Students match their preference for hybrid learning with a belief that it is the most effective learning environment for them.
Despite the fact that faculty prefer teaching in a hybrid environment, they remain skeptical of online learning. Nearly half do not agree online 45% learning is effective.
Students asked what technologies they wish their instructors used more, and we asked faculty what technologies they think could make them more effective instructors. Both agree that content and resource-focused technologies should be incorporated more and social media and tablets should be incorporated less.
“When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.”
Kultur, he explains (along with Bildung, or education), denoted in pre-unification Germany those qualities that the intellectuals and professionals of the small, isolated German middle class claimed for themselves in response to the disdain of the minor German nobles who employed them: intellectual achievement, of course, but also simple virtues like authenticity, honesty, and sincerity.
German courtiers, by contrast, according to the possessors of Kultur, had acquired “civilization” from their French tutors: manners, social polish, the cultivation of appearances. As the German middle class asserted itself in the nineteenth century, the particular virtues of Kultur became an important ingredient in national self-definition. The inferior values of “civilization” were no longer attributed to an erstwhile French-educated German nobility, but to the French themselves and to the West in general.
By 1914, the contrast between Kultur and Zivilisation had taken on a more aggressively nationalist tone. During World War I German patriotic propaganda vaunted the superiority of Germany’s supposedly rooted, organic, spiritual Kultur over the allegedly effete, shallow, cosmopolitan, materialist, Jewish-influenced “civilization” of Western Europe. Martin’s book shows how vigorously the Nazis applied this traditional construct.
Goebbels and Hitler were as obsessed with movies as American adolescents are today with social media.
Music was a realm that Germans felt particularly qualified to dominate. But first the German national musical scene had to be properly organized. In November 1933 Goebbels offered Richard Strauss the leadership of a Reich Music Chamber.
Goebbels organized in Düsseldorf in 1938 a presentation of “degenerate music” following the better-known 1937 exhibition of “degenerate art.”
As with music, the Nazis were able to attract writers outside the immediate orbit of the Nazi and Fascist parties by endorsing conservative literary styles against modernism, by mitigating copyright and royalty problems, and by offering sybaritic visits to Germany and public attention.
Painting and sculpture, curiously, do not figure in this account of the cultural fields that the Nazis and Fascists tried to reorganize “inter-nationally,” perhaps because they had not previously been organized on liberal democratic lines. Picasso and Kandinsky painted quietly in private and Jean Bazaine organized an exhibition with fellow modernists in 1941. Nazi cultural officials thought “degenerate” art appropriate for France.
Science would have made an interesting case study, a contrary one. Germany dominated the world of science before 1933. Germans won fifteen Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine between 1918 and 1933, more than any other nation. Far from capitalizing on this major soft power asset, Hitler destroyed it by imposing ideological conformity and expelling Jewish scientists such as the talented nuclear physicist Lise Meitner. The soft power of science is fragile, as Americans may yet find out.
American soft power thrived mostly through the profit motive and by offering popular entertainment to the young.
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The Original Axis of Evil
THE ANATOMY OF FASCISM By Robert O. Paxton. 321 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $26.
fascism — unlike Communism, socialism, capitalism or conservatism — is a smear word more often used to brand one’s foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them.
World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 contributed mightily to the advent of fascism. The war generated acute economic malaise, national humiliation and legions of restive veterans and unemployed youths who could be harnessed politically. The Bolshevik Revolution, but one symptom of the frustration with the old order, made conservative elites in Italy and Germany so fearful of Communism that anything — even fascism — came to seem preferable to a Marxist overthrow.
Paxton debunks the consoling fiction that Mussolini and Hitler seized power. Rather, conservative elites desperate to subdue leftist populist movements ”normalized” the fascists by inviting them to share power. It was the mob that flocked to fascism, but the elites who elevated it.
Fascist movements and regimes are different from military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. They seek not to exclude, but rather to enlist, the masses. They often collapse the distinction between the public and private sphere (eliminating the latter). In the words of Robert Ley, the head of the Nazi Labor Office, the only private individual who existed in Nazi Germany was someone asleep.
t was this need to keep citizens intoxicated by fascism’s dynamism that made Mussolini and Hitler see war as both desirable and necessary. ”War is to men,” Mussolini insisted, ”as maternity is to women.”
For every official American attempt to link Islamic terrorism to fascism, there is an anti-Bush protest that applies the fascist label to Washington’s nationalist rhetoric, assault on civil liberties and warmaking.
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 con: Daphne 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: Daphne 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.”
The differences between the most popular 3D printing technologies, including: fused deposition modeling (FDM), stereolithography (SLA), digital light processing (DLP), and selective laser sintering (SLS)
How to understand a 3D printer specifications chart
What 3D printing resolution quality mean in 3D printing
How educators at universities, high schools, and colleges around the world are using the Form 2 to empower students and conduct research
Web search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo are integral to making information more discoverable on the open web. How can you expose data about your organization, its services, people, collections, and other information in a way that is meaningful to these search engines?
In this 90 minute session, learn how to leverage Schema.org and semantic markup to achieve enhanced discovery of information on the open web. The session will provide an introduction to both Schema.org and the JSON-LD data format. Topics include an in-depth look at the Schema.org vocabulary, a brief overview of semantic markup with a focus on JSON-LD, and use-cases of these technologies. By the end of the session, you will have an opportunity to apply these technologies through a structured exercise. The session will conclude with resources and guidance for next steps.
Learning Outcomes
Participants will leave this webinar with tools for increasing the discoverability of information on the open web.
This program will include presentation slides, bibliographic references to resources referenced to in the slides, and hands-on exercise material. The exercise material will include instructions, template records for attendees to practice applying Schema.org and JSON-LD, and example records as reference material.
Who Should Attend
Librarians and other professionals interested in increasing discovery of their organization’s information and collections on the open web. General knowledge of metadata concepts and standards is encouraged. Familiarity with the concept of data formats (XML, JSON, MARC, etc.) would be helpful.
Jacob Shelby is the Metadata Technologies Librarian at North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries, where he performs metadata activities that support library information services and collections. He has collaborated on endeavors to enhance the discovery of library services and collections on the open web, including exposing NCSU Libraries digital special collections data as Schema.org data. In addition to these endeavors, Jacob has taught workshops at NCSU Libraries on Schema.org and semantic markup.
he General Services Administration (GSA) has ordered the removal of Kaspersky software platforms from its catalogues of approved vendors. Meanwhile, the Senate is considering a draft bill of the 2018 National Defense Acquisition Authorization (known as the NDAA, it specifies the size of and uses for the fiscal year 2018 US Defense Department budget) that would bar the use of Kaspersky products in the military.
W.H. cybersecurity coordinator warns against using Kaspersky Lab software
The whole ordeal is a nightmare for Kaspersky Lab. The company looks incompetent at preventing state-sponsored hacks in the best-case scenario and complicit with the Russian government in the worst-case scenario. However it plays out, the unfolding drama will certainly hurt the software maker’s footprint in the U.S., where Congress has already taken action to purge the government of the company’s software.
All wifi networks’ are vulnerable to hacking, security expert discovers
WPA2 protocol used by vast majority of wifi connections has been broken by Belgian researchers, highlighting potential for internet traffic to be exposed
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Cert) issued a warning on Sunday in response to the vulnerability.
“The impact of exploiting these vulnerabilities includes decryption, packet replay, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection and others,” the alert says, detailing a number of potential attacks. It adds that, since the vulnerability is in the protocol itself, rather than any specific device or software, “most or all correct implementations of the standard will be affected”.
Uribe-Tirado, A., Pinto, M., & Machin-Mastromatteo, J. (2017). Developing information literacy programs: Best practices from Latin America, Spain and Portugal. Information Development, 33, 543–549. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266666917728470
