Media technology—from mass media to social media and from video gaming to computer-mediated communication—plays an increasingly central role in people’s lives. Due to exponential increases in computing power, people now carry incredibly powerful computers—their smartphones—everywhere they go. This ever-greater access to media technology is generating an ever-greater conflict between media activities and the unmediated activities critical for psychological well-being—from our face-to-face conversations and family time to our down time and work lives. What are the costs and benefits of people’s modern media technology use for psychological well-being? Using a complementarity-interference (CI) framework, I review research to illuminate key psychological processes (i.e., mediators) and conditions (i.e., moderators) of the relationship between media technology and psychological well-being. Based on the existing evidence, I propose an initial theoretical CI model of the effects of media technology on psychological well-being. I use this CI model to outline important directions for future research, providing guidelines for an integrated, theoretically informed research on media technology.
Keywords: Media, Communication technology, Computer-mediated communication (CMC), Subjective well-being, Human-computer interaction (HCI)
Definition Media Technology
Media technology. In this chapter, we will explore psychological well-being in the context of modern media technology. In common parlance, we often think of the word ‘media’ as referring to mass media, such as news media (e.g., TV, radio), and more recently, to social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). But media—the plural of medium—broadly refers to any technological tool that serves as a bridge or conduit to stimuli not otherwise available in the immediate physical environment. Thus, media technology refers to books and newspapers, radio and television, video and computer games—or to any device or method people use to transcend the constraints of their immediate physical environment: from yesterday’s dial-up telephone to the today’s smartphone, and from writing a hand-written letter to texting a friend (c.f., Okdie et al., 2014). Related terms also exist in the literature including information and communication technology, or ICT, as well as computer-mediated communication, or CMC. Most of the findings discussed here apply to—and in fact come from—the literature on ICT and CMC
While using the broad term, media technology, this chapter will focus primarily on the effects of media technology developed in the past century or so, including television, video games, and, most recently, mobile computers such as smartphones. In other words, we will be focusing on screen media technology. I will use the term mediated to refer to the stimuli afforded by the media technology, and the term unmediated to refer to behavior that does not involve the use of media (e.g., face-to-face interactions). Even though media technology itself is physical, I will use the term immediate physical environment to refer to the environment in which the media technology use occurs.
Effective communication is one critical characteristics of effective and successful school principal. Research on effective schools and instructional leadership emphasizes the impact of principal leadership on creating safe and secure learning environment and positive nurturing school climate (Halawah, 2005, p. 334)
Halawah, I. (2005). The Relationship between Effective Communication of High School Principal and School Climate. Education, 126(2), 334-345.
Selection of school principals in Hong Kong. The findings confirm a four-factor set of expectations sought from applicants; these are Generic Managerial Skills; Communication and Presentation Skills; Knowledge and Experience; and Religious Value Orientation.
Kwan, P. (2012). Assessing school principal candidates: perspectives of the hiring superintendents. International Journal Of Leadership In Education, 15(3), 331-349. doi:10.1080/13603124.2011.617838
Yee, D. L. (2000). Images of school principals’ information and communications technology leadership. Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 9(3), 287–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759390000200097
Catano, N., & Stronge, J. H. (2007). What do we expect of school principals? Congruence between principal evaluation and performance standards. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 10(4), 379–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603120701381782
Communication can consist of two large areas:
broadcasting information: PR, promotions, notifications etc.
two-way communication: collecting feedback, “office hours” type of communication, backchanneling, etc.
Further communication initiated by/from principals can have different audiences
Reyes, P., & Hoyle, D. (1992). Teachers’ Satisfaction With Principals’ Communication. The Journal of Educational Research, 85(3), 163–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1992.9944433
parents: involvement, feeling of empowerment, support, volunteering
students
board members
community
Epstein, J. L. (1995). School/family/community partnerships – ProQuest. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(9), 701.
Others
Communication and Visualization
The ever-growing necessity to be able to communicate data to different audiences in digestible format.
considering the information discussed in class, split in groups of 4 and develop your institution strategy for effective and modern communication across and out of your school.
At University of Wisconsin – Superior – we have stopped offering proctoring for students. Faculty, however, have come up with a way for online testing. They ask student to use Kaltura tto record their face and part of the test and then post the video in the dropbox.
until recently, broadcasting and publishing were difficult and expensive affairs, their infrastructures riddled with bottlenecks and concentrated in a few hands.
When protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, a single livestreamer named Mustafa Hussein reportedly garnered an audience comparable in size to CNN’s for a short while. If a Bosnian Croat war criminal drinks poison in a courtroom, all of Twitter knows about it in minutes.
In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.
And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots? My note: see the ability to create fake audio and video footage: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/07/15/fake-news-and-video/
HERE’S HOW THIS golden age of speech actually works: In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.
at their core, their business is mundane: They’re ad brokers
They use massive surveillance of our behavior, online and off, to generate increasingly accurate, automated predictions of what advertisements we are most susceptible to and what content will keep us clicking, tapping, and scrolling down a bottomless feed.
in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen by screen by screen. Today’s phantom public sphere has been fragmented and submerged into billions of individual capillaries. Yes, mass discourse has become far easier for everyone to participate in—but it has simultaneously become a set of private conversations happening behind your back. Behind everyone’s backs.
It’s important to realize that, in using these dark posts, the Trump campaign wasn’t deviantly weaponizing an innocent tool. It was simply using Facebook exactly as it was designed to be used. The campaign did it cheaply, with Facebook staffers assisting right there in the office, as the tech company does for most large advertisers and political campaigns.
Outline:
The Gamification of the educations process is not a new concept. The advent of educational technologies, however, makes the idea timely and pertinent. In short 60 min, we will introduce the concept of gamification of the educational process and discuss real-live examples.
Learning Outcomes:
at the end of the session, participants will have an idea about gaming and gamification in education and will be able to discriminate between those two powerful concepts in education
at the end of this session, participants will be able search and select VIdeo 360 movies for their class lessons
at the end of the session, participants will be able to understand the difference between VR, AR and MR.
if you are interested in setting up a makerspace and/or similar gaming space at your school, please contact me after this workshop for more information.
How would you define gamification of the educational process?
Gaming and Gamification in academic and library settings (paper) Short URL: http://scsu.mn/1F008Re
Gamification takes game elements (such as points, badges, leaderboards, competition, achievements) and applies them to a non-game setting. It has the potential to turn routine, mundane tasks into refreshing, motivating experiences (What is GBL (Game-Based Learning)?, n.d.).
Gamification is defined as the process of applying game mechanics and game thinking to the real world to solve problems and engage users (Phetteplace & Felker, 2014, p. 19; Becker, 2013, p. 199; Kapp, 2012). Gamification requires three sets of principles: 1. Empowered Learners, 2. Problem Solving, 3. Understanding (Gee, 2005).
Apply gamification tactics to existing learning task
split in groups and develop a plan to gamify existing learning task
from the web page above, choose a movie or click on this link: https://youtu.be/nOHM8gnin8Y (to watch a black hole in video 360) Open the link on your phone and insert the phone in Google Cardboard. Watch the video using Google Cardboard.
“They were taking both sides of the argument this past weekend and pushing them out from their troll farms as much as they could to just raise the noise level in America and make a big issue seem like an even bigger issue as they’re trying to push divisiveness in the country,” as Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said in the fall.
Tools such as the German Marshall Fund’s “Hamilton 68” dashboard track Russian-linked accounts in real time to show what links, phrases and hashtags are circulating.
The Trump administration detailed the threat — without any specific mention of the 2016 interference — in the new National Security Strategy it released at the end of December.
The Republicans might have been tarnished by the St Petersburg troll factory, but Democratic fantasies about social media were rubbished in the process
The ads in question were memes, manufactured and posted to a number of bluntly named, pseudo-American Facebook accounts in 2016 by workers at a troll farm in St Petersburg, Russia. There were thousands of these ads, it seems, plus parallel efforts on Instagram and Twitter. Between them, they reached over 100 million people.
The memes were big news for a while because they showed what Russian interference in the 2016 election actually looked like, in vivid color. Eventually the story faded, though, in part because it was superseded by other stories, but also, I think, because the Russian ad story was deeply distasteful to both sides of our atrophied political debate.
The ads were clumsily written. They were rife with spelling errors and poor grammar. Their grasp of American history was awful. And over them all hovered a paranoid fear that the powerful were scheming to flip the world upside-down in the most outlandish ways: to turn our country over to the undocumented … to punish the hardworking … to crack down on patriots and Christians … to enact Sharia law right here at home.
The social media platforms aren’t neutral arbiters, selflessly serving the needs of society. As is all too obvious now, they are monopolies that manipulate us in a hundred different ways, selecting our news, steering us towards what we need to buy. The corporate entities behind them wield enormous power in Washington, too, filling Democratic campaign coffers and keeping the revolving door turning for trusted servants. Those who don’t comply get disciplined.
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Russia calls for answers after Chechen leader’s Instagram is blocked
Internet watchdog demands explanation after Ramzan Kadyrov claimed Facebook also suspended him without explanation
Kadyrov has accused the US government of pressuring the social networks to disable his accounts, which he said were blocked on Saturday without explanation. The US imposed travel and financial sanctions on Kadyrov last week over numerous allegations of human rights abuses.
The former rebel fighter, who is now loyal to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is a fan of social media, particularly Instagram, which he has used in recent years to make barely veiled death threats against Kremlin critics.
Leonid Levin, the head of the Russian parliament’s information technologies and communications committee, suggested the move by Facebook and Instagram was an attack on freedom of speech.
Dzhambulat Umarov, the Chechen press and information minister, described the blocking of Kadyrov’s accounts as a “vile” cyber-attack by the US.
Neither Instagram nor Facebook had commented at the time of publication.
In 2015, Kadyrov urged Chechen men not to let their wives use the WhatsApp messaging service after an online outcry over the forced marriage of a 17-year-old Chechen to a 47-year-old police chief. “Do not write such things. Men, take your women out of WhatsApp,” he said.
The law has been criticized as encouraging censorship.
The companies will also be forced to introduce an official complaint structure, obliging platforms to monitor their content and improve their real-time reporting protocols.
Platforms failing to react within 24-hours face €50 million fines. The challenge to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, VK, Vimeo, Flickr and the like are facing a major technological challenge which could come with significant costs.
The law adopted in June 2017, went into force in October 2017 and will be enforced from January 2018. The new law implies hiring hundreds of more employees.
Bitcoins Bulgarian police seized from an ‘organised crime gang’ would now pay off a FIFTH of the country’s national debt after value rises by 600% in six months
Officers seized hundreds of thousands of units of the virtual currency in May
It was worth $500million at the time but the value of Bitcoin has since surged
The haul of 213,519 units is now worth a staggering $3.3billion
Thta is enough to pay off almost a quarter of Bulgaria’s national debt
Malware, Phishing, Hacking, Ransomware – oh my! Learn about the threats to you, your users and your library. During this session, we will explore the threats to online security and discuss solutions that can be implemented at any level. Most importantly, we will look at how we can educate our users on current threats and safety
