deepfake

Deepfake danger: what a viral clip of Bill Hader morphing into Tom Cruise tells us

Are deepfakes a threat to democracy? The creator of a series of viral clips says he is raising awareness of their subversive potential

Elle Hunt  August 13, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/news/shortcuts/2019/aug/13/danger-deepfakes-viral-video-bill-hader-tom-cruise

deepfakes – doctored videos fabricating apparently real footage of people – and their potential to disrupt democracy.

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more on #fakenews and audio/video in this this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/07/15/fake-news-and-video/

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/07/21/deep-fake-audio/

Open Syllabus Project

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-07-19-how-a-database-of-6-million-syllabi-could-spawn-a-new-measure-of-scholarly-impact

the Open Syllabus Project

Why are professors hesitant to share their syllabi? “My guess is that folks are worried that it will get critiqued in ways that they’re not comfortable,” Becker says. “Some professors aren’t as confident in their teaching as they are in their research.”

The public website of the Open Syllabus Project does not give access to individual syllabi and does not say what professors are teaching which texts. Instead, it lets users search aggregate information drawn from the collection.

sources to intro VR

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-08-22-everything-you-need-to-know-to-get-started-with-ar-vr-in-the-classroom

Set Your Goals

Collaborate Effectively

a few apps below to begin.

  1. Merge Cubes.
  2. CoSpaces EDU.
  3. Nearpod.
  4. AR Portal (iOS only).

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more on VR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=extended+reality

influential tools for online learning

Online Learning’s ‘Greatest Hits’

Robert Ubell (Columnist)     Feb 20, 2019

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-20-online-learning-s-greatest-hits

dean of web-based distance learning

Learning Management Systems

Neck and neck for the top spot in the LMS academic vendor race are Blackboard—the early entry and once-dominant player—and coming-up quickly from behind, the relatively new contender, Canvas, each serving about 6.5 million students . The LMS market today is valued at $9.2 billion.

Digital Authoring Systems

Faced with increasingly complex communication technologies—voice, video, multimedia, animation—university faculty, expert in their own disciplines, find themselves technically perplexed, largely unprepared to build digital courses.

instructional designers, long employed by industry, joined online academic teams, working closely with faculty to upload and integrate interactive and engaging content.

nstructional designers, as part of their skillset, turned to digital authoring systems, software introduced to stimulate engagement, encouraging virtual students to interface actively with digital materials, often by tapping at a keyboard or touching the screen as in a video game. Most authoring software also integrates assessment tools, testing learning outcomes.

With authoring software, instructional designers can steer online students through a mixtape of digital content—videos, graphs, weblinks, PDFs, drag-and-drop activities, PowerPoint slides, quizzes, survey tools and so on. Some of the systems also offer video editing, recording and screen downloading options

Adaptive Learning

As with a pinwheel set in motion, insights from many disciplines—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, educational psychology and data analytics—have come together to form a relatively new field known as learning science, propelling advances in a new personalized practice—adaptive learning.

MOOCs

Of the top providers, Coursera, the Wall Street-financed company that grew out of the Stanford breakthrough, is the champion with 37 million learners, followed by edX, an MIT-Harvard joint venture, with 18 million. Launched in 2013, XuetangX, the Chinese platform in third place, claims 18 million.

Former Yale President Rick Levin, who served as Coursera’s CEO for a few years, speaking by phone last week, was optimistic about the role MOOCs will play in the digital economy. “The biggest surprise,” Levin argued, “is how strongly MOOCs have been accepted in the corporate world to up-skill employees, especially as the workforce is being transformed by job displacement. It’s the right time for MOOCs to play a major role.”

In virtual education, pedagogy, not technology, drives the metamorphosis from absence to presence, illusion into reality. Skilled online instruction that introduces peer-to-peer learning, virtual teamwork and other pedagogical innovations stimulate active learning. Online learning is not just another edtech product, but an innovative teaching practice. It’s a mistake to think of digital education merely as a device you switch on and off like a garage door.

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more on online learning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+learning

handwriting to text

OneNote
OneNote is the obvious choice for anyone who is using a Microsoft Surface or other Windows-based tablet. It is also available to use on iPads and on Android tablets. The option to have handwriting converted to text is an outstanding feature.

Google Keep
If you’re a G Suite for Education user, Google Keep. It doesn’t have the handwriting-to-text function that OneNote offers.

Zoho Notebook
Zoho Notebook doesn’t have the name recognition of OneNote or Keep. Zoho Notebook has the most intuitive design or organization options of the three digital notebooks featured here.

The downside to Zoho Notebook is that the handwriting option only appears on the Android and iOS platforms. If the handwriting option worked in the Chrome or Edge web browsers,

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more on screencasting lecturecapture in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=touch+screen

NLP and ACL

NLP – natural language processing; ACL – Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019)

Major trends in NLP: a review of 20 years of ACL research

Janna Lipenkova, July 23, 2019

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/major-trends-nlp-review-20-years-acl-research-janna-lipenkova

The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019)

 Data: working around the bottlenecks

large data is inherently noisy. \In general, the more “democratic” the production channel, the dirtier the data – which means that more effort has to be spent on its cleaning. For example, data from social media will require a longer cleaning pipeline. Among others, you will need to deal with extravagancies of self-expression like smileys and irregular punctuation, which are normally absent in more formal settings such as scientific papers or legal contracts.

The other major challenge is the labeled data bottleneck

crowd-sourcing and Training Data as a Service (TDaaS). On the other hand, a range of automatic workarounds for the creation of annotated datasets have also been suggested in the machine learning community.

Algorithms: a chain of disruptions in Deep Learning

Neural Networks are the workhorse of Deep Learning (cf. Goldberg and Hirst (2017) for an introduction of the basic architectures in the NLP context). Convolutional Neural Networks have seen an increase in the past years, whereas the popularity of the traditional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is dropping. This is due, on the one hand, to the availability of more efficient RNN-based architectures such as LSTM and GRU. On the other hand, a new and pretty disruptive mechanism for sequential processing – attention – has been introduced in the sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model by Sutskever et al. (2014).

Consolidating various NLP tasks

the three “global” NLP development curves – syntax, semantics and context awareness
the third curve – the awareness of a larger context – has already become one of the main drivers behind new Deep Learning algorithms.

A note on multilingual research

Think of different languages as different lenses through which we view the same world – they share many properties, a fact that is fully accommodated by modern learning algorithms with their increasing power for abstraction and generalization.

Spurred by the global AI hype, the NLP field is exploding with new approaches and disruptive improvements. There is a shift towards modeling meaning and context dependence, probably the most universal and challenging fact of human language. The generalisation power of modern algorithms allows for efficient scaling across different tasks, languages and datasets, thus significantly speeding up the ROI cycle of NLP developments and allowing for a flexible and efficient integration of NLP into individual business scenarios.

screen time and brain development

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2018/12/early_results_of_study_show_sc.html

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study tested 4,500 9-10-year-olds in its first released dataset. The ABCD study is the largest long-term study of brain development in U.S.

Early data from the study, analyzed by another group of researchers from the CHEO Research Institute’s Healthy Active Living and Obesity also showed that kids who spend less than two hours a day on screens, participated in 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous-intensity physical activity, and received nine to 11 hours of uninterrupted sleep had higher cognitive abilities.Cognition was measured by language abilities, episodic memory, executive function, attention, working memory, and processing speed.

building resilience

Building Resilience

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more on mindfulness in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindfulness

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