The event requires no registration, and is virtual only, free, and open to the public. Platform access is required, so please install one of the above platforms to attend the International Summit. You may attend in 2D on a desktop or laptop computer with a headphone and microphone (USB gaming headphone recommended), or with a virtual device such as the Oculus Go, Quest, and Rift, Vive, and other mobile and tethered devices. Please note the specifications and requirements of each platform.
Charlie Fink, author, columnist for Forbes magazine, and Adjunct Faculty member of Chapman University, will be presenting “Setting the Table for the Next Decade in XR,” discussing the future of this innovative and immersive technology, at the 2020 Educators in VR International Summit. He will be speaking in AltspaceVR on Tuesday, February 18 at 1:00 PM EST /
This workshop with Dr. Sarah Jones will focus on developing a relevant and new literacy for virtual reality, including the core competencies and skills needed to develop and understand how to become an engaged user of the technology in a meaningful way. The workshop will develop into research for a forthcoming book on Uncovering a Literacy for VR due to be published in 2020.
Sarah is listed as one of the top 15 global influencers within virtual reality. After nearly a decade in television news, Sarah began working in universities focusing on future media, future technology and future education. Sarah holds a PhD in Immersive Storytelling and has published extensively on virtual and augmented reality, whilst continuing to make and create immersive experiences. She has advised the UK Government on Immersive Technologies and delivers keynotes and speaks at conferences across the world on imagining future technology. Sarah is committed to diversifying the media and technology industries and regularly champions initiatives to support this agenda.
Currently there are limited ways to connect 3D VR environments to physical objects in the real-world whilst simultaneously conducting communication and collaboration between remote users. Within the context of a solar power plant, the performance metrics of the site are invaluable for environmental engineers who are remotely located. Often two or more remotely located engineers need to communicate and collaborate on solving a problem. If a solar panel component is damaged, the repair often needs to be undertaken on-site thereby incurring additional expenses. This triage of communication is known as inter-cognitive communication and intra-cognitive communication: inter-cognitive communication where information transfer occurs between two cognitive entities with different cognitive capabilities (e.g., between a human and an artificially cognitive system); intra-cognitive communication where information transfer occurs between two cognitive entities with equivalent cognitive capabilities (e.g., between two humans) [Baranyi and Csapo, 2010]. Currently, non-VR solutions offer a comprehensive analysis of solar plant data. A regular PC with a monitor currently have advantages over 3D VR. For example, sensors can be monitored using dedicated software such as EPEVER or via a web browser; as exemplified by the comprehensive service provided by Elseta. But when multiple users are able to collaborate remotely within a three-dimensional virtual simulation, the opportunities for communication, training and academic education will be profound.
Michael Vallance Ed.D. is a researcher in the Department of Media Architecture, Future University Hakodate, Japan. He has been involved in educational technology design, implementation, research and consultancy for over twenty years, working closely with Higher Education Institutes, schools and media companies in UK, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan. His 3D virtual world design and tele-robotics research has been recognized and funded by the UK Prime Minister’s Initiative (PMI2) and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). He has been awarded by the United States Army for his research in collaborating the programming of robots in a 3D Virtual World.
Augmented Reality Lens is popular among young people thanks to Snapchat’s invention. Business is losing money without fully using of social media targeting young people (14-25). In my presentation, Dominique Wu will show how businesses can generate more leads through Spark AR (Facebook AR/Instagram AR) & Snapchat AR Lens, and how to create a strategic Snapchat & Instagram AR campaigns.
Domnique Wu is an XR social media strategist and expert in UX/UI design.She has her own YouTube and Apple Podcast show called “XReality: Digital Transformation,” covering the technology and techniques of incorporating XR and AR into social media, marketing, and integration into enterprise solutions.
Mark Christian, EVP, Strategy and Corporate Development, GIGXR
Mixed Reality devices like the HoloLens are transforming education now. Mark Christian will discuss how the technology is not about edge use cases or POCs, but real usable products that are at Universities transforming the way we teach and learn. Christian will talk about the products of GIGXR, the story of how they were developed and what the research is saying about their efficacy. It is time to move to adoption of XR technology in education. Learn how one team has made this a reality.
As CEO of forward-thinking virtual reality and software companies, Mark Christian employs asymmetric approaches to rapid, global market adoption, hiring, diversity and revenue. He prides himself on unconventional approaches to building technology companies.
Virtual Reality is an effective medium to impart education to the student only if it is done right.The way VR is considered gimmick or not is by the way the software application are designed/developed by the developers not the hardware limitation.I will be giving insight about the VR development for educational content specifically designed for students of lower secondary school.I will also provide insights about the development of game in unity3D game engine.
Game Developer and VR developer with over 3 years of experience in Game Development.Developer of Zombie Shooter, winner of various national awards in the gaming and entertainment category, Avinash Gyawali is the developer of EDVR, an immersive voice controlled VR experience specially designed for children of age 10-18 years.
Virtual Reality Technologies for Learning Designers
Margherita Berti
Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer-generated experience that simulates presence in real or imagined environments (Kerrebrock, Brengman, & Willems, 2017). VR promotes contextualized learning, authentic experiences, critical thinking, and problem-solving opportunities. Despite the great potential and popularity of this technology, the latest two installations of the Educause Horizon Report (2018, 2019) have argued that VR remains “elusive” in terms of mainstream adoption. The reasons are varied, including the expense and the lack of empirical evidence for its effectiveness in education. More importantly, examples of successful VR implementations for those instructors who lack technical skills are still scarce. Margherita Berti will discuss a range of easy-to-use educational VR tools and examples of VR-based activity examples and the learning theories and instructional design principles utilized for their development.
Margherita Berti is a doctoral candidate in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) and Educational Technology at the University of Arizona. Her research specialization resides at the intersection of virtual reality, the teaching of culture, and curriculum and content development for foreign language education.
Amanda Fox, Creative Director of STEAMPunks/MetaInk Publishing, MetaInk Publishing
There is a barrier between an author and readers of his/her books. The author’s journey ends, and the reader’s begins. But what if as an author/trainer, you could use gamification and augmented reality(AR) to interact and coach your readers as part of their learning journey? Attend this session with Amanda Fox to learn how the book Teachingland leverages augmented reality tools such as Metaverse to connect with readers beyond the text.
Amanda Fox, Creative Director of STEAMPunksEdu, and author of Teachingland: A Teacher’s Survival Guide to the Classroom Apolcalypse and Zom-Be A Design Thinker. Check her out on the Virtual Reality Podcast, or connect with her on twitter @AmandaFoxSTEM.
Christian Jonathan Angel Rueda specializaes in didactic activity of the use of virtual reality/virtual worlds to learn the fundamentals of design. He shares the development of a course including recreating in the three-dimensional environment using the fundamentals learned in class, a demonstration of all the works developed throughout the semester using the knowledge of design foundation to show them creatively, and a final project class scenario that connected with the scenes of the students who showed their work throughout the semester.
Christian Jonathan Angel Rueda is a research professor at the Autonomous University of Queretaro in Mexico. With a PhD in educational technology, Christian has published several papers on the intersection of education, pedagogy, and three-dimensional immersive digital environments. He is also an edtech, virtual reality, and social media consultant at Eco Onis.
How we can bridge the gap between eLearning and XR. Richard Van Tilborg discusses combining brain insights enabled with new technologies. Training and education cases realised with the CoVince platform: journeys which start on you mobile and continue in VR. The possibilities to earn from your creations and have a central distribution place for learning and data.
Richard Van Tilborg works with the CoVince platform, a VR platform offering training and educational programs for central distribution of learning and data. He is an author and speaker focusing on computers and education in virtual reality-based tasks for delivering feedback.
Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial
But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. recognition technology.
Facial recognition technology has always been controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother. It has a tendency to deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color. And some facial recognition products used by the police — including Clearview’s — haven’t been vetted by independent experts.
Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool, according to Mr. Ton-That.
“We have no data to suggest this tool is accurate,” said Clare Garvie, a researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, who has studied the government’s use of facial recognition. “The larger the database, the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgänger effect. They’re talking about a massive database of random people they’ve found on the internet.”
Part of the problem stems from a lack of oversight. There has been no real public input into adoption of Clearview’s software, and the company’s ability to safeguard data hasn’t been tested in practice. Clearview itself remained highly secretive until late 2019.
The software also appears to explicitly violate policies at Facebook and elsewhere against collecting users’ images en masse.
while there’s underlying code that could theoretically be used for augmented reality glasses that could identify people on the street, Ton-That said there were no plans for such a design.
In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts (a statewide ban may follow). In December, San Diego suspended a facial recognition program in advance of a new statewide law, which declared it illegal, coming into effect. Forty major music festivals pledged not to use the technology, and activistsare calling for a nationwide ban. Many Democratic presidential candidates support at least a partial ban on the technology.
facial recognition bans are the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing on one particular identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society we’re in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries like China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In countries like the United States, it’s being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the government.
People can be identified at a distance by their heart beat or by their gait, using a laser-based system. Cameras are so good that they can read fingerprints and irispatterns from meters away. And even without any of these technologies, we can always be identified because our smartphones broadcast unique numbers called MAC addresses.
The data broker industry is almost entirely unregulated; there’s only one law — passed in Vermont in 2018 — that requires data brokers to register and explain in broad terms what kind of data they collect.
Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
finding appropriate sources,
peer-reviewed versus non-vetted sources
Google vs. Google Scholar vs. SCSU online dbases vs Academia.edu and ResearchGate.com
Digg http://digg.com/, Reddit https://www.reddit.com/ , Quora https://www.quora.com/, Wikipedia
However, none of these studies question the teaching methods used in the classes themselves or whether teachers are recognizing the power of digital devices for students to create, share, connect and discover information.
Digital Organization and Content Curation
Much like students understand the concept of binders, notebooks and notes in the physical world, they need a similar system in the digital one. Whether working with dividers and subjects in a tool like Notability or sections and pages in OneNote, students need to build vocabulary to support how they house their learning.
Tagging this way not only helps students stay organized, but it could also help them to examine trends across courses or even semesters.
As a doctoral student, I use OneNote. First, I create a new digital notebook each year. Inside that, I add sections for each term as well as my different courses. Finally, my notes get organized into individual pages within the sections. When I can recall the precise location where I put a particular set of notes, I navigate directly to that page. However, on the numerous occasions when an author, vocabulary term or concept seems familiar but I cannot recall the precise moment when I took notes, then the search function becomes critical.
Multimodal Notes
With most tools (Notability, OneNote, Evernote, etc.), students can not only capture typed and handwritten notes but also incorporate photos, audio and even video. These versatile capabilities allow students to customize their note taking process to meet their learning needs. Consider these possibilities:
Students may take notes on paper, add photos of those papers into a digital notebook, synthesize their thinking with audio or written notes, and then tag their digital notes for later retrieval.
Students might use audio syncing — a feature that records audio and then digitally syncs it with whatever the student writes or types — to capture the context of the class discussion or lecture. When reviewing their notes, students could click or tap on their notes and then jump directly to that point in the audio recording.
Teachers might provide students with their presentation slides or other note taking guides as PDF files. Now, students can focus on taking notes — using any modality — for synthesis, elaboration, reflection or analysis rather than in an attempt to capture content verbatim.
In 1949, neuropsychologist Donald Hebb famously wrote, “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
Concept Mapping
One of the powerful components of digital note taking is that the pages never end, and a full page isn’t an artificial barrier to limit thinking. Students can work on an infinitely expanding canvas to include as much information as they need. For example, concept mapping tools such as Coggle or Padlet allow students to create networks of ideas using text, links, images and even video without ever running out of room. (my note to John Eller – can we renew our 201-2013 discussion about pen vs computer concept mapping?)
what i find most important: Future IT Workforce: Deploying a broad array of modern recruitment, retention, and employment practices to develop a resilient IT talent pipeline for the institution
Digital Integrations: Ensuring system interoperability, scalability, and extensibility, as well as data integrity, security, standards, and governance, across multiple applications and platforms
Engaged Learning: Incorporating technologies that enable students to create content and engage in active learning in course curricula
Student Retention and Completion: Developing the capabilities and systems to incorporate artificial intelligence into student services to provide personalized, timely support
Administrative Simplification: Applying user-centered design, process improvement, and system reengineering to reduce redundant or unnecessary efforts and improve end-user experiences
Improved Enrollment: Using technology, data, and analytics to develop an inclusive and financially sustainable enrollment strategy to serve more and new learners by personalizing recruitment, enrollment, and learning experiences
Workforce of the Future: Using technology to develop curriculum, content, and learning experiences that prepare students for the evolving workforce
Holistic Student Success: Applying technology and data, including artificial intelligence, to understand and address the numerous contributors to student success, from finances to health and wellness to academic performance and degree planning (my note: this is what Christine Waisner, Mark Gill and Plamen Miltenoff are trying to do with their VR research)
Improved Teaching: Strengthening engagement among faculty, technologists, and researchers to achieve the true and expanding potential of technology to improve teaching
Student-Centric Higher Education: Creating a student-services ecosystem to support the entire student life cycle, from prospecting to enrollment, learning, job placement, alumni engagement, and continuing education
Iris Murdoch on Storytelling, Why Art Is Essential for Democracy, and the Key to Good Writing
“A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.” Ursula K. Le Guin
philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) — one of the most lucid and luminous minds of the twentieth century — explored in a long, deep, immensely insightful 1977 conversation with the British broadcaster and philosopher Bryan McGee, which aired on McGee’s television series Men of Ideas.
There is always more bad art around than good art, and more people like bad art than like good art.
James Baldwin wielded the double-edged sword of the artist’s duty to society, Murdoch insists on this largeness: The artist’s duty is to art, to truth-telling in his own medium, the writer’s duty is to produce the best literary work of which he is capable, and he must find out how this can be done.
Recent reports have noted how companies use data gathered from cell towers, ambient Wi-Fi, and GPS. But the location data industry has a much more precise, and unobtrusive, tool: Bluetooth beacons.
Companies like Reveal Mobile collect data from software development kits inside hundreds of frequently used apps. In the United States, another company, inMarket, covers 38 percent of millennial moms and about one-quarter of all smartphones, and tracks 50 million people each month. Otherplayers have similar reach.
What is an S.D.K.?A Software Development Kit is code that’s inserted into an app and enables certain features, like activating your phone’s Bluetooth sensor. Location data companies create S.D.K.s and developers insert them into their apps, creating a conduit for recording and storing your movement data.
Familiar tech giants are also players in the beacosystem. In 2015, Facebook began shipping free Facebook Bluetooth beacons to businesses for location marketing inside the Facebook app. Leaked documents show that Facebook worried that users would “freak out” and spread “negative memes” about the program. The company recently removed the Facebook Bluetooth beacons section from their website.
Not to be left out, in 2017, Google introduced Project Beacon and began sending beacons to businesses for use with Google Ads services. Google uses the beacons to send the businesses’ visitors notificationsthat ask them to leave photos and reviews, among other features. And last year, investigators at Quartz found that Google Android can track you using Bluetooth beacons even when you turn Bluetooth off in your phone.
Companies collecting micro-location data defend the practice by arguing that users can opt out of location services. They maintain that consumers embrace targeted ads because they’re more relevant.
You can download an app like Beacon Scanner and scan for beacons when you enter a store.But even if you detect the beacons, you don’t know who is collecting the data.
The Times’s guide on how to stop apps from tracking your location. For Android users, the F-Droid app store hosts free and open- source apps that do not spy on users with hidden trackers.
starting to hear more about what might be lost when schools focus too much on data. Here are five arguments against the excesses of data-driven instruction.
The National Education Policy Center releases annual reports on commercialization and marketing in public schools. In its most recent report in May, researchers there raised concerns about targeted marketing to students using computers for schoolwork and homework.
In the past few years several states have passed laws banning employers from looking at the credit reports of job applicants.
Similarly, for young people who get in trouble with the law, there is a procedure for sealing juvenile records
Educational transcripts, unlike credit reports or juvenile court records, are currently considered fair game for gatekeepers like colleges and employers. These records, though, are getting much more detailed.
Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.
We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.
It is time to break up Facebook.
America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances.
More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable.
Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective.
From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility.
Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics.About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network.The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.
unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it. (opyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)
As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).
The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.
Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.
As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.
Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
++++++++++++++++++++
We Don’t Need Social Media
The push to regulate or break up Facebook ignores the fact that its services do more harm than good
Hughes joins a growing chorus of former Silicon Valley unicorn riders who’ve recently had second thoughts about the utility or benefit of the surveillance-attention economy their products and platforms have helped create. He is also not the first to suggest that government might need to step in to clean up the mess they made
Nick Srnicek, author of the book Platform Capitalismand a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, wrotelast month, “[I]t’s competition — not size — that demands more data, more attention, more engagement and more profits at all costs
author Fritz Breithaupt. “Sometimes we commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful, empathy,” he writes in his forthcoming book The Dark Sides of Empathy.
Breithaupt, who directs the Experimental Humanities Lab at Indiana University, argues that empathy is a morally ambiguous capacity, one that can lead us astray if we don’t understand its many sides.
People assume that empathy is good because it is good for the recipient of empathy — I’m actually skeptical about this.
How is empathy good for the empathizer?
“vampiristic empathy.”
Vampiristic empathy is a form of empathy where people want to manipulate the people they empathize with so that they can, through them, experience the world in such a way that they really enjoy it.
An extreme case of this is helicopter parenting. Helicopter parents are constantly trying to steer their kids in the directions they think are the right directions. Of course they want the best for their children.
In a sense, extreme helicopter parents are robbing their kids of a selfhood so that they can basically project their own self into these kids.
empathy can actually make us more polarized instead of bringing us together.
Humans are very quick to take sides. And when you take one side, you take the perspective of that side. You can see the painful parts of that perspective and empathize with them, and that empathy can fuel seeing the other side as darker and darker or more dubious.
Are there other downsides to empathy?
[Empathizers] may overextend themselves. If you are a medical doctor who sees a lot of suffering and pain every day, it can very quickly become too much. Something like a third of medical doctors suffer from “empathy burnout” that is so severe that it affects their functioning as doctors and their personal life. They become the victim of feeling empathy. My note: and some therapists can suffer of “hollow” empathy – an empathy not as a human feeling but as a tool to extend their ability/control in the room.
Also, “MInnesota Nice” can acquire a rather different meaning seen through the lens of this research
My core argument here is that in many cases of altruistic help or humanitarian aid, people actually don’t really empathize as much with the person in need. They identify more with the helper, the hero, the person who intervenes even if it’s an imaginary helper.
If you want recognition and if that doesn’t come, it can turn into resentment.
we can learn to use empathy in a somewhat controlled way. We can learn when to block it, when to not allow empathy to be manipulated and when to fully turn it on.
Yes, we are born with empathy, but it needs constant practice [to know] when to use it and when not to use it. So the dark sides are so important to know because they teach us that in some cases you shouldn’t empathize.