Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
SEPTEMBER 6, 2018
https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2018/09/virtual-reality-book-tours.html
Vocaroo provides an easy way to record and download spoken audio.
This video provides an overview of the basic steps needed to make a VR tour. To add audio to the tour, follow the steps outlined in this video. And watch this video to learn how to layer-in pictures
VR Book Tour With Patches. is a free online tool for creating virtual reality scenes.
January 24, 20195:31 AM ET MATTHEW S. SCHWARTZ VANESSA ROMO
Microsoft President and Chief Legal Counsel Brad Smith explained that it’s not the first time the search engine has been blocked. “It happens periodically,” he said in an interview with Fox Business News from Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday.
“You know, we operate in China pursuant to some global principles that’s called the Global Network Initiative in terms of how we manage censorship demands and the like,” he said.
Although Bing enjoyed only about 2 percent of China’s search engine market, its banishment was significant in a country known for controlling electronic access to information. With Bing blocked, China’s citizens had even fewer options for finding information on the Internet.
“Formulating a product, you better know about ethics and understand legal frameworks.”
These days a growing number of people are concerned with bringing more talk of ethics into technology. One question is whether that will bring change to data-science curricula.
Following major data breaches and privacy scandals at tech companies like Facebook, universities including Stanford, the University of Texas and Harvard have all added ethics courses into computer science degree programs to address tech’s “ethical dark side,” the New York Times has reported.
As more college and universities consider incorporating humanities courses into technical degree programs, some are asking what kind of ethics should be taught.
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more on ethics in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=ethics
Never in the interests of the ordinary citizen
The Syrian people’s uprising began as a struggle over social and economic conditions, a fight for democracy in place of repression. Now it has been hijacked by regional and global conflicts
Karim Emile Bitar 21 January 2019
https://mondediplo.com/2013/06/02syria
If there is a constant in the history of the countries of the Levant, it is the conflict between the aspirations of their inhabitants for freedom, and the realpolitik that has led to the sacrifice of those aspirations to the geostrategic interests of foreign powers.
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more on OER in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=oer
Jon Henschen | August 16, 2018 | 529,478
Both jazz and classical art forms require not only music literacy, but for the musician to be at the top of their game in technical proficiency, tonal quality and creativity in the case of the jazz idiom. Jazz masters like John Coltrane would practice six to nine hours a day, often cutting his practice only because his inner lower lip would be bleeding from the friction caused by his mouth piece against his gums and teeth. His ability to compose and create new styles and directions for jazz was legendary. With few exceptions such as Wes Montgomery or Chet Baker, if you couldn’t read music, you couldn’t play jazz.
Besides the decline of music literacy and participation, there has also been a decline in the quality of music which has been proven scientifically by Joan Serra, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona. Joan and his colleagues looked at 500,000 pieces of music between 1955-2010, running songs through a complex set of algorithms examining three aspects of those songs:
1. Timbre- sound color, texture and tone quality
2. Pitch- harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements
3. Loudness- volume variance adding richness and depth
In an interview, Billy Joel was asked what has made him a standout. He responded his ability to read and compose music made him unique in the music industry, which as he explained, was troubling for the industry when being musically literate makes you stand out. An astonishing amount of today’s popular music is written by two people: Lukasz Gottwald of the United States and Max Martin from Sweden, who are both responsible for dozens of songs in the top 100 charts. You can credit Max and Dr. Luke for most the hits of these stars:
Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Taylor Swift, Jessie J., KE$HA, Miley Cyrus, Avril Lavigne, Maroon 5, Taio Cruz, Ellie Goulding, NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Ariana Grande, Justin Timberlake, Nick Minaj, Celine Dion, Bon Jovi, Usher, Adam Lambert, Justin Bieber, Domino, Pink, Pitbull, One Direction, Flo Rida, Paris Hilton, The Veronicas, R. Kelly, Zebrahead
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more on metaliteracies in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=metaliteracies
Integrating technology into your teaching practice can be intimidating. Where do you start? What tools do you choose? What are the questions you need to ask?
In Selecting the Right Tech Solutions for Your Classroom, you’ll get the guidance you need to thrive with edtech, whether you’re just dipping your toe in or rethinking a districtwide approach. Throughout the course, you’ll engage in online content, develop materials specific to your context and receive feedback from experts. The course culminates with a capstone project that can be used to communicate with stakeholders about your selected technology, your rationale for choosing it and how you’ll implement it.
This is a 15-hour, instructor-led course.
Winter session: February 5 – March 29, 2019
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/49580/one-gut-check-and-four-steps-students-can-apply-to-fact-check-information Anya Kamenetz Oct 31, 2017
Stanford University report found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers didn’t understand that the phrase “sponsored content” meant “advertising.”
Caulfield is also the director of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities‘s American Democracy Project. Starting this spring, the initiative will bring at least 10 universities together to promote web literacy.
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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming
https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/the-most-important-video-game-on-the-planet-c26988a8f497 Jan 11 2019,Brian Feldman
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/07/how-fortnite-became-the-most-popular-video-game-on-earth.html
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.
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more on FortNite in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fortnite
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/03/31/ready-player-one/
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more on ethics and AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=ethics