Archive of ‘Digital literacy’ category

Google Expeditions Higher Ed

VR packs a powerful punch in learning

November 8th, 2018 Jeanne Ingle

Tech-enriched teaching can make all the difference

VR packs a powerful punch in learning

Google Expeditions can be a fairly inexpensive way to present content. Students who have smartphones (Android or iOS) can download the Google Cardboard app and Google Expeditions for free. VR glasses can improve the experience but are not required.

Ideas for using VR in class

  • Do you teach biology? Take them on a tour of a virus or a cell.
  • Are you a professor in the arts? Visit street art around the world or the Royal Shakespeare Company.
  • Are you a guidance or career counselor? Bring your students to Berklee College of Music or meet a robotics engineer or female firefighter in NYC.
  • Astronomy professor? Send your students on the Juno mission to Jupiter or to experience the aurora borealis.
  • Professors of education can build lessons with your students so they can teach elementary students about animal camouflage or take children on a tour of the Aztec and Mayan pyramids.

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more on Google Expeditions in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=google+expeditions

VR training workers

I explored the inside of a human nose and it convinced me that the real business in VR isn’t gaming, it’s all about training workers

https://www.businessinsider.com/htc-vive-releases-headset-that-shows-the-future-of-vr-is-enterprise-2018-11

Rosalie Chan

  • On Thursday, virtual reality company HTC VIVE announced its new headset called the Vive Focus, which is aimed at enterprises.
  • It can be used for business collaboration, training and education, such as teaching medical students about sleep apnea, showing car designers how to fix and prototype a car, and conducting remote meetings in a 3D virtual space.

Although virtual reality is typically associated with consumers, such as for video gaming, the technology is increasingly being adopted for use in professional settings. VR and augmented reality are projected to grow to $162 billion by 2020, and more products are targeting enterprise use.

What makes this hardware significant is that it’s much simpler and more portable for customers to use, says Dan O’Brien, General Manager of the Americas at HTC VIVE (My note: so he said…). Other VR headsets that only developers may use might involve expensive hardware and require users to stay in one place.

VIVE Sync. This can be used to help employees collaborate with each other in a virtual space, especially when they work remotely. Each employee’s avatar can share ideas, show presentations, import images, show videos and more all in a 3D virtual space (My note: Second Life tried this; and failed; Do you have any NEW ideas, Dan?).

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

STEM Star Wars Kahoot gamification learning

Kahoot presents Star Wars-based quizzes for different disciplines

https://create.kahoot.it/pages/ebe8eef7-a483-4392-97c9-44aea89f137a

An excellent opportunity to gamify your classes.

If you are not a Kahoot user yet, please consider: a) the Kahoots (quizzes) can be an excellent conversation starter (vs. assessment tool) b) the Kahoots can be modified to your liking (you can change the content)

here some screen-sharing capture to get a taste of the excitement:

Engineering

Astronomy

 

can XR help students learn

Giving Classroom Experiences (Like VR) More … Dimension

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/11/02/virtual-reality-other-3-d-tools-enhance-classroom-experiences

at a session on the umbrella concept of “mixed reality” (abbreviated XR) here Thursday, attendees had some questions for the panel’s VR/AR/XR evangelists: Can these tools help students learn? Can institutions with limited budgets pull off ambitious projects? Can skeptical faculty members be convinced to experiment with unfamiliar technology?

All four — one each from Florida International UniversityHamilton CollegeSyracuse University and Yale University — have just finished the first year of a joint research project commissioned by Educause and sponsored by Hewlett-Packard to investigate the potential for immersive technology to supplement and even transform classroom experiences.

Campus of the Future” report, written by Jeffrey Pomerantz

Yale has landed on a “hub model” for project development — instructors propose projects and partner with students with technological capabilities to tap into a centralized pool of equipment and funding. (My note: this is what I suggest in my Chapter 2 of Arnheim, Eliot & Rose (2012) Lib Guides)

Several panelists said they had already been getting started on mixed reality initiatives prior to the infusion of support from Educause and HP, which helped them settle on a direction

While 3-D printing might seem to lend itself more naturally to the hard sciences, Yale’s humanities departments have cottoned to the technology as a portal to answering tough philosophical questions.

institutions would be better served forgoing an early investment in hardware and instead gravitating toward free online products like UnityOrganon and You by Sharecare, all of which allow users to create 3-D experiences from their desktop computers.

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Campus of the Future” report, written by Jeffrey Pomerantz

https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2018/8/ers1805.pdf?la=en

XR technologies encompassing 3D simulations, modeling, and production.

This project sought to identify

  • current innovative uses of these 3D technologies,
  • how these uses are currently impacting teaching and learning, and
  • what this information can tell us about possible future uses for these technologies in higher education.

p. 5 Extended reality (XR) technologies, which encompass virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), are already having a dramatic impact on pedagogy in higher education. XR is a general term that covers a wide range of technologies along a continuum, with the real world at one end and fully immersive simulations at the other.

p. 6The Campus of the Future project was an exploratory evaluation of 3D technologies for instruction and research in higher education: VR, AR, 3D scanning, and 3D printing. The project sought to identify interesting and novel uses of 3D technology

p. 7 HP would provide the hardware, and EDUCAUSE would provide the methodological expertise to conduct an evaluation research project investigating the potential uses of 3D technologies in higher education learning and research.

The institutions that participated in the Campus of the Future project were selected because they were already on the cutting edge of integrating 3D technology into pedagogy. These institutions were therefore not representative, nor were they intended to be representative, of the state of higher education in the United States. These institutions were selected precisely because they already had a set of use cases for 3D technology available for study

p. 9  At some institutions, the group participating in the project was an academic unit (e.g., the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University; the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University). At these institutions, the 3D technology provided by HP was deployed for use more or less exclusively by students and faculty affiliated with the particular academic unit.

p. 10 definitions
there is not universal agreement on the definitions of these
terms or on the scope of these technologies. Also, all of these technologies
currently exist in an active marketplace and, as in many rapidly changing markets, there is a tendency for companies to invent neologisms around 3D technology.

A 3D scanner is not a single device but rather a combination of hardware and
software. There are generally two pieces of hardware: a laser scanner and a digital
camera. The laser scanner bounces laser beams off the surface of an object to
determine its shape and contours.

p. 11 definitions

Virtual reality means that the wearer is completely immersed in a computer
simulation. Several types of VR headsets are currently available, but all involve
a lightweight helmet with a display in front of the eyes (see figure 2). In some
cases, this display may simply be a smartphone (e.g., Google Cardboard); in other
cases, two displays—one for each eye—are integrated into the headset (e.g., HTC
Vive). Most commercially available VR rigs also include handheld controllers
that enable the user to interact with the simulation by moving the controllers
in space and clicking on finger triggers or buttons.

p. 12 definitions

Augmented reality provides an “overlay” of some type over the real world through
the use of a headset or even a smartphone.

In an active technology marketplace, there is a tendency for new terms to be
invented rapidly and for existing terms to be used loosely. This is currently
happening in the VR and AR market space. The HP VR rig and the HTC Vive
unit are marketed as being immersive, meaning that the user is fully immersed in
a simulation—virtual reality. Many currently available AR headsets, however, are
marketed not as AR but rather as MR (mixed reality). These MR headsets have a
display in front of the eyes as well as a pair of front-mounted cameras; they are
therefore capable of supporting both VR and AR functionality.

p. 13 Implementation

Technical difficulties.
Technical issues can generally be divided into two broad categories: hardware
problems and software problems. There is, of course, a common third category:
human error.

p. 15 the technology learning curve

The well-known diffusion of innovations theoretical framework articulates five
adopter categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and
laggards. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).

It is also likely that staff in the campus IT unit or center for teaching and learning already know who (at least some of) these individuals are, since such faculty members are likely to already have had contact with these campus units.
Students may of course also be innovators and early adopters, and in fact
several participating institutions found that some of the most creative uses of 3D technology arose from student projects

p. 30  Zeynep Tufekci, in her book Twitter and Tear Gas

definition: There is no necessary distinction between AR and VR; indeed, much research
on the subject is based on a conception of a “virtuality continuum” from entirely
real to entirely virtual, where AR lies somewhere between those ends of the
spectrum.  Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino, “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays,” IEICE Transactions on Information Systems, vol. E77-D, no. 12 (1994); Steve Mann, “Through the Glass, Lightly,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 31, no. 3 (2012): 10–14.

For the future of 3D technology in higher education to be realized, that
technology must become as much a part of higher education as any technology:
the learning management system (LMS), the projector, the classroom. New
technologies and practices generally enter institutions of higher education as
initiatives. Several active learning classroom initiatives are currently under
way,36 for example, as well as a multi-institution open educational resources
(OER) degree initiative.37

p. 32 Storytelling

Some scholars have argued that all human communication
is based on storytelling;41 certainly advertisers have long recognized that
storytelling makes for effective persuasion,42 and a growing body of research
shows that narrative is effective for teaching even topics that are not generally
thought of as having a natural story, for example, in the sciences.43

p. 33 accessibility

The experience of Gallaudet University highlights one of the most important
areas for development in 3D technology: accessibility for users with disabilities.

p. 34 instructional design

For that to be the case, 3D technologies must be incorporated into the
instructional design process for building and redesigning courses. And for that
to be the case, it is necessary for faculty and instructional designers to be familiar
with the capabilities of 3D technologies. And for that to be the case, it may
not be necessary but would certainly be helpful for instructional designers to
collaborate closely with the staff in campus IT units who support and maintain
this hardware.

Every institution of higher
education has a slightly different organizational structure, of course, but these
two campus units are often siloed. This siloing may lead to considerable friction
in conducting the most basic organizational tasks, such as setting up meetings
and apportioning responsibilities for shared tasks. Nevertheless, IT units and
centers for teaching and learning are almost compelled to collaborate in order
to support faculty who want to integrate 3D technology into their teaching. It
is necessary to bring the instructional design expertise of a center for teaching
and learning to bear on integrating 3D technology into an instructor’s teaching (My note: and where does this place SCSU?) Therefore,
one of the most critical areas in which IT units and centers for teaching and
learning can collaborate is in assisting instructors to develop this integration
and to develop learning objects that use 3D technology. p. 35 For 3D technology to really gain traction in higher education, it will need to be easier for instructors to deploy without such a large support team.

p. 35 Sites such as Thingiverse, Sketchfab, and Google Poly are libraries of freely
available, user-created 3D models.

ClassVR is a tool that enables the simultaneous delivery of a simulation to
multiple headsets, though the simulation itself may still be single-user.

p. 37 data management:

An institutional repository is a collection of an institution’s intellectual output, often consisting of preprint journal articles and conference papers and the data sets behind them.49 An
institutional repository is often maintained by either the library or a partnership
between the library and the campus IT unit. An institutional repository therefore has the advantage of the long-term curatorial approach of librarianship combined with the systematic backup management of the IT unit. (My note: leaves me wonder where does this put SCSU)

Sharing data sets is critical for collaboration and increasingly the default for
scholarship. Data is as much a product of scholarship as publications, and there
is a growing sentiment among scholars that it should therefore be made public.50

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

music sounds multimedia royalty free

Five Places to Find Free Music and Sounds for Multimedia Projects

https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2018/11/five-places-to-find-free-music-and.html

Dig CC Mixter is Creative Commons licensed.

Musopen’s collection of free recordings contains performances of the works of hundreds of composers.
The Free Music Archive provides free, high-quality, music in a wide range of genres.

FMA seeks to maintain a high-quality resource through the use of selected curators who approve or deny all submissions to the collection.

The National Jukebox is an archive of more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925.

Sound Bible is a resource for finding and downloading free sound clips, sound effects, and sound bites.

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more on royalty free multimedia in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=royalty+free

Russian Influence Operations on Twitter

Russian Influence Operations on Twitter

Summary This short paper lays out an attempt to measure how much activity from Russian state-operated accounts released in the dataset made available by Twitter in October 2018 was targeted at the United Kingdom. Finding UK-related Tweets is not an easy task. By applying a combination of geographic inference, keyword analysis and classification by algorithm, we identified UK-related Tweets sent by these accounts and subjected them to further qualitative and quantitative analytic techniques.

We find:

 There were three phases in Russian influence operations : under-the-radar account building, minor Brexit vote visibility, and larger-scale visibility during the London terror attacks.

 Russian influence operations linked to the UK were most visible when discussing Islam . Tweets discussing Islam over the period of terror attacks between March and June 2017 were retweeted 25 times more often than their other messages.

 The most widely-followed and visible troll account, @TEN_GOP, shared 109 Tweets related to the UK. Of these, 60 percent were related to Islam .

 The topology of tweet activity underlines the vulnerability of social media users to disinformation in the wake of a tragedy or outrage.

 Focus on the UK was a minor part of wider influence operations in this data . Of the nine million Tweets released by Twitter, 3.1 million were in English (34 percent). Of these 3.1 million, we estimate 83 thousand were in some way linked to the UK (2.7%). Those Tweets were shared 222 thousand times. It is plausible we are therefore seeing how the UK was caught up in Russian operations against the US .

 Influence operations captured in this data show attempts to falsely amplify other news sources and to take part in conversations around Islam , and rarely show attempts to spread ‘fake news’ or influence at an electoral level.

On 17 October 2018, Twitter released data about 9 million tweets from 3,841 blocked accounts affiliated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA) – a Russian organisation founded in 2013 and based in St Petersburg, accused of using social media platforms to push pro-Kremlin propaganda and influence nation states beyond their borders, as well as being tasked with spreading pro-Kremlin messaging in Russia. It is one of the first major datasets linked to state-operated accounts engaging in influence operations released by a social media platform.

Conclusion

This report outlines the ways in which accounts linked to the Russian Internet ResearchAgency (IRA) carried out influence operations on social media and the ways their operationsintersected with the UK.The UK plays a reasonably small part in the wider context of this data. We see two possibleexplanations: either influence operations were primarily targeted at the US and British Twitterusers were impacted as collate, or this dataset is limited to US-focused operations whereevents in the UK were highlighted in an attempt to impact US public, rather than a concertedeffort against the UK. It is plausible that such efforts al so existed but are not reflected inthis dataset.Nevertheless, the data offers a highly useful window into how Russian influence operationsare carried out, as well as highlighting the moments when we might be most vulnerable tothem.Between 2011 and 2016, these state-operated accounts were camouflaged. Through manualand automated methods, they were able to quietly build up the trappings of an active andwell-followed Twitter account before eventually pivoting into attempts to influence the widerTwitter ecosystem. Their methods included engaging in unrelated and innocuous topics ofconversation, often through automated methods, and through sharing and engaging withother, more mainstream sources of news.Although this data shows levels of electoral and party-political influence operations to berelatively low, the day of the Brexit referendum results showed how messaging originatingfrom Russian state-controlled accounts might come to be visible on June 24th 2016, we believe UK Twitter users discussing the Brexit Vote would have encountered messages originating from these accounts.As early as 2014, however, influence operations began taking part in conversations aroundIslam, and these accounts came to the fore during the three months of terror attacks thattook place between March and June 2017. In the immediate wake of these attacks, messagesrelated to Islam and circulated by Russian state-operated Twitter accounts were widelyshared, and would likely have been visible in the UK.The dataset released by Twitter begins to answer some questions about attempts by a foreignstate to interfere in British affairs online. It is notable that overt political or electoralinterference is poorly represented in this dataset: rather, we see attempts at stirring societaldivision, particularly around Islam in the UK, as the messages that resonated the most overthe period.What is perhaps most interesting about this moment is its portrayal of when we as socialmedia users are most vulnerable to the kinds of messages circulated by those looking toinfluence us. In the immediate aftermath of terror attacks, the data suggests, social mediausers were more receptive to this kind of messaging than at any other time.

It is clear that hostile states have identified the growth of online news and social media as aweak spot, and that significant effort has gone into attempting to exploit new media toinfluence its users. Understanding the ways in which these platforms have been used tospread division is an important first step to fighting it.Nevertheless, it is clear that this dataset provides just one window into the ways in whichforeign states have attempted to use online platforms as part of wider information warfare
and influence campaigns. We hope that other platforms will follow Twitter’s lead and release
similar datasets and encourage their users to proactively tackle those who would abuse theirplatforms.

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

video skills digital literacy

Video skills are a valuable gateway to digital literacy

Learning to use the equipment and produce content helps students view the media they consume through a more critical lens

In a world of digital consumption, teaching students how to create what they see, hear and watch is like teaching them the secrets behind a magic trick. Students often spend hours weekly on digital devices, reading stories or looking at images, GIFs and video. They consume vast amounts of digital media without often understanding how it’s created.

Bradley has been teaching the video production class since 2005 as its regional occupational program (ROP) instructor for the Graphic Communications, Video Production, and Computer Animation and Modeling courses. Besides helping students develop technical skills, he also infuses his classes with classic film screenings. Students might come to class and watch “Fantasia,” “High Noon,” “Metropolis” and “Dr. Strangelove,” he says.

He also assigns students work that has a specific focus in mind and brings in local experts to help them learn more about a subject before they create.

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

Preparing Learners for 21st Century Digital Citizenship

ID2ID webinar (my notes on the bottom)

Digital Fluency: Preparing Learners for 21st Century Digital Citizenship
Eighty-five percent of the jobs available in 2030 do not yet exist.  How does higher education prepare our learners for careers that don’t yet exist?  One opportunity is to provide our students with opportunities to grow their skills in creative problem solving, critical thinking, resiliency, novel thinking, social intelligence, and excellent communication skills.  Instructional designers and faculty can leverage the framework of digital fluency to create opportunities for learners to practice and hone the skills that will prepare them to be 21st-century digital citizens.  In this session, join a discussion about several fluencies that comprise the overarching framework for digital fluency and help to define some of your own.

Please click this URL to join. https://arizona.zoom.us/j/222969448

Dr. Jennifer Sparrow, Senior Director for Teaching and Learning with Technology and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Learning, Design, and Technology at Penn State.    The webinar will take place on Friday, November 9th at 11am EST/4pm UTC (login details below)  

https://arizona.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e15266ee-7368-4378-b63c-a99301274877

My notes:

Jennifer does NOT see phone use for learning as an usage to obstruct. Similarly as with the calculator some 30-40 years ago, it was frowned upon, so now is technology. To this notion, added the fast-changing job market: new jobs created, old disappearing (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/students-are-being-prepared-jobs-no-longer-exist-here-s-n865096)

how DF is different from DLiteracy? enable students define how new knowledge can be created through technology. Not only read and write, but create poems, stories, if analogous w learning a language. slide 4 in https://www.slideshare.net/aidemoreto/vr-library

communication fluency. be able to choose the correct media. curiosity/failure fluency; creation fluency (makerspace: create without soldering, programming, 3Dprinting. PLA filament-corn-based plastic; Makers-in-residence)

immersive fluency: video 360, VR and AR. enable student to create new knowledge through environments beyond reality. Immersive Experiences Lab (IMEX). Design: physical vs virtual spaces.

Data fluency: b.book. how to create my own textbook

rubrics and sample projects to assess digital fluency.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/3/digital-fluency-preparing-students-to-create-big-bold-problems

https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference/2018/agenda/ethics-and-digital-fluency-in-vr-and-immersive-learning-environments

Literacy Is NOT Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age (The 21st Century Fluency Series)
https://www.amazon.com/Literacy-NOT-Enough-Century-Fluencies/dp/1412987806

What is Instructional Design 2.0 or 3.0? deep knowledge and understanding of faculty development. second, once faculty understands the new technology, how does this translate into rework of curriculum? third, the research piece; how to improve to be ready for the next cycle. a partnership between ID and faculty.

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