what do blockchain technology and NFTs have to do with Metaverse?
it is already possible to identify some of the characteristics of Web 3.0 such as the focus on the user (and not on companies), the massive use of artificial intelligence (as a powerful tool to provide the best analysis and the best result to people), as well as distributed networks (we will no longer depend on the gigantic centralized data servers). Moreover, Web 3.0 content will be more graphical with more videos and 3D images. Also, in Web 3.0, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will be commonplace, bringing more realistic graphics to applications and games
NFTs are the representation of a nonfungible asset in digital media. In a more technical definition, an NFT is a piece of software code that verifies that you hold ownership of a nonfungible digital asset, or the digital representation of the nonfungible physical asset in digital media.
It’s important to notice that NFTs existed before the first blockchain, but blockchain technology has transformed NFT markets by solving the double-spending problem and conferring scarcity, uniqueness and authenticity to a nonfungible token.
Zoom, Teams, Skype, and FaceTime all became daily fixtures, and many of us quickly became fatigued by seeing our colleagues, students and far-away loved ones almost exclusively in 2D. Most video conferencing solutions were not designed to be online classrooms. what is missing from the current video platforms that could improve online teaching: tools to better facilitate student interactions, including enhanced polling and quizzing features, group work tools, and more.
While universities continue to increase in-person and HyFlex courses, hoping to soon see campuses return to normalcy, there is mounting evidence that the increased interest in digital tools for teaching and learning will persist even after the pandemic.
We should move beyond 2D solutions and take advantage of what extended reality (XR) and virtual reality (VR) have to offer us.
Professor Courtney Cogburn created the 1,000 Cut Journey, an immersive VR research project that allows participants to embody an avatar that experiences various forms of racism. Professor Shantanu Lal has implemented VR headsets for pediatric dentistry patients who become anxious during procedures. At Columbia Engineering, professor Steven Feiner’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab explores the design and development of 2D and 3D user interfaces for a broad range of applications and devices. Professor Letty Moss-Salentijn is working with Feiner’s lab to create dental training simulations to guide dental students through the process of nerve block injection. Faculty, students and staff at Columbia’s Media Center for Art History have created hundreds of virtual reality panoramas of archaeology projects and fieldwork that are available on the Art Atlas platform.
In spring 2020, a group of Columbia students began to build “LionCraft,” a recreation of Columbia’s Morningside campus in Minecraft. Even though students were spread out around the world, they still found creative and fun ways to run into each other on campus, in an immersive online format.
Narrow AI is what we see all around us in computers today — intelligent systems that have been taught or have learned how to carry out specific tasks without being explicitly programmed how to do so.
General AI
General AI is very different and is the type of adaptable intellect found in humans, a flexible form of intelligence capable of learning how to carry out vastly different tasks, anything from haircutting to building spreadsheets or reasoning about a wide variety of topics based on its accumulated experience.
What can Narrow AI do?
There are a vast number of emerging applications for narrow AI:
Interpreting video feeds from drones carrying out visual inspections of infrastructure such as oil pipelines.
Organizing personal and business calendars.
Responding to simple customer-service queries.
Coordinating with other intelligent systems to carry out tasks like booking a hotel at a suitable time and location.
Flagging inappropriate content online, detecting wear and tear in elevators from data gathered by IoT devices.
Generating a 3D model of the world from satellite imagery… the list goes on and on.
What can General AI do?
A survey conducted among four groups of experts in 2012/13 by AI researchers Vincent C Müller and philosopher Nick Bostrom reported a 50% chance that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would be developed between 2040 and 2050, rising to 90% by 2075.
What is machine learning?
What are neural networks?
What are other types of AI?
Another area of AI research is evolutionary computation.
What is fueling the resurgence in AI?
What are the elements of machine learning?
As mentioned, machine learning is a subset of AI and is generally split into two main categories: supervised and unsupervised learning.
Supervised learning
Unsupervised learning
Which are the leading firms in AI?
Which AI services are available?
All of the major cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform — provide access to GPU arrays for training and running machine-learning models, with Google also gearing up to let users use its Tensor Processing Units — custom chips whose design is optimized for training and running machine-learning models.
Which countries are leading the way in AI?
It’d be a big mistake to think the US tech giants have the field of AI sewn up. Chinese firms Alibaba, Baidu, and Lenovo, invest heavily in AI in fields ranging from e-commerce to autonomous driving. As a country, China is pursuing a three-step plan to turn AI into a core industry for the country, one that will be worth 150 billion yuan ($22bn) by the end of 2020 to become the world’s leading AI power by 2030.
How can I get started with AI?
While you could buy a moderately powerful Nvidia GPU for your PC — somewhere around the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or faster — and start training a machine-learning model, probably the easiest way to experiment with AI-related services is via the cloud.
Space is limited so enterprise guests can register here to request an invitation for the below events:
July 14, Brooklyn, 9AM – 7PM
August 11, Austin, 9AM – 7PM
September 8, San Francisco, CA 9AM – 7PM
Campfire brings a new approach to AR/VR collaboration with innovative devices and applications designed to visualize and collaborate with 3D models and data. The company states that the resulting experience helps to advance the visual experience, ease-of-use, and workflow integration for users. Features of the Campfire platform include:
The Campfire Headset, which has a 92° diagonal field-of-view in AR, and a new level of comfort in VR;
The Campfire Console acts like a holographic projector to bring the intuitiveness and robustness of traditional monitors to shared holographic experiences;
The Campfire Pack turns a phone into a hand held controller to reduce the learning curve of dedicated controllers and gestural interfaces;
The Campfire Scenes app enables users to create, share, and control scenes composed from 40+ types of CAD/3D files;
The Campfire Viewer app enables users to work within 3D scenes alone or during video calls using a Campfire Headset, tablet, or phone.
The context of 360-degree video in teacher education
Towards an understanding of pedagogic knowledge and practice
The project
The research project was framed as an interpretive case study undertaken with 23 Year 3 students on the BA primary education studies course; we adopted Stake’s (Stake , 1995) instrumental case study approach using examination of a particular context to facilitate wider understanding. The work was aligned with modules developing students’ English and maths pedagogical content knowledge across Key Stages 1 and 2. It comprised four stages:
STAGE 1: TEACHING RECORDED WITH 360-DEGREE VIDEO
STAGE 2: POST-TEACHING TEACHER REFLECTION
STAGE 3: CREATION OF INTERACTIVE 360-DEGREE EXPERIENCES IN VIRTUAL REALITY
“Our America” and four other projects will evenly split $125,000 from Unity, the company announced Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference, which runs online through Friday. Each project may also get technical, marketing, and fundraising support from Unity.
Ahi Kā Rangers: An ecological mobile game with development led by Māori creators.
Dot’s Home: A game that explores historical housing injustices faced by Black and brown home buyers.
Future Aleppo: A VR experience for children to rebuild homes and cities destroyed by war.
Samudra: A children’s environmental puzzle game that takes the player across a polluted sea to learn about pollution and plastic waste.
The use of AR/VR in educational settings is on the rise, paving the way for new careers and a workforce trained to embrace technology.
If projections stay on track, the global spending on educational AR/VR is expected to rise from $1.8 billion to $12.6 billion over the next four years.
the International Data Corporation (IDC) released a report indicating that the pandemic has fueled an impressive forecast of worldwide expenditures on AR/VR, which are expected to grow from $12 billion in 2020 to $72.8 billion by 2024.
rom completing spinal surgery to training at a high-tech facility, such as the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Davis Global Center, which has AR/VR and holographic technologies among its many offerings.
Information Media and Digital Literacy for GLST 195:Global Society & Citizenship
Instructor: Prof. Chuks Ugochukwu Per Syllabus:
COURSE LEARNING OUTCOMES: The course meets Liberal Education Program (LEP), Goal Area 8: Global Perspective; and Goal Area 9: Ethical and Civic Responsibility objectives Goal Area 8: Global Perspective. Objective: Develop a comparative perspective and understanding of one’s place in a global context.
Students will be able to:
Describe and analyze political, economic, and cultural elements which influence relations of states and societies in their historical and contemporary dimensions.
Demonstrate knowledge of cultural, social, religious and linguistic differences.
Analyze specific international problems, illustrating the cultural,economic, and political differences that affect their solution.
Understand the role of a world citizen and the responsibility world citizens share for their common global future.
Goal Area 9: Ethical and Civic Responsibility Objective: Understand and evaluate ethical or civic issues and theories and participate in active citizenship or ethical judgment
OUR HUSKY COMPACT
Our Husky Compact is a bond shared by St. Cloud State University and its students that a SCSU education will prepare students for a life of growth and fulfillment – intellectually, professionally, and personally. When students graduate with an SCSU education, they will:
Think Creatively and Critically
Seek and Apply Knowledge
Communicate Effectively
Integrate Existing and Evolving Technologies
Engage as a Member of a Diverse and Multicultural World
Act with Personal Integrity and Civic Responsibility
+++++++++++++++++++++
Week ???: Information – Media and Digital Literacy
Mini-Assignment: After reading the information from the links above, take a minute to write out your own definition of 1. Fake News 2. Alternative Facts
Mini-Assignment: After reading the information from the links above, take a minute to write out your own definition of 1. Misinformation 2. Disinformation. What are their main characteristics? How do they differ?
Propaganda
Mini-Assignment: What is Propaganda? How do misinformation, disinformation, fake news and alternative facts fit into the process of propaganda?
Mini-Assignment: Using the information from the links above, can you establish the connection between conspiracy theories, propaganda, mis- and disinformation, fake news, alternative news and social media?
Mini-Assignment: using the info from the links above and/or information you have collected, can you define the role of bots and trolls in social media in regard to propaganda and conspiracy theories?
Mini-Assignment:: based on your own information and experience, as well as the information offered in the links, can you define your own resistance to clickbaits?
In a short paragraph, identify the issues you see as important to address in order to improve your own news literacy. time to accomplish the assignment: ~45 min (including listening to the podcast).
Why is it important to understand these processes?
Assignment: why is it important:
In a short paragraph, share your initial feeling about Fake News / Misinformation / Disinformation. 1. Do you think, it is important at all? 2. If yes, why; if not, why. 3. If yes, what is the importance, the impact? time to accomplish the assignment: ~5-10 min
How to deal with these processes
how do we apply hands-on critical thinking to withstand these processes?
Similarly to the assessment of popular information sources, academia requires vigorous vetting if the sources you will be using for your academic work. In the 21st century, your ability to find information in peer-reviewed journals might not be sufficient to assure accurate and reliable use of information from those resources for your research and writing. After your selection of peer-reviewed literature, you must be able to evaluate and determine the veracity and reliability of those sources. How do you evaluate a source of information to determine if it is appropriate for academic/scholarly use. There is no set “checklist” to complete but below are some criteria to consider when you are evaluating a source.
Here is a short (4 min) video introducing you to the well-known basics for evaluation of academic literature: https://youtu.be/qUd_gf2ypk4
ACCURACY
Does the author cite reliable sources?
How does the information compare with that in other works on the topic?
Can you determine if the information has gone through peer-review?
Are there factual, spelling, typographical, or grammatical errors?
AUDIENCE
Who do you think the authors are trying to reach?
Is the language, vocabulary, style and tone appropriate for intended audience?
What are the audience demographics? (age, educational level, etc.)
Are the authors targeting a particular group or segment of society?
AUTHORITY
Who wrote the information found in the article or on the site?
What are the author’s credentials/qualifications for this particular topic?
Is the author affiliated with a particular organization or institution?
What does that affiliation suggest about the author?
CURRENCY
Is the content current?
Does the date of the information directly affect the accuracy or usefulness of the information?
OBJECTIVITY/BIAS
What is the author’s or website’s point of view?
Is the point of view subtle or explicit?
Is the information presented as fact or opinion?
If opinion, is the opinion supported by credible data or informed argument?
Is the information one-sided?
Are alternate views represented?
Does the point of view affect how you view the information?
PURPOSE
What is the author’s purpose or objective, to explain, provide new information or news, entertain, persuade or sell?
Does the purpose affect how you view the information presented?
In 2021, however, all suggestions above may not be sufficient to distinguish a reliable source of information, even if the article made it through the peer-reviewed process. In time, you should learn to evaluate the research methods of the authors and decide if they are reliable. Same applies for the research findings and conclusions.
Assignment: seeking reliable information
From your syllabus weekly themes: 1. Food; 2. Health; 3. Energy; 4. Environment; 5. Security, chose a topic of your interest.
For example: Food: raising cattle for food contributes to climate changes, because of the methane gas, or Health: COVID is the same (or not the same) as the flu; or Energy: Fossil energy is bad (or good) for the environment; etc.
Please consult with me (email me for a zoom appointment: pmiltenoff@stcloudstate.edu), if you need to discuss the choice and narrowing down of the topic.
Once you decide on the topic, do the research by collecting four sources of information:
The first couple of sources will be from popular media, whereas each of the two articles will be having an opposite approach, arguments and understanding of the issue. For example, one article will claim fossil energy is bad for the environment and the other one will argue fossil fuel has insignificant impact on climate change. You must be able to evaluate the veracity and the leaning of each source. The source can be a newspaper or magazine article, video (TV or Social Media), audio (podcasts, TV, etc.), presentations (PowerPoint, SlideShare, etc.).
Having troubles finding opposing resources? Feel welcome to search for your topic among these news outlets on the conservative side: https://www.conservapedia.com/Top_Conservative_news_websites
and the https://aelieve.com/rankings/websites/category/news-media/top-liberal-websites/
In the same fashion, you will evaluate the second couple of sources from peer-reviewed journals. Each source will have different approach, argument and understanding of the issue and you must evaluate the robustness of the research method.
time to accomplish the assignment: ~30 min
Module 2 (video to introduce students to the readings and expected tasks)
Digital Citizenship, Global Citizenship and Multiculturalism
Assignment:
Global Citizenship and Multiculturalism and Information and Media Literacy
Study the following tweet feed https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2021/02/18/facebook-google-australia/
If the information from the tweet feed is insufficient, research the issue by seeking reliable sources. (In a short paragraph defend your choice of reliable sources).
What do you see as more important issue: the Facebook stance that it can be a subject of Australian law or the Australian government stance that Facebook is interfering in Australian life with its news delivery? Is Facebook a news outlet or a platform for news outlets? Does Facebook need to be regulated? By who; each country do have to regulate Facebook or Facebook needs to be regulated globally?
time to accomplish the assignment: ~30 min
Module 3 (video to introduce students to the readings and expected tasks)
Cabada, E., Kurt, E., & Ward, D. (2021). Constructing a campus-wide infrastructure for virtual reality. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2021.1881680
As an interdisciplinary hub, academic libraries are uniquely positioned to serve the full lifecycle of immersive environment needs, from development through archiving of successful projects. As and informal learning environment that or discipline neutral and high traffic, the academic library can serve as a clearinghouse for experimentation and transmission of best practices across colleges.
these foundational questions:
1. What VR infrastructure needs do faculty and researchers have?
2. Where is campus support lagging?
3. What current partnerships exist?
4. What and where is the campus level of interest in VR?
As marketing for workshops and programs can be challenging, particularly for large institutions, data was collected on where workshop participants learned about Step Into VR. The responses show that users learned of the workshops from a variety of ways with email ( 41 % ) as the most cited method (Figure 4). These marketing emails were sent through distributed listservs that reached nearly the entire campus population. Facebook was called out specifically and represented the second largest marketing method at 29% with the library website, friends, instructors, and digital signage representing the remaining marketing channels.
While new needs continue to emerge, the typical categories of consultation support observed include:
• Recommendations on hardware selection, such as choosing the best VR headset for viewing class content
• Guidance on developing VR applications that incorporate domain-specific curricular content
• Support for curricular integration of VR
• Recommendations on 360 capture media and equipment for documenting environments or experiences, such as the GoPro Fusion and Insta360 One X
• Advice on editing workflows, including software for processing and rendering of 360 content
Alex Fogarty
p. 9
While many library patrons understand the basic concepts of recording video on a camera, 360 cameras present a large divergence from this process in several primary ways. The first is a 360 camera captures every direction at once, so there is no inherent “focus,” and no side of a scene that is not recorded. This significantly changes how someone might compose a video recording, and also adds complexity to post-production, including how to orient viewers within a scene. The second area of divergence is that many of these devices, especially the high-end versions, are recording each lens to a separate data file or memory card and these ftles need to be combined, or “stitched,” at a later time using software specific to the camera. A final concern is that data ftles for high-resolution 3 D capture can be huge, requiring both large amounts of disk space and high-end processors and graphic cards for detailed editing to occur. For example, the Insta360 Pro 2 has 6 sensors all capable of data recording at 120 Mbps for a grand total of 720 Mbps. This translates into 43.2 gigabytes of data for every minute o
