The Facebook-owned company says it will start removing support for separate Oculus accounts in October, although users can maintain an existing account until January 1st, 2023. All users can maintain a distinct “VR profile” with a separate friends list.
Facebook also says that all future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook login, even if you’ve got a separate account already. The company is widely expected to announce a new version of its Oculus Quest headset this fall, and that policy would likely apply to it.
A single login also slightly simplifies launching experiences like Horizon, the social VR world that Facebook announced last year.
Presentation 1: Inspiring Faculty (+ Students) with Tales of Immersive Tech (Practitioner Presentation #106)
Authors: Nicholas Smerker
Immersive technologies – 360º video, virtual and augmented realities – are being discussed in many corners of higher education. For an instructor who is familiar with the terms, at least in passing, learning more about why they and their students should care can be challenging, at best. In order to create a font of inspiration, the IMEX Lab team within Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State devised its Get Inspired web resource. Building on a similar repository for making technology stories at the sister Maker Commons website, the IMEX Lab Get Inspired landing page invites faculty to discover real world examples of how cutting edge XR tools are being used every day. In addition to very approachable video content and a short summary calling out why our team chose the story, there are also instructional designer-developed Assignment Ideas that allow for quick deployment of exercises related to – though not always relying upon – the technologies highlighted in a given Get Inspired story.
Presentation 2: Lessons Learned from Over A Decade of Designing and Teaching Immersive VR in Higher Education Online Courses (Practitioner Presentation #101)
Authors: Eileen Oconnor
This presentation overviews the design and instruction in immersive virtual reality environments created by the author beginning with Second Life and progressing to open source venues. It will highlight the diversity of VR environment developed, the challenges that were overcome, and the accomplishment of students who created their own VR environments for K12, college and corporate settings. The instruction and design materials created to enable this 100% online master’s program accomplishment will be shared; an institute launched in 2018 for emerging technology study will be noted.
Presentation 3: Virtual Reality Student Teaching Experience: A Live, Remote Option for Learning Teaching Skills During Campus Closure and Social Distancing (Practitioner Presentation #110)
Summary: During the Coronavirus pandemic, Ithaca College teacher education majors needed a classroom of students in order to practice teaching and receive feedback, but the campus was closed, and gatherings forbidden. Students were unable to participate in live practice teaching required for their program. We developed a virtual reality pilot project to allow students to experiment in two third-party social VR programs, AltSpaceVR and Rumii. Social VR platforms allow a live, embodied experience that mimics in-person events to give students a more realistic, robust and synchronous teaching practice opportunity. We documented the process and lessons learned to inform, develop and scale next generation efforts.
Sunday, June 21 • 8:00am – 9:00am Escape the (Class)room games in OpenSim or Second Life FULLhttps://ilrn2020.sched.com/event/ceKP/escape-the-classroom-games-in-opensim-or-second-lifePre-registration for this tour is required as places are limited. Joining instructions will be emailed to registrants ahead of the scheduled tour time.The Guided Virtual Adventure tour will take you to EduNation in Second Life to experience an Escape room game. For one hour, a group of participants engage in voice communication and try to solve puzzles, riddles or conundrums and follow clues to eventually escape the space. These scenarios are designed for problem solving and negotiating language and are ideal for language education. They are fun and exciting and the clock ticking adds to game play.Tour guide(s)/leader(s): Philp Heike, let’s talk online sprl, Belgium
Presentation 1: Evaluating the impact of multimodal Collaborative Virtual Environments on user’s spatial knowledge and experience of gamified educational tasks (Full Paper #91)
Authors: Ioannis Doumanis and Daphne Economou
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Several research projects in spatial cognition have suggested Virtual Environments (VEs) as an effective way of facilitating mental map development of a physical space. In the study reported in this paper, we evaluated the effectiveness of multimodal real-time interaction in distilling understanding of the VE after completing gamified educational tasks. We also measure the impact of these design elements on the user’s experience of educational tasks. The VE used reassembles an art gallery and it was built using REVERIE (Real and Virtual Engagement In Realistic Immersive Environment) a framework designed to enable multimodal communication on the Web. We compared the impact of REVERIE VG with an educational platform called Edu-Simulation for the same gamified educational tasks. We found that the multimodal VE had no impact on the ability of students to retain a mental model of the virtual space. However, we also found that students thought that it was easier to build a mental map of the virtual space in REVERIE VG. This means that using a multimodal CVE in a gamified educational experience does not benefit spatial performance, but also it does not cause distraction. The paper ends with future work and conclusions and suggestions for improving mental map construction and user experience in multimodal CVEs.
Presentation 2: A case study on student’s perception of the virtual game supported collaborative learning (Full Paper #42)
Authors: Xiuli Huang, Juhou He and Hongyan Wang
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The English education course in China aims to help students establish the English skills to enhance their international competitiveness. However, in traditional English classes, students often lack the linguistic environment to apply the English skills they learned in their textbook. Virtual reality (VR) technology can set up an immersive English language environment and then promote the learners to use English by presenting different collaborative communication tasks. In this paper, spherical video-based virtual reality technology was applied to build a linguistic environment and a collaborative learning strategy was adopted to promote their communication. Additionally, a mixed-methods research approach was used to analyze students’ achievement between a traditional classroom and a virtual reality supported collaborative classroom and their perception towards the two approaches. The experimental results revealed that the virtual reality supported collaborative classroom was able to enhance the students’ achievement. Moreover, by analyzing the interview, students’ attitudes towards the virtual reality supported collaborative class were reported and the use of language learning strategies in virtual reality supported collaborative class was represented. These findings could be valuable references for those who intend to create opportunities for students to collaborate and communicate in the target language in their classroom and then improve their language skills
Presentation 1: Reducing Cognitive Load through the Worked Example Effect within a Serious Game Environment (Full Paper #19)
Authors: Bernadette Spieler, Naomi Pfaff and Wolfgang Slany
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Novices often struggle to represent problems mentally; the unfamiliar process can exhaust their cognitive resources, creating frustration that deters them from learning. By improving novices’ mental representation of problems, worked examples improve both problem-solving skills and transfer performance. Programming requires both skills. In programming, it is not sufficient to simply understand how Stackoverflow examples work; programmers have to be able to adapt the principles and apply them to their own programs. This paper shows evidence in support of the theory that worked examples are the most efficient mode of instruction for novices. In the present study, 42 students were asked to solve the tutorial The Magic Word, a game especially for girls created with the Catrobat programming environment. While the experimental group was presented with a series of worked examples of code, the control groups were instructed through theoretical text examples. The final task was a transfer question. While the average score was not significantly better in the worked example condition, the fact that participants in this experimental group finished significantly faster than the control group suggests that their overall performance was better than that of their counterparts.
Presentation 2: A literature review of e-government services with gamification elements (Full Paper #56)
Authors: Ruth S. Contreras-Espinosa and Alejandro Blanco-M
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Nowadays several democracies are facing the growing problem of a breach in communication between its citizens and their political representatives, resulting in low citizen’s engagement in the participation of political decision making and on public consultations. Therefore, it is fundamental to generate a constructive relationship between both public administration and the citizens by solving its needs. This document contains a useful literature review of the gamification topic and e-government services. The documents contain a background of those concepts and conduct a selection and analysis of the different applications found. A set of three lines of research gaps are found with a potential impact on future studies.
Presentation 1: Connecting User Experience to Learning in an Evaluation of an Immersive, Interactive, Multimodal Augmented Reality Virtual Diorama in a Natural History Museum & the Importance of Story (Full Paper #51)
Authors: Maria Harrington
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Reported are the findings of user experience and learning outcomes from a July 2019 study of an immersive, interactive, multimodal augmented reality (AR) application, used in the context of a museum. The AR Perpetual Garden App is unique in creating an immersive multisensory experience of data. It allowed scientifically naïve visitors to walk into a virtual diorama constructed as a data visualization of a springtime woodland understory, and interact with multimodal information directly through their senses. The user interface comprised of two different AR data visualization scenarios reinforced with data based ambient bioacoustics, an audio story of the curator’s narrative, and interactive access to plant facts. While actual learning and dwell times were the same between the AR app and the control condition, the AR experience received higher ratings on perceived learning. The AR interface design features of “Story” and “Plant Info” showed significant correlations with actual learning outcomes, while “Ease of Use” and “3D Plants” showed significant correlations with perceived learning. As such, designers and developers of AR apps can generalize these findings to inform future designs.
Presentation 2: The Naturalist’s Workshop: Virtual Reality Interaction with a Natural Science Educational Collection (Short Paper #11)
Authors: Colin Patrick Keenan, Cynthia Lincoln, Adam Rogers, Victoria Gerson, Jack Wingo, Mikhael Vasquez-Kool and Richard L. Blanton
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For experiential educators who utilize or maintain physical collections, The Naturalist’s Workshop is an exemplar virtual reality platform to interact with digitized collections in an intuitive and playful way. The Naturalist’s Workshop is a purpose-developed application for the Oculus Quest standalone virtual reality headset for use by museum visitors on the floor of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences under the supervision of a volunteer attendant. Within the application, museum visitors are seated at a virtual desk. Using their hand controllers and head-mounted display, they explore drawers containing botanical specimens and tools-of-the-trade of a naturalist. While exploring, the participant can receive new information about any specimen by dropping it into a virtual examination tray. 360-degree photography and three-dimensionally scanned specimens are used to allow user-motivated, immersive experience of botanical meta-data such as specimen collection coordinates.
Presentation 3: 360˚ Videos: Entry level Immersive Media for Libraries and Education (Practitioner Presentation #132)
Authors: Diane Michaud
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Within the continuum of XR Technologies, 360˚ videos are relatively easy to produce and need only an inexpensive mobile VR viewer to provide a sense of immersion. 360˚ videos present an opportunity to reveal “behind the scenes” spaces that are normally inaccessible to users of academic libraries. This can promote engagement with unique special collections and specific library services. In December 2019, with little previous experience, I led the production of a short 360˚video tour, a walk-through of our institution’s archives. This was a first attempt; there are plans to transform it into a more interactive, user-driven exploration. The beta version successfully generated interest, but the enhanced version will also help prepare uninitiated users for the process of examining unique archival documents and artefacts. This presentation will cover the lessons learned, and what we would do differently for our next immersive video production. Additionally, I will propose that the medium of 360˚ video is ideal for many institutions’ current or recent predicament with campuses shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Online or immersive 360˚ video can be used for virtual tours of libraries and/or other campus spaces. Virtual tours would retain their value beyond current campus shutdowns as there will always be prospective students and families who cannot easily make a trip to campus. These virtual tours would provide a welcome alternative as they eliminate the financial burden of travel and can be taken at any time.
At our physical iLRN conferences, the first day of the conference (Sunday) is typically devoted to one or more guided social tours of local attractions in which attendees have the opportunity to socialize and get to know one another while immersing themselves in the sights and sounds of the host city and/or region. As this year’s conference will take place entirely online, we are instead offering the opportunity for attendees to sign up for small-group “Guided Virtual Adventure” tours of 50 minutes in duration to various social and collaborative XR/immersive environments and platforms.
Proposals are being sought for prospective Guided Virtual Adventure tour offerings on Sunday, June 21, 2020. Tour destinations may be:
– a third-party XR/immersive platform with which you are familiar (e.g., Altspace, Mozilla Hubs, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Somnium Space, OrbusVR, Second Life);
– a specific virtual environment that you, your institution/organization, or someone else has developed within a third-party platform;
– a platform that you or your institution/organization has developed and/or specific environments within that platform.
There are no fees involved in offering a Guided Virtual Adventure tour; however, preference will be given to proposals that involve environments/platforms that are freely and openly accessible, and that are associated with nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. Where possible, it is strongly recommended that multiple offerings of the tour are made available throughout the day so as to cater for different time zones in which the 8,000+ iLRN 2020 event attendees will be based.
Companies wishing to offer Guided Virtual Adventure tours involving their commercial products and services may submit proposals for consideration, but the iLRN 2020 Organizing Committee reserves the right to, at its discretion, place limits on the number of tours of platforms/environments of a certain type or that address a particular target audience/application vertical. In doing so, they will prioritize companies that have purchased a sponsorship or exhibition package.
– Guided Virtual Adventure proposal submission deadline: May 18, 2020
– Notification of proposal review outcomes: May 21, 2020
– Presenter registration deadline: May 25, 2020
– Deadline for providing final participant instructions: June 1, 2020
– Guided Virtual Adventure Day: June 21, 2020
Other upcoming iLRN 2020 deadlines (see conference website for details):
– Immersive Learning Project Showcase & Competition – expressions of interest to participate due May 14, 2020 (deadline extended, no further extensions will be announced)
– Practitioner Stream oral and poster presentations – 1-2 page proposals, not for publication in proceedings, due May 18, 2020 (will not be extended)
– Workshops, Panel Sessions, and Special Sessions – 2-3 page proposals for publication in proceedings as extended-abstract descriptions of the sessions, due May 18, 2020 (will not be extended)
– Free registration deadline for non-presenter educators and students – May 23, 2020
he Intercept reported that Zoom video calls are not end-to-end encrypted, despite the company’s claims that they are.
Motherboard reports that Zoom is leaking the email addresses of “at least a few thousand” people because personal addresses are treated as if they belong to the same company
Apple was forced to step in to secure millions of Macs after a security researcher found Zoom failed to disclose that it installed a secret web server on users’ Macs, which Zoom failed to remove when the client was uninstalled
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‘Zoom is malware’: why experts worry about the video conferencing platform
A report from Motherboard found Zoom sends data from users of its iOS app to Facebook for advertising purposes, even if the user does not have a Facebook account.
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I used to thoroughly love @zoom_us as a platform for collaborating. I still use it. But it’s not something that I would recommend to others anymore. Here’s a thread as to why:
Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial
But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. recognition technology.
Facial recognition technology has always been controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother. It has a tendency to deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color. And some facial recognition products used by the police — including Clearview’s — haven’t been vetted by independent experts.
Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool, according to Mr. Ton-That.
“We have no data to suggest this tool is accurate,” said Clare Garvie, a researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, who has studied the government’s use of facial recognition. “The larger the database, the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgänger effect. They’re talking about a massive database of random people they’ve found on the internet.”
Part of the problem stems from a lack of oversight. There has been no real public input into adoption of Clearview’s software, and the company’s ability to safeguard data hasn’t been tested in practice. Clearview itself remained highly secretive until late 2019.
The software also appears to explicitly violate policies at Facebook and elsewhere against collecting users’ images en masse.
while there’s underlying code that could theoretically be used for augmented reality glasses that could identify people on the street, Ton-That said there were no plans for such a design.
In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts (a statewide ban may follow). In December, San Diego suspended a facial recognition program in advance of a new statewide law, which declared it illegal, coming into effect. Forty major music festivals pledged not to use the technology, and activistsare calling for a nationwide ban. Many Democratic presidential candidates support at least a partial ban on the technology.
facial recognition bans are the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing on one particular identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society we’re in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries like China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In countries like the United States, it’s being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the government.
People can be identified at a distance by their heart beat or by their gait, using a laser-based system. Cameras are so good that they can read fingerprints and irispatterns from meters away. And even without any of these technologies, we can always be identified because our smartphones broadcast unique numbers called MAC addresses.
The data broker industry is almost entirely unregulated; there’s only one law — passed in Vermont in 2018 — that requires data brokers to register and explain in broad terms what kind of data they collect.
Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
The phrase “school-to-prison pipeline” has long been used to describe how schools respond to disciplinary problems with excessively stringent policies that create prison-like environments and funnel children who don’t fall in line into the criminal justice system. Now, schools are investing in surveillance systems that will likely exacerbate existing disparities.
A number of tech companies are capitalizing on the growing market for student surveillance measures as various districts and school leaders committhemselves to preventing acts of violence. Rekor Systems, for instance, recently announced the launch of OnGuard, a program that claims to “advance student safety” by implementing countless surveillance and “threat assessment” mechanisms in and around schools.
While none of these methods have been proven to be effective in deterring violence, similarsystems have resulted in diverting resources away from enrichment opportunities, policing school communities to a point where students feel afraid to express themselves, and placing especially dangerous targets on students of color who are already disproportionately mislabeled and punished.ProPublica
Young people may be expert social-media and smartphone users, but many lack the digital skills they need for today’s jobs. How can we set them up for success?
One day he may lead Club members in a lesson on building digital resumes that can be customized quickly and make job-seeking easier when applying online. Another day they may create a blog. On this particular day, they drew up a budget for an upcoming event using a spreadsheet. For kids who are often glued to their smartphones, these types of digital tasks, surprisingly, can be new experiences.
The vast majority of young Americans have access to a smartphone, and nearly half say they are online “almost constantly.”
But although smartphones can be powerful learning tools when applied productively, these reports of hyperconnectivity and technological proficiency mask a deeper paucity of digital skills. This often-overlooked phenomenon is limiting some young people’s ability—particularly those in rural and low-income communities—to succeed in school and the workplace, where digital skills are increasingly required to collaborate effectively and complete everyday tasks.
According to a survey by Pew Research Center, only 17 percent of Americans are “digitally ready”—that is, confident using digital tools for learning. Meanwhile, in a separate study, American millennials ranked last among a group of their international peers when it came to “problem-solving in technology-rich environments,” such as sending and saving digital information
teach his sophomore pupils the technology skills they need in the workplace, as well as soft skills like teamwork.
Gamification can be approached in at least two ways. First, as a general process in which games and playful experiences are understood as essential components of society and culture.
Sebastian Deterding, Rilla
Khaled, Lennart Nacke and Dan Dixon have proposed a tentative history of
the term: “ ‘gamification’ as a term originated in the digital media industry.
The first documented use dates back to 2008, but gamification only entered
widespread adoption in the second half of 2010”
Jane McGonigal’s work, expounded in her contribution at the TED
Talk series in 2010, is also concerned with “selling” gamification to corporations.
In her book Reality is Broken. p.9 In her understanding, gamification is a concept that describes a new age where gamers can collectively use their problem-solving skills not only
to solve puzzles within a digital game but also to approach social and political
issues in the real world. Gaming, according to McGonigal’s vision,
could and should play a redeeming role. Game designers could become the
new social entrepreneurs, and citizens become gamers. From this perspective,
gamification thus becomes a technique for enabling greatly ambitious
change.
p. 10 Consumer loyalty, issues related to finance and governance, workers’ productivity, training and development – these are only some of the areas that are allegedly being positively revolu tionised by the emergence of gamification
As outlined by Ian Bogost in several contexts (2011a, 2011b), gamificatio has little to do with the design of games (or an allegedly salvific process), and much more with the exploitation of consumers. It frustrates the practice of game design and reduces playing to a stimulus-response experience
p. 11 Niklas Schrape proposes looking, through Foucault, at how gamification might work as a method to regulate individuals and their social lives. It also works as a pleasant regulator of behaviour because it offers positive feedback (rewards, leaderboards, etc.) rather than
negative penalties (fines, prison, etc.).
Ruffino looks at the work of Tim Ingold and his reading of Bergson and Heidegger and argues that participation, dwelling and co-existence could be seen as alternative ways of thinking about engagement: less as a transitive process that goes from games to their players and more as an in transitive status that needs to be narrated in order to be of any value
Foursquare alters the experience of moving about on the streets of a city and establishes a form of communication based on bodily proximity
p. 12 Joost Raessens examines how gamification could be seen in the context of a more general “ludic turn”, which affects society and culture at many different levels. This century, Raessens notes, has seen several different kinds of “turns”: We have seen the linguistic turn, the digital, followed by the material one and many others. To what extent could we say that we are now experiencing a playful turnp.
Counter-gamification is not a precise practice; it is not defined in guidebooks, workshops, or tutorials. It is instead a form of appropriation of playful elements by artists in order to promote radical and oppositional values.
p. 15 Fizek’s proposal is to expand the concept of play and fun and to introduce new forms of engagement in the practice of gamification
If the endgame approach were applied to gamification, Nicholson argues, we could see very different ways of designing and playing. The author explores these alternative modes of gamifying things through a text that offers both a theoretical understanding of gamification and exceptionally useful suggestions for designers.
p. 16 an eudaimonic view of gamification could bring a “good” way of living and
playing, one where joy and satisfaction are at the centre of a responsible practice. Gamification, according to Deterding, could become the name of a play practice that truly helps human beings in fulfilling their own lives and those of others
Iris Murdoch on Storytelling, Why Art Is Essential for Democracy, and the Key to Good Writing
“A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.” Ursula K. Le Guin
philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) — one of the most lucid and luminous minds of the twentieth century — explored in a long, deep, immensely insightful 1977 conversation with the British broadcaster and philosopher Bryan McGee, which aired on McGee’s television series Men of Ideas.
There is always more bad art around than good art, and more people like bad art than like good art.
James Baldwin wielded the double-edged sword of the artist’s duty to society, Murdoch insists on this largeness: The artist’s duty is to art, to truth-telling in his own medium, the writer’s duty is to produce the best literary work of which he is capable, and he must find out how this can be done.
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