Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
By Rhea Kelly 09/01/16
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/09/01/top-7-campus-technology-stories-in-august.aspx
1) Making Virtual Classrooms More Interactive
2) Taking Student Orientation Online
3) 7 Best Practices for Deploying Lecture Capture Campuswide
4) An LMS to Support ‘Gameful’ Learning
5) Why Today’s MOOCs Are Not Innovative
6) Kentucky State U Offers Free E-Textbooks for All Students
By David Nagel
VR’s applications for education have been much lauded, and tech heavyweights have begun investing in the technology, in part to both enable and capitalize on educational opportunities. Google, for example, has been offering its low-cost Google Cardboard kits, which, coupled with the Google Expeditions service, provides VR-based educational experiences and learning activities.
according to market research firm ABI Research, some 6 million consumer and prosumer cameras are expected to ship by 2021. (That’s out of a total of 70 million VR devices that are forecast to ship by then.)
Alphabet is breaking up Nest, its standalone smart-home gadgets company, and moving Nest’s software group back into Google.
enerally speaking, Google has very limited interest in making hardware in the first place. The cost of building things is high, the margins are low, and Google’s real specialty is in web services like Gmail and search anyway.
Google started signaling that Android, the most popular operating system in the world, and Chrome OS, its more niche operating system for laptops, were going to get smashed together. The result, ideally, will be a version of Android that can extend its smartphone dominance to tablets and laptops…which is why Android 7.0, the most recent release, makes split-screen multitasking such a tentpole feature.
the real business opportunity for Google is to compel a broad range of companies to create gadgets and home appliances using its software. The hardware is secondary. In fact, building its own hardware can even work against Google: The more successful Google is at selling its own hardware, the less likely other hardware makers want to use its software, since they view Google as a competitor.
Putting all its efforts behind expanding and extending Android has made Google a top player in the smartphone market, even after its late start against Apple and the iPhone.
Seeking to bring the qualities of well-designed games to pedagogical assessment, the University of Michigan created a learning management system that uses gaming elements such as competition, badges and unlocks to provide students with a personalized pathway through their courses.
By David Raths 08/24/16
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/08/24/an-lms-to-support-gameful-learning.aspx
UM School of Information and School of Education
a new type of learning management system called GradeCraft. GradeCraft borrows game elements such as badges and unlocks to govern students’ progress through a course. With unlocks, for example, you have to complete a task before moving to the next level.
Written in Ruby on Rails and hosted on Amazon Web Services, GradeCraft was created by a small team of students and faculty with additional software support from Ann Arbor-based developer Alfa Jango. Their work received support from UM’s Office of Digital Education and Innovation and the Office of the Provost. GradeCraft can work as a stand-alone platform or in conjunction with a traditional LMS via the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) protocol.
Here is how it works: Instructors create a course shell within GradeCraft (similar to the process with any LMS). Students use a tool called the “Grade Predictor” to plan a personalized pathway through the course, making predictions about both what they will do and how they will perform. When assignments are graded, predictions turn into progress; students are then nudged to revisit their semester plan, reassessing what work is available and how well they need to do to succeed overall. Students are able to independently choose an assessment pathway that matches their interests within the framework of learning objectives for the course.
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more on LMS in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gaming
more on gaming in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=lms
more on badges in this blog
Dear colleagues,
the topics of privacy pertaining technology is becoming ubiquitous.
If you feel that the content of your class material can benefit of such discussions, please let us know.
Please have some titles, which can help you brainstorm topics for discussions in your classes:
Power, Privacy, and the Internet
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/12/03/power-privacy-internet/
Privacy groups slam Department of Homeland Security social media proposal
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/08/24/dhs-social-media-proposal/
FBI quietly changes its privacy rules for accessing NSA data on Americans
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/03/09/surveillance-and-privacy/
Facebook canceled a student’s internship after he highlighted a massive privacy issue
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/08/17/facebook-and-privacy/
Samsung’s Privacy Policy Warns Customers Their Smart TVs Are Listening
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/02/10/privacy-smart-devices/
Teenagers, The Internet, And Privacy
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/11/05/teenagers-the-internet-and-privacy/
Online privacy: It’s time for a new security paradigm
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/09/25/online-privacy-its-time-for-a-new-security-paradigm/
On social media, privacy, etc.
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/03/14/on-social-media-privacy-etc/
Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity On the Web
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2013/12/03/hacking-the-future-privacy-identity-and-anonymity-on-the-web/
Are We Puppets in a Wired World?
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2013/10/23/pro-domo-sua-are-we-puppets-in-a-wired-world-surveillance-and-privacy-revisited/
How Teens Deal With Privacy and Mobile Apps
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2013/08/28/how-teens-deal-with-privacy-and-mobile-apps/
If you seek more tangible, hands-on assistance with similar and/or any topics regarding technology, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Journal of Technology and Teacher Education Volume 24, Number 2, ISSN 1059-7069 Publisher: Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education, Chesapeake, VA
https://www.learntechlib.org/p/152244/
The majority of the participants were female. All of the participants were junior and senior students enrolled in elementary teacher education programs. Specifically, this study compared pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy, outcome expectations, intentions (internal factors) and perceived school climate (external factor) for technology integration in education in these countries.
Unlike Turkey and the US, self-efficacy predicted technology integration intention to a smaller degree than school climate in the Spanish sample. Interestingly, outcome expectations scores did not make a statistically significant contribution to predicting pre-service teachers’ intention to use technology in the US sample.
Stefano Pirandola & Samuel L. Braunstein
http://www.nature.com/news/physics-unite-to-build-a-quantum-internet-1.19716
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/what-is-a-quantum-satellite/article9012342.ece
G+ link https://plus.google.com/+TessPajaron/posts/8YYgjoPrQvq
In an address to the VRX conference in San Francisco, noted game developer and tech wizard, Jesse Schell predicted that over 8 million VR gamer headsets will be sold in 2016. Facebook purchased Oculus Rift, presumably laying the groundwork for a future where friends and family will interact in rich virtual spaces. All the major players, including Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Google and an HTC and Valve partnership are jostling for the consumer headset market.
Experimenting with VR in his classes as part of a project piloted by Seattle-based foundry10, a privately funded research organization that creates partnerships with educators to implement, research and explore the various intersections of emerging technologies and learning, including VR..
And the technology’s potential for good is vast. It has already been used to help with autism, improve personal financial management, treat PTSD and manage pain. More and more news outlets, including the New York Times, are adopting immersive journalism, where news stories can be experienced through VR.
As an educational tool, VR might prove transformative. Google Expeditions allows students to take over 100 virtual journeys from ancient Rome to the surface of Mars. It might also have a big impact on social emotional learning (SEL), as VR’s unique ability to produce empathy recently led Wired magazine to explore its potential as “the ultimate empathy machine”. Addressing a persistent anxiety, Suter used Samsung Gear’s Public Speaking Simulator to successfully prepare a few nervous students for class presentations, reporting they felt “much more calm” during the live delivery.
Ethical Considerations
In a recently published article, researchers Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany review a series of ethical considerations when implementing VR. The illusion of embodiment may provide VR’s greatest value to education, but also lies at the heart of its ethical implementation. Madary and Metzinger believe that VR is not just an evolution from television and video game screens, but a revolution that will have an enormous social impact. In their paper, they claim that:
VR technology will eventually change not only our general image of humanity but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as “conscious experience,” “selfhood,” “authenticity,” or “realness.”
It’s important to remember that many current VR uses in schools, like Google Expeditions, are not interactive VR, but simply 360-degree video experiences. In these cases, students experience immersive 3D pictures or panoramas, but do not deeply interact with the content. The illusion of embodiment is a product of interactive content and motion tracking, where users can alter and affect their environment and engage with others who share their virtual space. Headsets like the Vive and Occulus Rift fall under this latter category, but it won’t be long before most, if not all, consumer oriented VR technology will be completely immersive and interactive.
1. Long-Term Effects and Prolonged Exposure
2. The Impact of Environment on Agency and Behavior
3. Aggravating Preexisting Psychological or Emotional Issues
4. (Un)Reality and Diminished Real World Interactions
5. Privacy and Data Gathering
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more on virtual reality in this IMS blog
Alienware, Zotac, and MSI have all shown off self-contained backpacks that can be used with the HTC Vive, and companies like The Void have created their own “backtops” for location-based entertainment.
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more on virtual reality in this blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=vr
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more on hackers in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=hackers