Archive of ‘Library and information science’ category

zSpace and Labster

https://zspace.com

zSpace is a technology firm based in Sunnyvale, California that combine elements of virtual and augmented reality in a computer. zSpace allows people to interact with simulated objects in virtual environments as if they are real.[1][2][3]

zSpace is known for its progressive developments in human-computer interaction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZSpace_(company)

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https://www.labster.com/

Give your students the chance to learn science in an engaging and effective way with Labster’s virtual labs.

Labster offers students a true-to-life lab experience at a fraction of the cost of a real lab.

You can supplement your teaching with virtual labs to prepare your students for the wet lab, to help them understand difficult concepts, to engage them with your science course, and more.

n our virtual lab simulations, students work through real-life case stories, interact with lab equipment, perform experiments and learn with theory and quiz questions.

Thanks to engaging 3D animations, students can explore life science at the molecular level and look inside the machines they are operating.   https://www.labster.com/why-choose-labster/

Integrates with D2L and the major LMS

a technologically literate graduate

Profile of a technologically literate graduate

By Jorge Valenzuela 1/7/2019

https://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=2329

When school leaders set out to create a profile of their ideal graduate, many trip up on defining technological literacy and subsequently struggle to select the right edtech to get students there.

digital equity and digital citizenship

use your divisionwide or statewide profile of a graduate.

STEP 1: Have a model and unpack it

In my state of Virginia (like many other states), we focus on these four:

  • Content knowledge
  • Workplace skills
  • Community engagement and civic responsibility
  • Career exploration

STEP 2: Tag team with colleagues to plan instruction

In step one we created our graduate profile by brainstorming and identifying both the personal and professional knowledge and skills that our future graduates need. Now it’s time to formulate plans to bring the profile to fruition. To ensure student success, implementation should take place in the classroom and tap the expertise of our colleagues.

Student  success is never due to one teacher, but a collaborative effort.

STEP 3: Identify and leverage the right industry partners

Technological literacy requires students to create authentic products using appropriate edtech, therefore developing technologically literate graduates should not be left entirely to teachers and schools.

Soliciting the help of our industry and business partners is so crucial to this process

Step 4: Create career pathways in schools

schools create systemic K-12 career pathways — or pipelines — for their students and give teachers ample time and space to plan and work together to maximize the learning aligned to well-developed graduate profiles.

Online course, storytelling, data

Online Course | A Thousand Words and a Picture: Storytelling with Data

https://events.educause.edu/courses/2019/a-thousand-words-and-a-picture-storytelling-with-data

Part 1: March 13, 2019 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Part 2: March 20, 2019 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Part 3: March 27, 2019 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET

Overview

A picture is worth a thousand words, but developing a data picture worth a thousand words involves careful thought and planning. IT leaders are often in need of sharing their story and vision for the future with campus partners and campus leadership. Delivering this message in a compelling way takes a significant amount of thought and planning. This session will take participants through the process of constructing their story, how to (and how not to) incorporate data and anecdotes effectively, how to design clear data visualizations, and how to present their story with confidence.

Learning Objectives

During this course, participants will:

  • Develop a story that elicits a specific outcome
  • Identify and effectively use data elements to support a compelling story
  • Learn how to tell your story in a clear and effective way

NOTE: Participants will be asked to complete assignments in between the course segments that support the learning objectives stated below and will receive feedback and constructive critique from course facilitators on how to improve and shape their work.

Facilitator

Leah LangLeah Lang, Director of Analytics Services, EDUCAUSE

Leah Lang leads EDUCAUSE Analytics Services, a suite of data services, products, and tools that can be used to inform decision-making about IT in higher education. The foundational service in this suite is the EDUCAUSE Core Data Services (CDS), higher education’s comprehensive IT benchmarking data service.

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more Educause webinars in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=educause+webinar

Digital Destruction of Democracy

The Digital Destruction of Democracy

ANYA SCHIFFRIN JANUARY 21, 2019

https://prospect.org/article/digital-destruction-democracy

Anya Schiffrin is an adjunct faculty member at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She worked in Hanoi from 1997 to 1999 as the bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics
By Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, & Hal Roberts
Oxford University Press
A Harvard law professor who is a well-known theorist of the digital age, Benkler and colleagues have produced an authoritative tome that includes multiple taxonomies and literature reviews as well as visualizations of the flow of disinformation.
clickbait fabricators
white supremacist and alt-right trolls
a history of the scholarship on propaganda, reminding the reader that much of the discussion began in the 1930s.
Benkler’s optimistic 2007 book, The Wealth of Networks, predicted that the Internet would bring people together and transform the way information is created and spread. Today, Benkler is far less sanguine and has become one of the foremost researchers of disinformation networks.
Fox News, BreitbartThe Daily CallerInfoWars, and Zero Hedge
As a result, mainstream journalists repeat and amplify the falsehoods even as they debunk them.
There is no clear line, they argue, between Russian propaganda, Breitbart lies, and the Trump victory. They add that Fox News is probably more influential than Facebook.
after George Soros gave a speech in January 2018 calling for regulation of the social media platforms, Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to shovel dirt at George Soros.
The European Union has not yet tried to regulate disinformation (although they do have codes of practice for the platforms), instead focusing on taxation, competition regulation, and protection of privacy. But Germany has strengthened its regulations regarding online hate speech, including the liability of the social media platforms.
disclosure of the sources of online political advertising.It’s a bit toothless because, just as with offshore bank accounts, it may be possible to register which U.S. entity is paying for online political advertising, but it’s impossible to know whether that entity is getting its funds from overseas. Even the Honest Ads bill was too much for Facebook to take.

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more on the issues of digital world and democracy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/02/19/facebook-digital-gangsters/

Literature on Digital Humanities

Burdick, A. (2012). Digital humanities . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma990078472690104318&context=L&vid=01MNPALS_SCS:SCS&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&tab=Everything&lang=en

digital humanities is born f the encounter between traditional humanities and computational methods.

p. 5. From Humanism to Humanities
While the foundations of of humanistic inquiry and the liberal arts can be traced back in the west to the medieval trivium and quadrivium, the modern and human sciences are rooted in the Renaissance shift from a medieval, church dominated, theocratic world view to be human centered one period the gradual transformation of early humanism into the disciplines that make up the humanities today Was profoundly shaped by the editorial practices involved in the recovery of the corpus of works from classical antiquity

P. 6. The shift from humanism to the institution only sanctioned disciplinary practices and protocols that we associate with the humanities today is best described as a gradual process of subdivision and specialization.
P. 7. Text-based disciplines in studies (classics, literature, philosophy, the history of ideas) make up, from the very start, the core of both the humanities and the great books curricular instituted in the 1920s and 1930s.
P. 10. Transmedia modes of argumentation
In the 21st-century, we communicate in media significantly more varied, extensible, and multiplicative then linear text. From scalable databases to information visualizations, from video lectures to multi-user virtual platforms serious content and rigorous argumentation take shape across multiple platforms in media. The best digital humanities pedagogy and research projects train students both in “reading “and “writing “this emergent rhetoric and in understanding how the reshape and three model humanistic knowledge. This means developing critically informed literacy expensive enough to include graphic design visual narrative time based media, and the development of interfaces (Rather then the rote acceptance of them as off-the-shelf products).
P. 11. The visual becomes ever more fundamental to the digital humanities, in ways that compliment, enhance, and sometimes are in pension with the textual.
There is no either/or, no simple interchangeability between language and the visual, no strict sub ordination of the one to the other. Words are themselves visual but other kinds of visual constructs do different things. The question is how to use each to its best effect into device meaningful interpret wing links, to use Theodor Nelson’s ludic neologism.
P. 11. The suite of expressive forms now encompasses the use of sound, motion graphics, animation, screen capture, video, audio, and the appropriation and into remix sink of code it underlines game engines. This expanded range of communicative tools requires those who are engaged in digital humanities world to familiarize themselves with issues, discussions, and debates in design fields, especially communication and interaction design. Like their print predecessors, form at the convention center screen environments can become naturalized all too quickly, with the results that the thinking that informed they were designed goes unperceived.

p. 13.

For digital humanists, design is a creative practice harnessing cultural, social, economic, and technological constraints in order to bring systems and objects into the world. Design in dialogue with research is simply a picnic, but when used to pose in frame questions about knowledge, design becomes an intellectual method. Digital humanities is a production based in Denver in which theoretical issues get tested in the design of implementations and implementations or loci after your radical reflection and elaboration.
Did you thaw humanists have much to learn from communication and media design about how to juxtapose and integrate words and images create hire he is of reading, Forge pathways of understanding, deployed grades in templates to best effect, and develop navigational schemata that guide in produce meaningful interactions.
P. 15.  The field of digital digital humanities me see the emergence of polymaths who can “ do it all” : Who can research, write, shoot, edit, code, model, design, network, and dialogue with users. But there is also ample room for specialization and, particularly, for collaboration.
P. 16. Computational activities in digital humanities.
The foundational layer, computation, relies on principles that are, on the surface, at odds with humanistic methods.
P. 17. The second level involves processing in a way that conform to computational capacities, and this were explored in the first generation of digital scholarship and stylometrics, concordance development, and indexing.
P. 17.
Duration, analysis, editing, modeling.
Duration, analysis, editing, and modeling comprise fundamental activities at the core of digital humanities. Involving archives, collections, repositories, and other aggregations of materials, duration is the selection and organization of materials in an interpretive framework, argument, or exhibit.
P. 18. Analysis refers to the processing of text or data: statistical and quantitative methods of analysis have brought close readings of texts (stylometrics and genre analysis, correlation, comparisons of versions for alter attribution or usage patterns ) into dialogue with distant reading (The crunching cuff large quantities of information across the corpus of textual data or its metadata).
Edit think has been revived with the advent of digital media and the web and to continue to be an integral activity in textual as well as time based formats.
P. 18. Model link highlights the notion of content models- shapes of argument expressed in information structures in their design he digital project is always an expression of assumptions about knowledge: usually domain specific knowledge given an explicit form by the model in which it is designed.
P. 19.  Each of these areas of activity- cure ration, analysis, editing, and modeling is supported by the basic building blocks of digital activity. But they also depend upon networks and infrastructure that are cultural and institutional as well as technical. Servers, software, and systems administration are key elements of any project design.
P. 30. Digital media are not more “evolved” have them print media nor are books obsolete; but the multiplicity of media in the very processes of mediation entry mediation in the formation of cultural knowledge and humanistic inquiry required close attention. Tug link between distant and clothes, macro and micro, and surface in depth becomes the norm. Here, we focus on the importance of visualization to the digital humanities before moving on to other, though often related, genre and methods such as Locative investigation, thick mapping, animated archives, database documentaries, platform studies, and emerging practices like cultural analytics, data mining and humanities gaming.
P. 35. Fluid texture out what he refers to the mutability of texts in the variants and versions Whether these are produced through Authorial changes, anything, transcription, translation, or print production

Cultural Analytics, aggregation, and data mining.
The field of cultural Analytics has emerged over the past few years, utilizing tools of high-end computational analysis and data visualization today sect large-scale coach data sets. Cultural Analytic does Not analyze cultural artifacts, but operates on the level of digital models of this materials in aggregate. Again, the point is not to pit “close” hermeneutic reading against “distant” data mapping, but rather to appreciate the synergistic possibilities and tensions that exist between a hyper localized, deep analysis and a microcosmic view

p. 42.

Data mining is a term that covers a host of picnics for analyzing digital material by “parameterizing” some feature of information and extract in it. This means that any element of a file or collection of files that can be given explicit specifications,  or parameters, can be extracted from those files for analysis.
Understanding the rehtoric of graphics is another essential skill, therefore, in working at a skill where individual objects are lost in the mass of processed information and data. To date, much humanities data mining has merely involved counting. Much more sophisticated statistical methods and use of probability will be needed for humanists to absorb the lessons of the social sciences into their methods
P. 42. Visualization and data design
Currently, visualization in the humanities uses techniques drawn largely from the social sciences, Business applications, and the natural sciences, all of which require self-conscious criticality in their adoption. Such visual displays including graphs and charts, may present themselves is subjective or even unmediated views of reality, rather then is rhetorical constructs.

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Warwick, C., Terras, M., & Nyhan, J. (2012). Digital humanities in practice . London: Facet Publishing in association with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma990078423690104318&context=L&vid=01MNPALS_SCS:SCS&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&tab=Everything&lang=en

 

Reading Digesting Scholarly Research

ELI Webinar | Reading & Digesting Scholarly Research: Tips to Save Time While Increasing Understanding

Tuesday, February 26 | 1:00p.m. – 2:00p.m. ET | Online

Reading and digesting scholarly research can be challenging when new journal issues, reports, and books are being released every day. Join Katie Linder, director of research for Oregon State University Ecampus, to learn some tips that will help you find scholarly research that’s applicable to your work, read that research more efficiently, evaluate the quality of scholarly research, and decide on the applicability of the research you’re reading to your day-to-day work. You’ll also have the opportunity to ask any questions you might have about reading and digesting scholarly research.

Outcomes

  • Find the scholarly research that is of most importance to your work
  • Read scholarly research efficiently
  • Evaluate the quality of scholarly research
  • Decide when and how to apply scholarly research results in your work

Katie Linder Research Director, Ecampus Oregon State University https://members.educause.edu/kathryn-linder

Russia disconnect Internet

Russia ‘successfully tests’ its unplugged internet

24 December 2019

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50902496

“Increasingly, authoritarian countries which want to control what citizens see are looking at what Iran and China have already done.

“It means people will not have access to dialogue about what is going on in their own country, they will be kept within their own bubble.”

a “sovereign Runet”?

In Iran, the National Information Network allows access to web services while policing all content on the network and limiting external information. It is run by the state-owned Telecommunication Company of Iran.

One of the benefits of effectively turning all internet access into a government-controlled walled garden, is that virtual private networks (VPNs), often used to circumvent blocks, would not work.

Another example of this is the so-called Great Firewall of China. It blocks access to many foreign internet services, which in turn has helped several domestic tech giants establish themselves.

Russia already tech champions of its own, such as Yandex and Mail.Ru, but other local firms might also benefit.

The country plans to create its own Wikipedia and politicians have passed a bill that bans the sale of smartphones that do not have Russian software pre-installed.

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Russia Is Considering An Experiment To Disconnect From The Internet

February 11, 20194:50 PM ET  SASHA INGBER

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/11/693538900/russia-is-considering-an-experiment-to-disconnect-from-the-internet

Russia is considering a plan to temporarily disconnect from the Internet as a way to gauge how the country’s cyberdefenses would fare in the face of foreign aggression, according to Russian media.

It was introduced after the White House published its 2018 National Security Strategy, which attributed cyberattacks on the United States to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Russia’s Communications Ministry also simulated a switching-off exercise of global Internet services in 2014, according to Russian outlet RT.

Russia’s State Duma will meet Tuesday to consider the bill, according to RIA Novosti.

Roskomnadzor has also exerted pressure on Google to remove certain sites on Russian searches.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Congress last month that Russia, as well as other foreign actors, will increasingly use cyber operations to “threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways—to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.”

My note: In the past, the US actions prompted other countries to consider the same:
Germanty – https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/07/01/privacy-and-surveillance-obama-advisor-john-podesta-every-country-has-a-history-of-going-over-the-line/

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

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

AI in the classroom

How Much Artificial Intelligence Should There Be in the Classroom?

By Betsy Corcoran and Jeffrey R. Young     Jan 23, 2019

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-23-how-much-artificial-intelligence-should-there-be-in-the-classroom

We can build robot teachers, or even robot teaching assistants. But should we?

the Chinese government has declared a national goal of surpassing the U.S. in AI technology by the year 2030, so there is almost a Sputnik-like push for the tech going on right now in China. At the same time, China is also facing a shortage of qualified teachers in many rural areas, and there’s a huge demand for high-quality language teachers and tutors throughout the country.

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more on AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence

K-12 And Higher Education Converged?

K-12 And Higher Education Are Considered Separate Systems. What If They Converged?

By Jeffrey R. Young     Sep 8, 2017

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-09-08-k-12-and-higher-education-are-considered-separate-systems-what-if-they-converged

In “The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education: Policies and Programs in a Changing Era,” two education professors point out potential benefits of taking a more holistic view to American education

interview with Christopher Loss, one of the editors.

What role does technology play in some of the convergences that occur or are happening?

There’s a great essay in the collection by June Ahn, which deals with the idea of technology as a key mediating source and mechanism for the creation of various kinds of convergences between and among different sectors (my note: K12 and higher ed).

Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology http://circlcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/CyberlearningCommunityReport2017.pdf (Oct, 2017)

Americans like to see themselves as among the best in the world in education. But lately, the education leaders have been looking abroad for ideas, I think. What can we learn from countries that do have closer links between K-12 and higher ed?

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