Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
https://bryanalexander.org/podcasts/podcasts-im-listening-to-in-november-2021/
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More on podcasts in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Podcasts
Coursera is blurring the lines between itself and institutions. The implications for the future of college education are profound.
The future of higher education is being led by a publicly traded company in California that is growing like gangbusters. Its online platform has a portfolio of thousands of courses from the world’s leading universities, corporations, and nonprofits.
Coursera, which since the spring has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is valued at 7 billion dollars and seems to be making all the right moves.
While college and university enrollments have been declining during the pandemic, Coursera’s enrollment rose from 53 million to 78 million students this spring—an increase greater than total U.S. higher education enrollment.
Coursera is only the tip of the iceberg of an explosion of non-collegiate higher education providers. They range from libraries and museums to media companies and software makers, not to mention a burgeoning number of online providers just like Coursera. Microsoft and Google are both offering more than 75 certificate programs.
As our society becomes more fragmented and divided, we have reason to worry that higher education’s transformation will further fragment us.
Equally important, we need to reintroduce a common curriculum to strengthen social bonds. General education should focus on the shared human experience—linking our past with our present and future, our heritage with the realities that will confront us today and tomorrow.
In the new Coursera world that will be increasingly corporatized, we need to ensure that we don’t lose our core values, our ethics, and our ability to tell fact from fiction.
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more on Coursera in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=coursera
There is reason to believe that shorter, competency-based programs will play an important role in the university landscape in the coming years.
Australian commentator Stephen Matchett expands: “MCs are the wild west of post-compulsory education and training, with neither law on what they actually are or order as to how they interact with formal providers. … Until (or if) this is sorted by regulators there needs to be a sheriff providing workable rules that stop the cowboys running riot.”
The lack of standards is also an issue in Canada. While degree standards have been agreed upon – the Canadian Degree Qualification framework, contained in the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC)’s 2007 Ministerial Statement on Quality Assurance of Degree Education in Canada, outlines expectations for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees – the CMEC has yet to issue a pan-Canadian framework for microcredentials.
In the absence of a pan-Canadian model or definition, for the purposes of this column I will use the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)’s definition, put forward in its May 2021 report, Making Sense of Microcredentials:
“A microcredential is a representation of learning, awarded for completion of a short program that is focused on a discrete set of competencies (i.e., skills, knowledge, attributes), and is sometimes related to other credentials.”
Developing and running effective microcredential programs is not simply a matter of bundling a group of existing classes into a new sub-degree level program (although there will certainly be some who try that approach). Effective microcredential programming needs to be an institution-wide effort, with appropriate resourcing and guidelines, along with effective recruiting and student support.
department chairs and other unit leaders to lead collegial discussions about the following questions:
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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredential
“the economic layer of Metaverse will be the NFTs”
REVOREDO, T. (2021, November 14). Why are major global brands experimenting with NFTs in the Metaverse? [Financial]. Cointelegraph. https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-are-major-global-brands-experimenting-with-nfts-in-the-metaversehttps://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcointelegraph.com%2Fnews%2Fwhy-are-major-global-brands-experimenting-with-nfts-in-the-metaverse&group=__world__
what do blockchain technology and NFTs have to do with Metaverse?
it is already possible to identify some of the characteristics of Web 3.0 such as the focus on the user (and not on companies), the massive use of artificial intelligence (as a powerful tool to provide the best analysis and the best result to people), as well as distributed networks (we will no longer depend on the gigantic centralized data servers). Moreover, Web 3.0 content will be more graphical with more videos and 3D images. Also, in Web 3.0, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will be commonplace, bringing more realistic graphics to applications and games
In July this year, Coca-Cola launched branded virtual clothing as nonfungible tokens,
NFTs are the representation of a nonfungible asset in digital media. In a more technical definition, an NFT is a piece of software code that verifies that you hold ownership of a nonfungible digital asset, or the digital representation of the nonfungible physical asset in digital media.
It’s important to notice that NFTs existed before the first blockchain, but blockchain technology has transformed NFT markets by solving the double-spending problem and conferring scarcity, uniqueness and authenticity to a nonfungible token.
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more on NFT in this IMS blog
Better questions to ask might be:
iPads have come a long way since our initial investment in interactive whiteboards.
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more on SAMR in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=samr
As soon as the coronavirus was declared a pandemic early last year, 88% of multinational organisations began encouraging remote working. By summer 2020, 83% of businesses surveyed said they will continue to offer remote-work options long after the world returns to complete normalcy.
Additionally, Gallup research conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic, indicated that employees are optimally engaged when they remote work 60% to 80% of the time. That’s three or four days in a workweek.
microlearning – brief training modules – increases information retention by up to 20%. Whether through videos or short quizzes, implementing microlearning can be beneficial without being time-consuming, allowing remote workers to get back to their tasks as soon as they’re done.
Microsoft and Meta are on a collision course for metaverse competition By Tom Warren@tomwarren Nov 2, 2021, 11:00am EDT
Microsoft Mesh always felt like the future of Microsoft Teams meetings, and now it’s starting to come to life in the first half of 2022. Microsoft is building on efforts like Together Mode and other experiments for making meetings more interactive, after months of people working from home and adjusting to hybrid work.
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Rather than ruling one metaverse, Microsoft wants its Mesh platform to be the glue that holds a multiverse of many worlds together.
Microsoft has been developing its own take on the metaverse through Mesh for several years now in conjunction with the launch of its Hololens AR headset.
Microsoft connects people across any device (smartphones, laptops, headsets, etc.) into shared spaces where they can all interact, no matter how they may have dialed in.
Microsoft imagines Teams as a prototype for the metaverse, where companies can set up their own spaces. Rather than rule its own metaverse as Meta/Facebook aspires to, Microsoft sees its role with Mesh in providing the foundational glue that helps hold a multiverse of worlds together. This is not just a philosophical view on technology. Microsoft’s Mesh is built to allow companies to use APIs, much like apps can on the iPhone today, to help a company build its metaverse and have a persistent identity across all these metaverses.
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more on metaverse in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=metaverse
In 1972, when the U.S. government passed the landmark Title IX laws to promote gender equality in education, there was a 12 percentage-point gap in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees going to men compared to women. By 1982, the gap had closed. Nobody predicted what happened next: the gap started to widen rapidly in the opposite direction. By 2019, the gender gap in bachelor awards was wider, at 14 points, than it had been in 1972 — but the other way round. (We are not claiming here that Title IX had much impact, however).
To Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, it is “the strangest and most profound change of the century, even more so because it is unfolding in a similar way pretty much all over the world.”
Importantly, there is a gender gap not only in rates of college enrollment, as we described earlier in the year, and recently highlighted in the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, but also in rates of completion among those who do enroll.
the gender gap widened significantly in 2020.
College enrollment has steadily declined following the Great Recession, with total enrollment among both men and women decreasing each year from 2012 to 2020. But many more women than men were enrolling in college when rates began to fall in 2012 (11.6 million women were enrolled at the time, compared to 8.6 million men). If the relative decline among men and women had been similar, we would expect the gender gap in enrollment rates to remain constant. Instead, the fall 2020 decline in male enrollment eclipsed the decline in female enrollment for the fifth year in a row and the gender gap in enrollment is widening. COVID-19 accelerated this trend.
Men born from 1955 to 1974 (ages 45-64 in 2019) who likely wrapped up their postsecondary education decades ago, attained bachelor’s and graduate degrees at a similar rate to women in their age group. By contrast, older men born before 1955 had higher educational attainment than women, and younger men born after 1974 seem to be consistently outpaced by women their age.
84% of students from the top income quintile enroll in any college in the fall after high school graduation compared to 72% of students in the middle class and 63% of students in the bottom income quintile.
metaverse (hopefully) won’t be the virtual world of ‘Snow Crash,’ or ‘Ready Player One.’ It will likely be something more complex, diverse, and wild.
The metaverse concept clearly means very different things to different people. What exists right now is a series of embryonic digital spaces, such as Facebook’s Horizon, Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox‘s digital space for gaming and game creation, and the blockchain-based digital world Decentraland–all of which have clear borders, different rules and objectives, and differing rates of growth.
different layers of realities that we can all be experiencing, even in the same environment or physical space. We’re already doing that with our phones to a certain extent—passively in a physical environment while mentally in a digital one. But we’ll see more experiences beyond your phone, where our whole bodies are fully engaged, and that’s where the metaverse starts to get interesting—we genuinely begin to explore and live in these alternate realities simultaneously.
Xverse
It will have legacy parts that look and feel like the web today, but it will have new nodes and capabilities that will look and feel like the Ready Player One Oasis (amazing gaming worlds), immersion leaking into our world (like my Magicverse concept), and every imaginable permutation of these. I feel that the Xverse will have gradients of sentience and autonomy, and we will have the emergence of synthetic life (things Sun and Thunder is working on) and a multitude of amazing worlds to explore. Building a world will become something everyone can do (like building a webpage or a blog) and people will be able to share richer parts of their external and inner lives at incredibly high-speed across the planet.
Reality will exist on a spectrum ranging from physical to virtual (VR), but a significant chunk of our time will be spent somewhere between those extremes, in some form of augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality will be a normal part of daily life. Virtual companions will provide information, commentary, updates and advice on matters relevant to you at that point in time, including your assets and activities, in both virtual and real spaces.
I think we can all agree our initial dreams of a fully immersive, separate digital world is not only unrealistic, but maybe not what we actually want. So I’ve started defining the metaverse differently to capture the zeitgeist: we’re entering an era where every computer we interact with, big or small, is increasingly world-aware. They can recognize faces, voices, hands, relative and absolute position, velocity, and they can react to this data in a useful way. These contextually aware computers are the path to unlocking ambient computing: where computers fade from the foreground to the background of everyday, useful tools. The metaverse is less of a ‘thing’ and more of a computing era. Contextual computing enables a multitude of new types of interactions and apps: VR sculpting tools and social hangouts, self-driving cars, robotics, smart homes.
as carbon is to the organic world, AI will be both the matrix that provides the necessary structural support and the material from which digital representation will be made. Of all the ways in which AI will shape the form of the metaverse, perhaps most essential is the role it will play in the physical-digital interface. Translating human actions into digital input–language, eye movement, hand gestures, locomotion–these are all actions which AI companies and researchers have already made tremendous progress on.
Qualcomm views the metaverse as an ever-present spatial internet complete with personalized digital experiences that spans the physical and virtual worlds, where everything and everyone can communicate and interact seamlessly.
As an active researcher in the security and forensics of VR systems, should the metaverse come into existence, we should explore and hypothesize the ways it will be misused.
I picture [the metaverse] almost like The Truman Show. Only, instead of walking into a television set, you walk into the internet and can explore any number of different realities
We imagine the metaverse as reality made better, a world infused with magic, stories, and functionality at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.
Rather than building the “metaverse,” a separate and fully virtual reality that is disconnected from the physical world, we are focused on augmenting reality, not replacing it. We believe AR–or computing overlaid on the world around us–has a smoother path to mass adoption, but will also be better for the world than a fully virtual world.
In the reality-based metaverse, we will be able to more effectively design products of the future, meet and collaborate with our colleagues far away, and experience any remote place in real-time.
I prefer to think of the metaverse as simply bringing our bodies into the internet.
The metaverse isn’t just VR! Those spaces will connect to AR glasses and to 2D spaces like Instagram. And most importantly, there will be a real sense of continuity where the things you buy are always available to you.
At its core will be a self-contained economy that allows individuals and businesses to create, own or invest in a range of activities and experiences.
the metaverse experience can be altered from the individual’s point of view and shaped or curated by any number of agents—whether human or A.I. In that sense, the metaverse does not have an objective look beyond its backend. In essence, the metaverse, together with our physical locations, forms a spatial continuum.
The AR applications of the metaverse are limitless and it really can become the next great version of the internet.
It seems fair to predict that the actual aesthetic of any given metaverse will be determined by user demand. If users want to exist in a gamified world populated by outrageous avatars and fantastic landscapes then the metaverse will respond to that demand. Like all things in this world the metaverse will be market driven
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More on meta-verse in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=metaverse
an understanding of how to harness the emotional appeal of e-learning tools is a central issue for learning and instruction, since research shows that initial situ-ational interest can be a first step in promoting learning
several educational theories that describe the affective, emotional, and motivational factors that play a role in multimedia learning which are relevant for understanding the role of immersion in VR learning environments.
the cognitive-affective theory of learning with media (Moreno and
Mayer 2007),
and
the integrated cognitive affective model of learning with multimedia
(ICALM; Plass and Kaplan 2016)
control-value theory of achievement emotion CVTAE
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-09239-007
Presence, intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, and control and active learning are the affective factors used in this study. defintions
The sample consisted of 104 students (39 females and 65 males; average age =23.8 years)
from a large European university.
immersive VR (Samsung Gear VR with Samsung Galaxy S6) and
the desktop VR version of a virtual laboratory simulation (on a standard computer). The
participants were randomly assigned to two groups: the first used the immersive VR
followed by the desktop VR version, and the second used the two platforms in the opposite
sequence.
The VR learning simulation used in this experiment was developed by the company Labster and designed to facilitate learning within the field of biology at a university level. The VR simulation was based on a realistic murder case in which the participants were required to investigate a crime scene, collect blood samples and perform DNA analysis in a high-tech laboratory in order to identify and implicate the murderer
we conclude that the emotional value of the immersive VR version of the learning simulation is significantly greater than the desktop VR version. This is a major empirical contribution of this study.