Searching for "freedom"

Jeremy Bailenson VR

presence (VR different from other media), virtual pit, haptic devices and environment

4 min: what’s the point?…
VR is a paradox, no rules,
what should you do and what to avoid
Ketaki Shriram dissertation
addiction
Gerd Bruder observed the other German person confused between VR and real world.
Common Sense Media – when children can VR and for how long
Jackie Baily worked with children VR Sesame street Grover
impossible, counterproductive, rare/expensive, dangerous are the 4 reasons to use it. Not ubiquitous!
12 min. empathy
Tobin Asher “Becoming Homeless” blame the situation or the character (min 17)

counterproductive:
June Lubchenko, 2013. NOAA. min 19. natural disasters, not trusting self-report, but actions.
Fio Micheli. counter productive to fly children to the coral in Italy, but VR makes it possible. learning efficacy. Motivation to learn. min 21.
min 26. MOOC – materials are for free. not replacing field trips, just making them more often.
min 27. spherical video to practice football with VR
min 29. Walmart – “academies” Mark Gill the nursing home simulation.

dangerous:
learning to drive.
freedom speech over all media but VR is specific, different. If you won’t do it in the real world, don’t do it in VR

questions
min 33. what is the iPhone for VR.
Fred Brooks

min 37. disentization. how many times to do something to have effect. Kathy Mayhew and Mark Gill research

min 38. AR and psychology – not much resources. virtual person breaks physics – walks through chairs. Greg Weltch Central Florida – AR breaks physics study.

min 42. if his lab gives grants for art content creation. Immersive Journalism, storytelling syllabus. Mark Gill for our class, Bill Gorcica . Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Mayday Foundation

 

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

Finland ideas for US education

OPINION: Can this 12-step program from Finland aid U.S. education?

 Finland system consistently receives top marks from UNICEF, the OECD and the World Economic Forum.
Many U.S. states are similar in population size and demographics to Finland, and education is largely run at the state level. In the economically depressed forest region of North Karelia — on the Russian border — where we spent much of our time, the unemployment rate is nearly 15 percent, compared with under 5 percent in America and our home state of New York. However, the U.S. child poverty rate is four times higher than Finland’s.
Delegations and universities from China and around the developing world are visiting Finland to learn how to improve their own school systems.Singapore has launched a series of Finnish-style school reforms.

n Finland, we heard none of the clichés common in U.S. education reform circles, like “rigor,” “standards-based accountability,” “data-driven instruction,” “teacher evaluation through value-added measurement” or getting children “college- and career-ready” starting in kindergarten.

Instead, Finnish educators and officials constantly stressed to us their missions of helping every child reach his or her full potential and supporting all children’s well-being. “School should be a child’s favorite place,” said Heikki Happonen, an education professor at the University of Eastern Finland and an authority on creating warm, child-centered learning environments.

How can the United States improve its schools? We can start by piloting and implementing these 12 global education best practices, many of which are working extremely well for Finland:

1) Emphasize well-being.

2) Upgrade testing and other assessments. 

3) Invest resources fairly.

4) Boost learning through physical activity. 

5) Change the focus. Create an emotional atmosphere and physical environment of warmth, comfort and safety so that children are happy and eager to come to school. Teach not just basic skills, but also arts, crafts, music, civics, ethics, home economics and life skills.

6) Make homework efficient. Reduce the homework load in elementary and middle schools to no more than 30 minutes per night, and make it responsibility-based rather than stress-based.

7) Trust educators and children. Give them professional respect, creative freedom and autonomy, including the ability to experiment, take manageable risks and fail in the pursuit of success.

8) Shorten the school day. Deliver lessons through more efficient teaching and scheduling, as Finland does. Simplify curriculum standards to a framework that can fit into a single book, and leave detailed implementation to local districts.

9) Institute universal after-school programs.

10) Improve, expand and destigmatize vocational and technical education.   Encourage more students to attend schools in which they can acquire valuable career/trade skills.

11) Launch preventive special-education interventions early and aggressively. 

12) Revamp teacher training toward a medical and military model. Shift to treating the teaching profession as a critical national security function requiring government-funded, graduate-level training in research and collaborative clinical practice, as Finland does.

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more on Finland Phenomenon in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=finland+phenomenon

Why Blockchain is Hard

Why Blockchain is Hard

Jimmy Song Bitcoin Educator, Developer and Entrepreneur/PGP Fingerprint: C1D7 97BE 7D10 5291 228C D70C

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-blockchain-is-hard-60416ea4c5c

What is a blockchain?

The main thing distinguishing a blockchain from a normal database is that there are specific rules about how to put data into the database. That is, it cannot conflict with some other data that’s already in the database (consistent), it’s append-only (immutable), and the data itself is locked to an owner (ownable), it’s replicable and available. Finally, everyone agrees on what the state of the things in the database are (canonical) without a central party (decentralized).

It is this last point that really is the holy grail of blockchain. Decentralization is very attractive because it implies there is no single point of failure.

The Cost of Blockchains

  • Development is stricter and slower
  • Incentive structures are difficult to design
  • Maintenance is very costly
  • Users are sovereign
  • All upgrades are voluntary
  • Scaling is really hard

Centralization is a lot easier

Like it or not, the word “blockchain” has taken on a life of its own. Very few people actually understand what it is, but want to appear hip so use these words as a way to sound more intelligent. Just like “cloud” means someone else’s computer and “AI” means a tweaked algorithm, “blockchain” in this context means a slow, expensive database.“blockchain” is really just a way to get rid of the heavy apparatus of government regulation. This is overselling what blockchain can do. Blockchain doesn’t magically take away human conflict.

So what is blockchain good for?

Most industries require new features or upgrades and the freedom to change and expand as necessary. Given that blockchains are hard to upgrade, hard to change and hard to scale, most industries don’t have much use for a blockchain. a lot of companies looking to use the blockchain are not really wanting a blockchain at all, but rather IT upgrades to their particular industry. This is all well and good, but using the word “blockchain” to get there is dishonest and overselling its capability.

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

the intellectual dark web

Nuance: A Love Story. My affair with the intellectual dark web

Meghan Daum Aug 24 https://medium.com/s/greatescape/nuance-a-love-story-ae6a14991059

the standard set of middle-class Democratic Party values: Public safety nets were a force for good, corporate greed was a real threat, civil and reproductive rights were paramount.

I remember how good it felt to stand with my friends in our matching college sweatshirts shouting “never again!” and “my body, my choice!”

(hey, why shouldn’t Sarah Palin call herself a feminist?) brought angry letters from liberals as well as conservatives.

We would all go to the mat for women’s rights, gay rights, or pretty much any rights other than gun rights. We lived, for the most part, in big cities in blue states.

When Barack Obama came into the picture, we loved him with the delirium of crushed-out teenagers, perhaps less for his policies than for being the kind of person who also listens to NPR. We loved Hillary Clinton with the fraught resignation of a daughter’s love for her mother. We loved her even if we didn’t like her. We were liberals, after all. We were family.

Words like “mansplaining” and “gaslighting” were suddenly in heavy rotation, often invoked with such elasticity as to render them nearly meaningless. Similarly, the term “woke,” which originated in black activism, was being now used to draw a bright line between those on the right side of things and those on the wrong side of things.

From the Black Guys on Bloggingheads, YouTube’s algorithms bounced me along a path of similarly unapologetic thought criminals: the neuroscientist Sam Harris and his Waking Up podcast; Christina Hoff Sommers, aka “The Factual Feminist”; the comedian turned YouTube interviewer Dave Rubin; the counter-extremist activist Maajid Nawaz; and a cantankerous and then little-known Canadian psychology professor named Jordan Peterson, who railed against authoritarianism on both the left and right but reserved special disdain for postmodernism, which he believed was eroding rational thought on campuses and elsewhere.

the sudden national obsession with female endangerment on college campuses struck me much the same way it had in the early 1990s: well-intended but ultimately infantilizing to women and essentially unfeminist.

Weinstein and his wife, the evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, who also taught at Evergreen, would eventually leave the school and go on to become core members of the “intellectual dark web.”

Weinstein talked about intellectual “feebleness” in academia and in the media, about the demise of nuance, about still considering himself a progressive despite his feeling that the far left was no better at offering practical solutions to the world’s problems than the far right.

an American Enterprise Institute video of Sommers, the Factual Feminist, in conversation with the scholar and social critic Camille Paglia — “My generation fought for the freedom for women to risk getting raped!” I watched yet another video in which Paglia sat by herself and expounded volcanically about the patriarchal history of art (she was all for it).

the brothers sat down together for a two-hour, 47-minute interview on theRubin Report,

James Baldwin’s line, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually

Jordan Peterson Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, is a sort of New and Improved Testament for the purpose-lacking young person (often but not always male) for whom tough-love directives like “clean up your room!” go down a lot easier when dispensed with a Jungian, evo-psych panache.

Quillette, a new online magazine that billed itself as “a platform for free thought”

the more honest we are about what we think, the more we’re alone with our thoughts. Just as you can’t fight Trumpism with tribalism, you can’t fight tribalism with a tribe.

media literacy backfire

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

Jan 5, 2017danah boyd

https://points.datasociety.net/did-media-literacy-backfire-7418c084d88d

Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenet of media literacy education.

Think about how this might play out in communities where the “liberal media” is viewed with disdain as an untrustworthy source of information…or in those where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of religious people…or where degrees are viewed as a weapon of the elite to justify oppression of working people. Needless to say, not everyone agrees on what makes a trusted source.

Students are also encouraged to reflect on economic and political incentives that might bias reporting. Follow the money, they are told. Now watch what happens when they are given a list of names of major power players in the East Coast news media whose names are all clearly Jewish. Welcome to an opening for anti-Semitic ideology.

In the United States, we believe that worthy people lift themselves up by their bootstraps. This is our idea of freedom. To take away the power of individuals to control their own destiny is viewed as anti-American by so much of this country. You are your own master.

Children are indoctrinated into this cultural logic early, even as their parents restrict their mobility and limit their access to social situations. But when it comes to information, they are taught that they are the sole proprietors of knowledge. All they have to do is “do the research” for themselves and they will know better than anyone what is real.

Combine this with a deep distrust of media sources.

Many marginalized groups are justifiably angry about the ways in which their stories have been dismissed by mainstream media for decades.It took five days for major news outlets to cover Ferguson. It took months and a lot of celebrities for journalists to start discussing the Dakota Pipeline. But feeling marginalized from news media isn’t just about people of color.

Keep in mind that anti-vaxxers aren’t arguing that vaccinations definitively cause autism. They are arguing that we don’t know. They are arguing that experts are forcing children to be vaccinated against their will, which sounds like oppression. What they want is choice — the choice to not vaccinate. And they want information about the risks of vaccination, which they feel are not being given to them. In essence, they are doing what we taught them to do: questioning information sources and raising doubts about the incentives of those who are pushing a single message. Doubt has become tool.

Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information. Quick and easy solutions may make the controversy go away, but they won’t address the underlying problems.

In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism (see Fukuyama), and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation.

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boyd, danah. (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (1 edition). New Haven: Yale University Press.
p. 8 networked publics are publics that are reconstructed by networked technologies. they are both space and imagined community.
p. 11 affordances: persistence, visibility, spreadability, searchability.
p. technological determinism both utopian and dystopian
p. 30 adults misinterpret teens online self-expression.
p. 31 taken out of context. Joshua Meyrowitz about Stokely Charmichael.
p. 43 as teens have embraced a plethora of social environment and helped co-create the norms that underpin them, a wide range of practices has emerged. teens have grown sophisticated with how they manage contexts and present themselves in order to be read by their intended audience.
p. 54 privacy. p. 59 Privacy is a complex concept without a clear definition. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis: the right to be let alone, but also ‘measure of th access others have to you through information, attention, and physical proximity.’
control over access and visibility
p. 65 social steganography. hiding messages in plain sight
p. 69 subtweeting. encoding content
p. 70 living with surveillance . Foucault Discipline and Punish
p. 77 addition. what makes teens obsessed w social media.
p. 81 Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. jokingly
p. 89 the decision to introduce programmed activities and limit unstructured time is not unwarranted; research has shown a correlation between boredom and deviance.
My interview with Myra, a middle-class white fifteen-year-old from Iowa, turned funny and sad when “lack of time” became a verbal trick in response to every question. From learning Czech to trakc, from orchestra to work in a nursery, she told me that her mother organized “98%” of her daily routine. Myra did not like all of these activities, but her mother thought they were important.
Myra noted that her mother meant well, but she was exhausted and felt socially disconnected because she did not have time to connect with friends outside of class.
p. 100 danger
are sexual predators lurking everywhere
p. 128 bullying. is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty.
p. 131 defining bullying in a digital era. p. 131 Dan Olweus narrowed in the 70s bulling to three components: aggression, repetition and imbalance on power. p. 152 SM has not radically altered the dynamics of bullying, but it has made these dynamics more visible to more people. we must use this visibility not to justify increased punishment, but to help youth who are actually crying out for attention.
p. 153 inequality. can SM resolve social divisions?
p. 176 literacy. are today’s youth digital natives? p. 178 Barlow and Rushkoff p. 179 Prensky. p. 180 youth need new literacies. p. 181 youth must become media literate. when they engage with media–either as consumers or producers–they need to have the skills to ask questions about the construction and dissemination of particular media artifacts. what biases are embedded in the artifact? how did the creator intend for an audience to interpret the artifact, and what are the consequences of that interpretation.
p. 183 the politics of algorithms (see also these IMS blog entries https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=algorithms) Wikipedia and google are fundamentally different sites. p. 186 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: the personalization algorithms produce social divisions that undermine any ability to crate an informed public. Harvard’s Berkman Center have shown, search engines like Google shape the quality of information experienced by youth.
p. 192 digital inequality. p. 194 (bottom) 195 Eszter Hargittai: there are signifficant difference in media literacy and technical skills even within age cohorts. teens technological skills are strongly correlated with socio-economic status. Hargittai argues that many youth, far from being digital natives, are quite digitally naive.
p. 195 Dmitry  Epstein: when society frames the digital divide as a problem of access, we see government and industry as the responsible party for the addressing the issue. If DD as skills issue, we place the onus on learning how to manage on individuals and families.
p. 196 beyond digital natives

Palfrey, J., & Gasser, U. (2008). Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (1 edition). New York: Basic Books.

John Palfrey, Urs Gasser: Born Digital
Digital Natives share a common global culture that is defined not by age, strictly, but by certain attributes and experience related to how they interact with information technologies, information itself, one another, and other people and institutions. Those who were not “born digital’ can be just as connected, if not more so, than their younger counterparts. And not everyone born since, say 1982, happens to be a digital native.” (see also https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/04/15/no-millennials-gen-z-gen-x/

p. 197. digital native rhetoric is worse than inaccurate: it is dangerous
many of the media literacy skills needed to be digitally savvy require a level of engagement that goes far beyond what the average teen pick up hanging out with friends on FB or Twitter. Technical skills, such as the ability to build online spaces requires active cultivation. Why some search queries return some content before others. Why social media push young people to learn how to to build their own systems, versus simply using a social media platforms. teens social status and position alone do not determine how fluent or informed they are via-a-vis technology.
p. 199 Searching for a public on their own

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Daum, M. (2018, August 24). My Affair With the Intellectual Dark Web – Great Escape. Retrieved October 9, 2018, from https://medium.com/s/greatescape/nuance-a-love-story-ae6a14991059

the intellectual dark web

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

fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news

The monopoly of the tech giants

Here’s the real danger that Facebook, Google, and the other tech monopolies pose to our society

Jamie Bartlett, October 1, 2018, https://blog.ed.ted.com/2018/10/01/heres-the-real-danger-that-facebook-google-and-the-other-tech-monopolies-pose-to-our-society/

distributed computing + power encryption = the future of Internet

the Dark Net is going mainstream, liberty, freedom, democracy; neither entirely dark, not entirely light, both things

The threat that tech monopolies pose to democracies is about more than the prices they charge: it’s the concentration of power, data and control over the public space — and their ability to wield this power over a growing number of economic activities, especially in the infrastructure and technologies of the future. The following companies operate as either monopolies or oligopolies in their respective fields: Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify. Integrated into everything, everywhere, their technology will blanket the world.

cultural hegemony.” That is, where domination can be achieved through controlling the ideas and assumptions available to the public. The idea, associated with philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci

In 1995, left-wing academics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron detailed the philosophy and ideas of the new tech wunderkinds, christening it “The Californian Ideology.” This ideology represented a fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco and entrepreneurial free market zeal.

All you needed to get to utopia was a belief in “disruption,” the idea that progress is achieved through smashing up old industries and institutions and replacing them with something new and digital.

Money and ideas in Silicon Valley have a very complicated relationship. Silicon Valley runs according to a Faustian pact: money in exchange for world-changing ideas.

Over the years, the big tech firms have very carefully cultivated the Californian Ideology. Even though they are massive multi-billion-dollar corporations with huge PR teams, they pitch themselves as anti-establishment.The worse these companies behave and the richer they become, the more they spend on looking cool and talking about fairness and community.

And to whom do we look in order to solve our collective social problems? It’s no longer the state, but the modern tech-geek superhero.

Total victory for the monopoly is not over economics or politics. It’s over assumptions, ideas and possible futures.

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

AI tracks students writings

Schools are using AI to track what students write on their computers

By Simone Stolzoff August 19, 2018
50 million k-12 students in the US
Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), any US school that receives federal funding is required to have an internet-safety policy. As school-issued tablets and Chromebook laptops become more commonplace, schools must install technological guardrails to keep their students safe. For some, this simply means blocking inappropriate websites. Others, however, have turned to software companies like GaggleSecurly, and GoGuardian to surface potentially worrisome communications to school administrators
In an age of mass school-shootings and increased student suicides, SMPs Safety Management Platforms can play a vital role in preventing harm before it happens. Each of these companies has case studies where an intercepted message helped save lives.
Over 50% of teachers say their schools are one-to-one (the industry term for assigning every student a device of their own), according to a 2017 survey from Freckle Education
But even in an age of student suicides and school shootings, when do security precautions start to infringe on students’ freedoms?
When the Gaggle algorithm surfaces a word or phrase that may be of concern—like a mention of drugs or signs of cyberbullying—the “incident” gets sent to human reviewers before being passed on to the school. Using AI, the software is able to process thousands of student tweets, posts, and status updates to look for signs of harm.
SMPs help normalize surveillance from a young age. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook and other recent data breaches from companies like Equifax, we have the opportunity to teach kids the importance of protecting their online data
in an age of increased school violence, bullying, and depression, schools have an obligation to protect their students. But the protection of kids’ personal information is also a matter of their safety

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

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

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

2018 NMC Horizon Report

2018 NMC Horizon Report

Cross-Institution & Cross-Sector Collaboration Long-Term Trend: Driving Ed Tech adoption in higher education for five or more years

Although a variety of collaborations between higher education and industry have emerged, more-explicit frameworks and guidelines are needed to define how these partnerships should proceed to have the greatest impact.

links to the Webinar on the report:
https://events.educause.edu/educause-live/webinars/2018/exploring-the-2018-horizon-report

link to the transcript: https://events.educause.edu/~/media/files/events/educause-live/2018/live1808/transcript.docx

Proliferation of Open Educational Resources Mid-Term Trend: Driving Ed Tech adoption in higher education for the next three to five years

The United States lags on the policy front. In September 2017, the Affordable College Textbook Act was once again introduced in both the US House of Representatives and the Senate “to expand the use of open textbooks
It is unlikely that ACTA will pass, however, as it has been unsuccessfully introduced to two previous Congresses.

The Rise of New Forms of Interdisciplinary Studies

Faculty members, administrators, and instructional designers are creating innovative pathways to college completion through interdisciplinary experiences, nanodegrees, and other alternative credentials, such as digital badges. Researchers, along with academic technologists and developers, are breaking new ground with data structures, visualizations, geospatial applications, and innovative uses of opensource tools.

Growing Focus on Measuring Learning

As societal and economic factors redefine the skills needed in today’s workforce, colleges and universities must rethink how to define, measure, and demonstrate subject mastery and soft skills such as creativity and collaboration. The proliferation of data-mining software and developments in online education, mobile learning, and learning management systems are coalescing toward learning environments that leverage analytics and visualization software to portray learning data in a multidimensional and portable manner

Redesigning Learning Spaces

upgrading wireless bandwidth and installing large displays that allow for more natural collaboration on digital projects. Some are exploring how mixed-reality technologies can blend 3D holographic content into physical spaces for simulations, such as experiencing Mars by controlling rover vehicles, or how they can enable multifaceted interaction with objects, such as exploring the human body in anatomy labs through detailed visuals. As higher education continues to move away from traditional, lecture-based lessons toward more hands-on activities, classrooms are starting to resemble real-world work and social environments

Authentic Learning Experiences

An increasing number of institutions have begun bridging the gap between academic knowledge and concrete applications by establishing relationships with the broader community; through active partnerships with local organizations

Improving Digital Literacy Solvable Challenge: Those that we understand and know how to solve

Digital literacy transcends gaining discrete technological skills to generating a deeper understanding of the digital environment, enabling intuitive and discerning adaptation to new contexts and cocreation of content.107 Institutions are charged with developing students’ digital citizenship, promoting the responsible and appropriate use of technology, including online communication etiquette and digital rights and responsibilities in blended and online learning settings. This expanded concept of digital competence is influencing curriculum design, professional development, and student-facing services and resources. Due to the multitude of elements of digital literacy, higher education leaders must obtain institution-wide buy-in and provide support for all stakeholders in developing these competencies.

Despite its growing importance, it remains a complex topic that can be challenging to pin down. Vanderbilt University established an ad hoc group of faculty, administrators, and staff that created a working definition of digital literacy on campus and produced a white paper recommending how to implement digital literacy to advance the university’s mission: https://vanderbilt.edu/ed-tech/committees/digital-literacy-committee.php

Adapting Organizational Designs to the Future of Work

Technology, shifting information demands, and evolving faculty roles are forcing institutions to rethink the traditional functional hierarchy. Institutions must adopt more flexible, teambased, matrixed structures to remain innovative and responsive to campus and stakeholder needs.

Attempts to avoid bureaucracy also align with a streamlined workforce and cost elimination. Emphasis has been placed on designing better business models through a stronger focus on return on investment. This involves taking a strategic approach that connects financial practice (such as analyzing cost metrics and resource allocation) with institutional change models and goals.124

Faculty roles have been and continue to be impacted by organizational change, as well as by broader economic movements. Reflective of today’s “gig economy,” twothirds of faculty members are now non-tenure, with half working part-time, often in teaching roles at several institutions. This stands as a stark contrast to 1969, when almost 80 percent of faculty were tenured or tenuretrack; today’s figures are nearly inverted. Their wages are applying pressure to traditional organizational structures.Rethinking tenure programs represents another change to organizational designs that aligns with the future of work.

Organizational structures are continuing to evolve on the administrative side as well. With an emphasis on supporting student success, many institutions are rethinking their student services, which include financial aid, academic advising, and work-study programs. Much of this change is happening within the context of digital transformation, an umbrella term that denotes the transformation of an organization’s core business to better meet customer needs by leveraging technology and data.

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added Nov 13, 2018

6 growing trends taking over academic libraries

BY MERIS STANSBURY
March 24th, 2017

Horizon Report details short-and long-term technologies, trends that will impact academic libraries worldwide in the next 5 years.

6 growing trends taking over academic libraries

Short-Term, 1-2 years):

  • Research Data Management: The growing availability of research reports through online library databases is making it easier for students, faculty, and researchers to access and build upon existing ideas and work. “Archiving the observations that lead to new ideas has become a critical part of disseminating reports,” says the report.
  • Valuing the User Experience: Librarians are now favoring more user-centric approaches, leveraging data on patron touchpoints to identify needs and develop high-quality engaging experiences.

(Mid-Term, 3-5 years):

  • Patrons as Creators: Students, faculty, and researchers across disciplines are learning by making and creating rather than by simply consuming content. Creativity, as illustrated by the growth of user-generated videos, maker communities, and crowdfunded projects in the past few years, is increasingly the means for active, hands-on learning. People now look to libraries to assist them and provide tools for skill-building and making.
  • Rethinking Library Spaces: At a time when discovery can happen anywhere, students are relying less on libraries as the sole source for accessing information and more for finding a place to be productive. As a result, institutional leaders are starting to reflect on how the design of library spaces can better facilitate the face-to-face interactions.

(Long-Term, 5 or more years):

  • Cross-Institution Collaboration: Within the current climate of shrinking budgets and increased focus on digital collections, collaborations enable libraries to improve access to scholarly materials and engage in mission-driven cooperative projects.
  • Evolving Nature of the Scholarly Record: Once limited to print-based journals and monographic series, scholarly communications now reside in networked environments and can be accessed through an expansive array of publishing platforms. “As different kinds of scholarly communication are becoming more prevalent on the web, librarians are expected to discern the legitimacy of these innovative approaches and their impact in the greater research community through emerging altmetrics tools,” notes the report.
  • Improving digital literacy: According to the report, digital literacy transcends gaining isolated technological skills to “generate a deeper understanding of the digital environment, enabling intuitive adaptation to new contexts, co-creation of content with others, and an awareness of both the freedom and risks that digital interactions entail. Libraries are positioned to lead efforts to develop students’ digital citizenship, ensuring mastery of responsible and appropriate technology use, including online identity, communication etiquette, and rights and responsibilities.

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more on the NMC Horizon Report in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=horizon+report

Immersive Storytelling and Learning

An Imaginary Interview with Lev Vygotsky on Immersive Storytelling and Learning

Ulla, Founder and CEO of ThingLink

https://medium.com/@ulla/an-imaginary-interview-with-lev-vygotsky-on-immersive-storytelling-and-learning-5bbb211c6e50

digital storytelling at the Festival Della Didattica Digitale (Digital Teaching Festival) in Italy.

the trending but undefined concepts of digital storytelling and immersive learning

definition

Storytelling is a logical form of thought. It is an analytical process including perception, labeling, organizing, categorizing real and imaginary objects and their real and imaginary relations in speech.

Q: What do you think immersive documentation technologies such as 360 images and videos can bring to this process?

V: 360 degree media and virtual reality are cultural-historically developed tools that mediate our relationship to the world in a new way. They expand the possible fields of perception transcending space and time. Perception precedes other psychological functions.

Definition

Immersive storytelling can be understood as an activity through which students use language to visualize relations and meaning in 360 degree digital environments. Naming or describing relations between objects in our field of perception using verbal or visual language awakens intellectual processes fundamental to learning.

Q: Would you say immersive storytelling is a form of creative play?

V: That is a possible interpretation. Play is a psychological process through which we create an imaginary situation or place, reflecting or separating objects and their actual meaning, or creating new meanings. The ability to digitally create and modify situations and environments can be understood as a form of play, opening a realm of spontaneity and freedom, connected with pleasure.

Q: Can robots help us learn? Is AI already the More Knowledgeable Other?

V: The More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) refers to anyone or anything who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, with respect to a particular task, process, or concept. If a robot with artificial intelligence can function as an MKO and support our problem solving, it can expand our Zone of Proximal Development.

fake news disinformation propaganda

the secret of freedom

the secret of freedom

if we are in a post-truth moment then we need to understand the tools we have at hand to deal with falsehoods.

Tom Dickinson describes four different types of distributed ‘fake news’.

‘Fake news’ is lazy language. Be specific. Do you mean:
A) Propaganda
B) Disinformation
C) Conspiracy theory
D) Clickbait

The RAND Corporation, a US think-tank with strong ties to the military industrial complex, recently looked at the influence of the Russian Propaganda Model and how best to deal with it.

Three factors have been shown to increase the (limited) effectiveness of retractions and refutations: (1) warnings at the time of initial exposure to misinformation, (2) repetition of the retraction or refutation, and (3) corrections that provide an alternative story to help fill the resulting gap in understanding when false ‘facts’ are removed.

Critical thinking requires us to constantly question assumptions, especially our own. To develop these skills, questioning must be encouraged. This runs counter to most schooling and training practices. When do students or employees get to question underlying assumptions of their institutions? If they cannot do this, how can we expect them to challenge various and pervasive types of ‘fake news’?

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

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