In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional metrics[2] proposed as an alternative[3] to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index.[4] The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010,[1] as a generalization of article level metrics,[5] and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc. They are related to Webometrics, which had similar goals but evolved before the social web. Altmetrics did not originally cover citation counts.[6] It also covers other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, downloads, or mentions in social media and news media.[7][8]
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more on analytics and metrics in education in this IMS blog
1. Just 8.8 percent of U.S. students are classified as “high achievers” in mathematics, according to the most recent international assessments. That’s well below the average of 12.6 percent for affluent nations.
2. No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal law, incentivizes “just getting kids over a bar,” Finn says. “In the public policies affecting our schools — state and federal — there’s almost no incentive to boost a smart kid up the scale or take someone who’s ‘proficient’ and push them to ‘advanced.’ ” [We’ve written before about proficiency and the tendency, under high-stakes testing, for schools to focus resources on kids who are “on the bubble.”]
7. One promising practice from overseas is screening all kids at third or fourth grade — after they’ve had a few years of school — and directing special resources to the top scorers. Here in the U.S., all third-graders are tested, but the high scorers don’t get anything. Meanwhile, screening for gifted programs usually happens in kindergarten, which creates a heavy bias toward those who come from more affluent homes.
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more on gifted education in this IMS blog
Social media has the potential to facilitate much closer relationships between libraries and their patrons. Current usage of social media by the library community generally remains ad hoc and somewhat experimental, but the uptake of these tools is accelerating, and they will likely play an increasingly important role in library service provision and outreach in the future. Taylor & Francis has produced a white paper that analyzes current practices relating social media’s use in the library and how this differs by librarian job role. The sample was taken from academic librarians around the world, which also allows us to examine differences by geographic location. The goal: to establish how librarians are currently using social media in their roles, the most useful social media tools and best applications for these tools in a library setting.
explores a variety of social media tools in terms of how they can be used to organize information and communities. Together, you will survey and use a variety of social media tools, such as Delicious, Diigo, Facebook, Goodreads, Google Hangouts, LibraryThing, Pinterest, Storify, Twitter, and more! You will also explore how social media tools can be used to organize and disseminate information and how they can be used to foster and sustain communities of learning.
With the widespread use of library technology that incorporates social media components, intelligent objects, and knowledge-sharing tools comes the ability of libraries to provide greater opportunities for patron engagement in those discovery systems through user-generated content. These features may include the ability of users to contribute commentary such as reviews, simple point-and-click rating systems (e.g. one star to five stars), or to engage in extensive discussions or other social interactions. This kind of content could transform authoritative files, alter information architecture, and change the flow of information within the library discovery system.
Across generations, concerns for privacy may dissipate with time as specific technologies take hold or as people become aware of a technology’s benefits and value those over their value for privacy.
Library Privacy Guidelines for Students in K-12 Schools
p. 1 definition of social media for libraries
six primarytypes exist: “collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites,” and two types of virtual worlds: “virtual game worlds, which ask users to follow the rules of the game, and virtual social worlds, wherein users can behave without rules in almost any way they like” (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010: 59) it is not that I disagree with such definition, but i wish there was a “door” mentioning “flexibility” and “necessity to reassess” what social media is every year, 3 year, 5 years
p. 2 definition what is strategic planning
identify the needs of your target audiences,
identify the ways in which you can meet those needs, and
identify ways to respond confidently and proactively to changesin those needs.
Where the organization is
Where the organization should go
How the organization can get there (McNamara, 2011)
It must be:
Flexible
Based on data
Maintainable
Regularly cared for
covers and confirms my notes to the SCSU library use of its social media:
p. 83 ask uncomfortable questions
in planning, we must be prepared to ask, critically consider and answer questions that make us uncomfortable (not only that I was not let to ask questions, I was ousted from any body that was making decisions regarding social media. I was openly opposed and rebuked for asking why 3 reference librarians will keep the passwords to the account for the library SM)
p. 83 Communicate
If your team communicates honestly and thoroughly, then positive feelings and advocates for your social media endeavors will grow. In the span of 6 months, I had to ask three times where are the notes of the social media committee kept and eventually i will receive an answer, which in it nebulous and apologetic form was practically not an answer.
p. 83 Don’t rush to conclusions
Satisficing often works, but it can also lead to conclusions that are less then optimal. In the fall of 2013, I had to fight an overwhelming majority opposing my proposal that social media needs to include student representation, since SM is about dialog, not broadcasting (see page 86) and the current staff and faculty see SM as another form of broadcasting. In the span of six months, by the summer of 2014 library staff and faculty had fallen in the other extreme, letting one single student run all library SM. That student did/could not have understanding of the scope and goals of the library resulting in satisficing.
p. 84 aim for consensus, but don’t require it Consensus was the leitmotiv of the dean; it failed in general, and it failed in SM.
p. 84 get an external reviewer
p. 84 value and celebrate small success
a strategic plan will be realized through a series of small actions, not one or two pivotal plots.
p. 84 create accountability
p. 86 maintain a consistent tone and brand
visual and tone based consistency. This library DOES maintain consistency by posting Instagram pictures of people covering their faces with books, so part of their face compliments a face on cover of books. It is done by other libraries and it would have been cute and original if not overdone. If the SM activities of a library consist mostly of such activities then the “branding” part definitely is hurt. Yet, the faculty in this library vehemently adhere to “let’s see what other libraries are doing,” but does not understand that it needs further conceptualizing to figure out how to transform into “brand.”
p. 86 capitalize on the strengths of social media
“in many cases, business and libraries use SM exactly as they use their websites: to push content. This has been the main criticism from the start: the three reference librarians holding the passwords to the SM account were using Facebook as a announcement board and kept dormant the other accounts. The resolution of the library faculty who was called to arbitrate the argument with these three librarian: “I don’t understand very well Facebook.” The interim dean, who, subsequently had to resolve this dispute: “I don’t use Facebook.”
p. 87 Metrics
Analyze and tweak plan
measuring success is about maximizing time and efforts, not about laying blame for shortcomings or failures. this applies to daily tasks and responsibilities and shuffling time, but when the organization does not have a clear overarching goal and clear strategy how to achieve it, then issues must be raised up. which leads to:
p. 92 Plan for conversation
the inclusion of conversation. incorporate your patrons as primary content creators (not appointing just a single student worker to broadcast)
p. 92 use SM as an assessment or feedback tool
p. 93 plan to monitor your brand
if you decide to start watching these types of mentions, you’ll want to consider whether you’ll adopt a passive or an active role in responding to them.
enerally speaking, Google has very limited interest in making hardware in the first place. The cost of building things is high, the margins are low, and Google’s real specialty is in web services like Gmail and search anyway.
the real business opportunity for Google is to compel a broad range of companies to create gadgets and home appliances using its software. The hardware is secondary. In fact, building its own hardware can even work against Google: The more successful Google is at selling its own hardware, the less likely other hardware makers want to use its software, since they view Google as a competitor.
Putting all its efforts behind expanding and extending Android has made Google a top player in the smartphone market, even after its late start against Apple and the iPhone.
The company accepts requests for removals via its support website
1. School administrator John Wetter took on an odd assignment over summer break at the request of one of his principals: Track down any PokéStops or gyms lurking on Hopkins school grounds. He asked game developer Niantic Labs to remove it from the game.
So far the game has only been blocked at sites such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
2. Some educators are embracing the interest in “Pokémon Go” as a potential teaching tool. “Any time something becomes a big pop culture sensation, as a teacher I try to just kind of ride the coattails,” At St. Paul’s Washington Technology Magnet School, educator Eric Gunderson made a spinoff of “Pokémon Go” that students can play on their district-issued iPads. He created it using an augmented reality app called Aurasma. He printed pictures of eggs on sheets of paper. Get the printed egg in view of the iPad’s camera, and an animated animal appears onscreen, a knockoff Pokémon.
The Minnesota Department of Education said it hasn’t gotten inquiries from school districts concerned about “Pokémon Go.” A spokesperson for the Osseo Area School District noted that students face many distractions. “Our leaders are very skilled in dealing with whatever the distraction of the day is,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
In an address to the VRX conference in San Francisco, noted game developer and tech wizard, Jesse Schell predicted that over 8 million VR gamer headsets will be sold in 2016. Facebook purchased Oculus Rift, presumably laying the groundwork for a future where friends and family will interact in rich virtual spaces. All the major players, including Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Google and an HTC and Valve partnership are jostling for the consumer headset market.
Experimenting with VR in his classes as part of a project piloted by Seattle-based foundry10, a privately funded research organization that creates partnerships with educators to implement, research and explore the various intersections of emerging technologies and learning, including VR..
As an educational tool, VR might prove transformative. Google Expeditions allows students to take over 100 virtual journeys from ancient Rome to the surface of Mars. It might also have a big impact on social emotional learning (SEL), as VR’s unique ability to produce empathy recently led Wired magazine to explore its potential as “the ultimate empathy machine”. Addressing a persistent anxiety, Suter used Samsung Gear’s Public Speaking Simulator to successfully prepare a few nervous students for class presentations, reporting they felt “much more calm” during the live delivery.
Ethical Considerations
In a recently published article, researchers Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany review a series of ethical considerations when implementing VR. The illusion of embodiment may provide VR’s greatest value to education, but also lies at the heart of its ethical implementation. Madary and Metzinger believe that VR is not just an evolution from television and video game screens, but a revolution that will have an enormous social impact. In their paper, they claim that:
VR technology will eventually change not only our general image of humanity but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as “conscious experience,” “selfhood,” “authenticity,” or “realness.”
It’s important to remember that many current VR uses in schools, like Google Expeditions, are not interactive VR, but simply 360-degree video experiences. In these cases, students experience immersive 3D pictures or panoramas, but do not deeply interact with the content. The illusion of embodiment is a product of interactive content and motion tracking, where users can alter and affect their environment and engage with others who share their virtual space. Headsets like the Vive and Occulus Rift fall under this latter category, but it won’t be long before most, if not all, consumer oriented VR technology will be completely immersive and interactive.
1. Long-Term Effects and Prolonged Exposure
2. The Impact of Environment on Agency and Behavior
3. Aggravating Preexisting Psychological or Emotional Issues
4. (Un)Reality and Diminished Real World Interactions