this goes, we are well on our way toward a week one roster of forewarned, well-informed, consenting participants. But only if this information is available in a timely way, and that means the day that registration opens. Any lesser commitment means a waste of time for prospective learners who don’t have it in the bank.

If communication were easy, all marriages would be made in heaven, differing perspectives would be valued, all students would be well rested and at ease, and we would get the sauce we asked for with our McNuggets. So much for the Better Universe. Here in this one, we instructors spend a lot of time trying to get across ideas that are perfectly clear in our heads to generally smart and willing learners. Often, it can feel like threading a needle with a climbing rope in a hailstorm. Sometimes, it is harder than that. Why Am I Communicating? Merlin Mann once said, “Never hit ‘Send’ on an email unless you know what you want to happen as a result.” Whenever communicating with students, it's worth asking, "Why am I doing this? What do I want to happen as a result?" ("Ah!" you say, being an academic and therefore the kind of person who can't wait to say this sort of thing, "Locution, illocution, and perlocution." That's fine.) Often, we are simply conveying information. What is the schedule, the readings, the assignments, the rubrics; where is the feedback; when is the review, the exam, the due date for the paper; how does one reach the instructor, how does one cite sources. Learners need the info. Hopefully, another purpose is motivating learners. Think of geese honking one another along in their V-formation on a chilly morning. "Hey, everyone got their reflection papers in on deadline: great professionalism, can't wait to read them. On to the next unit!" "Last push before final papers are due: get your sleep, eat well, try to remember why you cared about your paper topic in the first place, and let's run through the finish line!" Sometimes, we mean to model a behavior or an activity for learners. If my learners are engaged in a collaborative activity in an unfamiliar mode--a Twitter game, a group poem in a Google doc, a discussion-forum weeklong debate--then I may want to find a way to join as a participant, "showing the way" for learners who might hesitate to get themselves out onto the dance floor. An aspect of communication that happens to be much on my mind these days is disciplinary formation. In my case, the ongoing effort to help learners wrap their heads around what I mean by "biblical studies," its materials, and particularly its methods and principles. Biblical studies is not Bible Study. Biblical studies relies on publicly available evidence and explicit lines of reasoning, and does not grant methodological place to private revelation or sectarian doctrine. The subject matter of biblical studies is texts, not God. You don't get all of this over in a syllabus, or an introductory lecture. It's an ongoing communicative process. "What are we doing here, and how do we do it, and why this way and not another?" Any number of reasons to communicate could be added. Some of these are course correction ("Whoa y'all, remember that your responses to classmates have to substantively engage their own content, not just springboard off on your own thing"); self correction ("Sorry gang, I wrote two different due dates in the course documents; let's go with the later one, found in such-and-so doc on our Moodle site”); gathering information instead of disseminating it (a survey, a diagnostic quiz). There is no shortage of good reasons to communicate with learners, and it will do everyone good if I know what the purpose of each one is. How Should I Communicate This? A big part of the answer to this question derives from a prior question: "Who Should Hear This?" Deciding among your available channels (syllabus, email, blog post, Zoom meeting, dedicated course Twitter hash tag, YouTube video lecture, MP3 audio lecture, mumbling passive-aggressively in the hallways) mainly involves deciding on your audience. Sure, you know who you're talking to, but also, who do you want to be sure overhears it, and why? ("Ah!" you say, "Locution, illo..." except now nobody is listening.) Private communication is the norm for feedback ("You got a B-plus, and here's why"). But, what about that wonderful form of feedback, "Catching the learner doing something right"? Alexis showed exemplary leadership moderating her small group this week. I can tell her so via email, and she may find that motivating, but what I really need is for her small-group colleagues Brad, Charlise, and Darius to overhear this since they will be moderating in future weeks. So, I will praise Alexis in whichever venue this work is happening (discussion forum, Google Doc, Twitter thread). Heads up, Brad and company! As for that disciplinary formation I'm working on. I know from experience how much back-and-forth this can involve. My explanations are prone to misunderstanding; learners have substantive pre-formation to unpack and unlearn; I'm still discovering what kinds of questions my efforts will elicit. If anything calls for synchronic discourse (Zoom meeting, Chat session, webinar), this does. Still, no reason not to supplement with asynchronous tools: an Ask-Me-Anything (About Biblical Studies) discussion forum, for example, or a Glossary built by learners over the course of the semester (on the Learning Management System? as a Google Doc with a shareable link?). Also, disciplinary formation lends itself to a bit of "public theology" if possible. My learners aren't the only ones confused about what goes on in my field, and it's not like "Bible" doesn't have a prominent place in public discourse and policy. How about a webinar or social-media event open to the public? ("Students, prepare your pseudonyms, we have incoming!") What is a syllabus for? Twenty years of teaching and I still can't quite say. I tend to tick-tock over time between the 3-page bare-bones syllabus (with other course docs picking up the slack: schedule, rubrics, policies, weekly instructions) and the 39-page behemoth that serves as The Complete and Final Revelation of Your Instructor to Her Flock (it never is). If I am going with multiple course docs all living in an LMS, then learners will need these to refer to one another: the course docs cross-reference each other, and the syllabus cross-references everything. It's not a scavenger hunt. (But you could include a real Scavenger Hunt through the course docs as a first-week activity!) Of course, you can't use a tool you've never heard of (and I warn against using one in the field you've not tried first privately). Twitter, Google Docs, Slack, Discord, Zoom, YouTube, WordPress . . . pick one when you're in the mood and get some friends to take it out with you for a spin: gossip, play a game, exchange recipes. If nothing else, you'll have something to say at parties besides "Ah! Locution . . . ." Brooke Lester Assistant Professor Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

Students are always already being "formed" in our online classes, whether we mean to have incorporated "formation" into our course designs or not. In this ineluctable process of formation, do the communities of inquiry designed into our online classes align with the norms and values of the communities into which we mean to form our learners? By "formation" in this post, I do not particularly mean "spiritual formation," but I also do not exclude it. If "spiritual formation" involves the practices and conditions for becoming transformed into the community of disciples to Jesus Christ so too is the instructor of (say) Hebrew Bible, Church History, or Theology also forming learners toward the norms and practices of their respective disciplinary communities. Even before that, however, we are already forming learners into a prior community: the communities of inquiry fostered in our course designs. Some readers will already know that from a constructivist perspective learning always involves a creative synthesis, accomplished in the learner, of the experiences and insights she brings to the learning moment, with the new information she encounters there. Crafting within herself this new thing, she is changed in the process of constructing for herself new enduring understandings; that is, she is transformed. Moreover, again from a constructivist standpoint, this creative enterprise of making meaning happens most reliably in collaboration with other learners and in the generation of public projects; that is, the learner is transformed among and via community. Learning, then, is always a matter of transformation in and into community. What, then, will be the norms, practices, and ideology of this learning community, or community of inquiry? To what extent will these be intentional or accidental? How well or poorly will they align with the communities into which we mean our learners to be formed: the community of disciples, or of biblical scholars, or of chaplains, or historians, or theologians? For example, one enduring understanding that I mean for learners to absorb in my Hebrew Bible courses is that biblical studies grounds its claims in publicly available evidence and explicit lines of reasoning, rather than in private revelation or sectarian dogma. Documentary hypotheses for the composition of the Pentateuch are not "alternative dogmas" to an unassailable sectarian claim that Moses authored the first five books of the Bible. An archaeological conclusion that Jericho had no fortifications during any possible time in which one can posit an emergence of Israel in the land is not an "alternative dogma" to an appeal to tradition that Joshua made the walls to tumble down. In this context, with what sort of cognitive dissonance do I set a learner if I refuse to make transparent my rubrics for assessing his exegesis paper? ("It just feels like a B minus.") If my appeal is to the inscrutable and unquestionable authority of my disciplinary expertise and teaching experience, I signal a very different kind of norms for the community of biblical scholars to that which I have been at pains to illustrate in my course design. Do my syllabus and other communication documents direct learners toward institutional policies regarding accommodations for medical issues, disabilities, neurodivergence, and so on? An explicit commitment to reasonable accommodation signals a community norm of inclusion. If I want my learners to imagine the community of disciples as one marked by radical inclusion, then the community of inquiry fostered in my online class is the place to start. Do you find that your institutional policies regarding accommodation are difficult to locate, or hard to understand, or implicitly overridden by instructor whim? It may be time to escalate the matter (to a dean of students or academic dean, to a faculty council, even to a student council). Accommodation in the online class is at least as challenging as in the face-to-face class. How does one accommodate "extra time" for a collaborative assignment that begins and ends over the course of a week? Have I crafted my course documents (syllabus, assignment instructions, feedback) such that they are legible to a "reading" computer program used by a cognitively or visually impaired learner (or my audio-visual resources for the hearing-impaired learner)? It's a tough standard by which to evaluate my online course design, but one that takes seriously the facts that 1) I explicitly describe to learners the ideals of the disciplinary community in which my class seeks to form them, and 2) my course design is forming them into some kind of community of inquiry with its own values . . . intended or not, planned or accidental.

Like so many aspects of the online course, we must pre-plan student interaction and incorporate it into the course at the design stage. I find it helpful to distinguish between organizational interaction (exchanges that help learners understand, and thrive in, the structures of the course) and social interaction (ways that the instructor mediates social presence to learners and helps them do the same with the instructor and with one another). Here, I focus on organizational interaction. In a later post, I will focus on mediating social presence online. A running theme animating the following suggestions is "What do we owe our learners?" It's easy to get caught up in easy bashing on "entitled students," and it's true that learners are sometimes unskilled in knowing reasonable from unreasonable expectations in higher education (it's a weird environment!). But in our more measured moments, instructors acknowledge that we have obligations to our students, among which I include clarity of expectations and a willingness to admit the imperfections of our course designs. Pre-Term Communication: Interacting with learners online begins when class registration opens, months before the term begins. Learners considering your online course have a right to know what they are getting into. A syllabus for the online class is a learner's first chance to discern whether the class is a good fit. Before registering, a learner should know: information about required synchronous sessions: Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. the shape, or "flow," of a typical week or unit; for example, "Readings are due Mondays," "Discussion forum posts are due Tuesdays with replies to peers by Fridays," "Short written assignments are due at the end of every three-week unit." the planned assignments and activities; these may be in brief "draft" form but must be reliable policies: participation policies, late work policies, disability/accommodation policies, academic integrity policies, instructor contact policies Don't stop at the registration point: email registered learners a month before the first day of the term, directing them to the syllabus and reminding them of first-week activities and requirements. Do it again at the two-week mark, and once more the day before the term begins. This is the time for potential students to weed themselves out. If your online class is not the right fit for a learner, better for everyone if they realize it now, rather than in the third week of your class! Weed now, or pay later. Which brings us to . . . Squeeze them out! This is a tough interaction, but necessary. If I am confident that all my registered learners have received the information they need about early-term expectations, then with a clear conscience I can employ a draconian first-week participation policy . . . and I do employ a draconian first-week participation policy. My reason for this is that (at least in my experience) there will be a few students who sort of drift in around the middle of the second week, or even later, now ready to start getting involved. Without exception (again in my experience), these learners will not prove to be a good fit in terms of meeting deadlines and accomplishing work according to instructions. By requiring learners to have participated in all activities during the first week (on penalty of an immediate withdrawal), these students are spared a likely failing grade, and these students will now NOT soak up a disproportionate block of the instructor's time and attention at the expense of other learners. Those who show up have a right to our time and attention, and students not yet prepared to succeed have a right to be dealt with honestly. Squeeze them out. Mid-term evaluations: In this instance, I mean "learners evaluating you." (Hopefully, your learners have been receiving early and frequent feedback on their own work from the instructor.) By allowing learners to evaluate their learning experience mid-term, and by responding promptly and honestly, you communicate to learners that their experience matters. Even small "mid-course corrections" in response to learner evaluations can pay off large dividends in the form of student goodwill . . . right at the time in the calendar when learners and instructors alike are prone to grow frazzled and, shall we say, disenchanted with one another. Of course, also designed into the course will be the modes and means of interactions: emails, video or audio lectures, remote office hours, possible synchronous sessions, social media, and so on. I will address these in a later post on mediating social presence in the online course.

My most recent tweet (of almost ten thousand) was 40 weeks ago. My most recent Facebook status update (except for a brief "thank you" for birthday wishes in July) was 46 weeks ago. The previous three years, however, I have taught my main introductory course, "Introduction to the Hebrew Bible," as an open, freely-available, online event built almost entirely on social media, especially Twitter, WordPress blogs, and Google Docs. This was the Open Old Testament Learning Event, or "OOTLE." My use of social media in higher education was based on a belief in the power of making for learning, and on a utopian vision for the internet that was based on my own experience. Eventually, the failures of the major centralized social-media platforms to proactively account for systemic abuse of marginalized users led me to abandon our pioneer outpost of open learning, and to retreat with my students back into the familiar confines of "the devil I know," the closed learning management system or "LMS." Many educators will have some familiarity with the learning theory "constructivism" (sometimes "constructionism"). According to this model, learners do not simply "acquire" knowledge, but rather always "construct" knowledge by synthesizing their existing understandings with new information or insights. Less well known, however, is that according to a constructivist model, this knowledge-making is more likely to occur where learning happens socially and where learners collaboratively build artifacts that are publicly shared. As the internet age took hold, and learners began increasingly to build their knowledge in a world of information excess rather than a world of information scarcity, it was often remarked that content on the internet was composed by perhaps 1% of internet users. Perhaps 9% of users interact with this content, and some 90% only passively consume content. This is sometimes called the "1% rule" or the "90/9/1 rule." From computer science to the humanities, educators began to embrace the power of "maker culture" to unleash the potential of constructivist learning in individuals, and to remake the internet in the image of the whole body of its users. It was in this context that the use of social media in higher education began to spread like fire: classroom Twitter "back channels" or weekly synchronous "Twitter chats"; blogging assignments on open web platforms like WordPress; presentation or digital storytelling on YouTube; and Facebook groups and pages. Then in 2014 came "Gamergate," a campaign of organized harassment against female game designers and game enthusiasts, including frequent credible threats of sexual violence and murder. Gamergate provided a playbook for white supremacist organizations and eventually, it seems, even for Russian interference via "troll farms" in 2015-16 U.S. political discourse on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. ("Trolling" describes skillful, media-savvy practices in derailing or redirecting discourse, whether for pleasure, malice, or profit.) Even among social-media users apparently uninvolved in these large events, in became clear that the codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies dictated by the young, white "tech bros" of social media (Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook), could not provide marginalized users anything like the safe environment enjoyed by privileged users less likely to be targeted. This remains the case, skewed as these policies are toward favoring "free speech" in an absolute sense and leaving users to block malicious actors as best they can . . . only possible, of course, after the malicious acts have occurred. Even we relatively privileged users became accustomed to weary acknowledgements that "of course Twitter is a cesspool, but . . . " Eventually, "But. . . “ became for me, and for many educators in my circles, "But what?" and then "But nothing." It had become impossible to offer my learners a reasonable guarantee that they would enjoy equitable social-media experiences, regardless of how they chose to present their race, gender, sexual self-understanding, class, or other differences. As I consider shepherding learners again into the social-media space ("not yet, not yet"), I remain optimistic about decentralized platforms like Mastodon. It is clear that the "one size fits all" approach to codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies (as on Twitter and Facebook) is untenable. On Mastodon, a radical free-speech, no-holds-barred community can have its minimalistic code of conduct, while a more proactive, highly-moderated community can choose to federate with that group, or not. I have not given up on a commitment to learning via collaborative construction of publicly available artifacts, but I am once bitten . . .and will twice be shy of any monetized, centralized platform.

G. Brooke Lester, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Scriptures, and Director for Emerging Pedagogies, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Time was, my Biblical Hebrew students and I sweated grimly in a thrice-weekly race against time. But now, with the lectures recorded (as voice-narrated...