Archive of ‘Millennials’ category

apprenticeships not degrees

Survey: Adults think apprenticeships, not degrees, will raise employability

 Aug. 13, 2018

62% think apprenticeships and other on-the-job training programs make job seekers more employable than a college education, according to an American Staffing Association survey of more than 2,000 respondents.

Career and technical education initiatives, such as career pathway programs,

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more on microredentialing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredentialing

In memoriam: Avicii

Avicii

Bergling took his name from the Buddhist term for hell, avīci

https://soundcloud.com/skrillex/avicii-levels-skrillex-remix#t=30:16

Tracks including Levels, Fade Into Darkness and Silhouettes were slick, massive, earnest and unapologetically pop-oriented. (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/20/avicii-appreciation-the-poster-boy-for-edm-who-struggled-with-the-spotlight)

Ibiza Ibiza Ibiza Ibiza

empathy parents teens

How Empathy Is Important For Parents And Teens When Things Get Stressful

The brain develops rapidly during the adolescent years, which partially explains why teens experience anger, sadness and frustration so intensely.
2014 survey published by the American Psychological Association found that teens report feeling even more stressed than adults, and that this affects them in unhealthy ways. Approximately 30 percent of the 1,018 teens surveyed reported feeling sad, overwhelmed or depressed, and 25 percent said that they had skipped meals because of their anxiety.

Sheryl Gonzalez Ziegler, a psychologist in Denver, Colo., explains, “When teens are overwhelmed, parents may try to connect with their kids’ feelings by drawing on their own childhood experiences. They may say things like, “When I was fourteen, I had a job, and I still did my homework and made time for my friends. I know that you can do this, too.'”

They mean well when they try to connect with their teens in this comparative way, but often it prompts a communication breakdown.

Instead:

When I was your age, I had difficulty with my friends. I felt confused, and my heart was broken, too.”

She says that these disclosures remind kids that even if technology is different, human emotions are the same. Parents can bond with their kids by focusing on these similarities.

It’s particularly important to teach adolescents how to develop a specific type of empathy called cognitive empathy

If empathy helps us sympathize with how another person is feeling, cognitive empathy also allows us to try to understand someone else’s perspective and how they perceive the world, even when our feelings differ.

Because teenagers are so emotionally driven, they may be prone to react in exaggerated ways. Hence, a conflict with a teacher, a clash with a friend or an unanswered text can feel like the end of the world. By strengthening their cognitive empathy, teens can develop an emotional pause button, which reminds them that even when feelings take over, stressful circumstances are temporary.

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more on empathy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=empathy

Library Technology Conference 2018

Plamen Miltenoff and Mark Gill presentation: http://sched.co/E8l3

#LTC2018 #VRlib – join us for a discussion

Library Technology Conference 2018 from Plamen Miltenoff
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http://libtechconf.org/schedule/

 Keynote Speaker: Sarah T. Roberts

Commercial Content Moderation:

social media – call centers in Iowa, where agriculture is expected. not an awesome job. http://sched.co/D7pQ
Caleris as featured in New York Times.
Sarah Roberts talk about psychological effects of working at Caleris; it resembles the effect of air strikes on the drone pilots
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html
Flipping and Assessing Information Literacy
Mary Beth Sancomb-Moran
Librarian, University of Minnesota Rochester
DOI purpose for students’ research
http://ilaap.ca/ to asses the lib instruction
https://www.qualtrics.com/
4 videos 3 min each
Building Online Exhibits with the Islandora Digital Asset Management Solution

Alex Kent

Drupal based. Google Analytics like. Bookmarks. objects list can be shared through social media, email, etc. Pachyderm used to have timeline like Islandora. still images, audio, video

Library as Publisher: OpenSUNY Textbooks

Leah Root

http://sched.co/D7iS

Publishing/Web Services Developer, Milne Library, State University of New York at Geneseo
http://navigator.suny.edu/content/about
https://textbooks.opensuny.org/suny-oer-services-request/
executive board and advisory staff
jQuery
digital humanities
https://www.facebook.com/InforMediaServices/videos/1471602976283528/
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Notes from LIBTECH 2017: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/03/07/library-technology-conference-2017/

Lin Chun China expert

Chun, L. (2017). Discipline and power: knowledge of China in political science. Critical Asian Studies49(4), 501-522. doi:10.1080/14672715.2017.1362321

http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3daph%26AN%3d125811392%26site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite

Lin Chun or ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chun_Lin18

p. 501 – is political science “softer” than the other soft social sciences?
thus…  political science “may never live up to its lofty ambition of scientific explanation and prediction. Indeed, like other social sciences, it can be no more than a ‘ science in formation’ permanently seeking to surmount obstacles to objectivity.”

p. 502 disciplinary parochialism
the fetishes of pure observation, raw experience, unambiguous rationality, and one-way causality were formative influences in the genesis of the social sciences. the ‘unfortunate positivism” of such impulses, along with the illusion of a value-free science, converged to produce a behavioral revolution in the interwar period Behaviorism was then followed through an epistemological twist, by boldly optimistic leaps to an “end of ideology” and ultimately to a claimed “end of history” itself.

p. 503
early positivism was openly underpinned by an European condescension toward Asians’ “ignorance and prejudice.” Behind similar depictions lay a comprehensive Eurocentric social and political philosophy.
this is illustrated its view of China through the grand narrative of modernization.

p. 504
Robert McNamara famously reiterated that if World War I was a chemist’s war and Word War II a physicist’s, Vietnam “might well have to be considered the social scientists’ war.”

Although China nominally remains a communist state, it has doubtlessly changed color without a color revolution.

p. 505
In the fixed disciplinary eye, “China” is to specific to produce anything generalizable beyond descriptive and self-containing narratives. The area studies approach, in contrast to disciplinary approaches, is all about cultural, historical, and ethnographic specificities.

If first-hand information contradicts theoretical conclusions, redress is sought only at the former end (my note – ha ha ha, such an elegant but scathing criticism of [Western] academia).

The catch [is] that Chinese otherness is in essence not a matter of cultural difference (hence limitations of criticizing Eurocentrism and Orientalism) and does not merely reproduce itself by inertia.
Given a long omitted self-critical rethinking of the discipline’s parochial base, calling for cross-fertilizing alone would be fruitless or even lead only to a one-way colonization of seemingly particularistic histories by an illusive universal science.

p. 506
political culture, once a key concept of political science’s hope for unified theorization, has turned out to be no answer
Long after its heyday, modernization theory – now with its new face of globalization – remains a primary signifier and legitimating benchmark. To those, who use it to gauge developments since 1945, private property and liberal democracy are permanent, unquestioned norms that are to be globally homogenized.
Moreover, since modernity is assumed to be a liberal capitalists condition, the revolutionary nationalism of an oppressed people remaking itself into a new historical subject noncompliant with capitalism cannot be modernizational.

p. 507
Political scientists and historical sociologists… saw the communist in power as formidable modernizers, but distinguished the Maoist model from the Stalinist in economic management and campaign politics.
Their analyses showed how organic connections between top-down mobilization and bottom-up participation cultivated in an active citizenry and high intensity politics. My note: I disagree here with the author, since such statement can be arbitrary from a historical point of view; indeed, for a short period of time, such “organic connection” can produce positive results, but once calcitrated (as it is in China for the past 6-7 decades), it turns stagnant.

p. 510
the state’s altered support base is essentially a matter of class power, involving both adaptive cultivation of new economic elites and iron-fist approaches to protest and dissent. By the same weight of historical logic, the party’s internal decay, loss of its founding ideological vision and commitment, and collusion with capital will do more than any outside force ever could do to destroy the regime.
That the Party stays in power is not primarily because the country’s economy continues to grow, but is more attributable to a residual social reliance on its credentials and organizational capacities accumulated in earlier revolutionary and socialist struggles. This historical promise has so far worked to the extent that cracks within the leadership are more or less held in check, resentment against local wrongs are insulated from central intentions, and social policies in one way or another respond to common outcries, consultative deliberations, and pressure groups.

p. 511
The word “madness” has indeed been freely employed to describe nations and societies judged inept at modern reason, as found in contemporary academic publications on epi- sodes of the PRC history.
My note: I agree with this – the deconstructionalists: (Jaques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov) linguistically prove the inability of Western cultures to understand and explain other cultures. In this case, Lin Chun is right; just because western political scientist cannot comprehend foreign complex societal problems and/or juxtaposing them to their own “schemes,” prompts the same western researchers to announce them as “mad.”

p. 513aa
This is the best and worst of times for the globalization of knowledge. In one scenario, an eventual completion of the political science parameters can now seal both knowledge, sophisticatedly canalized, and ideology, universally uncontested – even if the two are never separable in the foundation of political science. In another scenario, causes and effects no longer rule out atypical polities, but the differences are presented as culturally incompatible. In either case, the trick remains to let anormalies make the norms validate preexist- ing disciplinary sanctions.

p. 514
Overcoming outmoded rigidities will nurture a robust scholarship committed to universally resonant theories.

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more on China in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=china

Google in the classroom

How Has Google Affected The Way Students Learn?

con?:with the advent of personal assistants like Siri and Google Now that aim to serve up information before you even know you need it, you don’t even need to type the questions.

pro: Whenever new technology emerges — including newspapers and television — discussions about how it will threaten our brainpower always crops up, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote in a 2010 op-ed in The New York Times. Instead of making us stupid, he wrote, the Internet and technology “are the only things that will keep us smart.”

Pro and conDaphne Bavelier, a professor at the University of Geneva, wrote in 2011 that we may have lost the ability for oral memorization valued by the Greeks when writing was invented, but we gained additional skills of reading and text analysis.

conDaphne Bavelier, a professor at the University of Geneva, wrote in 2011 that we may have lost the ability for oral memorization valued by the Greeks when writing was invented, but we gained additional skills of reading and text analysis.

con: A 2008 study commissioned by the British Library found that young people go through information online very quickly without evaluating it for accuracy.

pro or con?: A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that when people know they have future access to information, they tend to have a better memory of how and where to find the information — instead of recalling the information itself.

pro: The bright side lies in a 2009 study conducted by Gary Small, the director of University of California Los Angeles’ Longevity Center, that explored brain activity when older adults used search engines. He found that among older people who have experience using the Internet, their brains are two times more active than those who don’t when conducting Internet searches.

the Internet holds great potential for education — but curriculum must change accordingly. Since content is so readily available, teachers should not merely dole out information and instead focus on cultivating critical thinking

make questions “Google-proof.”

“Design it so that Google is crucial to creating a response rather than finding one,” he writes in his company’s blog. “If students can Google answers — stumble on (what) you want them to remember in a few clicks — there’s a problem with the instructional design.”

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more on use of laptop and phones in the classroom in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/04/03/use-of-laptops-in-the-classroom/

VR headset future

VR’s future depends on you buying a dorky headset

Oculus, the VR company that Mark Zuckerberg bought for more than $2 billion, has a problem: It’s struggling to convince people to buy its gear.

https://www.cnet.com/news/vr-virtual-reality-future-depends-on-you-buying-a-dorky-headset-oculus-zuckerberg-playstation-vive/

Oculus Connect, starting Wednesday in San Jose, California. Facebook’s Oculus VR division promises discussions on how health care, movies and video games are adapting to this still nascent technology. One panel will explore how the disability community can benefit from VR gear and presentations.

Facebook chief competitors, Sony and HTC, followed suit. The PlayStation VR dropped to $400 from $500, and the Vive dropped to $599 from $799 all in the past three months.

Survios made Raw Data more widely available for Oculus, Vive and PlayStation VR. Survios is also looking beyond VR for customers, redesigning Raw Data to work in arcades as well.

Over the summer, Apple and Google announced new technologies called ARKit and ARCore, respectively, that are designed to help iPhones and iPads or any device powered by Google’s Android software marry computer-generated images with the real world.

A $2.99 app, Star Guide AR, highlights stars and constellations in the sky once you point your phone at them. Another, Ikea Place, previews furniture in your home with a tap. Walk around your living room and you can see the furniture you placed while looking through the screen on your phone. So far, both are available only for the iPhone.

App developers I spoke with say they’re excited by augmented reality and believe it may help spur people to buy VR systems as well.

Microsoft’s focusing on both AR and VR. In an October update to its Windows 10 software for PCs, the company is partnering with device makers like Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer and Samsung to create headsets based on its designs. They’ll sell for as little as $300 each when they begin hitting store shelves Oct. 17.

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more on virtual reality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality

students entitlement and disruptiveness

Student Entitlement: Key Questions and Short Answers

By: 

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/student-entitlement-key-questions-short-answers

What is student entitlement? 

“tendency to possess an expectation of academic success without taking personal responsibility for achieving that success.”

How widespread is it?

The research (and there’s not a lot) reports finding less student entitlement than faculty do.

Can a student be entitled without being rude and disruptive? 

Yes. Students can have beliefs like those mentioned above and only discuss them with other students or not discuss them at all. Part of what makes entitlement challenging for teachers are those students who do verbally express the attitudes, often aggressively.

Are millennial students more entitled than previous generations? That’s another widely held assumption in the academic community, but support from research is indirect and inconsistent.

Is entitlement something that only happens in the academic environment? No, it has been studied, written about, and observed in other contexts (like work environments

What’s causing it?

A number think it’s the result of previous educational experiences and/or grade inflation. Some blame technology that gives students greater access to teachers and the expectation of immediate responses. Fairly regularly, student evaluations are blamed for the anonymous power and control they give students. And finally, there’s the rise in consumerism that’s now associated with education. Students (and their parents) pay (usually a lot) for college and the sense that those tuition dollars entitle them to certain things, is generally not what teachers think education entitles learners to receive.

How should teachers respond?

It helps if teachers clarify their expectations with constructive positive language and even more importantly with discussions of the rationales on which those expectations rest. Teacher authority gets most students to follow the rules, but force doesn’t generally change attitudes and those are what need to be fixed in this case.

October 18 for Student Entitlement: Truth, Fiction, or Some of Both and stay tuned for more in-depth information and resources that we’ll make available in Faculty Focus Premium in subsequent weeks.

References: Elias, R. Z. (2017). Academic entitlement and its relationship to cheating ethics. Journal of Education for Business, 92 (4), 194-199.

Greenberger, E., et. al. (2008). Self-entitled college students: Contributions of personality, parenting and motivational factors. Journal of Youth Adolescence, 37, 1193-1204.

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Responding to Disruptive Students

Negative attention doesn’t help difficult students change their ways, but teachers can alter classroom dynamics through this exercise.

Mapping Behavior

Draw a map of your classroom, including doors, windows, desks, blackboards—all significant items and areas. I’m sure you’ve already got a clear idea of where the most challenging students usually sit. Now imagine teaching class on a regular day. Trace the paths you usually take across the room. Do you sometimes speed up for a particular reason?

Now put your breathing on the map. Are you conscious of the way you breathe during class? Use a new color and draw a wavy line on top of the lines and arrows you’ve already sketched. Does the wavy line look even, or have you drawn some chaotic or nervous zigzags? Could it be that you’ve sometimes forgotten to breathe?

Investing time in building physical and emotional familiarity with the learning environment, instead of nervously anticipating disruption, changes the educator’s perspective toward the whole class, their interaction with individual students, and their self-awareness. Negative attention stops being a solution—instead it is seen as a hindrance to the process of understanding students’ needs.

achievement or empathy

Sending Mixed Message: Do Parents Value Kids’ Achievement Over Empathy?
By MindShift JUNE 26, 2014

Sending Mixed Message: Do Parents Value Kids’ Achievement Over Empathy?

Jessica Lahey explains the rhetoric gap in an Atlantic article

80 percent of the youths surveyed reported that their parents ‘are more concerned about achievement or happiness than caring for others.’ Approximately the same percentage reported that their teachers prioritize student achievement over caring.

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more on empathy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=empathyhttps://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=empathy

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