Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
As we use Google Meet to learn, grow as educators in this important time, and connect with students – these updates might be of interest.#infusedclassroom #GoogleEdu #chromebook pic.twitter.com/MgrxgHgZCt
— Holly Clark 🚀The Infused Classroom (@HollyClarkEdu) June 14, 2020
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more on Google Hangouts in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=hangouts
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more on instructional design and OER in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=instructional+design
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=OER
Most students do not want an online education, and many are calling for reductions in tuition fees to compensate for what they perceive might be a lower-quality education and experience. Some might choose to wait for a return to on-campus delivery.
Most professors do not want to teach in an online environment because they value engaging with students in discussions, debates, and laboratory demonstrations. There are many good pedagogical reasons why most post-secondary education continues to take place in a face-to-face, on-campus delivery mode despite the longstanding availability of technology to support online teaching.
Professor and student preferences aside, there is a more pressing problem looming.
There is precious little time for professors to change all of their courses to an online mode of delivery.
Nova Scotia Universities and Colleges need a significant and urgent infusion of funding from the provincial government to cover the increased costs of converting post-secondary education into an entirely different mode of operation over the next three months. Universities cannot be expected to cover those costs alone, and neither should students.
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more on online teaching in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+teaching
After March 2020 reports about Zoom privacy issues, now Zoom acknowledges working with the Chinese government:
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Unlike many other major tech platforms based in the U.S., Zoom, which is headquartered in California, has not been blocked by the Chinese government. Zoom said in a blog post that it is “developing technology over the next several days that will enable us to remove or block at the participant level based on geography” which will allow the company to “to comply with requests from local authorities when they determine activity on our platform is illegal within their borders; however, we will also be able to protect these conversations for participants outside of those borders where the activity is allowed.”
Zoom’s interference with the Tiananmen gatherings and its suspension of user accounts raised alarm among many in higher education, which increasingly depends on Zoom to operate courses remotely — including for students located within China’s borders.
Multiple scholars took to Twitter to express their worries
PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression, condemned Zoom for shuttering the activist’s account.
This is not the first time Zoom’s links to China have come under scrutiny. In April, the company admitted that some of its user data were “mistakenly” routed through China; in response, the company announced that users of paid Zoom accounts could opt out of having their data routed through data centers in China.
An April 3 report by scholars at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy said Zoom’s research and development operations in China could make the company susceptible “to pressure from Chinese authorities.”
Zoom, whose Chinese-born CEO is a U.S. citizen, said in its latest annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it had more than 700 employees at its research and development centers in China as of Jan. 31. The SEC filing notes that Zoom has a “high concentration of research and development personnel in China, which could expose us to market scrutiny regarding the integrity of our solution or data security features.”
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Zoom Just Totally Caved In to China on Censorship from r/technology
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more about Zoom in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=zoom
other languages — the top players being Julia, Go, and Rust. Julia is great for mathematical and technical tasks, while Go is awesome for modular programs, and Rust is the top choice for systems programming.
Since data scientists and AI specialists deal with lots of mathematical problems, Julia is the winner for them.
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https://www.instagram.com/p/CBVtuAIDOZ3/
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more on Python in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=python
Greetings to you all! Presently, I am undertaking a masters course in “Instruction Design and Technology” which has two components: Coursework and Research. For my research, I would like to pursue it in the field of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mobile Learning. I am thinking of an idea that could lead to collaboration among students and directly translate into enhanced learning for students while using an AR application. However, I am having a problem with coming up with an application because I don’t have any computing background. This, in turn, is affecting my ability to come up with a good research topic.
I teach gross anatomy and histology to many students of health sciences at Mbarara University, and this is where I feel I could make a contribution to learning anatomy using AR since almost all students own smartphones. I, therefore, kindly request you to let me know which of the freely-available AR app authoring tools could help me in this regard. In addition, I request for your suggestions regarding which research area(s) I should pursue in order to come up with a good research topic.
Hoping to hear from you soon.
Grace Muwanga Department of Anatomy Mbarara University Uganda (East Africa)
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matthew.macvey@journalism.cuny.edu
Dear Grace, a few augmented reality tools which I’ve found are relatively easy to get started with:
For iOS, iPhone, iPad: https://www.torch.app/ or https://www.adobe.com/products/aero.html
To create AR that will work on social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat (and will work on Android, iOS) try https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/ or https://lensstudio.snapchat.com/ . You’ll want to look at the tutorials for plane tracking or target tracking https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/learn/documentation/tracking-people-and-places/effects-in-surroundings/
https://lensstudio.snapchat.com/guides/general/tracking/tracking-modes/
One limitation with Spark and Snap is that file sizes need to be small.
If you’re interested in creating AR experiences that work directly in a web browser and are up for writing some markup code, look at A-Frame AR https://aframe.io/blog/webxr-ar-module/.
For finding and hosting 3D models you can look at Sketchfab and Google Poly. I think both have many examples of anatomy.
Best, Matt
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“Beth L. Ritter-Guth” <britter-guth@NORTHAMPTON.EDU>
I’ve been using Roar. They have a 99$ a year license.
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I have recently been experimenting with an AR development tool called Zappar, which I like because the end users do not have to download an app to view the AR content. Codes can be scanned either with the Zappar app or at web.zappar.com.
From a development standpoint, Zappar has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface called ZapWorks Designer that will help you build basic AR experiences quickly, but for a more complicated, more interactive use case such as learning anatomy, you will probably need ZapWorks Studio, which will have much more of a learning curve. The Hobby (non-commercial) license is free if you are interested in trying it out.
You can check out an AR anatomy mini-lesson with models of the human brain, liver, and heart using ZapWorks here: https://www.zappar.com/campaigns/secrets-human-body/. Even if you choose to go with a different development tool, this example might help nail down ideas for your own project.
Hope this helps,
Brighten
Brighten Jelke Academic Assistant for Virtual Technology Lake Forest College bjelke@lakeforest.edu Office: DO 233 | Phone: 847-735-5168
http://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/resources/innovationspaces/virtualspace.php
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more on XR in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=xr+education
Modest3D Guided Virtual Adventure – iLRN Conference 2020 – Session 1: currently, live session: https://youtu.be/GjxTPOFSGEM
https://mediaspace.minnstate.edu/media/Modest+3D/1_28ejh60g
Instruction and Instructional Design
Presentation 1: Inspiring Faculty (+ Students) with Tales of Immersive Tech (Practitioner Presentation #106)
Authors: Nicholas Smerker
Immersive technologies – 360º video, virtual and augmented realities – are being discussed in many corners of higher education. For an instructor who is familiar with the terms, at least in passing, learning more about why they and their students should care can be challenging, at best. In order to create a font of inspiration, the IMEX Lab team within Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State devised its Get Inspired web resource. Building on a similar repository for making technology stories at the sister Maker Commons website, the IMEX Lab Get Inspired landing page invites faculty to discover real world examples of how cutting edge XR tools are being used every day. In addition to very approachable video content and a short summary calling out why our team chose the story, there are also instructional designer-developed Assignment Ideas that allow for quick deployment of exercises related to – though not always relying upon – the technologies highlighted in a given Get Inspired story.
Presentation 2: Lessons Learned from Over A Decade of Designing and Teaching Immersive VR in Higher Education Online Courses (Practitioner Presentation #101)
Authors: Eileen Oconnor
This presentation overviews the design and instruction in immersive virtual reality environments created by the author beginning with Second Life and progressing to open source venues. It will highlight the diversity of VR environment developed, the challenges that were overcome, and the accomplishment of students who created their own VR environments for K12, college and corporate settings. The instruction and design materials created to enable this 100% online master’s program accomplishment will be shared; an institute launched in 2018 for emerging technology study will be noted.
Presentation 3: Virtual Reality Student Teaching Experience: A Live, Remote Option for Learning Teaching Skills During Campus Closure and Social Distancing (Practitioner Presentation #110)
Authors: Becky Lane, Christine Havens-Hafer, Catherine Fiore, Brianna Mutsindashyaka and Lauren Suna
Summary: During the Coronavirus pandemic, Ithaca College teacher education majors needed a classroom of students in order to practice teaching and receive feedback, but the campus was closed, and gatherings forbidden. Students were unable to participate in live practice teaching required for their program. We developed a virtual reality pilot project to allow students to experiment in two third-party social VR programs, AltSpaceVR and Rumii. Social VR platforms allow a live, embodied experience that mimics in-person events to give students a more realistic, robust and synchronous teaching practice opportunity. We documented the process and lessons learned to inform, develop and scale next generation efforts.
Target audience sector: Informal and/or lifelong learning
Supported devices: Desktop/laptop – Windows, Desktop/laptop – Mac
Platform/environment access: Download from a website and install on a desktop/laptop computer
Official website: http://www.secondlife.com
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Click here to remove from My Sched.Presentation 1: Evaluating the impact of multimodal Collaborative Virtual Environments on user’s spatial knowledge and experience of gamified educational tasks (Full Paper #91)
Authors: Ioannis Doumanis and Daphne Economou
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Several research projects in spatial cognition have suggested Virtual Environments (VEs) as an effective way of facilitating mental map development of a physical space. In the study reported in this paper, we evaluated the effectiveness of multimodal real-time interaction in distilling understanding of the VE after completing gamified educational tasks. We also measure the impact of these design elements on the user’s experience of educational tasks. The VE used reassembles an art gallery and it was built using REVERIE (Real and Virtual Engagement In Realistic Immersive Environment) a framework designed to enable multimodal communication on the Web. We compared the impact of REVERIE VG with an educational platform called Edu-Simulation for the same gamified educational tasks. We found that the multimodal VE had no impact on the ability of students to retain a mental model of the virtual space. However, we also found that students thought that it was easier to build a mental map of the virtual space in REVERIE VG. This means that using a multimodal CVE in a gamified educational experience does not benefit spatial performance, but also it does not cause distraction. The paper ends with future work and conclusions and suggestions for improving mental map construction and user experience in multimodal CVEs.
Presentation 2: A case study on student’s perception of the virtual game supported collaborative learning (Full Paper #42)
Authors: Xiuli Huang, Juhou He and Hongyan Wang
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The English education course in China aims to help students establish the English skills to enhance their international competitiveness. However, in traditional English classes, students often lack the linguistic environment to apply the English skills they learned in their textbook. Virtual reality (VR) technology can set up an immersive English language environment and then promote the learners to use English by presenting different collaborative communication tasks. In this paper, spherical video-based virtual reality technology was applied to build a linguistic environment and a collaborative learning strategy was adopted to promote their communication. Additionally, a mixed-methods research approach was used to analyze students’ achievement between a traditional classroom and a virtual reality supported collaborative classroom and their perception towards the two approaches. The experimental results revealed that the virtual reality supported collaborative classroom was able to enhance the students’ achievement. Moreover, by analyzing the interview, students’ attitudes towards the virtual reality supported collaborative class were reported and the use of language learning strategies in virtual reality supported collaborative class was represented. These findings could be valuable references for those who intend to create opportunities for students to collaborate and communicate in the target language in their classroom and then improve their language skills
Click here to remove from My Sched.Presentation 1: Reducing Cognitive Load through the Worked Example Effect within a Serious Game Environment (Full Paper #19)
Authors: Bernadette Spieler, Naomi Pfaff and Wolfgang Slany
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Novices often struggle to represent problems mentally; the unfamiliar process can exhaust their cognitive resources, creating frustration that deters them from learning. By improving novices’ mental representation of problems, worked examples improve both problem-solving skills and transfer performance. Programming requires both skills. In programming, it is not sufficient to simply understand how Stackoverflow examples work; programmers have to be able to adapt the principles and apply them to their own programs. This paper shows evidence in support of the theory that worked examples are the most efficient mode of instruction for novices. In the present study, 42 students were asked to solve the tutorial The Magic Word, a game especially for girls created with the Catrobat programming environment. While the experimental group was presented with a series of worked examples of code, the control groups were instructed through theoretical text examples. The final task was a transfer question. While the average score was not significantly better in the worked example condition, the fact that participants in this experimental group finished significantly faster than the control group suggests that their overall performance was better than that of their counterparts.
Presentation 2: A literature review of e-government services with gamification elements (Full Paper #56)
Authors: Ruth S. Contreras-Espinosa and Alejandro Blanco-M
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Nowadays several democracies are facing the growing problem of a breach in communication between its citizens and their political representatives, resulting in low citizen’s engagement in the participation of political decision making and on public consultations. Therefore, it is fundamental to generate a constructive relationship between both public administration and the citizens by solving its needs. This document contains a useful literature review of the gamification topic and e-government services. The documents contain a background of those concepts and conduct a selection and analysis of the different applications found. A set of three lines of research gaps are found with a potential impact on future studies.
Click here to remove from My Sched.Presentation 1: Connecting User Experience to Learning in an Evaluation of an Immersive, Interactive, Multimodal Augmented Reality Virtual Diorama in a Natural History Museum & the Importance of Story (Full Paper #51)
Authors: Maria Harrington
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Reported are the findings of user experience and learning outcomes from a July 2019 study of an immersive, interactive, multimodal augmented reality (AR) application, used in the context of a museum. The AR Perpetual Garden App is unique in creating an immersive multisensory experience of data. It allowed scientifically naïve visitors to walk into a virtual diorama constructed as a data visualization of a springtime woodland understory, and interact with multimodal information directly through their senses. The user interface comprised of two different AR data visualization scenarios reinforced with data based ambient bioacoustics, an audio story of the curator’s narrative, and interactive access to plant facts. While actual learning and dwell times were the same between the AR app and the control condition, the AR experience received higher ratings on perceived learning. The AR interface design features of “Story” and “Plant Info” showed significant correlations with actual learning outcomes, while “Ease of Use” and “3D Plants” showed significant correlations with perceived learning. As such, designers and developers of AR apps can generalize these findings to inform future designs.
Presentation 2: The Naturalist’s Workshop: Virtual Reality Interaction with a Natural Science Educational Collection (Short Paper #11)
Authors: Colin Patrick Keenan, Cynthia Lincoln, Adam Rogers, Victoria Gerson, Jack Wingo, Mikhael Vasquez-Kool and Richard L. Blanton
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For experiential educators who utilize or maintain physical collections, The Naturalist’s Workshop is an exemplar virtual reality platform to interact with digitized collections in an intuitive and playful way. The Naturalist’s Workshop is a purpose-developed application for the Oculus Quest standalone virtual reality headset for use by museum visitors on the floor of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences under the supervision of a volunteer attendant. Within the application, museum visitors are seated at a virtual desk. Using their hand controllers and head-mounted display, they explore drawers containing botanical specimens and tools-of-the-trade of a naturalist. While exploring, the participant can receive new information about any specimen by dropping it into a virtual examination tray. 360-degree photography and three-dimensionally scanned specimens are used to allow user-motivated, immersive experience of botanical meta-data such as specimen collection coordinates.
Presentation 3: 360˚ Videos: Entry level Immersive Media for Libraries and Education (Practitioner Presentation #132)
Authors: Diane Michaud
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Within the continuum of XR Technologies, 360˚ videos are relatively easy to produce and need only an inexpensive mobile VR viewer to provide a sense of immersion. 360˚ videos present an opportunity to reveal “behind the scenes” spaces that are normally inaccessible to users of academic libraries. This can promote engagement with unique special collections and specific library services. In December 2019, with little previous experience, I led the production of a short 360˚video tour, a walk-through of our institution’s archives. This was a first attempt; there are plans to transform it into a more interactive, user-driven exploration. The beta version successfully generated interest, but the enhanced version will also help prepare uninitiated users for the process of examining unique archival documents and artefacts. This presentation will cover the lessons learned, and what we would do differently for our next immersive video production. Additionally, I will propose that the medium of 360˚ video is ideal for many institutions’ current or recent predicament with campuses shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Online or immersive 360˚ video can be used for virtual tours of libraries and/or other campus spaces. Virtual tours would retain their value beyond current campus shutdowns as there will always be prospective students and families who cannot easily make a trip to campus. These virtual tours would provide a welcome alternative as they eliminate the financial burden of travel and can be taken at any time.
Can anyone recommend any online video editing options to use with students? (I currently use Wevideo and have for years, but I pay for it and am looking for a free option!) @themerrillsedu @lesliefisher @JakeMillerTech
— Carol VanHoosier (@CarolVanHoosier) June 3, 2020
That’s the best online one that I’m aware of. @screencasto also has some editing in their paid version; @Screencastify allows some basic cutting & trimming edits; @Flipgrid can do cutting, trimming, and combining of clips.
— Jake Miller (@JakeMillerTech) June 3, 2020
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more on video editing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=video+edit
The SAMR model lays out 4 tiers of online learning: substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition.https://t.co/g4m4BUyZx9
— edutopia (@edutopia) June 7, 2020
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more on SAMR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=samr
https://www.facebook.com/groups/educatorsinvr/permalink/702577083922779/
