Plokhy, S. (2011). The “New Eastern Europe”: What to Do with the Histories of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova? East European Politics and Societies, 25(4), 763-769. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325411398914
my note: this 2011 article, suddenly becomes relevant, considering the current situation in Ukraine. My opinion as a historian is that further “decentralization” of the 20th century definition of “Eastern Europe,” as contested as it is (e.g., are Poland, the Czech R, Slovakia, and Hungary “Central Europe” or “Eastern Europe?” Are the Balkans In EE?), will further exacerbate the debate around the definition.
on the other hand, the author may have a point, by claiming Central European and Balkan countries are now generally referred as the “European Union,” but that also is not as simple, considering the exclusion of some former Yugoslav/Balkan countries.
other complexities (similarly to the downfall of Yugoslavia): religion[s], ethnicity, geopolitical issues.
“Thus, the NEE is not just a figment of current geopolitical imagination. There are geographic, cultural, ethnic, and historical factors that set it apart from its neighbors. But can history as a discipline and we as its practitioners benefit from this new conceptualization of the old Eastern Europe?”
With China muscling its way into the first ranks as a global power in science and technology—building vast new academic complexes, climbing to the top ranks of the world’s elite universities, surpassing the U.S. in PhD graduates in science and engineering, and on its way to outperforming all other nations in science and technology academic citations—I was puzzled to discover that China is on hold in offering online higher ed degrees.
To expand the nation’s technical talent pool, Chinese universities are upgrading their capacity to offer more up-to-date science and technology courses, with universities just beginning to introduce degrees in artificial intelligence, machine learning, software engineering and other advanced specialties. For China, the move is a departure from its centuries-old tradition of favoring literature and the liberal arts.
China has come a long way from cinema-style instruction to adopt more common digital learning practices, often closely following U.S. advances in online pedagogy, such as flipped classrooms and MOOCs.
Curiously, China’s reluctance to offer online degrees parallels the attitude toward online degrees in the Ivy League in the U.S.—both have embraced MOOCs while turning away from virtual degrees out of concern that remote degrees will damage their reputations.
UDL is a complicated way to teach. It involves giving multiple representations of the same information to students which they then choose from. Students also choose to work collaboratively or individually. And they decide how to demonstrate their learning through written work, a video, a poster or some other means.
UDL as a form of classroom differentiation. Differentiation – the process of giving different students in the same classroom different forms of instruction
a new paper by Dr. Guy A. Boysen of McKendree University in the U.S. Boysen claims that this lack of evidence is one of the five ways in which UDL parallels debunked learning styles theories.
Institutions of higher education have a chance to play a role in transforming the outdated perception of what college is–via strategies including upskilling
There is a greater need than ever before to provide increasingly specialized disciplinary knowledge, coupled with advanced workforce skills, without diminishing the role and importance of a broad-based education that ensures critical thinking and analytical reasoning along with social and communications skills and understanding. Simultaneously, in the context of millions of employees with some or no college and no degree, there is a need for academia to play an increased role in facilitating the continued employability of people already in the workforce through short-term credentials and certifications, enabling an updating of their knowledge and skills base.
Coskilling: The integration of knowledge (broad based and specialized) and relevant job skills into degree programs so that both facets are mastered simultaneously requires that institutions of higher ed focus on four key aspects simultaneously: (a) Increase opportunities for students to gain a well-rounded education intertwined with professional skills; (b) Respond at a significantly faster pace to the needs of the job market and be better aligned with advances in technology and information; (c) Create more flexible and personalized pathways for students to convert knowledge and learning to skills that result in earnings capacity; and (d) Change the “stove pipe” structure between academe and the workplace to enable greater alignment between the curriculum and new areas of workforce need.
Coding and “skills-building” bootcamps, enhanced career development services, and credentials and certificates are increasingly being offered by community colleges and universities either by themselves, or in conjunction with, external entities. Some are forming partnerships with corporate giants such as Boeing, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, and Google,
Upskilling
a greater need for employees to be “upskilled–mastering new skills, developing an understanding of a higher level of use of technology, and operating in a highly data-driven world. While a portion of upskilling can be undertaken “on the job,” institutions of higher education have the responsibility and opportunity to develop new certificates and courses, both self-standing and stackable, towards post-baccalaureate degrees that will build on existing levels of knowledge and skill sets.
Laubersheimer, J., Ryan, D., & Champaign, J. (2016). InfoSkills2Go: Using Badges and Gamification to Teach Information Literacy Skills and Concepts to College-Bound High School Students. Journal of Library Administration, 56(8), 924.
From online trivia and virtual board games to complex first-person perspective video games and in-person scavenger hunts, libraries are creating games for a variety of purposes, including orientations and instruction (Broussard,2012; Mallon, 2013; Smith & Baker, 2011).
Although the line between gaming and gamification can be blurry, most scholars recognize differences. Games are interactive, involvechallenge, risk, and reward, and have rules and a goal (Pivec, Dziabenko, &Schinnerl, 2003; Becker, 2013). Gamification, on the other hand, utilizes spe-cific gaming elements, often interactivity and rewards, to make an ordinary task more engaging (Prince, 2013). The gamification layer is not the focus of an endeavor, but rather can add enjoyment and a sense of competition toa task.
Battista (2014) argues that well-executed badges could represent an authentic assessment tool, because they often require the student to tangibly demonstrate a skill, competency, or learning outcome.
Use of the badges helped the team organize the Web site and provided a hierarchy to follow once the steps for earning each badge were created.Each badge consists of three to six tasks. A task can be a tutorial, a video, a game, or a short reading assignment on a given topic. An assessment is given for each task
The fourth and final platform the group considered was BadgeOS fromLearningTimes. BadgeOS requires a WordPress installation BadgeOS was designed to work with Credly (https://credly.com/) and Mozilla Open Badges (http://openbadges.org/) as standard features. LearnDash was the most useful plugin for the project beyond BadgeOS. Available for a reasonable fee, LearnDash adds tools and features that give WordPress the ability to be used as a complete learning management system(LMS). Available for free under the GNU Public License, BuddyPress(https://buddypress.org/) is another plugin that was capable of integrating with BadgeOS as an extension. The advantage of BuddyPress for the project group was the addition of social media components and functionality to the project Web site. Go-daddy.com offered comprehensive technical support, easy application instal-lation, and competitively priced hosting packages. A 3-year hosting agree-ment was purchased that included domain registration, unlimited storageand unlimited bandwidth.
The artist, who only exists online, was working in digital spaces long before anyone talked about NFTs.
The deal with Avedon is this: They don’t exist offline, simply describing themselves as “from the internet.” They are a digitally native creature, building art across online worlds like Second Life, Fortnite, and Star Citizen, and showing said art in prestigious galleries across the United States and Europe.
There’s no separating the art from the artist, because the artist is the art project, a sprightly-looking, nonbinary virtual being untethered from a human body. You could call them a high-art version of avatar influencers like Lil Miquela, although the most apt characterization might be a cross between the Japanese hologram pop idol Hatsune Miku and the pseudonymous British street artist Banksy—the performance of persona is part of the project. Like the ethereal Hatsune Miku, Avedon is visually represented by an avatar. But while it’s out in the open that Miku is a software-fueled collaboration between teams of humans,
The recently signed $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure package includes $2.75 billion for digital equity and inclusion work, delivering an investment that advocates are calling unprecedented and historic.
Within the $65 billion going toward broadband, the $2.75 billion for digital equity and inclusion is set for two programs made up of grants. First, the money will go toward a digital equity capacity grant program for states.
What the metaverse will (and won’t) be, according to 28 experts
metaverse (hopefully) won’t be the virtual world of ‘Snow Crash,’ or ‘Ready Player One.’ It will likely be something more complex, diverse, and wild.
The metaverse concept clearly means very different things to different people. What exists right now is a series of embryonic digital spaces, such as Facebook’s Horizon, Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox‘s digital space for gaming and game creation, and the blockchain-based digital world Decentraland–all of which have clear borders, different rules and objectives, and differing rates of growth.
TIFFANY ROLFE
different layers of realities that we can all be experiencing, even in the same environment or physical space. We’re already doing that with our phones to a certain extent—passively in a physical environment while mentally in a digital one. But we’ll see more experiences beyond your phone, where our whole bodies are fully engaged, and that’s where the metaverse starts to get interesting—we genuinely begin to explore and live in these alternate realities simultaneously.
It will have legacy parts that look and feel like the web today, but it will have new nodes and capabilities that will look and feel like the Ready Player One Oasis (amazing gaming worlds), immersion leaking into our world (like my Magicverse concept), and every imaginable permutation of these. I feel that the Xverse will have gradients of sentience and autonomy, and we will have the emergence of synthetic life (things Sun and Thunder is working on) and a multitude of amazing worlds to explore. Building a world will become something everyone can do (like building a webpage or a blog) and people will be able to share richer parts of their external and inner lives at incredibly high-speed across the planet.
YAT SIU, COFOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF GAMING AND BLOCKCHAIN COMPANY ANIMOCA BRANDS
Reality will exist on a spectrum ranging from physical to virtual (VR), but a significant chunk of our time will be spent somewhere between those extremes, in some form of augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality will be a normal part of daily life. Virtual companions will provide information, commentary, updates and advice on matters relevant to you at that point in time, including your assets and activities, in both virtual and real spaces.
TIMONI WEST, VP OF AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY, UNITY:
I think we can all agree our initial dreams of a fully immersive, separate digital world is not only unrealistic, but maybe not what we actually want. So I’ve started defining the metaverse differently to capture the zeitgeist: we’re entering an era where every computer we interact with, big or small, is increasingly world-aware. They can recognize faces, voices, hands, relative and absolute position, velocity, and they can react to this data in a useful way. These contextually aware computers are the path to unlocking ambient computing: where computers fade from the foreground to the background of everyday, useful tools. The metaverse is less of a ‘thing’ and more of a computing era. Contextual computing enables a multitude of new types of interactions and apps: VR sculpting tools and social hangouts, self-driving cars, robotics, smart homes.
as carbon is to the organic world, AI will be both the matrix that provides the necessary structural support and the material from which digital representation will be made. Of all the ways in which AI will shape the form of the metaverse, perhaps most essential is the role it will play in the physical-digital interface. Translating human actions into digital input–language, eye movement, hand gestures, locomotion–these are all actions which AI companies and researchers have already made tremendous progress on.
Qualcomm views the metaverse as an ever-present spatial internet complete with personalized digital experiences that spans the physical and virtual worlds, where everything and everyone can communicate and interact seamlessly.
As an active researcher in the security and forensics of VR systems, should the metaverse come into existence, we should explore and hypothesize the ways it will be misused.
CHITRA RAGAVAN, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER AT BLOCKCHAIN DATA ANALYTICS COMPANY ELEMENTUS
I picture [the metaverse] almost like The Truman Show. Only, instead of walking into a television set, you walk into the internet and can explore any number of different realities
We imagine the metaverse as reality made better, a world infused with magic, stories, and functionality at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.
CAROLINA ARGUELLES NAVAS, GLOBAL PRODUCT MARKETING, AUGMENTED REALITY, SNAP
Rather than building the “metaverse,” a separate and fully virtual reality that is disconnected from the physical world, we are focused on augmenting reality, not replacing it. We believe AR–or computing overlaid on the world around us–has a smoother path to mass adoption, but will also be better for the world than a fully virtual world.
URHO KONTTORI, COFOUNDER AND CTO OF AR/VR HEADSET MAKER VARJO
In the reality-based metaverse, we will be able to more effectively design products of the future, meet and collaborate with our colleagues far away, and experience any remote place in real-time.
ATHERINE ALLEN, CEO OF IMMERSIVE TECH RESEARCH CONSULTANCY LIMINA IMMERSIVE
I prefer to think of the metaverse as simply bringing our bodies into the internet.
The metaverse isn’t just VR! Those spaces will connect to AR glasses and to 2D spaces like Instagram. And most importantly, there will be a real sense of continuity where the things you buy are always available to you.
At its core will be a self-contained economy that allows individuals and businesses to create, own or invest in a range of activities and experiences.
NANDI NOBELL, SENIOR ASSOCIATE AT GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN FIRM CALLISONRTKL
the metaverse experience can be altered from the individual’s point of view and shaped or curated by any number of agents—whether human or A.I. In that sense, the metaverse does not have an objective look beyond its backend. In essence, the metaverse, together with our physical locations, forms a spatial continuum.
NICK CHERUKURI, CEO AND FOUNDER OF MIXED REALITY GLASSES MAKER THIRDEYE
The AR applications of the metaverse are limitless and it really can become the next great version of the internet.
SAM TABAR, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, BITCOIN MINING COMPANY BIT DIGITAL
It seems fair to predict that the actual aesthetic of any given metaverse will be determined by user demand. If users want to exist in a gamified world populated by outrageous avatars and fantastic landscapes then the metaverse will respond to that demand. Like all things in this world the metaverse will be market driven
Part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series A book series from the University of Minnesota Press Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, Series Editors
Defintion
Critical infrastructure studies has emerged as a framework for linking thought on the complex relations between society and its material structures across fields such as science and technology studies, design, ethnography, media infrastructure studies, feminist theory, critical race and ethnicity studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, animal studies, literary studies, the creative arts, and others (see the CIstudies.org Bibliography )
An informal consensus seems to have emerged that if students in the humanities are going to make use of quantitative methods, they should probably first learn to program. Introductions to this dimension of the field are organized around programming languages: The Programming Historian is built around an introduction to Python; Matthew Jockers’s Text Analysis with R is at its heart a tutorial in the R language; Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton’s Humanities Data in R begins with chapters on the language; Folgert Karsdorp’s Python Programming for the Humanities is a course in the language with examples from stylometry and information retrieval.[11] “On the basis of programming,” writes Moretti in “Literature, Measured,” a recent retrospective on the work of his Literary Lab, “much more becomes possible”
programming competence is not equivalent to competence in analytical methods. It might allow students to prepare data for some future analysis and to produce visual, tabular, numerical, or even interactive summaries; Humanities Data in R gives a fuller survey of the possibilities of exploratory data analysis than the other texts.[15]Yet students who have focused on programming will have to rely on their intuition when it comes to interpreting exploratory results. Intuition gives only a weak basis for arguing about whether apparent trends, groupings, or principles of variation are supported by the data.
From Humanities to Scholarship: Librarians, Labor, and the Digital
First hired as a “digital humanities librarian,” I saw my title changed within less than a year to “digital scholarship librarian,” with a subject specialty later appended (American History). Some three-plus years later at a different institution, I now find myself a digital-less “religion and theology librarian.” At the same time, in this position, my experience and expertise in digital humanities (or “digital scholarship”) are assumed, and any associated duties are already baked into the job description itself.
Jonathan Senchyne has written about the need to reimagine library and information science graduate education and develop its capacity to recognize, accommodate, and help train future library-based digital humanists in both computational research methods and discipline-focused humanities content (368–76). However, less attention has been paid to tracking where these digital humanities and digital scholarship librarians come from, the consequences and opportunities that arise from sourcing librarians from multiple professional and educational stations, and the more ontological issues associated with the nature of their labor—that is, what is understood as work for the digital humanist in the library and what librarians could be doing.
Makransky, G., & Lilleholt, L. (2018). A structural equation modeling investigation of the emotional value of immersive virtual reality in education. Educational Technology Research and Development, 66(5), 1141–1164. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-018-9581-2
an affective path in which immersion predicted presence and positive emotions, and a cognitive path in which immersion fostered a positive cognitive value of the task in line with the control value theory of achievement emotions.
business analyses and reports (e.g., Belini et al.2016; Greenlight and Roadtovr 2016), predict that virtual reality (VR) could be the biggest future computing platform of all time.
better understanding of the utility and impact of VR when it is applied in an educational context.
several different VR systems exist, including cave automatic virtual envi-ronment (CAVE), head mounted displays (HMD) and desktop VR. CAVE is a projection-based VR system with display-screen faces surrounding the user (Cruz-Neira et al.1992). As the user moves around within the bounds of the CAVE, the correct perspective and stereo projections of the VE are displayed on the screens. The user wears 3D glasses insidethe CAVE to see 3D structures created by the CAVE, thus allowing for a very lifelikeexperience. HMD usually consist of a pair of head mounted goggles with two LCD screens portraying the VE by obtaining the user ́s head orientation and position from a tracking system (Sousa Santos et al. 2008). HMD may present the same image to both eyes (monoscopic), or two separate images (stereoscopic) making depth perception possible. Like the CAVE, HMD offers a very realistic and lifelike experience by allowing the user to be completely surrounded by the VE. As opposed to CAVE and HMD, desktop VR does not allow the user to be surrounded by the VE. Instead desktop VR enables the user to interact with a VE displayed on a computer monitor using keyboard, mouse, joystick or touch screen (Lee and Wong 2014; Lee et al. 2010).
the use of simulations results in at least as good or better cognitive outcomes and attitudes toward learning than do more traditional teaching methods (Bayraktar2000; Rutten et al. 2012; Smetana and Bell2012; Vogel et al.2006). However, a recent report concludes that there are still many questions that need to be answered regarding the value of simulations in education (Natioan Research Council2011). In the past, virtual learning simulations were primarily accessed through desktop VR. With the increased use of immersive VR it is now possible to obtain a much higher level of immersion in the virtual world, which enhances many virtual experiences (Blascovich and Bailenson2011).
an understanding of how to harness the emotional appeal of e-learning tools is a central issue for learning and instruction, since research shows that initial situ-ational interest can be a first step in promoting learning several educational theories that describe the affective, emotional, and motivational factors that play a role in multimedia learning which are relevant for understanding the role of immersion in VR learning environments.
the cognitive-affective theory of learning with media (Moreno and Mayer2007),
and
the integrated cognitive affective model of learning with multimedia (ICALM; Plass and Kaplan2016)
Presence, intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, and control and active learning are the affective factors used in this study. defintions
The sample consisted of 104 students (39 females and 65 males; average age=23.8 years) from a large European university.
immersive VR (Samsung Gear VR with Samsung Galaxy S6) and the desktop VR version of a virtual laboratory simulation (on a standard computer). The participants were randomly assigned to two groups: the first used the immersive VR followed by the desktop VR version, and the second used the two platforms in the opposite sequence.
The VR learning simulation used in this experiment was developed by the company Labster and designed to facilitate learning within the field of biology at a university level. The VR simulation was based on a realistic murder case in which the participants were required to investigate a crime scene, collect blood samples and perform DNA analysis in a high-tech laboratory in order to identify and implicate the murderer
we conclude that the emotional value of the immersive VR version of the learning simulation is significantly greater than the desktop VR version. This is a major empirical contribution of this study.