In France, the Yellow Jacket movement has embraced the American movement. In Italy, backers hail from the anti-vaccine community. In Britain, adherents draw from Brexit followers.
The FFTCUK Facebook group has now amassed more than 13,000 members.
People were dressed in QAnon shirts or ones displaying the slogan “WWG1WGA”. Short for “Where we go one we go all”, it is the best-known rallying cry for QAnon believers.
Alexandra Arkhipova, an anthropologist at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration who tracks the spread of online conspiracy theories, has found that while there are fewer explicit references to QAnon on Russian-language social media than Covid-19 denialism and 5G fears, its prevalence is spreading.
Data gathered by Arkhipova since August reveals thousands of Russian-language social media posts about QAnon. On VKontakte and Telegram — an encrypted messaging service popular in Russia – groups dedicated to spreading the conspiracy theory in Russia have grown to include tens of thousands of members.
Services like Chegg have become more accessible to students during unproctored exams in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, causing what UO chemistry professor Shannon Boettcher believes is a “huge problem with academic dishonesty across the nation in the light of remote learning and COVID-19.”
he Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice and takedown process requires that service providers remove material that a copyright owner identifies on their website through a valid notice of copyright infringement or become subject to potential secondary liability for assisting with copyright infringement, according to Copyright Alliance.
Chegg Inc. has been sued twice in federal court for claims of copyright infringement, denying allegations in both instances.
Apart from its subscription services, Chegg rents and sells textbooks. The publishing company John Wiley & Sons Inc. filed a lawsuit against Chegg on Dec. 18, 2018, in Manhattan U.S. District Court, alleging that Chegg sold counterfeit versions of its textbooks.
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This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid
Chegg is based in Santa Clara, California, but the heart of its operation is in India, where it employs more than 70,000 experts with advanced math, science, technology and engineering degrees. The experts, who work freelance, are online 24/7, supplying step-by-step answers to questions posted by subscribers (sometimes answered in less than 15 minutes).
Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig has profited handsomely. His holdings in Chegg plus after-tax proceeds from stock sales add up to $300 million. Rosensweig, who declined to speak to Forbes,has said that Chegg Study was “not built” for cheating. He describes it instead as the equivalent of an asynchronous, always-on tutor, ready to help students with detailed answers to problems. In a 2019 interview, he said higher education needs to adjust to the on-demand economy, the way Uber or Amazon have.
Throughout the pandemic, schools have spent millions on remote proctoring, a controversial practice in which colleges pay private companies like Honorlock and Examity to surveil students while they take tests.
Chegg Study was enjoying steady growth and little competition. Its only serious rival, privately held Course Hero, is a much smaller operation, valued at $1.1 billion, that generates most of its answers from students.
My note:
such proliferation would not have been possible, if the middle and upper administration has been more supportive of faculty when misconduct is detected. If the administration turns blind eye due to “enrollment” and “retention” priorities and curbs faculty reports regarding academic dishonesty, the industry naturally fills out the gap between a mere syllabus statement and inability to act upon it.
There is plenty of lipservice regarding “personalized learning,” but the reality is overworked faculty, who do not have the opportunity to spend sufficient time with students, less to educate them about plagiarism, cheating and similar “auxiliary” trends besides the content of the course.
Nearly 3,000 librarians, academics and students have now signed an open letter calling for a public investigation into the “unaffordable, unsustainable and inaccessible” academic ebook market.
Johanna Anderson, subject librarian at the University of Gloucestershire and one of the authors of the letter, says: “Publishers are manipulating the market and price gouging from Covid. We are trying to support students during an unprecedented public health crisis and they are making it so much harder. It is a scandal.”
Caroline Ball, subject librarian at the University of Derby, says one reason librarians are angry is that academic publishing is one of the most lucrative industries in the world, with unusually high profit margins, estimated at around 40%.
Thousands of families struggling with home learning are being offered free high-speed broadband following a partnership between internet provider Hyperoptic and dozens of local authorities across the UK.
The vast majority of emergent virtual and hybrid learning models appear to be “stuck at substitution”—that is, they seek to recreate or translate the brick-and-mortar school experience into the cloud without stopping to ask which aspects of those models may not truly serve students in the time of COVID-19 or beyond.
When we say “stuck at substitution,” some readers may recognize the SAMR model of education technology integration. The SAMR framework describes four different levels of technology use, from Substitution to Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition (SAMR). At its most basic level, education technology can be used to simply substitute: to replace traditional methods of teaching and learning with ones that are digitally mediated, but are still based on the same basic structure and pedagogy.
edtech can be used for augmentation, to bring some other affordance or benefit to the teaching and learning experience—for example, when that worksheet becomes a shared Google Doc that allows for collaboration and increased critical thinking.
Redefinition means thinking beyond existing paradigms and schedules that are built for an on-campus experience. It is the opportunity to imagine entirely new ways of teaching and learning—for example, attendance policies that emphasize engagement versus seat time, blended learning models that leverage technology for anywhere, anytime learning, and instructional design that allows increased student choice and participation.
Remote Learning Will Keep a Strong Foothold Even After the Pandemic, Survey Finds
The survey, conducted between Sept. 15 and Nov. 11, included seven questions that covered areas such as staffing challenges, professional development, and approaches to the 2020-21 school year.
The survey was sent to leaders in 317 regular public-school districts and charter management organizations, who are part of RAND’s district panel. The response rate was 84 percent.
Twenty percent of district and charter management organizations said in a new survey that they had started or were planning a virtual school or fully remote option this academic year and expected those options would remain after the pandemic. Another 10 percent said the same about hybrid or blended learning, while 7 percent said some lesser version of remote learning will continue when the pandemic is in the rearview mirror.
Misinformation and disinformation are rife, but so far it’s been seen as a challenge for policy-makers and big tech, including social media platforms.
The sheer volume of data being created makes it hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. From destroying 5G towers to conspiracies like QAnon and unfounded concern about election fraud, distrust is becoming the default – and this can have incredibly damaging effects on society.
So far, the tech sector – primarily social media companies, given that their platforms enable fake news to spread exponentially – have tried to implement some measures, with varying levels of success. For example, WhatsApp has placed a stricter limit on its message-forwarding capability and Twitter has begun to flag misleading posts.
the rise of tech startups that are exploring ways to detect and stem the flow of disinformation, such Right of Reply, Astroscreen and Logically.
The law specifies that it doesn’t apply to people who use illegal streaming services or “individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.”
Rather, it’s focused on “commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services” that make money from illegally streaming copyrighted material.
Last year, the Department of Justice charged two computer programmers from Las Vegas for illegal pirating thousands of hours of television shows from Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu and streaming them on websites called iStreamItAll and Jetflicks. One man admitted to earning more than $1 million from his piracy operations.
Stiegler discovered philosophy in prison for robbery and was mentored by Derrida. His 3-volume Technics and Time, evoking Heidegger’s Being and Time, takes up the grammatological rather than deconstructive path taken by Derrida in the 1970s. Stiegler’s research on intergenerational care, phamakology, and algorithmic governance continue with his colleagues at the IRI in Paris and around the world. I first met Bernard when he visited Madison in 2015, and I gave him a tour of DesignLab. At the suggestion of collaborator Ana Vujanovic, we reached out to him and were collaborating on a lecture performance over the past year or so. I had tickets and hotel reserved to Paris when COVID struck. Disappointed, we Zoomed and discussed how to proceed and possible workshops, still being pursued with IRI. He passed away last summer, due to cancer. In this 2-hour interview with Zero Books, Stiegler discusses Marx and Greenspan on the proletarianization of intellect achieved by IT, his rejection of defunding the police, and COVID and the positions taken to it by Zizek and Agamben. Throughout the interview, Bernard’s patient passion and clarity of thought shine through. “Making a Mouk” is a short, accessible text; https://www.dropbox.com/…/Bernard_Stiegler_Making_a… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd-9LPVilmM
