Stanford University report found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers didn’t understand that the phrase “sponsored content” meant “advertising.”
Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research. [Some places to look: Wikipedia, Snopes, Politifact and NPR’s own Fact Check website.]
Go upstream to the source: Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information. Is it a reputable scientific journal? Is there an original news media account from a well-known outlet? If that’s not immediately apparent, then move to step 3.
Read laterally: Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.
Circle back: If you get lost, or hit dead ends or find yourself going down a rabbit hole, back up and start over.
Every number released in conjunction with Fortnite is staggering, even within the context of a $137 billion industry. On the same day as its Fortnite Pro-Am tournament at E3, the video-game industry’s largest convention, the game was released for the Nintendo Switch, and within 24 hours it had been downloaded more than 2 million times. Analysts estimate that Fortnite is currently raking in more than $300 million a month, and has made its maker, Epic Games, more than $1.2 billion since its battle royale mode launched in late September.
Fortnite is virtually identical on every platform, and players can move from their PlayStation to their phone and back without missing a beat. Milligan first heard about the game back in September. “It was the next new game, like when Minecraft came out, but way more popular.”
The cadence of a Fortnite game is that nothing is happening and then, very suddenly, everything is happening. The game has three main modes: solo (every player for themselves), duos (teams of two), and squads (teams of three or four), but there are consistently around 100 players in every session.
Even when kids aren’t playing Fortnite, they’re talking about Fortnite or finding ways to profit from it.
Video games pioneered the dopamine-rush cycle. Using bright graphics and sound effects to make players feel continual accomplishment, arcade games were honed to make players feel like they needed to feed in just one more quarter over and over again — slot machines that kept people entranced without ever having to pay out. The addictive core of video-gaming never went away, even as games became more complicated: Every win, every high score, every 100 percent completion, every secret and Easter egg was a chance for a little rush of accomplishment and satisfaction.
And then mobile products learned to do the same thing. Give people goals, reward them with flashes of color, and you could entrance them into something resembling addiction. This was called, tellingly and unsurprisingly, “gamification”: Treat every app and every activity as a video game, with scores, prizes, and leaderboards. Snapchat rewarded users who talked every day with “streaks”; the exercise app Strava allowed you to compete with other joggers and earn badges; Foursquare turned the entire world into a game of king of the hill.
The process has come full circle. Fortnite is a gamified video game.
The crackdown on a new generation of Russian musicians began in late November of 2018, when Dmitry Kuznetsov, a 25-year-old rapper known as Husky, was prevented from performing in the southern city of Krasnodar and arrested. His arrest set off a wave of protest by fellow rappers that eventually came to the attention of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Two years ago, Russians were surprised when young protesters turned out in masses for anti-government demonstrations, called for by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who communicates directly with his supporters via YouTube and Twitter.
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Putin wants government to “take charge” of rap music
Rap and other modern [forms of art] are rested upon three pillars – sex, drugs and protest,” he (Putin) said. “I am most worried about drugs. This is the way towards the degradation of a nation.”
Norman Stone’s sparkling new book, Hungary: A Short History, is a warning against ignoring history. It presents a country that never quite “caught up” with the West, and therefore never “settled down” to a calm post-nationalist existence. The modernising influence of industrialisation has always been subsumed in the problem of borders, religions, languages, and nationalities.
We are exploring the very same topic. We have been using Credly for the past year or so to give badges to faculty who complete courses in a 3 course series we developed for effective online teaching.
That said, we are a Canvas school and, as we explore our own pilot program, are looking at Badgr’s badging solution (which is free to use, at least for Canvas, maybe all though?) as well as their Pathway’s solution for stacking badges and providing a view of that badge path for participants.
It’s is all very early stage but those are the two platforms and vendors we have focused our time currently.
the emphasis (strong side) is the streamlining of the different offices and activities on campus
levels of proficiency is very much geared toward undergrads
aspects of gamification, but no peer support credit/badge
U of Pittsburgh – OCC outside the class curriculum
Monclair U (NJ second largest):
U of Wyoming: after level 3, career coach does storytelling appointment.
pilot is $5K and institutional can vary between $10-15K
Remind, emailed users late Monday to tell them that Verizon had decided to treat their messages as spam — a move that would make it impossible to continue distributing messages for free. The change would affect 7 million of the service’s 31 million users
Remind officials said the company had been trying to negotiate with Verizon since last summer, when the company first announced the rate increase. (They also said they are locked in a similar conflict with a telecommunications company in Canada.)
Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum with Guest Sue Bohle, Serious Play Conference
An interactive discussion on gaming in education
January 17, 2 – 3 PM (EST)
Sue Bohle, Executive Director, Producer, Serious Play Conference, for a lively discussion on gaming in education.
Sue is a leader in the space and has seen tremendous growth and potential of serious games in corporate training and eLearning. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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notes from the webinar:
i had issues connecting and the streams of the guest speaker (Sue) and Bryan will stall when each of them were talking.
examples for formally learning through games
I’d love to hear Sue chat about: Students as game authors, what do you do to encourage reflection on game events?
Dan LaSota:
Is there any intersection between “Minds on Fire” from Mark Carnes, https://reacting.barnard.edu and your conference?
Dan LaSota
To me “simulation” means some scenario that can be rapidly run again and again, with the user/player tweaking variables and seeing what happens. If it’s “fun” there is more of an intersection with games. If not so fun, it might be considered by most more of a model. Computers can and do help with the iteration process because they can reset to T=0 much quicker than human players. Although “role play” is also a kind of simulation.
Facebook group the Tribe:
Minecraft in education.
John Gould with Drexel: he is going now after the school boards about games in education
Noreen Barajas Horizon Project Director, Educause
AI book integrated in junior high Seattle Michelle Zimmerman, article in Forbes,
Keven Diel Lockhead expert on AI, military
gaming as a way to bypassing the metacognitive (thinking about thinking). Without teaching about learning. Number of libraries Nebraska State: games are developed by libraries.
Tobee Soultie gaming industry. National Intelligence Agency for first response and refurbished for teachers and bullying.
The overuse of technology has overtaken drugs, sex and bullying as the biggest parental worry, according to the annual Brigham Young and Deseret News American Family Survey.
The American Academy of Pediatrics supports this idea of joint media engagement, basically engaging alongside your kids, as you suggest, whether with games, videos or social media. But isn’t there such a thing as too much screen time?
When people talk about addiction, I think it’s weird we want to blame the digital media because you can form unhealthy relationships with lots of things — food, sex, work, money.
We’re using screens as a babysitter.
There’s an interesting study that recently came out that looked at how parents and young children were interacting around devices. It showed that this joint media engagement is not happening.
I feel like part of the problem is that parents are getting essentially abstinence-only education, like in sex education. The research on that says, if all you hear is, “Just say no,” it has no positive effects.
Nobody actually thinks we’re going to have a world without [tech]. They’re aiming for that healthy relationship. A healthy relationship is you being able to have the autonomy to make good decisions.