Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
http://www.differencebetween.net/language/grammar-language/difference-between-such-as-and-like/
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more on proofreading academic writing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proofreading
Looking forward to discussion in tonight’s technology seminar.
We’re exploring disruptive innovation, both pro and con.— Bryan Alexander (@BryanAlexander) September 24, 2019
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine
Michael Porter, a professor at the Harvard Business School. The scholar who in some respects became his successor, Clayton M. Christensen, entered a doctoral program at the Harvard Business School in 1989 and joined the faculty in 1992. Christensen was interested in why companies fail. In his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he argued that, very often, it isn’t because their executives made bad decisions but because they made good good decisions, the same kind of good decisions that had made those companies successful for decades. (The “innovator’s dilemma” is that “doing the right thing is the wrong thing.”)
Christensen called “disruptive innovation”: the selling of a cheaper, poorer-quality product that initially reaches less profitable customers but eventually takes over and devours an entire industry.
Christensen has co-written books urging disruptive innovation in higher education (“The Innovative University”), public schools (“Disrupting Class”), and health care (“The Innovator’s Prescription”).
Startups are ruthless and leaderless and unrestrained, and they seem so tiny and powerless, until you realize, but only after it’s too late, that they’re devastatingly dangerous: Bang! Ka-boom! Think of it this way: the Times is a nation-state; BuzzFeed is stateless. Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.
The word “innovate”—to make new—used to have chiefly negative connotations: it signified excessive novelty, without purpose or end.
Joseph Schumpeter, in his landmark study of business cycles, used the word to mean bringing new products to market, a usage that spread slowly, and only in the specialized literatures of economics and business.
Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact.
Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments.
Like the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the meltdown didn’t dim the fervor for disruption; instead, it fuelled it, because these products of disruption contributed to the panic on which the theory of disruption thrives.
People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either.
Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.
Christensen and Eyring’s recommendations for the disruption of the modern university include a “mix of face-to-face and online learning.” The publication of “The Innovative University,” in 2011, contributed to a frenzy for Massive Open Online Courses, or moocs, at colleges and universities across the country, including a collaboration between Harvard and M.I.T., which was announced in May of 2012. Shortly afterward, the University of Virginia’s panicked board of trustees attempted to fire the president, charging her with jeopardizing the institution’s future by failing to disruptively innovate with sufficient speed;
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more on Clayton Christensen in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=clayton
I was beginning to think Foucault’s writings on the “disciplinary society” were becoming irrelevant. But then my niece started the 5th grade. Her teachers add and subtract behavioral points in an app shared with her mom. Note that she lost a point for using the restroom today. pic.twitter.com/3nXJ9Mdbyo
— Josh Seim (@JoshSeim) September 27, 2019
with Melanie Guentzel, Director of Graduate Student Services, mjguentzel@stcloudstate.edu
when: Tue, Jan. 22, 2 PM
where: Plymouth campus on Zoom: https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/438287799
who: new international graduate students at SCSU
students in Engineering Management, Regulatory Affairs, and Applied Clinical Research.
Access the library from a distance: https://www.stcloudstate.edu/library/
Research and Writing Tips
Digital fluency
Jennifer Sparrow Dec 13, 2018
Research has shown that 50 percent of college students spend a minimum of five hours each week on social media. These social channels feed information from news outlets, private bloggers, friends and family, and myriad other sources that are often curated based on the user’s interests. But what really makes social media a tricky resource for students and educators alike is that most companies don’t view themselves as content publishers. This position essentially absolves social media platforms of the responsibility to monitor what their users share, and that can allow false even harmful information to circulate.
“How do we help students become better consumers of information, data, and communication?” Fluency in each of these areas is integral to 21st century-citizenry, for which we must prepare students.
In English 202C, a technical writing course, students use our Invention Studio and littleBits to practice inventing their own electronic devices, write instructions for how to construct the device, and have classmates reproduce the invention.
The proliferation of mobile devices and high-speed Wi-Fi have made videos a common outlet for information-sharing. To keep up with the changing means of communication, Penn State campuses are equipped with One Button Studio, where students can learn to produce professional-quality video. With this, students must learn how to take information and translate it into a visual medium in a way that will best benefit the intended audience. They can also use the studios to hone their presentation or interview skills by recording practice sessions and then reviewing the footage.
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more on digital media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+media
Will teachers use @Google‘s new anti-plagiarism tool to target cheaters—or tee up teachable moments about fair use and proper citation?https://t.co/1pDnqutyNt
— Education Week (@educationweek) August 31, 2019
Will teachers use @Google's new anti-plagiarism tool to target cheaters—or tee up teachable moments about fair use and proper citation?https://t.co/1pDnqutyNt
— Education Week (@educationweek) August 31, 2019
Ed-tech historian and critic Audrey Watters, for example, said plagiarism-detection software in general frames all writers as potential cheaters, undermining the trust that is essential to strong student-teacher relationships. She said the companies making the software tend to accept as given that most writing assignments are so cookie-cutter that students can reasonably consider copying someone else’s work a viable strategy.
My note: the paragraph above reflects my deep personal belief and most of the information and notes in this blog regarding the “automation” of plagiarism detection
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more on plagiarism in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=plagiarism
“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.”
“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.
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (public library).
the fundamental difference between the function of philosophy and that of art — one being to clarify and concretize, the other to mystify and expand.
A century after Nietzsche examined the power of language to both conceal and reveal truth, and several years before Oliver Sacks’s trailblazing insight into narrative as the pillar of identity, Murdoch considers how we, as storytelling creatures, use language in the parallel arts of literature and living
Hemingway’s admonition against the dangers of ego in creative work. distinguish a recognisable style from a personal presence.
bridging William James’s landmark assertion that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” and Tolstoy’s insistence that “emotional infectiousness” is what separates good art from the bad
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.
In consonance with John F. Kennedy’s exhortation to a propaganda-smothered society — “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”
(My note: Lenin – Art is always political. He did not distinguish art and propaganda. http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1924-2/socialist-cinema/socialist-cinema-texts/lenin-on-the-most-important-of-the-arts/)
after the teenage Sylvia Plath precociously observed that “once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader,”Murdoch examines the laboratory for reflection and interpretation
My note: on Sylvia Plath, see Elif Shafak’s Black Milk: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9923549-black-milk
Susan Sontag’s beautiful wisdom on storytelling and what it means to be a moral human being, Murdoch weighs the relationship between morality and truth, as mediated by language
Rebecca West on storytelling as a survival mechanism,
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more on storytelling in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=storytelling
Copyediting is the process of checking for mistakes, inconsistencies, and repetition. During this process, your manuscript is polished for publication.
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more on dissertation writing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=dissertation+writing
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft June 3, 2019
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-machine-sensors.html
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS have developed AIfES, an artificial intelligence (AI) concept for microcontrollers and sensors that contains a completely configurable artificial neural network. AIfES is a platform-independent machine learning library which can be used to realize self-learning microelectronics requiring no connection to a cloud or to high-performance computers. The sensor-related AI system recognizes handwriting and gestures, enabling for example gesture control of input when the library is running on a wearable.
a machine learning library programmed in C that can run on microcontrollers, but also on other platforms such as PCs, Raspberry PI and Android.
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more about machine learning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=machine+learning
| Published in Interesting Facts | Written by Patricia May
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-major-differences-between-schooling-in-Europe-vs-the-US
Kelly Mae Ross, Staff Writer Aug. 11, 2017, at 7:00 a.m. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/2017-08-11/how-bachelors-degree-programs-in-the-us-and-europe-differ
Schools and class in Europe and America
The secret to a sound American education? Have rich parents
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2010/03/29/schools-and-class-in-europe-and-america
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West, M. (2012). Global lessons for improving U.S. Education: international comparisons of student achievement illustrate the gains possible for students in the United States and offer insights on how to achieve them. Issues in Science and Technology, 28(3), 37–44. https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=gale_ofa287392223&context=PC&vid=01MNPALS_SCS:SCS&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&tab=Everything&lang=en
Launched in 2000 as a project of the OECD, the PISA is administered every three years to nationally representative samples of students in each OECD country and in a growing number of partner countries and subnational units such as Shanghai. The 74 education systems that participated in the latest PISA study, conducted during 2009, represented more than 85% of the global economy and included virtually all of the United States’ major trading partners, making it a particularly useful source of information on U.S. students’ relative standing.
The United States’ historical advantage in terms of educational attainment has long since eroded, however. U.S. high-school graduation rates peaked in 1970 at roughly 80% and have declined slightly since, a trend often masked in official statistics by the growing number of students receiving alternative credentials, such as a General Educational Development (GED) certificate.
in many respects the U.S. higher education system remains the envy of the world. Despite recent concerns about rapidly increasing costs, declining degree completion rates, and the quality of instruction available to undergraduate students, U.S. universities continue to dominate world rankings of research productivity. The 2011 Academic Rankings of World Universities, an annual publication of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, placed eight U.S. universities within the global top 10, 17 within the top 20, and 151 within the top 500. A 2008 RAND study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense found that 63% of the world’s most highly cited academic papers in science and technology were produced by researchers based in the United States. Moreover, the United States remains the top destination for graduate students studying outside of their own countries, attracting 19% of all foreign students in 2008. This rate is nine percentage points higher than the rate of the closest U.S. competitor, the United Kingdom.
Abel, H. (1959). Polytechnische Bildung und Berufserziehung in internationaler Sicht. International Review of Education / Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft / Revue Internationale de l’Education, 5(4), 369–382. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01417254
Peterson, P., Woessmann, L., Hanushek, E., & Lastra-Anadon, C. (2011). Are U.S students ready to compete? The latest on each state’s international standing.(feature). Education Next, 11(4), 50–59.
Student Proficiency on NAEP
At one time it was left to teachers and administrators to decide exactiy what level of math proficiency should be expected of students. But, increasingly, states, and the federal government itself, have established proficiency levels that students are asked to reach. A national proficiency standard was set by the board that governs the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and generally known as the nation’s report card.
a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA. The crosswalk is made possible by the fact that representative (but separate) samples of the high-school graduating Class of 2011 took the NAEP and PISA math and reading examinations. NAEP tests were taken in 2007 when the Class of 2011 was in 8th grade and PISA tested 15-year-olds in 2009, most of whom are members of the Class of 2011. Given that NAEP identified 32 percent of U.S. 8th-grade students as proficient in math, the PISA equivalent is estimated by calculating the minimum score reached by the top-performing 32 percent of U.S. students participating in the 2009 PISA test. (See methodological sidebar for further details.)
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