Author Archive

Global world affairs

Former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel‘The World Is Changing Dramatically’

Former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel speaks to DER SPIEGEL about his call for the country to take on a new global role and why Germans are underestimating the dangers posed by the current geopolitical situation.

Interview Conducted by  and Britta Sandberg September 24, 2018  04:32 PM

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/interview-with-former-german-foreign-minister-sigmar-gabriel-a-1229393.html

Now Trump is criticizing us for not spending enough money on our military. Part of the truth, however, is that the U.S. wanted exactly that for a very long time. They were worried that too much military power in Germany could provoke the next world war. I once told Tillerson, I don’t know what you are complaining about, you raised us for 70 years to be peaceniks. Now that’s what we are and you’re surprised. He laughed.

Some people want Germany to be something like a large Switzerland, but we are simply too big. We can’t just stand on the sidelines. Because of the Assad regime’s bombs, almost a million refugees were standing in front of our door. It’s not just about military operations, but about crisis prevention, diplomacy, economic development. Germany shouldn’t transform from a geopolitical abstainer to an influential geo-strategist. I wish that we would return to once again having strategic debates — no matter the result. It is important to prepare the public for the fact that the world has changed.

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more on political science in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=political+science

Social Media to organize info

Rethinking Social Media to Organize Information and Communities eCourse

https://www.alastore.ala.org/content/rethinking-social-media-organize-information-and-communities-ecourse

Tired of hearing all the reasons why you should be using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other popular social media tools? Perhaps it’s time to explore social media tools in a supportive and engaging environment with a keen eye toward using those tools more effectively in your work.

Join us and social media guru and innovator Paul Signorelli in this four-week, highly-interactive eCourse as he explores a variety of social media tools in terms of how they can be used to organize information and communities. Together, you will survey and use a variety of social media tools, such as Delicious, Diigo, Facebook, Goodreads, Google Hangouts, LibraryThing, Pinterest, Twitter, and more! You will also explore how social media tools can be used to organize and disseminate information and how they can be used to foster and sustain communities of learning.

After participating in this eCourse, you will have an:

  • Awareness of how social media tools can be used to support the work you do with colleagues and other community stakeholders in fostering engagement through onsite and online communities
  • Increased ability to identify, explore, and foster the use of social media tools that support you and those you serve
  • Increased ability to use a variety of social media tools effectively in your day-to-day work

Part 1: Using Social Media Tools to Organize and Provide Access to Information
Delicious, Diigo, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and other tagging sites

Part 2: Organizing, Marketing, and Running Programs
Facebook, Pinterest, and other tools for engagement

Part 3: Expanding and Analyzing Community Impact
Twitter, Storify, and other microblogging resources

Part 4: Sustaining Engagement with Community Partners
Coordinating your presence and interactions across a variety of social media tools

trainer-instructional designer-presenter-consultant. Much of his work involves fostering community and collaboration face-to-face and online through libraries, other learning organizations, and large-scale community-based projects including San Francisco’s Hidden Garden Steps project, which has its origins in a conversation that took place within a local branch library. He remains active on New Media Consortium Horizon Report advisory boards/expert panels, in the Association for Talent Development (ATD–formerly the American Society for Training & Development), and with the American Library Association; adores blended learning; and remains a firm advocate of developing sustainable onsite and online community partnerships that meet all partners’ needs. He is co-author of Workplace Learning & Leadership with Lori Reed and author of the upcoming Change the World Using Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield, Autumn 2018).

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more on social media in libraries
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media+library

 

ALA VR in libraries

Virtual and Augmented Reality in Libraries

Hannah PopeLibrary Technology Reports

Hannah Pope is the Emerging Technologies Librarian at the Belk Library and Information Commons at Appalachian State University. She has been working with virtual and augmented reality devices for almost two years. She continues to grow the program at her library and frequently works with faculty members to incorporate virtual and augmented reality into their curriculum by providing avenues for students to experience curated applications. Pope has an MS library science degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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more on VR in libraries in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality+library

Identity Politics New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy

Fukuyama, F. (2018). Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy. Foreign Affairs97(5), 90–114. Retrieved from http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dkeh%26AN%3d131527250%26site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite

For the most part, twentieth-century politics was defined by economic issues. On the left, politics centered on workers, trade unions, social welfare programs, and redistributive policies. The right, by contrast, was primarily interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector. Politics today, however, is defined less by economic or ideological concerns than by questions of identity. Now, in many democracies, the left focuses less on creating broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and lgbt people. The right, meanwhile, has redefined its core mission as the patriotic protection of traditional national identity, which is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity,
or religion.

Again and again, groups have come to believe that their identities—whether national, religious, ethnic, sexual, gender, or otherwise—are not receiving adequate recognition. Identity politics is no longer a minor phenomenon, playing out only in the rarified confines of university campuses or providing a backdrop to low-stakes skirmishes in “culture wars” promoted by the mass media. Instead, identity politics has become a master concept that explains much of what is going on in global affairs.

Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities,
threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure. Unless such liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity,
they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict.

But in liberal democracies, equality under the law does not result in economic or social equality. Discrimination continues to exist against a wide variety of groups, and market economies produce large inequalities of outcome.

And the proportion of white working-class children growing up in single-parent families rose from 22 percent in 2000 to 36 percent in 2017.

Nationalists tell the disaffected that they have always been core members of a great
nation and that foreigners, immigrants, and elites have been conspiring to hold them down.

Firefox Reality

available for Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream

From the moment you open the browser, you will be presented with immersive experiences that can be enjoyed on a VR headset directly from the Firefox Reality browser. We are working with creators around the world to bring an amazing collection of games, videos, environments, and experiences that can be accessed directly from the home screen.

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more on VR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality+education

blockchain and refugees

blockchain for refugees

As Norwegian Refugee Council research found, 70 percent of Syrian refugees lack basic identification and documents showing ownership of property.

The global passport

Host nations certainly has a share in the damage, as they face problems concerning the accessibility of vital information about the newcomers — dealing with the undocumented refugee, the immigration service can’t gain the information about his/her health status, family ties or criminal record, or verify any other vital data that helps them make a decision. Needless to say, this may lead to the designation of refugee status being exploited by economic migrants, fugitives or even the war criminals that caused the mass displacement to begin with.

Another important issue is data security. Refugees’ personal identities are carefully re-established with the support of clever biometric systems set up by the U.N. Agency for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR registers millions of refugees and maintains those records in a database. But the evidence suggests that centralized systems like this could be prone to attacks. As a report on UNCHR’s site notes, Aadhaar — India’s massive biometric database and the largest national database of people in the world — has suffered serious breaches, and last year, allegations were made that access was for sale on the internet for as little as $8

Finland, a country with a population of 5.5 million, cannot boast huge numbers of refugees. For 2018, it set a quota of 750 people, mainly flying from Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s way less than neighboring Sweden, which promised to take in 3,400. Nevertheless, the country sets a global example of the use of effective technology in immigration policy: It’s using blockchain to help the newcomers get on their feet faster.

The system, developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI, maintains a full analogue of a bank account for every one of its participants.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, the billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros revealed that his structures already use a blockchain in immigration policies

In 2017, Accenture and Microsoft Corp. teamed up to build a digital ID network using blockchain technology, as part of a U.N.-supported project to provide legal identification to 1.1 billion people worldwide with no official documents.

a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with blockchain platform IOTA to explore how the technology could increase efficiency.

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more on blockchain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain

Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

https://moz.com/blog/absolute-beginners-guide-to-google-analytics

Kristi Hines June 24th, 2015

  • How many people visit my website?
  • Where do my visitors live?
  • Do I need a mobile-friendly website?
  • What websites send traffic to my website?
  • What marketing tactics drive the most traffic to my website?
  • Which pages on my website are the most popular?
  • How many visitors have I converted into leads or customers?
  • Where did my converting visitors come from and go on my website?
  • How can I improve my website’s speed?
  • What blog content do my visitors like the most?

Google Analytics account. If you have a primary Google account that you use for other services like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google+, or YouTube, then you should set up your Google Analytics using that Google account. Or you will need to create a new one.

Big tip: don’t let your anyone (your web designer, web developer, web host, SEO person, etc.) create your website’s Google Analytics account under their own Google account so they can “manage” it for you. If you and this person part ways, they will take your Google Analytics data with them, and you will have to start all over.

go to Google Analytics and click the Sign into Google Analytics button.

Google Analytics offers hierarchies to organize your account. You can have up to 100 Google Analytics accounts under one Google account. You can have up to 50 website properties under one Google Analytics account. You can have up to 25 views under one website property.

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more on Google Analytics in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=google+analytics

 

Games and Online Interactive Content

Wednesday, 11/21/2018 – Wednesday, 12/12/2018

Looking for a beginner’s crash course in game making software and process? Games can be an excellent teaching resource, and game development is easier than ever. Whether you’re looking to develop your own teaching resources or run a game-making program for users, this course will give you the information you need to choose the most appropriate software development tool, structure your project, and accomplish your goals. Plain language, appropriate for absolute beginners, and practical illustrative examples will be used. Participants will receive practical basic exercises they can complete in open source software, as well as guides to advanced educational resources and available tutorials.

This is a blended format web course:

The course will be delivered as 4 separate live webinar lectures, one per week on Wednesday November 21 and then repeating Wednesdays, November 28, December 5 and December 12 at Noon Central time. You do not have to attend the live lectures in order to participate. The webinars will be recorded and distributed through the web course platform for asynchronous participation. The web course space will also contain the exercises and discussions for the course.

Learning Outcomes

  • Participants will be able to name five different software tools available to assist them or their users in creating games and interactive web content, as well as identify the required knowledge and skills to effectively use each program.
  • Participants will be able to effectively structure the development process of a game from brainstorming to launch.
  • Participants will be able to identify and articulate areas in which games can increase educational effectiveness and provide practical, desirable skills.

Who Should Attend

Library staff looking to develop educational games or run game making programs for users (including tween or teen users).

Instructors

Ruby Warren

Ruby Warren believes in the power of play, and that learning is a lot more effective when it’s interactive. She is the User Experience Librarian at the University of Manitoba Libraries, where she recently completed a research leave focused on educational game prototype development, and has been playing games from around the time she developed object permanence.

<Cost

  • LITA Member: $135
  • ALA Member: $195
  • Non-member: $260

Moodle and Webinar login info will be sent to registrants the week prior to the start date.

How to Register

Register here, courses are listed by date and you need to log in.

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more on games and libraries in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=games+library

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