The US Senate has voted to give law enforcement agencies access to web browsing data without a warrant, dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance powers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The power grab was led by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell as part of a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, which gives federal agencies broad domestic surveillance powers.
“Today the Senate made clear that the purpose of the PATRIOT Act is to spy on Americans, no warrants or due process necessary,” Dayton Young, director of product at Fight for the Future, told Motherboard.
Raise your hand if you agree that the Senate GOP’s vote to permit the FBI to review your browsing history without a warrant is a flagrant government overreach ✋
Canada will see the fastest growth, with a CAGR of 145.2 percent over the forecast period. Other leaders in terms of growth include Central and Eastern Europe at 133.5 percent, Western Europe at 121.2 percent and the U.S. at 120.5 percent.
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Leslie Fisher Thinks Augmented Reality First, Then VR in the Classroom
An interview with the former Apple K–12 systems engineer, who will participate in multiple sessions during ISTE.
THE Journal: What do you think about virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in the classroom? Is the cost point for VR prohibitive?
In virtual reality, one of my favorite apps is CoSpaces. It allows anyone to design a 3D space, and then interact with it in virtual reality.
Virtual reality can be quite affordable with Google Cardboard. We can get into basic interaction in VR with Cardboard. There are 40 or 50 VR apps where you can simply use Cardboard and explore. Google Street View allows you to do virtual viewing of many different locations. That technology augments what the teacher is doing.
Most kids can’t afford to buy their own Oculus headset. That price point is quite a bit higher. But we don’t need to have 30 kids using Oculus all of the time. Two or three might work
My note: sometimes around 2011, the Chronicle had a report on Berkeley students listening to coursecasts at 2X (can’t find the reference). Here some other sources about #speedlistening:
the introduction of Overcast, a podcast-playback app designed by the creator of the text-bookmaking app Instapaper. One of Overcast’s key selling points is a feature called Smart Speed. Smart Speed isn’t about simply playing audio content at 150 or 200 percent of the standard rate; it instead tries to remove, algorithmically, the extraneous things that can bulk up the play time of audio content: dead air, pauses between sentences, intros and outros, that kind of thing.
Teaching tool or distraction? The key to any engaging lesson in the classroom, of course, is to connect it to the learning objectives, and Kahoot! makes it easy to do so.
https://www.sli.do/. A basic account is free. this package does not allow question moderation and restricts the number of polls you can ask per class
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The Distracted Classroom: Transparency, Autonomy, and Pedagogy
in my role as director of my college’s teaching center, I hosted a faculty discussion of Jay R. Howard’s excellent book Discussion in the College Classroom, which recommends that we build structural methods of participation into our courses, rather than just relying on the vocal students to carry the conversation.
The first three columns in “The Distracted Classroom” series have explored the fundamental problem of digital distraction in our lives today, the way recent technologies have exacerbated that problem, and the possible solutions. All of those columns drew on the research presented by Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen in their excellent book,The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World.
Autonomy. The literature on helping students take a deep approach toward their learning — as opposed to a more surface or strategic orientation — suggests they learn best when they feel a sense of autonomy in class. Another approach to the problem of digital distraction, then, would be to invite students into the process of setting the policies that will operate in the classroom.
Cathy Davidson has argued very effectively for what she calls a “class constitution” — an agreement that the class has reached together about certain aspects of how the course will operate.
In February, Google added WebVR to Chrome on Daydream-ready phones (like Pixel and ZenFone). The WebVR standard allows users to view virtual reality (VR) experiences in a browser like Chrome by simply tapping a link and putting on a compatible headset. Yesterday, the company revealed it added support for Google Cardboard and launched a new homepage for web-based VR experiments.
WebVR support on Chrome for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive is “coming soon.”
new report from market research firm Gartner, overall device shipments will remain flat in 2017, even as traditional PCs (including laptops) go into a decline that’s forecast to last at least through 2019. Excluding smart phones
The study, conducted by adaptive learning provider Front Row Education, found that 75 percent of teachers use technology with students on a daily basis and that a bit more than half have a 1-to-1 ratio of devices to students in their classrooms (up 10 points from last year’s survey). That increase in student devices is helping to drive an increase in the use of technology, with about 60 percent of teachers surveyed saying they expect to increase the use of technology in the 2016–2017 school year.
60 percent of teachers have access to Chromebooks, up 15 percent from last year; 64 percent have access to iPads, down 5 percent from last year. iPads tend to be the tool of choice in lower grades (75 percent in K–2), while Chromebooks dominate the middle school years (66 percent). Interestingly,
first: link to the Hospital Center, but not to the study; difficult to check the facts, which are discussed in the editorial.
title talks about “social media,” but it is not about social media, it is about texting. danah boyd and Eszter Hargittai are apparently not household names in the house of the managing editor
then the author jumps from one issue to another: mindfulness or contemplative computing, but h/she has no clue about these issues also.
the research, which claims that social media (which is not social media, but more like BYOD + texting) has a negative impact on academic performance is no different the research that shows very positive impact of learning with social media. It is NOT about social media, it is about how it is used (methodology).
Join Mario Callegaro, Senior Survey Research Scientist at Google UK, and one of own survey research scientists, Sarah Cho, on February 24 at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET for our webinar, Market research surveys gone mobile: Optimizing for better results.
Mario Callegaro
Senior Survey Research Scientist
Quantitative Marketing Team, Google UK
Sarah Cho
Survey Research Scientist
SurveyMonkey
.My notes from the Webinar.
Surveys uncover the WHY. Big Data,
why mobile matters. tablet and smart phone penetration: around 60-80% in Europe. According to Pew In the US, 68% smartphone and 45% tablet
faster reaction but longer questionnaire completion time on smartphones = device effects
survey design device vs. survey take device – mismatch. When there is a mismatch, questions are asked.
5 strategies to handle mobile phone respondents: 1. do nothing
surveym0nkey: do all surveys have to be mobile optimized? no, so make sure you think about the context in which you are sending out
2. discourage the use of mobile phones for answering 3. optimize the web questionnaire for mobile browsers 4. mobile app
design considerations for multiple devices surveys. two “actors”: survey designer and survey platform
confounds when interpreting findings across devices: use homogeneous population (e.g students)
difference between mouse vs fingers as input devices
what about tablets: as long as flash is not used, tablet is very much the same as laptop/desktop. phablets (iPhone growth of the screen)
mobile survey design tips (Sarah)
multiple choice: ok to use, but keep wording short, format response vertically instead of horizontally.
open-ended q type: hard to type (but no word on voice recognition???)
logo
multimedia: images, clarity, video, avoid (bandwidth constrains), use Youtube, so every device can play it, versus Flash, Java Script etc
