Mar
2019
Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.”
By Suzanne Scacca June 25, 2018
What is truly impressive, however, is how we are now able to use design to tell a story. In other words, we no longer need to use long scrolls to set up plots or describe what a company does. This is especially great when designing for the mobile experience, which already sets pretty strict limits on how much we can “tell” versus “show.”
Develop user personas before you do anything else when strategizing and planning for a website. Your personas should have a key “problem” they face.
In video game design, there is something known as “ludonarrative dissonance.”
the unpleasant situation where we’re asking players to do something they don’t want to do… or prevent them from doing what they want.
Here’s an interesting fact: people are 22 times more likely to remember data when it’s presented in a narrative form.
The brain digests visual content 60% more quickly than written content, so your web designs and other visuals (like video, animation, and so on) are the keys to doing this.
The Airbnb blog always does a great job of this type of visual storytelling.
As of August 2017, 52.64% of all visits to websites were done via a smartphone. And, starting in 2017, the most popular size for a smartphonewas between five and six inches and will only continue to grow in popularity as the years go on.
That’s not a lot of space to fill with content for the majority of site visitors, is it?
Functional minimalism is already something you’re doing in your own web design efforts, but have you thought about how it can tie into the storytelling aspect as well?
Here are some ways in which you might use symbols to declutter your site:
In video games, you can use light and darkness to draw attention to important pathways. On websites, it’s not always easy to employ the use of lightness or darkness as too-dark of a design or too-light of text could lead to a bad user experience. What you want to do instead is create a “spotlight” of sorts. You can do this by infusing a key area of your design with a dramatic color or a boldly stylized font.
If you’ve ever played a horror video game before, you know how critical the element of sound can be for it.
That said, while you might not be able to direct visitors down the page with the sound of something playing down below, you can use other elements to lead them. For one, you can use interactive elements like animation to draw their attention to where it needs to go.
For some brands, it might make sense to employ the use of an actual mascot to guide visitors through the story.
As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.” Ideally, your web design will do more showing of that story instead of telling, which is how video game design tends to succeed in this matter.
Remember: Storytelling isn’t just relegated to big brands that can weave bright and shiny tales about how consumers’ lives were changed with their products. Nor is it just for video game designers that have hours of gameplay to develop for their audiences. A story simply needs to convey to the end-user how their problem can be fixed by your site’s solution. Through subtle design strategies inspired by video game storytelling techniques, you can effectively share and shape your own story.
Recording of the presentations at the workshop available here:
https://zoom.us/recording/share/YtDl7AA3Te_whtCnZZdv93EiNZbljU7yyzl7ibOEam-wIumekTziMw
Educause Nercomp 2019 conference workshop registration here: https://events.educause.edu/special-topic-events/nercomp-annual-conference/2019/agenda/xr-mission-possible-separate-registration-is-required
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1giTtWQST4FkryY8XA8jJ04Ow8uI4wJiRoYo7I1Ot1U4/edit#
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BArsT4T0y73Ez9X_ZtYpJrUYYJmsKso2IMk_cAOM55Q/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RMzYj2gzKClK-DJ5K7FIIVpUnr1563n7K52XmcpEgjQ/edit
February 5, 2019 https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/02/06/what-is-performance-assessment.html
William Heard Kilpatrick “The Project Method”
Today, despite major advances in ways to measure learning, we still don’t have common definitions for project-based learning or performance assessment.
In the absence of agreed-upon definitions for this evolving field, Education Week reporters developed a glossary
Proficiency-based or competency-based learning: These terms are interchangeable. They refer to the practice of allowing students to progress in their learning as they master a set of standards or competencies. Students can advance at different rates. Typically, there is an attempt to build students’ ownership and understanding of their learning goals and often a focus on “personalizing” students’ learning based on their needs and interests.
Project-based learning: Students learn through an extended project, which may have a number of checkpoints or assessments along the way. Key features are inquiry, exploration, the extended duration of the project, and iteration (requiring students to revise and reflect, for example). A subset of project-based learning is problem-based learning, which focuses on a specific challenge for which students must find a solution.
Standards-based grading: This refers to the practice of giving students nuanced and detailed descriptions of their performance against specific criteria or standards, not on a bell curve. It can stand alone or exist alongside traditional letter grading.
Performance assessment: This assessment measures how well students apply their knowledge, skills, and abilities to authentic problems. The key feature is that it requires the student to produce something, such as a report, experiment, or performance, which is scored against specific criteria.
Portfolio: This assessment consists of a body of student work collected over an extended period, from a few weeks to a year or more. This work can be produced in response to a test prompt or assignment but is often simply drawn from everyday classroom tasks. Frequently, portfolios also contain an element of student reflection.
Exhibition: A type of performance assessment that requires a public presentation, as in the sciences or performing arts. Other fields can also require an exhibition component. Students might be required, for instance, to justify their position in an oral presentation or debate.
Performance task: A piece of work students are asked to do to show how well they apply their knowledge, skills, or abilities—from writing an essay to diagnosing and fixing a broken circuit. A performance assessment typically consists of several performance tasks. Performance tasks also may be included in traditional multiple-choice tests.
When: 1/23/2019 Wed 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM |
Where: Centennial Hall – 100 Lecture Room |
Who: Anyone interested in new methods for teaching |
Kyle Bowen, Director, Teaching and Learning with Technology https://members.educause.edu/kyle-bowen
Jennifer Sparrow, Senior Director of Teaching and Learning With Tech, https://members.educause.edu/jennifer-sparrow
Malcolm Brown, Director, Educause, Learning Initiative
more in this IMB blog on Jennifer Sparrow and digital fluency: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/11/01/preparing-learners-for-21st-century-digital-citizenship/
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Feb 5, 2018 webinar notes
creating a jazz band of one: ThoughSourus
Eureka: machine learning tool, brainstorming engine. give it an initial idea and it returns similar ideas. Like Google: refine the idea, so the machine can understand it better. create a collection of ideas to translate into course design or others.
Netlix:
influencers and microinfluencers, pre- and doing the execution
place to start explore and generate content.
a machine can construct a book with the help of a person. bionic book. machine and person working hand in hand. provide keywords and phrases from lecture notes, presentation materials. from there recommendations and suggestions based on own experience; then identify included and excluded content. then instructor can construct.
Design may be the least interesting part of the book for the faculty.
multiple choice quiz may be the least interesting part, and faculty might want to do much deeper assessment.
use these machine learning techniques to build assessment. how to more effectively. inquizitive is the machine learning
students engagements and similar prompts
presence in the classroom: pre-service teachers class. how to immerse them and practice classroom management skills
https://books.wwnorton.com/books/inquizitive/overview/
First class: marriage btw VR and use of AI – an environment headset: an algorithm reacts how teachers are interacting with the virtual kids. series of variables, oppty to interact with present behavior. classroom management skills. simulations and environments otherwise impossible to create. apps for these type of interactions
facilitation, reflection and research
AI for more human experience, allow more time for the faculty to be more human, more free time to contemplate.
Jason: Won’t the use of AI still reduce the amount of faculty needed?
Christina Dumeng: @Jason–I think it will most likely increase the amount of students per instructor.
Andrew Cole (UW-Whitewater): I wonder if instead of reducing faculty, these types of platforms (e.g., analytic capabilities) might require instructors to also become experts in the various technology platforms.
Dirk Morrison: Also wonder what the implications of AI for informal, self-directed learning?
Kate Borowske: The context that you’re presenting this in, as “your own jazz band,” is brilliant. These tools presented as a “partner” in the “band” seems as though it might be less threatening to faculty. Sort of gamifies parts of course design…?
Dirk Morrison: Move from teacher-centric to student-centric? Recommender systems, AI-based tutoring?
Andrew Cole (UW-Whitewater): The course with the bot TA must have been 100-level right? It would be interesting to see if those results replicate in 300, 400 level courses
Recording available here
Twitter lost 9 million users worldwide in the third quarter of 2018, according to the latest company earnings report.
Facebook grew during the same period in every market except Europe, where it lost a million monthly active users. But it has faced a backlash since a whistle-blower revealed in March 2018 that some 87 million people had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. It was the beginning of a months-long scandal that revealed the network was slow to respond when Russian operatives used it to spread misinformation to influence U.S. elections.
guide (available as PDF here and Google Doc here) to offer some explanations of how to avoid copyright infringement by using media that you can legally re-use for classroom projects including blog posts, web pages, videos, slideshows, and podcasts. The guide also includes 21 places to find media to use in classroom projects.
FOR MORE INFO ON COPYRIGHT AND RELATED (fair use, Creative Commons etc.): contact Rachel Wexelbaum, rwexelabum@stcloudstate.edu
Please have an excellent outline of what “free” means, what is Creative Commons, what is Public Domain + stock sites with images:
and many more at http://blog.bufferapp.com/free-image-sources-list
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more on free visuals in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/04/07/stock-photos/
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/06/01/social-media-and-presentations-free-image-sources/
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/11/01/public-domain-video-clips/
http://www.freeimages.co.uk/index.htm
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/2015-02-27/20-sites-get-free-stock-images-commercial-use
NICHOLAS THOMPSON AND Issy Lapowsky 12.17.18
https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ira-propaganda-senate-report/
THERE’S A MEME on Instagram, circulated by a group called “Born Liberal.” “Born Liberal” was a creation of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian propaganda wing
Conversations around the IRA’s operations traditionally have focused on Facebook and Twitter, but like any hip millennial, the IRA was actually most obsessive about Instagram.
the IRA deployed 3,841 accounts, including several personas that “regularly played hashtag games.” That approach paid off; 1.4 million people engaged with the tweets, leading to nearly 73 million engagements. Most of this work was focused on news, while on Facebook and Instagram, the Russians prioritized “deeper relationships,” according to the researchers. On Facebook, the IRA notched a total of 3.3 million page followers, who engaged with their politically divisive content 76.5 million times. Russia’s most popular pages targeted the right wing and the black community. The trolls also knew their audiences; they deployed Pepe memes at pages intended for right-leaning millennials, but kept them away from posts directed at older conservative Facebook users. Not every attempt was a hit; while 33 of the 81 IRA Facebook pages had over 1,000 followers, dozens had none at all.
The report also points out new links between the IRA’s pages and Wikileaks, which helped disseminate hacked emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta
Russian presence unrelated to the relatively small ad spend that Facebook executives pointed to as the story first unfolded, in what the report authors describe as an attempt to downplay the problem.
“While many people think of memes as “cat pictures with words,” the Defense Department and DARPA have studied them for years as a powerful tool of cultural influence, capable of reinforcing or even changing values and behavior.
“over the past five years, disinformation has evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war.” And yet, rather than fighting back effectively, Americans are battling each other over what to do about it.
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memetic warfare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetic_warfare
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A year after the Meme Warfare Center proposal was published, DARPA, the Pentagon agency that develops new military technology, commissioned a four-year study of memetics. The research was led by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, founder of the Robotic Technology Institute, and an academic with a background in physics and cybernetics.
Finkelstein’s study of “Military Memetics” centered on a basic problem in the field, determining “whether memetics can be established as a science with the ability to explain and predict phenomena.” It still had to be proved, in other words, that memes were actual components of reality and not just a nifty concept with great marketing.
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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media