The result was a top-to-bottom makeover of the school’s curriculum and its overall approach. Gone were majors seen as stodgy or less aligned with a career path — including religion, art history and music. In their place are programs in sport management, international studies and crime, law and justice. There is a new emphasis on technology, and all students are required to complete an internship, a study-away trip or a research project in order to graduate.
The college has dubbed its approach “the new liberal arts” and trademarked the term.
https://sched.co/JAqk
the type of data: wikipedia. the dangers of learning from wikipedia. how individuals can organize mitigate some of these dangers. wikidata, algorithms.
IBM Watson is using wikipedia by algorythms making sense, AI system
youtube videos debunked of conspiracy theories by using wikipedia.
semantic relatedness, Word2Vec
how does algorithms work: large body of unstructured text. picks specific words
lots of AI learns about the world from wikipedia. the neutral point of view policy. WIkipedia asks editors present as proportionally as possible. Wikipedia biases: 1. gender bias (only 20-30 % are women).
conceptnet. debias along different demographic dimensions.
citations analysis gives also an idea about biases. localness of sources cited in spatial articles. structural biases.
geolocation on Twitter by County. predicting the people living in urban areas. FB wants to push more local news.
danger (biases) #3. wikipedia search results vs wkipedia knowledge panel.
collective action against tech: Reddit, boycott for FB and Instagram.
data labor: what the primary resources this companies have. posts, images, reviews etc.
boycott, data strike (data not being available for algorithms in the future). GDPR in EU – all historical data is like the CA Consumer Privacy Act. One can do data strike without data boycott. general vs homogeneous (group with shared identity) boycott.
the wikipedia SPAM policy is obstructing new editors and that hit communities such as women.
how to access at different levels. methods and methodological concerns. ethical concerns, legal concerns,
tweetdeck for advanced Twitter searches. quoting, likes is relevant, but not enough, sometimes screenshot
engagement option
social listening platforms: crimson hexagon, parsely, sysomos – not yet academic platforms, tools to setup queries and visualization, but difficult to algorythm, the data samples etc. open sources tools (Urbana, Social Media microscope: SMILE (social media intelligence and learning environment) to collect data from twitter, reddit and within the platform they can query Twitter. create trend analysis, sentiment analysis, Voxgov (subscription service: analyzing political social media)
graduate level and faculty research: accessing SM large scale data web scraping & APIs Twitter APIs. Jason script, Python etc. Gnip Firehose API ($) ; Web SCraper Chrome plugin (easy tool, Pyhon and R created); Twint (Twitter scraper)
Facepager (open source) if not Python or R coder. structure and download the data sets.
TAGS archiving google sheets, uses twitter API. anything older 7 days not avaialble, so harvest every week.
social feed manager (GWUniversity) – Justin Litman with Stanford. Install on server but allows much more.
legal concerns: copyright (public info, but not beyond copyrighted). fair use argument is strong, but cannot publish the data. can analyize under fair use. contracts supercede copyright (terms of service/use) licensed data through library.
methods: sampling concerns tufekci, 2014 questions for sm. SM data is a good set for SM, but other fields? not according to her. hashtag studies: self selection bias. twitter as a model organism: over-represnted data in academic studies.
methodological concerns: scope of access – lack of historical data. mechanics of platform and contenxt: retweets are not necessarily endorsements.
ethical concerns. public info – IRB no informed consent. the right to be forgotten. anonymized data is often still traceable.
table discussion: digital humanities, journalism interested, but too narrow. tools are still difficult to find an operate. context of the visuals. how to spread around variety of majors and classes. controversial events more likely to be deleted.
takedowns, lies and corrosion: what is a librarian to do: trolls, takedown,
development kit circulation. familiarity with the Oculus Rift resulted in lesser reservation. Downturn also.
An experience station. clean up free apps.
question: spherical video, video 360.
safety issues: policies? instructional perspective: curating,WI people: user testing. touch controllers more intuitive then xbox controller. Retail Oculus Rift
app Scatchfab. 3modelviewer. obj or sdl file. Medium, Tiltbrush.
College of Liberal Arts at the U has their VR, 3D print set up.
Penn State (Paul, librarian, kiniseology, anatomy programs), Information Science and Technology. immersive experiences lab for video 360.
CALIPHA part of it is xrlibraries. libraries equal education. content provider LifeLiqe STEM library of AR and VR objects. https://www.lifeliqe.com/
libraians, IT staff, IDs. help faculty with course design, primarily online, master courses. Concordia is GROWING, mostly because of online students.
solve issues (putting down fires, such as “gradebook” on BB). Librarians : research and resources experts. Librarians helping with LMS. Broadening definition of Library as support hub.
digital humanities is born f the encounter between traditional humanities and computational methods.
p. 5. From Humanism to Humanities
While the foundations of of humanistic inquiry and the liberal arts can be traced back in the west to the medieval trivium and quadrivium, the modern and human sciences are rooted in the Renaissance shift from a medieval, church dominated, theocratic world view to be human centered one period the gradual transformation of early humanism into the disciplines that make up the humanities today Was profoundly shaped by the editorial practices involved in the recovery of the corpus of works from classical antiquity
P. 6. The shift from humanism to the institution only sanctioned disciplinary practices and protocols that we associate with the humanities today is best described as a gradual process of subdivision and specialization.
P. 7. Text-based disciplines in studies (classics, literature, philosophy, the history of ideas) make up, from the very start, the core of both the humanities and the great books curricular instituted in the 1920s and 1930s.
P. 10. Transmedia modes of argumentation
In the 21st-century, we communicate in media significantly more varied, extensible, and multiplicative then linear text. From scalable databases to information visualizations, from video lectures to multi-user virtual platforms serious content and rigorous argumentation take shape across multiple platforms in media. The best digital humanities pedagogy and research projects train students both in “reading “and “writing “this emergent rhetoric and in understanding how the reshape and three model humanistic knowledge. This means developing critically informed literacy expensive enough to include graphic design visual narrative time based media, and the development of interfaces (Rather then the rote acceptance of them as off-the-shelf products).
P. 11. The visual becomes ever more fundamental to the digital humanities, in ways that compliment, enhance, and sometimes are in pension with the textual.
There is no either/or, no simple interchangeability between language and the visual, no strict sub ordination of the one to the other. Words are themselves visual but other kinds of visual constructs do different things. The question is how to use each to its best effect into device meaningful interpret wing links, to use Theodor Nelson’s ludic neologism.
P. 11. The suite of expressive forms now encompasses the use of sound, motion graphics, animation, screen capture, video, audio, and the appropriation and into remix sink of code it underlines game engines. This expanded range of communicative tools requires those who are engaged in digital humanities world to familiarize themselves with issues, discussions, and debates in design fields, especially communication and interaction design. Like their print predecessors, form at the convention center screen environments can become naturalized all too quickly, with the results that the thinking that informed they were designed goes unperceived.
p. 13.
For digital humanists, design is a creative practice harnessing cultural, social, economic, and technological constraints in order to bring systems and objects into the world. Design in dialogue with research is simply a picnic, but when used to pose in frame questions about knowledge, design becomes an intellectual method. Digital humanities is a production based in Denver in which theoretical issues get tested in the design of implementations and implementations or loci after your radical reflection and elaboration.
Did you thaw humanists have much to learn from communication and media design about how to juxtapose and integrate words and images create hire he is of reading, Forge pathways of understanding, deployed grades in templates to best effect, and develop navigational schemata that guide in produce meaningful interactions.
P. 15. The field of digital digital humanities me see the emergence of polymaths who can “ do it all” : Who can research, write, shoot, edit, code, model, design, network, and dialogue with users. But there is also ample room for specialization and, particularly, for collaboration.
P. 16. Computational activities in digital humanities.
The foundational layer, computation, relies on principles that are, on the surface, at odds with humanistic methods.
P. 17. The second level involves processing in a way that conform to computational capacities, and this were explored in the first generation of digital scholarship and stylometrics, concordance development, and indexing.
P. 17.
Duration, analysis, editing, modeling.
Duration, analysis, editing, and modeling comprise fundamental activities at the core of digital humanities. Involving archives, collections, repositories, and other aggregations of materials, duration is the selection and organization of materials in an interpretive framework, argument, or exhibit.
P. 18. Analysis refers to the processing of text or data: statistical and quantitative methods of analysis have brought close readings of texts (stylometrics and genre analysis, correlation, comparisons of versions for alter attribution or usage patterns ) into dialogue with distant reading (The crunching cuff large quantities of information across the corpus of textual data or its metadata).
Edit think has been revived with the advent of digital media and the web and to continue to be an integral activity in textual as well as time based formats.
P. 18. Model link highlights the notion of content models- shapes of argument expressed in information structures in their design he digital project is always an expression of assumptions about knowledge: usually domain specific knowledge given an explicit form by the model in which it is designed.
P. 19. Each of these areas of activity- cure ration, analysis, editing, and modeling is supported by the basic building blocks of digital activity. But they also depend upon networks and infrastructure that are cultural and institutional as well as technical. Servers, software, and systems administration are key elements of any project design.
P. 30. Digital media are not more “evolved” have them print media nor are books obsolete; but the multiplicity of media in the very processes of mediation entry mediation in the formation of cultural knowledge and humanistic inquiry required close attention. Tug link between distant and clothes, macro and micro, and surface in depth becomes the norm. Here, we focus on the importance of visualization to the digital humanities before moving on to other, though often related, genre and methods such as Locative investigation, thick mapping, animated archives, database documentaries, platform studies, and emerging practices like cultural analytics, data mining and humanities gaming.
P. 35. Fluid texture out what he refers to the mutability of texts in the variants and versions Whether these are produced through Authorial changes, anything, transcription, translation, or print production
Cultural Analytics, aggregation, and data mining.
The field of cultural Analytics has emerged over the past few years, utilizing tools of high-end computational analysis and data visualization today sect large-scale coach data sets. Cultural Analytic does Not analyze cultural artifacts, but operates on the level of digital models of this materials in aggregate. Again, the point is not to pit “close” hermeneutic reading against “distant” data mapping, but rather to appreciate the synergistic possibilities and tensions that exist between a hyper localized, deep analysis and a microcosmic view
p. 42.
Data mining is a term that covers a host of picnics for analyzing digital material by “parameterizing” some feature of information and extract in it. This means that any element of a file or collection of files that can be given explicit specifications, or parameters, can be extracted from those files for analysis.
Understanding the rehtoric of graphics is another essential skill, therefore, in working at a skill where individual objects are lost in the mass of processed information and data. To date, much humanities data mining has merely involved counting. Much more sophisticated statistical methods and use of probability will be needed for humanists to absorb the lessons of the social sciences into their methods
P. 42. Visualization and data design
Currently, visualization in the humanities uses techniques drawn largely from the social sciences, Business applications, and the natural sciences, all of which require self-conscious criticality in their adoption. Such visual displays including graphs and charts, may present themselves is subjective or even unmediated views of reality, rather then is rhetorical constructs.
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Warwick, C., Terras, M., & Nyhan, J. (2012). Digital humanities in practice . London: Facet Publishing in association with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.
Our survey polled 232 faculty members across the country about their use of technology in the classroom, their likes and dislikes, their predictions for the future and more. The majority of respondents (68 percent) come from public institutions, with 28 percent from private nonprofits and 4 percent working at for-profit schools. Seventy-two percent work at four-year colleges or universities; 26 percent are at community colleges (the remaining 2 percent designated their institutional level as “other”).
Respondents represent institutions of a range of sizes, with about one-third (32 percent) working in colleges or universities with 2,500 to 9,999 students. Just under half (45 percent) of respondents are from institutions with 10,000 students or more.
Our respondents are veterans of higher education: The largest group (47 percent) has more than 20 years of experience, with 81 percent logging at least 11 years in the field.
The top three most common school and college types among our respondents are education (22 percent), business/business administration (17 percent) and liberal arts (12 percent). But overall, respondents work in a wide range of disciplines, from engineering and medicine to humanities and fine arts. The top 10 states with the most survey respondents are New York, Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
United States digital literacy frameworks tend to focus on educational policy details and personal empowerment, the latter encouraging learners to become more effective students, better creators, smarter information consumers, and more influential members of their community.
National policies are vitally important in European digital literacy work, unsurprising for a continent well populated with nation-states and struggling to redefine itself, while still trying to grow economies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent financial pressures
African digital literacy is more business-oriented.
Middle Eastern nations offer yet another variation, with a strong focus on media literacy. As with other regions, this can be a response to countries with strong state influence or control over local media. It can also represent a drive to produce more locally-sourced content, as opposed to consuming material from abroad, which may elicit criticism of neocolonialism or religious challenges.
p. 14 Digital literacy for Humanities: What does it mean to be digitally literate in history, literature, or philosophy? Creativity in these disciplines often involves textuality, given the large role writing plays in them, as, for example, in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s instructor’s guide. In the digital realm, this can include web-based writing through social media, along with the creation of multimedia projects through posters, presentations, and video. Information literacy remains a key part of digital literacy in the humanities. The digital humanities movement has not seen much connection with digital literacy, unfortunately, but their alignment seems likely, given the turn toward using digital technologies to explore humanities questions. That development could then foster a spread of other technologies and approaches to the rest of the humanities, including mapping, data visualization, text mining, web-based digital archives, and “distant reading” (working with very large bodies of texts). The digital humanities’ emphasis on making projects may also increase
Digital Literacy for Business: Digital literacy in this world is focused on manipulation of data, from spreadsheets to more advanced modeling software, leading up to degrees in management information systems. Management classes unsurprisingly focus on how to organize people working on and with digital tools.
Digital Literacy for Computer Science: Naturally, coding appears as a central competency within this discipline. Other aspects of the digital world feature prominently, including hardware and network architecture. Some courses housed within the computer science discipline offer a deeper examination of the impact of computing on society and politics, along with how to use digital tools. Media production plays a minor role here, beyond publications (posters, videos), as many institutions assign multimedia to other departments. Looking forward to a future when automation has become both more widespread and powerful, developing artificial intelligence projects will potentially play a role in computer science literacy.
In traditional instruction, students’ first contact with new ideas happens in class, usually through direct instruction from the professor; after exposure to the basics, students are turned out of the classroom to tackle the most difficult tasks in learning — those that involve application, analysis, synthesis, and creativity — in their individual spaces. Flipped learning reverses this, by moving first contact with new concepts to the individual space and using the newly-expanded time in class for students to pursue difficult, higher-level tasks together, with the instructor as a guide.
Let’s take a look at some of the myths about flipped learning and try to find the facts.
Myth: Flipped learning is predicated on recording videos for students to watch before class.
Fact: Flipped learning does not require video. Although many real-life implementations of flipped learning use video, there’s nothing that says video must be used. In fact, one of the earliest instances of flipped learning — Eric Mazur’s peer instruction concept, used in Harvard physics classes — uses no video but rather an online text outfitted with social annotation software. And one of the most successful public instances of flipped learning, an edX course on numerical methods designed by Lorena Barba of George Washington University, uses precisely one video. Video is simply not necessary for flipped learning, and many alternatives to video can lead to effective flipped learning environments [http://rtalbert.org/flipped-learning-without-video/].
Fact: Flipped learning optimizes face-to-face teaching. Flipped learning may (but does not always) replace lectures in class, but this is not to say that it replaces teaching. Teaching and “telling” are not the same thing.
Myth: Flipped learning has no evidence to back up its effectiveness.
Fact: Flipped learning research is growing at an exponential pace and has been since at least 2014. That research — 131 peer-reviewed articles in the first half of 2017 alone — includes results from primary, secondary, and postsecondary education in nearly every discipline, most showing significant improvements in student learning, motivation, and critical thinking skills.
Myth: Flipped learning is a fad.
Fact: Flipped learning has been with us in the form defined here for nearly 20 years.
Myth: People have been doing flipped learning for centuries.
Fact: Flipped learning is not just a rebranding of old techniques. The basic concept of students doing individually active work to encounter new ideas that are then built upon in class is almost as old as the university itself. So flipped learning is, in a real sense, a modern means of returning higher education to its roots. Even so, flipped learning is different from these time-honored techniques.
Myth: Students and professors prefer lecture over flipped learning.
Fact: Students and professors embrace flipped learning once they understand the benefits. It’s true that professors often enjoy their lectures, and students often enjoy being lectured to. But the question is not who “enjoys” what, but rather what helps students learn the best.They know what the research says about the effectiveness of active learning
Assertion: Flipped learning provides a platform for implementing active learning in a way that works powerfully for students.
The Exposure Approach: we don’t provide a way for participants to determine if they learned anything new or now have the confidence or competence to apply what they learned.
The Exemplar Approach: from ‘show and tell’ for adults to show, tell, do and learn.
The Tutorial Approach: Getting a group that can meet at the same time and place can be challenging. That is why many faculty report a preference for self-paced professional development.build in simple self-assessment checks. We can add prompts that invite people to engage in some sort of follow up activity with a colleague. We can also add an elective option for faculty in a tutorial to actually create or do something with what they learned and then submit it for direct or narrative feedback.
The Course Approach: a non-credit format, these have the benefits of a more structured and lengthy learning experience, even if they are just three to five-week short courses that meet online or in-person once every week or two.involve badges, portfolios, peer assessment, self-assessment, or one-on-one feedback from a facilitator
The Academy Approach: like the course approach, is one that tends to be a deeper and more extended experience. People might gather in a cohort over a year or longer.Assessment through coaching and mentoring, the use of portfolios, peer feedback and much more can be easily incorporated to add a rich assessment element to such longer-term professional development programs.
The Mentoring Approach: The mentors often don’t set specific learning goals with the mentee. Instead, it is often a set of structured meetings, but also someone to whom mentees can turn with questions and tips along the way.
The Coaching Approach: A mentor tends to be a broader type of relationship with a person.A coaching relationship tends to be more focused upon specific goals, tasks or outcomes.
The Peer Approach:This can be done on a 1:1 basis or in small groups, where those who are teaching the same courses are able to compare notes on curricula and teaching models. They might give each other feedback on how to teach certain concepts, how to write syllabi, how to handle certain teaching and learning challenges, and much more. Faculty might sit in on each other’s courses, observe, and give feedback afterward.
The Self-Directed Approach:a self-assessment strategy such as setting goals and creating simple checklists and rubrics to monitor our progress. Or, we invite feedback from colleagues, often in a narrative and/or informal format. We might also create a portfolio of our work, or engage in some sort of learning journal that documents our thoughts, experiments, experiences, and learning along the way.
In 2014, administrators at Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) in Charlotte, North Carolina, began talks with members of the North Carolina State Board of Community Colleges and North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) leadership about starting a CBE program.
Building on an existing project at CPCC for identifying the elements of a digital learning environment (DLE), which was itself influenced by the EDUCAUSE publication The Next Generation Digital Learning Environment: A Report on Research,1 the committee reached consensus on a DLE concept and a shared lexicon: the “Digital Learning Environment Operational Definitions,
When: Friday, September 28, 8:30am-3:00pm Where: Wilson Research Collaboration Studio, Wilson Library Cost: Free; advanced registration is required
1968 was one of the most turbulent years of the 20th century. 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of that year’s landmark political, social and cultural events–events that continue to influence our world today.
Focusing on the importance of this 50 year anniversary we are calling out to all faculty, staff, students, and community partners to participate the workshop ‘Mapping 1968, Conflict and Change’. This all-day event is designed to bring people together into working groups based on common themes. Bring your talent and curiosity to apply an interdisciplinary approach to further explore the spatial context of these historic and/or current events. Learn new skills on mapping techniques that can be applied to any time in history. To compliment the expertise that you bring to the workshop, working groups will also have the support of library, mapping, and data science experts to help gather, create, and organize the spatial components of a given topic.
Workshop sponsors: Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), U-Spatial, Liberal Arts Technologies & Innovation Services (LATIS), Digital Arts, Science & Humanities (DASH), and UMN Libraries.
Henneping County scanned the deeds, OCR, Python script to search. Data in an open source. covenant data. Local historian found microfishes, the language from the initial data. e.g. eugenics flavor: arian, truncate.
storymaps.arcgis.com/en/gallery https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#s=0 cloud-based mapping software. ArcGIS Online. organizational account for the U, 600 users. over 700 storymaps creates within the U, some of them are not active, share all kind of data: archive data on spreadsheet, but also a whole set of data within the software; so add the data or use the ArcGIS data and use templates. web maps into the storymap app, Living Atlas: curated set of data: hunderd sets of data, from sat images, to different contents. 846 layers of data, imagery, besides org account, one can create maps within the free account with limited access. data browser to use my own data – Data Enrichment to characterized my data. census data from 2018 and before,
make plan, create a storyboard, writing for the web, short and precise (not as writing for a journal), cartographic style, copyright, citing the materials, choosing the right map scale for each page. online learning materials, some only thru org account ESRI academy has course catalogue. Mapping 101, Dekstop GIS 101, Collector 101, Imagery 101, SQL 101, Story Maps 101,
The “Mapping 1968, Conflict and Change” planning committee is very pleased with the amount of interest and the wonderful attendance at Friday’s gathering. Thank you for attending and actively participating in this interdisciplinary workshop!
To re-cap and learn more on your thoughts and expectations of the workshop we would be grateful if you can take a few moments to complete the workshop evaluation. Please complete the evaluation even if you were unable to attend last Friday, there are questions regarding continued communication and the possibility for future events of this kind.
Juxtapose JS from Knight Lab is a free tool for making and hosting side-by-side comparisons of images. The tool was designed to help people see before and after views of a location, a building, a person, or anything else that changes appearance over time. Juxtapose JS will let you put the images into a slider frame that you can embed into a webpage where viewers can use the slider to reveal more or less of one of the images.
Storyline JS is one of the newer Knight Lab offerings. This beta product is designed to help students tell stories with data. The basic purpose of Storyline JS is to help students can create interactive line graphs. Students add annotations to the data points their line graphs. Those annotations are used to tell the story of the data represented in the graph.
Scene VR is another beta product from Knight Lab. The purpose of Scene VR is to enable users to stitch together panoramic images and VR images to create an immersive photo story. Stories published through Scene VR can be embedded into websites and viewed on desktop computers as well as on tablets and mobile phones.
If you want to embed audio into a written story, Soundcite JS is the tool for you. Soundcite JS lets you add audio clips to a written story. When Soundcite JS is properly used, a play button appears where you specify in the text. For example, if I wrote a story that included a scene in which a dog barks, I could have “the dog barks at the stranger” be highlighted with a play button that when clicked plays the sound of a dog barking.
StoryMap JS lets you combine elements of timelines and maps to create mapped stories. On StoryMap JS you create slides that are matched to locations on your map. Each slide in your story can include images or videos along with text. As you scroll through your story there are simple transitions between each slide. StoryMap JS integrates with your Google Drive account. To get started with StoryMap JS you have to grant it access to your Google Drive account. StoryMap JS will create a folder in your Google Drive account where all of your storymap projects will be saved. With StoryMap JS connected to your Google Drive account you will be able to pull images from your Google Drive account to use in your StoryMap JS projects. Here’s a good tutorial video made by Jan Serie Center’s Digital Liberal Arts initiative at Macalester College.
Presidents believe the business models for elite private colleges, elite private liberal arts colleges and public
flagship universities are viable over the next 10 years. They are less likely to think the business model for
community colleges is viable, and relatively few think for-profit institutions and other private nonprofit
institutions have viable business models.
• Nearly all presidents believe that additional colleges will merge or close this year, with 30 percent predicting that
between one and five colleges will close, 40 percent between 6 and 10, and 29 percent more than 10.
• Thirteen percent of presidents say they could see their own college closing or merging in the next five years.
That is higher than the 9 percent of chief business officers who answered that way in an Inside Higher Ed survey
last summer.
Children who use smartphones, tablets, and video games for more than seven hours a day are more likely to experience premature thinning of the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain that processes thought and action, a 2018 study found. https://t.co/OJe6ZTBVkx
But others say banning laptops can be counterproductive, arguing these devices can create opportunity for students to discover more information during class or collaborate. And that certain tools and technologies are necessary for learners who struggle in a traditional lecture format.
Flanigan, who studies self-regulation, or the processes students use to achieve their learning goals, began researching digital distraction after confronting it in the classroom as a graduate instructor.
Digital distraction tempts all of us, almost everywhere. That’s the premise of Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University.
The professor is upset. The professor has taken action, by banning laptops.
Bruff, whose next book, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, is set to be published this fall, is among the experts who think that’s a mistake. Why? Well, for one thing, he said, students are “going to have to graduate and get jobs and use laptops without being on Facebook all day.” The classroom should help prepare them for that.
When Volk teaches a course with 50 or 60 students, he said, “the idea is to keep them moving.”Shifting the focal point away from the professor can help, too. “If they are in a small group with their colleagues,” Volk said, “very rarely will I see them on their laptops doing things they shouldn’t be.”
Professors may not see themselves as performers, but if they can’t get students’ attention, nothing else they do matters. “Learning doesn’t happen without attention,” said Lang, who is writing a book about digital distraction, Teaching Distracted Minds.
One aspect of distraction Lang plans to cover in his book is its history. It’s possible, he said, to regard our smartphones as either too similar or dissimilar from the distractions of the past. And it’s important, he said, to remember how new this technology really is, and how much we still don’t know about it.
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Study: Use of digital devices in class affects students’ long-term retention of information
A new study conducted by researchers at Rutgers University reveals that students who are distracted by texts, games, or videos while taking lecture notes on digital devices are far more likely to have their long-term memory affected and to perform more poorly on exams, even if short-term memory is not impacted, EdSurge reports.
Exam performance was not only poorer for students using the devices, but also for other students in classes that permitted the devices because of the distraction factor, the study found.
After conducting the study, Arnold Glass, the lead researcher, changed his own policy and no longer allows his students to take notes on digital devices.
A nationally representative Gallup poll conducted in March showed that 42% of K-12 teachers feel that the use of digital devices in the classroom are “mostly helpful” for students, while only 28% feel they are “mostly harmful.” Yet 69% of those same teachers feel the devices have a harmful impact on student mental health and 55% feel they negatively affect student physical health.
According to a 2016 study of college students, student waste about 20% of their class time for “non-class” purposes — texting, emailing, or using social media more than 11 times in a typical day. In K-12, increased dependence on digital devices often interferes with homework completion as well.
Though the new study focused on long-term retention, past studies have also shown that indicate a negative correlation between use of digital devices during class and exam scores. A 2015 study by the London School of Economics revealed that pupils in schools that banned cell phones performed better on exams and that the differences were most notable for low-performing students.
Using laptops in class harms academic performance, study warns. Researchers say students who use computers score half a grade lower than those who write notes
findings, published in the journal Economics of Education Review in a paper, based on an analysis of the grades of about 5,600 students at a private US liberal arts college, found that using a laptop appeared to harm the grades of male and low-performing students most significantly.
While the authors were unable to definitively say why laptop use caused a “significant negative effect in grades”, the authors believe that classroom “cyber-slacking” plays a major role in lower achievement, with wi-fi-enabled computers providing numerous distractions for students.
High schoolers assigned a laptop or a Chromebook were more likely to take notes in class, do internet research, create documents to share, collaborate with their peers on projects, check their grades and get reminders about tests or homework due dates.
Blended Learning – the idea of incorporating technology into the every day experience of education – can save time, raise engagement, and increase student retention.
Lets face it, our students are addicted to their phones. Like…drugs addicted. It is not just a bad habit, it is hard wired in their brains(literally) to have the constant stimulation of their phones.
If you are interested in the research, there is a lot out there to read about how it happens and how bad it is.
a Scientific American article published about a recent study of nomophobia – on adults (yes, many of us are addicted too).
My note: naturally, the LinkedIn CEO will make such claim, since it is good for his business. Please take a look at this Chronicle of Higher Ed posting:
Namely,
When it comes to getting students ready for the job market, presidents are not always in agreement with employers and parents on what role the institution should play in the process.
presidents are more divided about whether colleges should provide a broad education or specific training, and one- third of them don’t want to be held accountable for the career outcomes of their students
The LinkedIn CIO claims that:
The notion that an entrepreneur who built his career upon a professional network is now saying that skill level is what matters most in a job search should be a sign to colleges and universities that the era of college as a search for personal discovery is rapidly coming to an end.
Colleges must develop stronger training programs, similar to approaches used in applied science for lab and research exposure, to bolster career readiness in the liberal arts and social sciences. Without it, businesses will soon realize that they can develop these learning outlets on their own, in benefit of their own bottom lines.
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more on LInkedIn in this IMS blog:
