anthropologist about Cold War history
categories: teaching
October 2018 archive
men in humanities
categories: teaching
We Need More Men in the Humanities
Around the turn of the millennium, American society realized a looming crisis: the lack of female representation in STEM fields. But today we are witnessing a crisis of male leadership in a variety of workplaces. From the president to CEOs of major companies to actors and power players in Hollywood, the past several months have exposed the toxic work environments they preside over or worsen in scandal after scandal. Though different in nature, this crisis is of equal importance as the STEM shortage. Yet, to date, no prominent solutions or interventions have been seriously proposed. In contrast, a quick Google search brings up dozens of programs for girls in STEM, but not one national program appears for boys in the arts and humanities.
latest indicators of the demographics and earnings of public school humanities teachers — most of whom are women and many of whom aren’t paid well — underscore that we need more men in the arts and humanities.
The Humanities Indicators report that, “As of 2015, women earned 61 percent of all master’s and professional-practice degrees in the humanities and 54 percent of the doctoral degrees in the field.” And the latest report on public school teachers found that “76 percent of humanities teachers were women, the largest share among subject specialists.” When male K-12 role models barely exist in these disciplines, what message does that send to our young boys and men?
You may have heard of Girls Who Code, the National Girls Collaborative Project, the National Math and Science Initiative, the Women in Engineering Proactive Network or the Million Women Mentors. Those programs are increasing the number of STEM graduates over all and injecting some much-needed diversity into the fields.
But our society suffers when boys and men are actively discouraged from pursuing their interests in the arts and humanities. The cycle of toxic masculinity starts early. Boys are often told not to cry or show emotion. They are socially trained to repress it, and they take pride in this false resilience.
the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. In an annual event called “Cops and Docs,” accomplished medical professionals and highly trained police officers take a group trip to the museum. Over the course of the evening, mixed groups of cops and docs look at paintings, sculptures and other works of art, and they then share their answers to a pretty basic question: What do you see?
Another program, “The Art of Perception,” takes police detectives, FBI agents and high-ranking Secret Service and CIA executives to well-known museums and galleries like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection to observe works by Picasso, Caravaggio, Edward Hopper and other masters. Program creator Amy E. Herman says the exercise is “not about looking at art. It’s about talking about what you see.”
4Humanities, a nonprofit concerned with the role and perception of the humanities in public. For more information, please see: http://www.christinehenseler.com or http://4humanities.org/.
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more on male students in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/09/19/less-boys-more-girls-in-college/
first VR optometry lab
categories: educational technology, instructional technology
University of Waterloo to have first virtual reality optometry lab in Canada
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2018 https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/university-waterloo-have-first-virtual-reality-optometry-lab
A new virtual reality (VR) training lab at the University of Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science, will help Canada’s next generation of optometrists learn how to diagnose vision problems and eye diseases more quickly and accurately.
The new lab, funded through an $800,000 investment by national eye care provider FYidoctors, At a total cost of $1.5 million, the FYidoctors Simulation Lab is the first of its kind in Canada and will ensure the School remains at the forefront in optometric education in North America.
Dr. Al Ulsifer, CEO and Chairman of FYidoctors and Waterloo alumnus, said that this investment isn’t just an investment in the University, but a stake in the future generation of optometrists.
The Equipment:
The lab will initially include 5 Eyesi® Binocular Indirect Ophthalmoscopes (BIO) are state of the art augmented reality simulator for training of retinal examinations and provides a highly realistic and dynamic 3D simulation of the anatomical structures of the eye and ophthalmoscope optics.
For more detailed information visit: https://www.vrmagic.com/simulators/feature-pages/indirect/
Phase two of the lab, to be unveiled at a later date, will include the addition of the Eyesi® Slit Lamp simulators. This technology will allow students to practice basic handling of the device and skills required to conduct a corneal exam, retinal exam and Gonioscopy & Tonometry.
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more on AR Augmented Reality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=augmented+reality
The monopoly of the tech giants
categories: social media
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
multi-user reference support experiences
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/eprint/AU2Q4SJGYQG5YTQ5A9RU/full
Hahn, J. (2018). Virtual reality learning environments | Development of multi-user reference support experiences | Information and Learning Science | Ahead of Print. EmeraldInsight. Retrieved from https://www.emeraldinsight.com/eprint/AU2Q4SJGYQG5YTQ5A9RU/full
case study: an undergraduate senior projects computer science course collaboration whose aim was to develop textual browsing experiences, among other library reference functionality, within the HTC Vive virtual reality (VR) headset. In this case study, readers are introduced to applied uses of VR in service to library-based learning through the research and development of a VR reading room app with multi-user support. Within the VR reading room prototype, users are able to collaboratively explore the digital collections of HathiTrust, highlight text for further searching and discovery and receive consultative research support from a reference specialist through VR.
Library staff met with the project team weekly over the 16 weeks of both semesters to first scope out the functionality of the system and vet requirements.
The library research team further hypothesized that incorporating reference-like support in the VR environment can support library learning. There is ample evidence in the library literature which underscores the importance of reference interactions as learning and instructional experiences for university students
Educational benefits to immersive worlds include offering a deeper presence in engagement with rare or non-accessible artifacts. Sequeira and Morgado (2013, p. 2) describe their Virtual Archeology project as using “a blend of techniques and methods employed by historians and archaeologists using computer models for visualizing cultural artefacts and heritage sites”.
The higher-end graphics cards include devices such as the NVIDIA GeForceTM GTX 1060 or AMD RadeonTM RX 480, equivalent or better. The desktop system that was built for this project used the GeForce GTX 1070, which was slightly above the required minimum specifications.
Collaboration: Library as client.
Specific to this course collaboration, computer science students in their final year of study are given the option of several client projects on which to work. The Undergraduate Library has been a collaborator with senior computer science course projects for several years, beginning in 2012-2013 with mobile application design and chat reference software re-engineering (Hahn, 2015). (My note: Mark Gill, this is where and how Mehdi Mekni, you and I can collaborate)
The hurdles the students had the most trouble with was code integration – e.g. combining various individual software parts towards the end of the semester. The students also were challenged by the public HathiTrust APIs, as the system was developed to call the HathiTrust APIs from within the Unity programming environment and developing API calls in C#. This was a novel use of the HathiTrust search APIs for the students and a new area for the research team as well.
There are alternatives to Unity C# programming, notably WebVR, an open source specification for VR programming on the open web.
A-Frame has seen maturation as a platform agnostic and device agnostic software programming environment. The WebVR webpage notes that the specification supports HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Google Daydream and Google Cardboard (WebVR Rocks, 2018). Open web platforms are consistent with library values and educational goals of sharing work that can be foundational in implementing VR learning experience both in VR environments and shareable on the web, too.
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more on VR in libraries in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality+library
MOOC and online learning discussion
Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum
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Special Guest:
Anant Agarwal, CEO and founder of edX as well as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT
An interactive discussion on MOOCs, online learning, and the goal of 100 million learners by 2022
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The Future Trends Forum welcomes
Anant Agarwal , the founder and CEO of edX, a non-profit venture created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focused on transforming online and on-campus learning through groundbreaking methodologies.
He aims to help bring quality education to everyone, everywhere. Anant has also been a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT for 30 years.
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more on MOOC in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mooc
VR resurgence
State’s universities envision VR resurgence
Chris O’Malley
why the sudden interest in VR and AR after years of hype that failed to live up to expectations?
Heather Bellini, of Goldman Sachs Research, noted in a report last year that faster microprocessors and more powerful graphics cards have allowed more images per second to be delivered since the industry’s potential was hyped a decade ago.
There have also been advancements in AR gear, like glasses that allow vision of the real world but also have data or graphical images projected onto part of the glass.
As such, Goldman Sachs is projecting VR and AR to become an $80 billion market by 2025 – roughly equivalent to the size of the current PC market.
he big problems with VR is “motion to photon latency,” which is the time it takes to turn your head and the screen to refresh at the same rate.
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more on XR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=extended+reality
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality+education
avoid mistakes microcredentialing
The Seven Deadly Sins Of Digital Badging In Education
Troy Markowitz Sep 16, 2018, 09:00am
An academic institution’s digital badging initiative is getting off the ground and students are “earning” badges, or micro-credentials, but are they actually providing value to the student toward his or her future career?
Parth Detroja, bestselling author of Swipe to Unlock
According to a report by the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA), one in five institutions now offers digital badges, but as educators tinker with micro-credentialing, digital badging initiatives at educational institutions can prove worthless to students due to seven common mistakes.
1. (Operational Inefficiency) Making faculty and staff manually issue badges
2. Issuing badges without authentic evidence
3. Issuing badges randomly
4. Expecting students to manually claim badges
5. Hiding badges where employers won’t look
6. Storing badges in a separate silo
7. Issuing badges that don’t match to internships or jobs
Troy Markowitz is Vice President of Academic Partnerships at Portfolium
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more on microcredentialing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredentialing