Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social-network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. Beacon Press.
p. 1 Digital Migration: young people’s historic move to the online world
p. 8 broadband adoption in 2005-6. p. 9 before broadband, Internet was more textual then visual. p. 11 broadband more then just expand technical capabilities paved the way for profund behavioral shifts and social transformation
Broadband did not create radically new online activities. But expand a relatively small collection of early adopting technophiles into a massive but highly differentiated public of netizens, world builders, blogger, gamers, social networkers, content creators
p. 19 Social Media 101 what schools are learning about themselves and young technology users.
p. 20 DOPA (the Delete Online Predators Act), p. 21 brought the elimination of most interactive web applications from public schools and libraries. Social-Web enthusiasts strongly opposed DOPA. ALA also.
p. 24 MacArthur Foundation’s white paper: Living and Learning with New Media”
p. 30 NTIA National Telecommunications and Information Administration
p. 36 mother allowed her teenage daughter to use Facebook. The one caveat: the mother would be able to access her daughter’s profile. A common practice. A mother of a fifteen year old boy who recently started using FB occasionally looks at his page. 2007 Pew writes that “41% of today’s teens believe that their parents monitor them after they’ve gone online.” This is not unusual.
p. 41 schools cannot punish for what happened at home. But what about what happened online? Referring to social media: when kids get into disagreements via FB, it often spills over into the schools.
p. 44 sexting.
p. 47 the very well connected: friending, bonding and community in the digital age
p. 52 Malcolm Wiley and Stuart Rice 1933 argued that technology such as the automobile and telephone hastened the unraveling of the social fabric of the American life.
p. 72 phatic exchanges. Vetere, Howward and Gibbs. Brief but sencere. Katz James E and Mark Aakhus call “perpetual contact.”
p. 75 Digital Gates
How race and class distinctions are shaping the digital world
dana boyd 2007 article “Viewing American Class Divisions through FB and MySpace.”
p. 77 Hargittai Facebook is more white then MySpace.
p. 99 television and social network sites represent two fundamentally different kinds of mediated experiences. Whereas television is about watching and consuming, SNS are primarily about doing and sharing.
p. 100 Paul Eastwick and Wendi Gardner There.com – the virtual world may not prove to be a perfect utopian gateway from the real world.
p. 103 We Play: the allure of social games, synthetic worlds and secnd lives.
p. 106 a growing number of young men are turning to interactive entertainment like games rather than television and movies as their first source for leisure and a desired choice for social interaction with their friends.
p. 131 heavy users of virtual worlds differ from the 68% of young people, who believe that online-only relationships can be as fulfilling as off-line relationships. Synthetic world users are much more likely to believe that online relationships can be just as fulfilling as off-line relationships.
p. 133 Hooked Rethinking the Internet addition debate
p. 134 valid mental disorder. Journal of American Psychiatry 2007 – Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) for DSM-IV. P. 136 some of the problems researchers
An interactive discussion on MOOCs, online learning, and the goal of 100 million learners by 2022
The Future Trends Forum welcomes
Anant Agarwal , the founder and CEO of edX, a non-profit venture created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focused on transforming online and on-campus learning through groundbreaking methodologies.
He aims to help bring quality education to everyone, everywhere. Anant has also been a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT for 30 years.
As Norwegian Refugee Council research found, 70 percent of Syrian refugees lack basic identification and documents showing ownership of property.
The global passport
Host nations certainly has a share in the damage, as they face problems concerning the accessibility of vital information about the newcomers — dealing with the undocumented refugee, the immigration service can’t gain the information about his/her health status, family ties or criminal record, or verify any other vital data that helps them make a decision. Needless to say, this may lead to the designation of refugee status being exploited by economic migrants, fugitives or even the war criminals that caused the mass displacement to begin with.
Another important issue is data security. Refugees’ personal identities are carefully re-established with the support of clever biometric systems set up by the U.N. Agency for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR registers millions of refugees and maintains those records in a database. But the evidence suggests that centralized systems like this could be prone to attacks. As a report on UNCHR’s site notes, Aadhaar — India’s massive biometric database and the largest national database of people in the world — has suffered serious breaches, and last year, allegations were made that access was for sale on the internet for as little as $8
Finland, a country with a population of 5.5 million, cannot boast huge numbers of refugees. For 2018, it set a quota of 750 people, mainly flying from Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s way less than neighboring Sweden, which promised to take in 3,400. Nevertheless, the country sets a global example of the use of effective technology in immigration policy: It’s using blockchain to help the newcomers get on their feet faster.
The system, developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI, maintains a full analogue of a bank account for every one of its participants.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, the billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros revealed that his structures already use a blockchain in immigration policies
In 2017, Accenture and Microsoft Corp. teamed up to build a digital ID network using blockchain technology, as part of a U.N.-supported project to provide legal identification to 1.1 billion people worldwide with no official documents.
a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with blockchain platform IOTA to explore how the technology could increase efficiency.
breakdown of IoT functionality, from Deloitte. They give 5 general types of services that IoT “things” can do:
Internal state: Heartbeat- and ping-like broadcasts of health, potentially including diagnostics and additional status reporting (for example, battery level, CPU/memory utilization, strength of network signal, up-time or software/platform version).
Location: Communication of physical location via GPS, GSM, triangulation or proximity techniques
Physical attributes: Monitoring the world surrounding the device, including altitude, orientation, temperature, humidity, radiation, air quality, noise and vibration
Functional attributes: Higher-level intelligence rooted in the device’s purpose for describing business process or workload attributes
Actuation services: Ability to remotely trigger, change or stop physical properties or actions on the device.
Examples of IoT in action
There are some pretty well-known IoT products that some of you already use, including:
Nest Thermostat (and others). These allow you to control your AC from your phone, anywhere that you can connect to the Internet.
Smart lights: Same concept, but for lights. You can turn lights on/off from your phone. Phillips Hue is an example of this
Bluetooth Trackers – Tile (https://www.thetileapp.com/) is an example of a Bluetooth Tracker. Put one on that thing you always lose (i.e., car keys). The next time you lose those keys, you can find them again via an app on your phone.
Smart Home appliances – things like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomeKit.
Smart power switches – Belkin’s Wemo Insight Wi-Fi Smart Plug is an example. They let you turn the plug (and therefore anything connected to it) on and off, set schedules for the plug, monitor energy consumption and use, etc. You can also connect it to Amazon Alexa and Google Home for hands-free voice control
Health and exercise trackers – Fitbits “fit” into this category, too.
How does IoT affect libraries?
Here are some ways libraries are already incorporating IoT technology into their libraries:
Smart Building Technology: As libraries retrofit their buildings with newer technology (or build new buildings/branches), they are starting to see more IoT-based technology. For example, some libraries can can adjust heating, cooling and lights from a smartphone app. Some newer building monitoring and security systems can be monitored via mobile apps.
RFID: RFID technology (sensors in books) is a type of IoT technology, and has been around for awhile.
Beacon Technology: There are at least two library-focused companies experimenting with Beacon technology (Capira Technologies and Bluubeam).
People counters: Check out Jason Griffey’s Measure the Future project. Here’s what he says about Measure the Future: “Imagine having a Google-Analytics-style dashboard for your library building: number of visits, what patrons browsed, what parts of the library were busy during which parts of the day, and more. Measure the Future is working to make that happen by using open-hardware based sensors that can collect data about building usage that is now invisible. Making these invisible occurrences explicit will allow librarians to make strategic decisions that create more efficient and effective experiences for their patrons.”
Library classes! Libraries are also teaching classes about the Internet of Things. These include classes focused on introducing patrons to IoT technology, and classes that focus on an aspect of IoT, like a class on making things with Arduinos or how to use your new Fitbit.
Roughly half of U.S. teens say they spend too much time on their cellphones, according to research from Pew. About the same proportion of teens report taking steps to limit their use of the devices. Another survey found that about two-thirds of parents also worry their children spend too much time in front of screens; nearly 60% of parents report setting screen time restrictions for their children. The findings come as some technology companies introduce features to cut back on phone addiction.
Amid roiling debates about the impact of screen time on teenagers, roughly half of those ages 13 to 17 are themselves worried they spend too much time on their cellphones. Some 52% of U.S. teens report taking steps to cut back on their mobile phone use, and similar shares have tried to limit their use of social media (57%) or video games (58%), a new Pew Research Center survey finds.
Overall, 56% of teens associate the absence of their cellphone with at least one of these three emotions: loneliness, being upset or feeling anxious. Additionally, girls are more likely than boys to feel anxious or lonely without their cellphone.
The vast majority of teens in the United States have access to a smartphone, and 45% are online on a near constant basis. The ubiquity of social media and cellphones and other devices in teens’ lives has fueled heated discussions over the effects of excessive screen time and parents’ role in limiting teens’ screen exposure. In recent months, many major technology companies, including Google and Apple, have announced new products aimed at helping adults and teens monitor and manage their online usage.
Girls are somewhat more likely than boys to say they spend too much time on social media (47% vs. 35%).
Meanwhile, 31% of teens say they lose focus in class because they are checking their cellphone – though just 8% say this often happens to them, and 38% say it never does.
Girls are more likely than boys to express feelings of anxiety (by a 49% to 35% margin) and loneliness (by a 32% to 20% margin) when they do not have their phone with them.
Cross-Institution & Cross-Sector Collaboration Long-Term Trend: Driving Ed Tech adoption in higher education for five or more years
Although a variety of collaborations between higher education and industry have emerged, more-explicit frameworks and guidelines are needed to define how these partnerships should proceed to have the greatest impact.
Proliferation of Open Educational Resources Mid-Term Trend: Driving Ed Tech adoption in higher education for the next three to five years
The United States lags on the policy front. In September 2017, the Affordable College Textbook Act was once again introduced in both the US House of Representatives and the Senate “to expand the use of open textbooks
It is unlikely that ACTA will pass, however, as it has been unsuccessfully introduced to two previous Congresses.
The Rise of New Forms of Interdisciplinary Studies
Faculty members, administrators, and instructional designers are creating innovative pathways to college completion through interdisciplinary experiences, nanodegrees, and other alternative credentials, such as digital badges. Researchers, along with academic technologists and developers, are breaking new ground with data structures, visualizations, geospatial applications, and innovative uses of opensource tools.
Growing Focus on Measuring Learning
As societal and economic factors redefine the skills needed in today’s workforce, colleges and universities must rethink how to define, measure, and demonstrate subject mastery and soft skills such as creativity and collaboration. The proliferation of data-mining software and developments in online education, mobile learning, and learning management systems are coalescing toward learning environments that leverage analytics and visualization software to portray learning data in a multidimensional and portable manner
Redesigning Learning Spaces
upgrading wireless bandwidth and installing large displays that allow for more natural collaboration on digital projects. Some are exploring how mixed-reality technologies can blend 3D holographic content into physical spaces for simulations, such as experiencing Mars by controlling rover vehicles, or how they can enable multifaceted interaction with objects, such as exploring the human body in anatomy labs through detailed visuals. As higher education continues to move away from traditional, lecture-based lessons toward more hands-on activities, classrooms are starting to resemble real-world work and social environments
Authentic Learning Experiences
An increasing number of institutions have begun bridging the gap between academic knowledge and concrete applications by establishing relationships with the broader community; through active partnerships with local organizations
Improving Digital Literacy Solvable Challenge: Those that we understand and know how to solve
Digital literacy transcends gaining discrete technological skills to generating a deeper understanding of the digital environment, enabling intuitive and discerning adaptation to new contexts and cocreation of content.107 Institutions are charged with developing students’ digital citizenship, promoting the responsible and appropriate use of technology, including online communication etiquette and digital rights and responsibilities in blended and online learning settings. This expanded concept of digital competence is influencing curriculum design, professional development, and student-facing services and resources. Due to the multitude of elements of digital literacy, higher education leaders must obtain institution-wide buy-in and provide support for all stakeholders in developing these competencies.
Despite its growing importance, it remains a complex topic that can be challenging to pin down. Vanderbilt University established an ad hoc group of faculty, administrators, and staff that created a working definition of digital literacy on campus and produced a white paper recommending how to implement digital literacy to advance the university’s mission: https://vanderbilt.edu/ed-tech/committees/digital-literacy-committee.php
Adapting Organizational Designs to the Future of Work
Technology, shifting information demands, and evolving faculty roles are forcing institutions to rethink the traditional functional hierarchy. Institutions must adopt more flexible, teambased, matrixed structures to remain innovative and responsive to campus and stakeholder needs.
Attempts to avoid bureaucracy also align with a streamlined workforce and cost elimination. Emphasis has been placed on designing better business models through a stronger focus on return on investment. This involves taking a strategic approach that connects financial practice (such as analyzing cost metrics and resource allocation) with institutional change models and goals.124
Faculty roles have been and continue to be impacted by organizational change, as well as by broader economic movements. Reflective of today’s “gig economy,” twothirds of faculty members are now non-tenure, with half working part-time, often in teaching roles at several institutions. This stands as a stark contrast to 1969, when almost 80 percent of faculty were tenured or tenuretrack; today’s figures are nearly inverted. Their wages are applying pressure to traditional organizational structures.Rethinking tenure programs represents another change to organizational designs that aligns with the future of work.
Organizational structures are continuing to evolve on the administrative side as well. With an emphasis on supporting student success, many institutions are rethinking their student services, which include financial aid, academic advising, and work-study programs. Much of this change is happening within the context of digital transformation, an umbrella term that denotes the transformation of an organization’s core business to better meet customer needs by leveraging technology and data.
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added Nov 13, 2018
6 growing trends taking over academic libraries
BY MERIS STANSBURY
March 24th, 2017
Horizon Report details short-and long-term technologies, trends that will impact academic libraries worldwide in the next 5 years.
Research Data Management: The growing availability of research reports through online library databases is making it easier for students, faculty, and researchers to access and build upon existing ideas and work. “Archiving the observations that lead to new ideas has become a critical part of disseminating reports,” says the report.
Valuing the User Experience: Librarians are now favoring more user-centric approaches, leveraging data on patron touchpoints to identify needs and develop high-quality engaging experiences.
(Mid-Term, 3-5 years):
Patrons as Creators: Students, faculty, and researchers across disciplines are learning by making and creating rather than by simply consuming content. Creativity, as illustrated by the growth of user-generated videos, maker communities, and crowdfunded projects in the past few years, is increasingly the means for active, hands-on learning. People now look to libraries to assist them and provide tools for skill-building and making.
Rethinking Library Spaces: At a time when discovery can happen anywhere, students are relying less on libraries as the sole source for accessing information and more for finding a place to be productive. As a result, institutional leaders are starting to reflect on how the design of library spaces can better facilitate the face-to-face interactions.
(Long-Term, 5 or more years):
Cross-Institution Collaboration: Within the current climate of shrinking budgets and increased focus on digital collections, collaborations enable libraries to improve access to scholarly materials and engage in mission-driven cooperative projects.
Evolving Nature of the Scholarly Record: Once limited to print-based journals and monographic series, scholarly communications now reside in networked environments and can be accessed through an expansive array of publishing platforms. “As different kinds of scholarly communication are becoming more prevalent on the web, librarians are expected to discern the legitimacy of these innovative approaches and their impact in the greater research community through emerging altmetrics tools,” notes the report.
Improving digital literacy: According to the report, digital literacy transcends gaining isolated technological skills to “generate a deeper understanding of the digital environment, enabling intuitive adaptation to new contexts, co-creation of content with others, and an awareness of both the freedom and risks that digital interactions entail. Libraries are positioned to lead efforts to develop students’ digital citizenship, ensuring mastery of responsible and appropriate technology use, including online identity, communication etiquette, and rights and responsibilities.”
Kiwi enhances learning experiences by encouraging active participation with AR and social media. A student can use their smartphone or tablet to scan physical textbooks and unlock learning assistance tools, like highlighting, note creation and sharing, videos and AR guides—all features that encourage peer-to-peer learning. (my note, as reported at the discussion at the QQLM conference in Crete about Zois Koukopoulos, Dimitrios Koukopoulos Augmented Reality Dissemination and Exploitation Services for Libraries: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/05/21/measuring-learning-outcomes-of-new-library-initiatives/
Street Smarts VR is a startup that is working to provide solutions for a major issue facing America’s communities: conflicts between police officers and citizens.
NYC Media Lab recently collaborated with Bloomberg and the augmented reality startup Lampix on a fellowship program to envision the future of learning in the workplace. Lampix technology looks like it sounds: a lamp-like hardware that projects AR capabilities, turning any flat surface into one that can visualize data and present collaborative workflows.
Calling Thunder: The Unsung History of Manhattan, a project that came out of a recent fellowship program with A+E Networks, re-imagines a time before industrialization, when the City we know now was lush with forests, freshwater ponds, and wildlife.
https://www-wired-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.wired.com/story/187-things-the-blockchain-is-supposed-to-fix/amp
Blockchains, which use advanced cryptography to store information across networks of computers, could eliminate the need for trusted third parties, like banks, in transactions, legal agreements, and other contracts. The most ardent blockchain-heads believe it has the power to reshape the global financial system, and possibly even the internet as we know it.
Now, as the technology expands from a fringe hacker toy to legitimate business applications, opportunists have flooded the field. Some of the seekers are mercenaries pitching shady or fraudulent tokens, others are businesses looking to cash in on a hot trend, and still others are true believers in the revolutionary and disruptive powers of distributed networks.
Mentions of blockchains and digital currencies on corporate earnings calls doubled in 2017 over the year prior, according to Fortune. Last week at Consensus, the country’s largest blockchain conference, 100 sponsors, including top corporate consulting firms and law firms, hawked their wares.
Here is a noncomprehensive list of the ways blockchain promoters say they will change the world. They run the spectrum from industry-specific (a blockchain project designed to increase blockchain adoption) to global ambitions (fixing the global supply chain’s apparent $9 trillion cash flow issue).
Things Blockchain Technology Will Fix
Bots with nefarious intent
Skynet
People not taking their medicine
Device storage that could be used for bitcoin mining
despite China’s many technological advances, in this new cyberspace race, the West had the lead.
Xi knew he had to act. Within twelve months he revealed his plan to make China a science and technology superpower. By 2030 the country would lead the world in AI, with a sector worth $150 billion. How? By teaching a generation of young Chinese to be the best computer scientists in the world.
Today, the US tech sector has its pick of the finest minds from across the world, importing top talent from other countries – including from China. Over half of Bay Area workers are highly-skilled immigrants. But with the growth of economies worldwide and a Presidential administration hell-bent on restricting visas, it’s unclear that approach can last.
In the UK the situation is even worse. Here, the government predicts there’ll be a shortfall of three million employees for high-skilled jobs by 2022 – even before you factor in the immigration crunch of Brexit. By contrast, China is plotting a homegrown strategy of local and national talent development programs. It may prove a masterstroke.
In 2013 the city’s teenagers gained global renown when they topped the charts in the PISA tests administered every three years by the OECD to see which country’s kids are the smartest in the world. Aged 15, Shanghai students were on average three full years ahead of their counterparts in the UK or US in maths and one-and-a-half years ahead in science.
Teachers, too, were expected to be learners. Unlike in the UK, where, when I began to teach a decade ago, you might be working on full-stops with eleven-year-olds then taking eighteen-year-olds through the finer points of poetry, teachers in Shanghai specialised not only in a subject area, but also an age-group.
Shanghai’s success owed a lot to Confucian tradition, but it fitted precisely the best contemporary understanding of how expertise is developed. In his book Why Don’t Kids Like School? cognitive Dan Willingham explains that complex mental skills like creativity and critical thinking depend on our first having mastered the simple stuff. Memorisation and repetition of the basics serve to lay down the neural architecture that creates automaticity of thought, ultimately freeing up space in our working memory to think big.
Seung-bin Lee, a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, told me of studying fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for the three years leading up to the Suneung, the fearsome SAT exam taken by all Korean school leavers on a single Thursday each November, for which all flights are grounded so as not to break students’ concentration during the 45 minutes of the English listening paper.
Korea’s childhoods were being lost to a relentless regime of studying, crushed in a top-down system that saw them as cyphers rather than kids.
A decade ago, we consoled ourselves that although kids in China and Korea worked harder and did better on tests than ours, it didn’t matter. They were compliant, unthinking drones, lacking the creativity, critical thinking or entrepreneurialism needed to succeed in the world. No longer. Though there are still issues with Chinese education – urban centres like Shanghai and Hong Kong are positive outliers – the country knows something that we once did: education is the one investment on which a return is guaranteed. China is on course to becoming the first education superpower.
Troublingly, where education in the UK and US has been defined by creativity and independent thinking – Shanghai teachers told me of visits to our schools to learn about these qualities – our direction of travel is now away from those strengths and towards exams and standardisation, with school-readiness tests in the pipeline and UK schools minister Nick Gibb suggesting kids can beat exam stress by sitting more of them. Centres of excellence remain, but increasingly, it feels, we’re putting our children at risk of losing out to the robots, while China is building on its strong foundations to ask how its young people can be high-tech pioneers. They’re thinking big – we’re thinking of test scores.
soon “digital information processing” would be included as a core subject on China’s national graduation exam – the Gaokao – and pictured classrooms in which students would learn in cross-disciplinary fashion, designing mobile phones for example, in order to develop design, engineering and computing skills. Focusing on teaching kids to code was short-sighted, he explained. “We still regard it as a language between human and computer.” (My note: they are practically implementing the Finland’s attempt to rebuild curricula)
“If your plan is for one year,” went an old Chinese saying, “plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years, educate children.” Two and half thousand years later chancellor Gwan Zhong might update his proverb, swapping rice for bitcoin and trees for artificial intelligence, but I’m sure he’d stand by his final point.