LinkedIn launches its own Snapchat Stories. Here’s why it shouldn’t have
No app is safe from the Stories plague
LinkedIn confirms to TechCrunch that it plans to build Stories for more sets of users, but first it’s launching “Student Voices” just for university students in the U.S. The feature appears atop the LinkedIn home screen and lets students post short videos to their Campus Playlist.
My note: Since 2012, I unsuccessfully tried to convince two library directors to approve similar video “channel” on the SCSU library web page with students’ testimonies and ability for students to comment / provide feedback regarding the issues raised in the videos. Can you guess the outcome of such proposal?
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/11/03/video-skills-digital-literacy/
A LinkedIn spokesperson tells us the motive behind the feature is to get students sharing their academic experiences like internships, career fairs and class projects that they’d want to show off to recruiters as part of their personal brand.
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more on LinkedIn in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=linkedin
4 eLearning Trends To Treat With Caution
https://elearningindustry.com/instructional-design-models-and-theories
Steve Penfold March 27, 2018
Jumping onboard to a new industry trend with insufficient planning can result in your initiative failing to achieve its objective and, in the worst case, even hinder the learning process. So which hot topics should you treat with care?
1. Virtual Reality, or VR
Ultimately, the key question to consider when adopting anything new is whether it will help you achieve the desired outcome. VR shouldn’t be incorporated into learning just because it’s a common buzzword. Before you decide to give it a go, consider how it’s going to help your learner, and whether it’s truly the most effective or efficient way to meet the learning goal.
2. Gamification
considering introducing an interactive element to your learning, don’t let this deter you—just ensure that it’s relevant to the content and will aid the learning process.
3. Artificial Intelligence, or AI
If you are confident that a trend is going to yield better results for your learners, the ROI you see may well justify the upfront resources it requires.
Again, it all comes down to whether a trend is going to deliver in terms of achieving an objective.
4. Microlearning
The theory behind microlearning makes a lot of sense: organizing content into sections so that learning can fit easily with modern day attention spans and learners’ busy lifestyles is not a bad thing. The worry is that the buzzword, ‘microlearning’, has grown legs of its own, meaning the industry is losing sight of its’ founding principles.
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more on elearning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=elearning
Blurred Lines—between virtual reality games, research, and education
http://library.ifla.org/2133/
p. 5 a LibGuide was created that provided a better description of the available software for both the Microsoft Hololens and the HTC Vive and also discussed potential applications for the technology.
Both the HTC Vive and the Hololens were made bookable through the library’s LibCalendar booking system, streamlining the booking process and creating a better user experience.
When the decision was made to bring virtual and augmented reality into the McGill University Library, an important aspect of this project was to develop a collection of related software to be used alongside the technology. In building this software collection a priority was placed on acquiring software that could be demonstrated as having educational value, or that could potentially be used in relation to, or in support of, university courses.
For the Microsoft Hololens, all software was acquired through Microsoft’s Online Store. The store has a number of educationally relevant HoloLens apps available for purchase. The app ARchitect, for example, gives a basic sense of how augmented reality could be used for viewing new building designs. The app Robotics BIW allows user to simulate robotic functions. A select number of apps, such as Land of the Dinosaurs and Boulevard, provide applications for natural history and art. There were a select number of apps related to science, mathematics and medicine, and others with artistic applications. All of the HoloLens applications were free but, compared to what is available for virtual reality, the experiences were much smaller in size and scope.
For the HoloLens, a generic user account was created and shared with person who booked the HoloLens at the time of their booking. After logging into this account – which could sometimes prove to be a challenge because typing is done using the headset’s gesture controls – the user could select a floating tile which would reveal a list of available software. An unresolved problem was that users would then need to refer to the HoloLens LibGuide for a detailed description of the software, or else choose software based on name alone, and the names were not always helpful.
For the Microsoft HoloLens, the three most popular software programs were Land of the Dinosaurs, Palmyra and Insight Heart. Insight Heart allow users to view and manipulate a 3D rendering of a high-resolution human heart, Land of the Dinosaurs provided an augment reality experience featuring 3D renderings of dinosaurs, and Palmyra gave an augmented reality tour of the ancient city of Palmyra.
p. 7 Though many students had ideas for research projects that could make use of the technology, there was no available software that would have allowed them to use augmented reality in the way they wanted. There were no students interested in developing their own software to be used with the technology either.
p. 8 we found that the Microsoft HoloLens received significant use from our patrons, we would recommend the purchase of one only for libraries serving researchers and developers.
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Getting Real in the Library: A Case Study at the University of Florida
Samuel R. Putnam and Sara Russell GonzalezIssue 39, 2018-02-05
Getting Real in the Library: A Case Study at the University of Florida
As an alternative, Microsoft offers a Hololens with enterprise options geared toward multiple users for $5000.
The transition from mobile app development to VR/AR technology also reflected the increased investment in VR/AR by some of the largest technology companies in the world. In the past four years, Facebook purchased the virtual reality company Oculus, Apple released the ARKit for developing augmented reality applications on iOS devices, Google developed Google Cardboard as an affordable VR option, and Sony released Playstation VR to accompany their gaming platform, just to name a few notable examples. This increase of VR/AR development was mirrored by a rise in student interest and faculty research in using and creating new VR/AR content at UF.
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Arnhem, J.-P. van, Elliott, C., & Rose, M. (2018). Augmented and Virtual Reality in Libraries. Rowman & Littlefield.
360 degree video in library instruction
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Hammady, R., & Ma, M. (2018). Designing Spatial UI as a Solution of the Narrow FOV of Microsoft HoloLens: Prototype of Virtual Museum Guide. In
Proceedings of the 4th International AR & VR Conference 2018. Springer. Retrieved from
https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/4799/
‘HoloMuse’ that engage users with archaeological artefacts through gesture-based interactions (Pollalis, Fahnbulleh, Tynes, & Shaer, 2017). Another research utilised HoloLens to provide in-situ assistant for users (Blattgerste, Strenge, Renner, Pfeiffer, & Essig, 2017). HoloLens also used to provide magnification for low vision users by complementary finger-worn camera alongside with the HMD (Stearns, DeSouza, Yin, Findlater, & Froehlich, 2017). Even in the medical applications, HoloLens contributed in 3D visualisation purposes using AR techniques (Syed, Zakaria, & Lozanoff, 2017) and provide optimised measurements in medical surgeries(Pratt et al., 2018) (Adabi et al., 2017). Application of HoloLens extended to visualise prototype designs (DeLaOsa, 2017) and showed its potential in gaming industry (Volpe, 2015) (Alvarez, 2015) and engaging cultural visitors with gaming activities (Raptis, Fidas, & Avouris, 2017).
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Evaluating the Microsoft HoloLens through an augmented reality assembly application
To assess the HoloLens’ potential for delivering AR assembly instructions, the cross-platform Unity 3D game engine was used to build a proof of concept application. Features focused upon when building the prototype were: user interfaces, dynamic 3D assembly instructions, and spatially registered content placement. The research showed that while the HoloLens is a promising system, there are still areas that require improvement, such as tracking accuracy, before the device is ready for deployment in a factory assembly setting.
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Pollalis, C., Fahnbulleh, W., Tynes, J., & Shaer, O. (2017). HoloMuse: Enhancing Engagement with Archaeological Artifacts Through Gesture-Based Interaction with Holograms. In
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 565–570). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3024969.3025094
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Gračanin, D., Ciambrone, A., Tasooji, R., & Handosa, M. (2017). Mixed Library — Bridging Real and Virtual Libraries. In S. Lackey & J. Chen (Eds.), Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (pp. 227–238). Springer International Publishing.
We use Microsoft HoloLens device to augment the user’s experience in the real library and to provide a rich set of affordances for embodied and social interactions.We describe a mixed reality based system, a prototype mixed library, that provides a variety of affordances to support embodied interactions and improve the user experience.
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Dourish, P. (n.d.). Where the Action Is. Retrieved November 23, 2018, from
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/where-actionembodied interactions
Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls “embodied interaction”—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.
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Pollalis, C., Fahnbulleh, W., Tynes, J., & Shaer, O. (2017). HoloMuse: Enhancing Engagement with Archaeological Artifacts Through Gesture-Based Interaction with Holograms. In
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 565–570). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3024969.3025094HoloMuse, an AR application for the HoloLens wearable device, which allows users to actively engage with archaeological artifacts from a museum collection
pick up, rotate, scale, and alter a hologram of an original archeological artifact using in-air gestures. Users can also curate their own exhibit or customize an existing one by selecting artifacts from a virtual gallery and placing them within the physical world so that they are viewable only using the device. We intend to study the impact of HoloMuse on learning and engagement with college-level art history and archeology students.
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Library Spaces II: The IDEA Lab at the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center
https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/52190/DL5_mischo_IDEA_Lab2.pdf
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more on Hololens in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=hololens
Why Technology Favors Tyranny
Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don’t take steps to stop it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/
YUVAL NOAH HARARI OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE
Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology in any detail, but they can sense that the future is passing them by. In 1938 the common man’s condition in the Soviet Union, Germany, or the United States may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world, and that he was the future (provided, of course, that he was an “ordinary man,” rather than, say, a Jew or a woman).
n 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.
Fears of machines pushing people out of the job market are, of course, nothing new, and in the past such fears proved to be unfounded. But artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills.
Israel is a leader in the field of surveillance technology, and has created in the occupied West Bank a working prototype for a total-surveillance regime. Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone call, post something on Facebook, or travel from one city to another, they are likely to be monitored by Israeli microphones, cameras, drones, or spy software. Algorithms analyze the gathered data, helping the Israeli security forces pinpoint and neutralize what they consider to be potential threats.
The conflict between democracy and dictatorship is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. AI may swing the advantage toward the latter.
As we rely more on Google for answers, our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of a Google search. This process has likewise affected our physical abilities, such as navigating space.
So what should we do?
For starters, we need to place a much higher priority on understanding how the human mind works—particularly how our own wisdom and compassion can be cultivated.
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more on SCSU student philosophy club in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=philosophy+student+club