Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
Over 250 million people play the shooting game “Fortnite,” with dance moves from the game seen at weddings and mimicked by professional athletes. And “Minecraft” has become a hit in classrooms.
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more on classcraft in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=classcraft
Valuing data over design instinct puts metrics over users
Benek Lisefski August 13, 2019
https://modus.medium.com/data-driven-design-is-killing-our-instincts-d448d141653d
Overreliance on data to drive design decisions can be just as harmful as ignoring it. Data only tells one kind of story. But your project goals are often more complex than that. Goals can’t always be objectively measured.
Data-driven design is about using information gleaned from both quantitative and qualitative sources to inform how you make decisions for a set of users. Some common tools used to collect data include user surveys, A/B testing, site usage and analytics, consumer research, support logs, and discovery calls.
Designers justified their value through their innate talent for creative ideas and artistic execution. Those whose instincts reliably produced success became rock stars.
In today’s data-driven world, that instinct is less necessary and holds less power. But make no mistake, there’s still a place for it.
Data is good at measuring things that are easy to measure. Some goals are less tangible, but that doesn’t make them less important.
Data has become an authoritarian who has fired the other advisors who may have tempered his ill will. A designer’s instinct would ask, “Do people actually enjoy using this?” or “How do these tactics reflect on our reputation and brand?”
Digital interface design is going through a bland period of sameness.
Data is only as good as the questions you ask
When to use data vs. when to use instinct
Deciding between two or three options? This is where data shines. Nothing is more decisive than an A/B test to compare potential solutions and see which one actually performs better. Make sure you’re measuring long-term value metrics and not just views and clicks.
Sweating product quality and aesthetics? Turn to your instinct. The overall feeling of quality is a collection of hundreds of micro-decisions, maintained consistency, and execution with accuracy. Each one of those decisions isn’t worth validating on its own. Your users aren’t design experts, so their feedback will be too subjective and variable. Trust your design senses when finessing the details.
Unsure about user behavior? Use data rather than asking for opinions. When asked what they’ll do, customers will do what they think you want them to. Instead, trust what they actually do when they think nobody’s looking.
Building brand and reputation? Data can’t easily measure this. But we all know trustworthiness is as important as clicks (and sometimes they’re opposing goals). When building long-term reputation, trust your instinct to guide you to what’s appealing, even if it sometimes contradicts short-term data trends. You have to play the long game here.
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more on big data in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=big+data
Imagine if we didn’t know how to use books – notes on a digital practices framework
Imagine if we didn’t know how to use books – notes on a digital practices framework https://t.co/EDttc5XMZr pic.twitter.com/YlI2PIEX9L
— Ana Cristina Pratas (@AnaCristinaPrts) September 1, 2019
the 20/60/20 model of change. The idea is that the top 20% of any group will be game for anything, they are your early adopters, always willing to try the next best thing. The bottom 20% of a group will hate everything and spend most of their time either subtly slowly things down or in open rebellion. The middle 60% are the people who have the potential to be won or lost depending on how good your plan is
The top stream is about all the sunshine and light about working with others on the internet. It’s advantages and pitfalls, ways in which to promote prosocial discourse. The middle stream is about pragmatics. The how’s of doing things, it starts out with simple guidelines and moves forward the technical realities of licensing, content production and tech using. The bottom stream is about the self. How to keep yourself safe, how to have a healthy relationship with the internet from a personal perspective.
Level 1 – Awareness
Level 2 – Learning
Level 3 Interacting and making
Level 4 – Teaching
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more on digital literacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+literacy
deep fake: definition
What are “deepfakes?”
That’s the nickname given to computer-created artificial videos or other digital material in which images are combined to create new footage that depicts events that never actually happened. The term originates from the online message board Reddit.
One initial use of the fake videos was in amateur-created pornography, in which the faces of famous Hollywood actresses were digitally placed onto that of other performers to make it appear as though the stars themselves were performing.
How difficult is it to create fake media?
It can be done with specialized software, experts say, the same way that editing programs such as Photoshop have made it simpler to manipulate still images. And specialized software itself isn’t necessary for what have been dubbed “shallow fakes” or “cheap fakes.”
Researchers also say they are working on new ways to speed up systems aimed at helping establish when video or audio has been manipulated. But it’s been called a “cat and mouse” game in which there may seldom be exact parity between fabrication and detection.
At least one state has considered legislation that would outlaw distributing election-oriented fake videos.
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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
Robert Ubell (Columnist) Feb 20, 2019
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-20-online-learning-s-greatest-hits
dean of web-based distance learning
Neck and neck for the top spot in the LMS academic vendor race are Blackboard—the early entry and once-dominant player—and coming-up quickly from behind, the relatively new contender, Canvas, each serving about 6.5 million students . The LMS market today is valued at $9.2 billion.
Faced with increasingly complex communication technologies—voice, video, multimedia, animation—university faculty, expert in their own disciplines, find themselves technically perplexed, largely unprepared to build digital courses.
instructional designers, long employed by industry, joined online academic teams, working closely with faculty to upload and integrate interactive and engaging content.
nstructional designers, as part of their skillset, turned to digital authoring systems, software introduced to stimulate engagement, encouraging virtual students to interface actively with digital materials, often by tapping at a keyboard or touching the screen as in a video game. Most authoring software also integrates assessment tools, testing learning outcomes.
With authoring software, instructional designers can steer online students through a mixtape of digital content—videos, graphs, weblinks, PDFs, drag-and-drop activities, PowerPoint slides, quizzes, survey tools and so on. Some of the systems also offer video editing, recording and screen downloading options
As with a pinwheel set in motion, insights from many disciplines—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, educational psychology and data analytics—have come together to form a relatively new field known as learning science, propelling advances in a new personalized practice—adaptive learning.
Of the top providers, Coursera, the Wall Street-financed company that grew out of the Stanford breakthrough, is the champion with 37 million learners, followed by edX, an MIT-Harvard joint venture, with 18 million. Launched in 2013, XuetangX, the Chinese platform in third place, claims 18 million.
Former Yale President Rick Levin, who served as Coursera’s CEO for a few years, speaking by phone last week, was optimistic about the role MOOCs will play in the digital economy. “The biggest surprise,” Levin argued, “is how strongly MOOCs have been accepted in the corporate world to up-skill employees, especially as the workforce is being transformed by job displacement. It’s the right time for MOOCs to play a major role.”
In virtual education, pedagogy, not technology, drives the metamorphosis from absence to presence, illusion into reality. Skilled online instruction that introduces peer-to-peer learning, virtual teamwork and other pedagogical innovations stimulate active learning. Online learning is not just another edtech product, but an innovative teaching practice. It’s a mistake to think of digital education merely as a device you switch on and off like a garage door.
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more on online learning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+learning
Children who use smartphones, tablets, and video games for more than seven hours a day are more likely to experience premature thinning of the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain that processes thought and action, a 2018 study found. https://t.co/OJe6ZTBVkx
— EdWeek Teacher (@EdWeekTeacher) August 1, 2019
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2018/12/early_results_of_study_show_sc.html
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study tested 4,500 9-10-year-olds in its first released dataset. The ABCD study is the largest long-term study of brain development in U.S.
Early data from the study, analyzed by another group of researchers from the CHEO Research Institute’s Healthy Active Living and Obesity also showed that kids who spend less than two hours a day on screens, participated in 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous-intensity physical activity, and received nine to 11 hours of uninterrupted sleep had higher cognitive abilities.Cognition was measured by language abilities, episodic memory, executive function, attention, working memory, and processing speed.
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more on gamification in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gamification
Gamification can be approached in at least two ways. First, as a general process in which games and playful experiences are understood as essential components of society and culture.
Sebastian Deterding, Rilla
Khaled, Lennart Nacke and Dan Dixon have proposed a tentative history of
the term: “ ‘gamification’ as a term originated in the digital media industry.
The first documented use dates back to 2008, but gamification only entered
widespread adoption in the second half of 2010”
Jane McGonigal’s work, expounded in her contribution at the TED
Talk series in 2010, is also concerned with “selling” gamification to corporations.
In her book Reality is Broken. p.9 In her understanding, gamification is a concept that describes a new age where gamers can collectively use their problem-solving skills not only
to solve puzzles within a digital game but also to approach social and political
issues in the real world. Gaming, according to McGonigal’s vision,
could and should play a redeeming role. Game designers could become the
new social entrepreneurs, and citizens become gamers. From this perspective,
gamification thus becomes a technique for enabling greatly ambitious
change.
p. 10 Consumer loyalty, issues related to finance and governance, workers’ productivity, training and development – these are only some of the areas that are allegedly being positively revolu tionised by the emergence of gamification
As outlined by Ian Bogost in several contexts (2011a, 2011b), gamificatio has little to do with the design of games (or an allegedly salvific process), and much more with the exploitation of consumers. It frustrates the practice of game design and reduces playing to a stimulus-response experience
p. 11 Niklas Schrape proposes looking, through Foucault, at how gamification might work as a method to regulate individuals and their social lives. It also works as a pleasant regulator of behaviour because it offers positive feedback (rewards, leaderboards, etc.) rather than
negative penalties (fines, prison, etc.).
Ruffino looks at the work of Tim Ingold and his reading of Bergson and Heidegger and argues that participation, dwelling and co-existence could be seen as alternative ways of thinking about engagement: less as a transitive process that goes from games to their players and more as an in transitive status that needs to be narrated in order to be of any value
Foursquare alters the experience of moving about on the streets of a city and establishes a form of communication based on bodily proximity
p. 12 Joost Raessens examines how gamification could be seen in the context of a more general “ludic turn”, which affects society and culture at many different levels. This century, Raessens notes, has seen several different kinds of “turns”: We have seen the linguistic turn, the digital, followed by the material one and many others. To what extent could we say that we are now experiencing a playful turnp.
p. 14 the definition of gamification as the use of game elements in a non-game context.
Philippette suggests the very idea that games that can influencethe non-game context could be re-interpreted following Henriot’s theories on play (https://www.academia.edu/16293099/Gamification_Rethinking_playing_the_game_with_Jacques_Henriot
Counter-gamification is not a precise practice; it is not defined in guidebooks, workshops, or tutorials. It is instead a form of appropriation of playful elements by artists in order to promote radical and oppositional values.
p. 15 Fizek’s proposal is to expand the concept of play and fun and to introduce new forms of engagement in the practice of gamification
If the endgame approach were applied to gamification, Nicholson argues, we could see very different ways of designing and playing. The author explores these alternative modes of gamifying things through a text that offers both a theoretical understanding of gamification and exceptionally useful suggestions for designers.
p. 16 an eudaimonic view of gamification could bring a “good” way of living and
playing, one where joy and satisfaction are at the centre of a responsible practice. Gamification, according to Deterding, could become the name of a play practice that truly helps human beings in fulfilling their own lives and those of others
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More on Bogost in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=bogost
According to the authors of a newly published report, at least 10 state education agencies—Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Washington—have launched official microcredential pilots. And another five states—Illinois, Maryland, Montana, New York, and Wyoming—are experimenting with microcredentials in some way.
sponsored by the non-profit Digital Promise, the report argues that we’ve reached a kind of tipping point in the evolution of the “emerging micro-credentialing ecosystem,”
Reports from early adopters (among them, the NEA, the country’s largest teachers’ union) have been promising, and the potential market for such programs is potentially huge. According to Digital Promise, nearly three out of four U.S. teachers are currently engaged in some type of informal professional development or learning.
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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredent
Conclusions sur- rounding use have therefore been
largely negative and smartphones have repeatedly
been associated with depression (Elhai, Dvorak,
Levine, & Hall, 2017), anxiety (Richardson,
Hussain, & Griffiths, 2018), disrupted sleep
(Rosen, Carrier, Miller, Rokkum, & Ruiz, 2016),
cognitive
impairment (Clayton,
Leshner,&
Almond, 2015), and poor academic performance
(Lepp, Barkley, & Karpinski, 2015). This repeats a
pattern of research priorities, which previously
focused on the ne- gative impacts of many other
screen-based technologies, systematically moving
from television and video games, to the internet
and social media (Rosen et al., 2014).
There is also little
evidence to support the existence of the constructs
under investigation (e.g., technology ‘addiction’),
yet many papers and scales continue to use
language associated with a specific diagnosis (see
Panova & Carbonell, 2018 for a recent review).
When it comes to understanding the impact of
technology more generally, there is an intrinsic
lack of high-quality evidence (Ellis et al., 2018a).
Revised psychometric tests may hold some value
in the future, provided they are grounded in
relevant theory and validated accordingly.