https://www.edweek.org/technology/opinion-what-can-be-done-about-k-12s-looming-tech-nightmare/2022/01
As of this past August, Politico has reported that ransomware attacks have hit 58 education organizations and school districts, including 830 individual schools. Last March, the Broward County, Fla., district didn’t pay a $40 million ransom, leading the hackers to publish 26,000 stolen files online (these included student and staff Social Security numbers and addresses).
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more on cybersecurity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity
Building Better Digital Badges: Pairing Completion Logic With Psychological Factors
https://www.academia.edu/21600030/Building_Better_Digital_Badges_Pairing_Completion_Logic_With_Psychological_Factors
This article analyzes digital badges through mechanics and psychology. This approach involves understanding the underlying logics of badges as well as the experiential nature of badges-in-use. The proposed model provides additional insight about badges and recommends design strategies to complement existing scholarship. Procedure. This article examines an existing model of completion logic for digital badges. This model is expanded upon by pairing these formal mechanics with relevant psychological theory, summarizing key principles that pertain to how people interact with badges. It then considers three dimensions of badges in use—social, cognitive, and affective—reviewing examples and analyzing the relationship of badging to debriefing.
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More on micro credentialing in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredential
Graphene Nanoribbon Breakthrough Could Lead to High-Speed, Low-Power Nanoscale Data Storage
Reference: “Spin splitting of dopant edge state in magnetic zigzag graphene nanoribbons” by Raymond E. Blackwell, Fangzhou Zhao, Erin Brooks, Junmian Zhu, Ilya Piskun, Shenkai Wang, Aidan Delgado, Yea-Lee Lee, Steven G. Louie and Felix R. Fischer, 22 December 2021, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04201-y
WHY TECHNOLOGY FAVORS TYRANNY
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/
Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don’t take steps to stop it.
liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete.
The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but feared they were losing their economic worth.
artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills. And we don’t know of any third kind of skill—beyond the manual and the cognitive—in which humans will always have an edge.
Israel is a leader in the field of surveillance technology, and has created in the occupied West Bank a working prototype for a total-surveillance regime.
The conflict between democracy and dictatorship is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. AI may swing the advantage toward the latter.
As we rely more on Google for answers, our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of a Google search.
The race to accumulate data is already on, and is currently headed by giants such as Google and Facebook and, in China, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these companies have acted as “attention merchants”—they capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and then they resell our attention to advertisers.
We aren’t their customers—we are their product.
Nationalization of data by governments could offer one solution; it would certainly curb the power of big corporations. But history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overmighty governments.