Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
Congrats everyone https://t.co/auPV8Kp7VZ
— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) December 31, 2019
http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow
14. inBloom. The Shared Learning Collaborative (2011)
Thiel is notorious among Silicon Valley billionaires for explicitly endorsing Trump in 2016 and speaking at the Republican National Convention that year. Thiel, a libertarian who runs a company that enhances government surveillance efforts, has also questioned the value of women voting.
a series of dinners at Zuckerberg’s home in California with conservative pundits and activists like white supremacist Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
It’s safe to say that Zuckerberg’s politics are issue-specific and generally party-agnostic.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard after two years. Zuckerberg has enrolled for the past decade at the University of Davos, where rich people pretend they are smart and smart people pander to the rich. If someone chooses to study world politics from Henry Kissinger, you can assume that he will have some twisted views of how the world works.
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More on Siva Vaidhyanathan in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/04/15/no-millennials-gen-z-gen-x/
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-06-10-humanizing-education-s-algorithms
predictive algorithms to better target students’ individual learning needs.
Personalized learning is a lofty aim, however you define it. To truly meet each student where they are, we would have to know their most intimate details, or discover it through their interactions with our digital tools. We would need to track their moods and preferences, their fears and beliefs…perhaps even their memories.
There’s something unsettling about capturing users’ most intimate details. Any prediction model based off historical records risks typecasting the very people it is intended to serve. Even if models can overcome the threat of discrimination, there is still an ethical question to confront – just how much are we entitled to know about students?
We can accept that tutoring algorithms, for all their processing power, are inherently limited in what they can account for. This means steering clear of mythical representations of what such algorithms can achieve. It may even mean giving up on personalization altogether. The alternative is to pack our algorithms to suffocation at the expense of users’ privacy. This approach does not end well.
There is only one way to resolve this trade-off: loop in the educators.
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more on algorithms in this IMS blog
blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=algor
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48103430
McMullan, T. (2018, April 26). How Technology Got Under Our Skin – Featured Stories. Retrieved April 2, 2019, from Medium website: https://medium.com/s/story/how-technology-got-under-our-skin-cee8a71b241b
anthropocene
Like the circle-bound symmetry of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the meat and bones of the human race are the same in 2018 as they were in 1490. And yet, we are different.
Michael Patrick Lynch, writer and professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut.
“The digital revolution is more like the revolution brought on by the written word. Just as the written word allowed us to time-travel — to record our thoughts for others, including ourselves, to read in the future — so the internet has allowed for a kind of tele-transportation , breaking down barriers of space and physical limitation and connecting us across the globe in ways we now take for granted, as we do the written word.”
In the book Self-Tracking, authors Gina Neff, a sociology professor at Oxford University, and Dawn Nafus, a research scientist at Intel, describe this phenomenon as a shuffling between physical signs and observed recordings: “The data becomes a ‘prosthetic of feeling,’Advocates of this “prosthetic of feeling” argue that self-tracking can train people to recognize their own body signals, tuning the senses to allow for a greater grasp of biological rhythms.but what if the body-as-data is exploited by the state, or by an insurance company that can predict when you’ll get diabetes, or a data analytics firm that can use it to help sway elections? The Chinese government is going so far as to plan a social credit score for its citizens by 2020, giving each of the country’s 1.3 billion residents a reputation number based on economic and social status. What is particularly subtle about all this is that, like a scientific épistémè, our way of thinking is perhaps unconsciously guided by the configurations of knowledge these new technologies allow. We don’t question it.
Hannah Knox. Computational machines are “shaping what we expect it means to be a human”, Knox wrote for the Corsham Institute’s Observatory for a Connected Society.
Facebook goads us to remember past moments on a daily basis, the stacked boxes of tape in Beckett’s play replaced with stacks of servers in remote data centers in northern Sweden.“There is reasonable evidence that [the internet] has reduced our internal memory ability,” says Phil Reed, a professor of psychology at Swansea University.
Moderate tech use correlated with positive mental health, according to a paper published in Psychological Science by Andrew Przybylski of Oxford and Netta Weinstein at Cardiff University, who surveyed 120,000 British 15-year-olds.Again, the crucial question is one of control. If our way of thinking is changed by our intimacy with these technologies, then is this process being directed by individuals, or the ledgers of private companies, or governments keen on surveilling their citizens? If we conceive of these systems as extensions of our own brains, what happens if they collapse?
Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) are coming in leaps and bounds, with companies like Neuralink and CTRL-Labs in the United States exploring both surgical and noninvasive processes that allow computers to be controlled directly by signals from the brain. It’s a field that involves fundamentally changing the relationship between our minds, bodies, and machines.Kevin Warwick, emeritus professor at Coventry University and a pioneer in implant technology
Between the creation of a social rating system and street cameras with facial recognition capabilities, technology reports coming out of China have raised serious concerns for privacy advocates. These concerns are only heightened as Chinese investors turn their attention to the United States education technology space acquiring companies with millions of public school users.
A particularly notable deal this year centers on Edmodo, a cross between a social networking platform and a learning management system for schools that boasts having upwards of 90 million users. Net Dragon, a Chinese gaming company that is building a significant education division, bought Edmodo for a combination of cash and equity valued at $137.5 million earlier this month.
Edmodo began shifting to an advertising model last year, after years of struggling to generate revenue. This has left critics wondering why the Chinese firm chose to acquire Edmodo at such a price, some have gone as far as to call the move a data grab.
as data becomes a tool that governments such as Russia and China could use to influence voting systems or induce citizens into espionage, more legislators are turning their attention to the acquisitions of early-stage technology startups.
NetDragon officials, however, say they have no interest in these types of activities. Their main goal in acquiring United States edtech companies lies in building profitability, says Pep So, NetDragon’s Director of Corporate Development.
In 2015, the firm acquired the education technology platform, Promethean, a company that creates interactive displays for schools. NetDragon executives say that the Edmodo acquisition rounds out their education product portfolio—meaning the company will have tools for supporting multiple aspects of learning including; preparation, instructional delivery, homework, assignment grading, communication with parents students and teachers and a content marketplace.
NetDragon’s monetization plan for Edmodo focuses on building out content that gets sold via its platform. Similar to tools like TeachersPayTeachers, So hopes to see users putting up content on the platform’s marketplace, some free and others for a fee (including some virtual reality content), so that the community can buy, sell and review available educational tools.
As far as data privacy is concerned, So notes that NetDragon is still learning what it can and cannot do. He noted that the company will comply with Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal regulation created in order to protect the privacy of children online, but says that the rules and regulations surrounding the law are confusing for all actors involved.
Historically, Chinese companies have faced trust and branding issues when moving into the United States market, and the reverse is also true for U.S. companies seeking to expand overseas. Companies have also struggled to learn the rules, regulations and operational procedures in place in other countries.
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https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/pompeo-merkel-iran-huawei-agenda-110409835.html
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more on data privacy in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=data+privacy
At NYC Media Lab recent Exploring Future Reality conference, long-time educators including Agnieszka Roginska of New York University and Columbia University’s Steven Feiner pointed to emerging media as a way to improve multi-modal learning for students and train computer systems to understand the world around us.
the Lab has completed dozens of rapid prototyping projects; exhibited hundreds of demos from the corporate, university and entrepreneurship communities; helped new startups make their mark; and hosted three major events, all to explore emerging media technologies and their evolving impact.
Mobile AR
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/
Training and simulations for police https://streetsmartsvr.com/
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.
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more on VR and education
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality+education
more on AR in education
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=augmented+reality+education
09.04.17
https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-us-government-shouldnt-ban-kaspersky-security-software/
he General Services Administration (GSA) has ordered the removal of Kaspersky software platforms from its catalogues of approved vendors. Meanwhile, the Senate is considering a draft bill of the 2018 National Defense Acquisition Authorization (known as the NDAA, it specifies the size of and uses for the fiscal year 2018 US Defense Department budget) that would bar the use of Kaspersky products in the military.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kasperksy-lab-software-suspected-ties-russian-intelligence-rob-joyce/
14 September 2017 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41262049
10.11.17
https://www.wired.com/story/kaspersky-russia-antivirus/
Israel and Russia’s overlapping hacks of Kaspersky complicate espionage narrative
The whole ordeal is a nightmare for Kaspersky Lab. The company looks incompetent at preventing state-sponsored hacks in the best-case scenario and complicit with the Russian government in the worst-case scenario. However it plays out, the unfolding drama will certainly hurt the software maker’s footprint in the U.S., where Congress has already taken action to purge the government of the company’s software.
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more on cybersecurity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity