Some 79 percent of U.S. 13- to 18-year-olds surveyed said they have a Snapchat account, more than any other type of social media. Of that age group, 73 percent have an Instagram account and just 57 percent say they are on Facebook.
Respondents had to choose only one social network they could keep if they were “trapped on a deserted island.” This time, 44 percent of teens picked Snapchat, ahead of Instagram (24 percent) and Facebook (14 percent). One year ago, for RBC’s same survey question, the percentage of teens who insisted on keeping Snapchat on a desert island led with 28 percent — suggesting the app is still growing in necessity/popularity among young people.
This case study of Indiana University’s e-text initiative reports on students’ actual use of and engagement with digital textbooks.
In a typical semester, students read more in the first four weeks and less in later weeks except during major assessment times; in a typical week, most reading occurs between 5:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. from Monday to Thursday, indicating that students use e-texts mainly as a self-study resource.
Highlighting was the markup feature most used by students, whereas use of the other interactive markup features (shared notes, questions, and answers) was minimal, perhaps because of students’ lack of awareness of these features.
Research found that higher engagement with e-texts (reading and highlighting) correlated with higher course grades.
Although cost savings is often cited as a key advantage of electronic textbooks (aka, e-textbooks or simply e-texts), e-texts also provide powerful markup and interaction tools. For these tools to improve student learning, however, their adoption is critically important.
The Indiana University e-texts program, which began in 2009, has four primary goals:
Drive down the cost of materials for students
Provide high-quality materials of choice
Enable new tools for teaching and learning
Shape the terms of sustainable models that work for students, faculty, and authors
To date, student savings on textbooks amount to $21,673,338. However, we recognize that many students do not pay the full list price for paper textbooks when they purchase online, buy used copies, or recoup some of their costs when they resell their texts after the semester is over.
herefore, we divide the calculated savings by two and report that total as a more accurate representation of student savings. Consequently, we claim that students have saved about $11 million since IU’s e-texts program started in spring 2012.
In addition to printing through the e-text platform, students can purchase a print-on-demand (PoD) copy of an e-text for an additional fee.
One downside of e-texts is that students lease their textbook for a limited time instead of owning it. This lease generally lasts a semester or six months, and students lose their access afterwards. However, with IU’s e-text model, students get access to the textbook before the first day of class and maintain their access until they graduate from Indiana University. That is, students can go back to the e-texts after their course to review or reference the content in the book. This could be especially important if the e-text course is a prerequisite for another course.
ECAR collaborated with 157 institutions to collect responses from 13,451 faculty respondents across 7 countries about their technology experiences. ECAR also collaborated with 124 institutions to collect responses from 43,559 undergraduate students across 10 countries about their technology experiences. Please see the 2017 student and faculty studies hub for more about this year’s research.
When it comes to meeting technological support needs, students’ default modality is DIY. Students are more than twice as likely to figure out solutions to technology problems on their own, to search online sources, or to ask a friend than they are to use their campus help desk. Contacting the vendor or company to fix a technology problem is the last resort.
Laptops are king, smartphones are queen, and tablets are on the way out.
Students’ experiences with their instructors’ use of and approach to technology in the classroom are a mixed bag. A majority of students said most of their instructors have adequate technology skills, use technology to enhance learning, and encourage the use of collaborative technology tools. However, students said fewer faculty use technology for sophisticated learning tasks (e.g., engagement, creative and critical thinking), and relatively few faculty ask students to use their own devices for in-class work.
Students are choosing sides in the online versus face-to-face debate. For the fourth year in a row, the number of students preferring a blended learning environment that includes some to mostly online components has increased. The number of students preferring completely face-to-face or completely online courses continues to dwindle. The number of students expressing no preference has been cut by more than half since 2014.
Students are satisfied with features of their LMS…except when they aren’t.Students have favorable opinions about the basic features and functionalities of their LMS. But, the more sophisticated the task and the more engagement required of students, the less happy they tend to be. This may be a function of the tools, the instructors who use them, or both.
Students would like their instructors to use more technology in their classes.Technologies that provide students with something (e.g., lecture capture, early-alert systems, LMS, search tools) are more desired than those that require students to give something (e.g., social media, use of their own devices, in-class polling tools). We speculate that sound pedagogy and technology use tied to specific learning outcomes and goals may improve the desirability of the latter.
Students reported that faculty are banning or discouraging the use of laptops, tablets, and (especially) smartphones more often than in previous years. Some students reported using their devices (especially their smartphones) for nonclass activities, which might explain the instructor policies they are experiencing. However, they also reported using their devices for productive classroom activities (e.g., taking notes, researching additional sources of information, and instructor-directed activities).
the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and “big if true“s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets “on a very selective basis.”
The library doesn’t say how many tweets it has in its collection now, but in 2013, it said it had already amassed 170 billion tweets, at a rate of half a billion tweets a day.
Tweets can now be longer, too: This fall, Twitter rolled out 280-character tweets to most users across the platform.
Another issue: Twitter only gives the library the text of tweets – not images, videos, or linked content. “Tweets now are often more visual than textual, limiting the value of text-only collecting,” the library says.
The library also has to figure out how to effectively manage deleted tweets, whicharen’t part of the archive.
‘Honour’ killings in Karachi shock Pakistan’s largest city
Murders of teenagers show that poor communities in cities are becoming more entrenched in conservative values
he murders in Ali Brohi Goth shocked Karachi, the country’s largest city. The sheer brutality was unusual, and while domestic violence is rife and “honour” killings do occur in the city, they are almost exclusively reported in rural areas where village councils run parallel judiciary systems.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has reported an average of 650 “honour” killings annually over the past decade. But since most go unreported, the real number is likely to be much higher.
in France, four eggs “were placed before birth on top of drones while still inside the eggshell and, after hatching, (were kept) there during their early feeding period,” Reuters reported in November.
The eagles were named after characters in The Three Musketeers, and by February proved capable of intercepting drones in lightning-fast horizontal chases.
“Soon they will be casting off from peaks in the nearby Pyrenees Mountains,” AFP reported.
The military has already ordered a second brood of eagles, according to AFP.
The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2018 (JCDL 2018L: https://2018.jcdl.org/) will be held in conjunction with UNT Open Access
Symposium 2018 (https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2018) on June 3 – 6, 2018
in Fort Worth, Texas, the rustic and artistic threshold into the American
West. JCDL welcomes interesting submissions ranging across theories, systems,
services, and applications. We invite those managing, operating, developing,
curating, evaluating, or utilizing digital libraries broadly defined, covering
academic or public institutions, including archives, museums, and social
networks. We seek involvement of those in iSchools, as well as working in
computer or information or social sciences and technologies. Multiple tracks
and sessions will ensure tailoring to researchers, practitioners, and diverse
communities including data science/analytics, data curation/stewardship, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, hypertext (and Web/network science), multimedia, publishing, preservation, digital humanities, machine learning/AI, heritage/culture, health/medicine, policy, law, and privacy/ intellectual property.
General Instructions on submissions of full papers, short papers, posters and
demonstrations, doctoral consortium, tutorials, workshops, and panels can be
found at https://2018.jcdl.org/general_instructions. Below are the submission
deadlines:
• Jan. 15, 2018 – Tutorial and workshop proposal submissions
• Jan. 15, 2018 – Full paper and short paper submissions
• Jan. 29, 2018 – Panel, poster and demonstration submissions
• Feb. 1, 2018 – Notification of acceptance for tutorials and workshops
• Mar. 8, 2018 – Notification of acceptance for full papers, short papers,
panels, posters, and demonstrations
• Mar. 25, 2018 – Doctoral Consortium abstract submissions
• Apr. 5, 2018 – Notification of acceptance for Doctoral Consortium
• Apr. 15, 2018 – Final camera-ready deadline for full papers, short papers,
panels, posters, and demonstrations
“They were taking both sides of the argument this past weekend and pushing them out from their troll farms as much as they could to just raise the noise level in America and make a big issue seem like an even bigger issue as they’re trying to push divisiveness in the country,” as Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said in the fall.
Tools such as the German Marshall Fund’s “Hamilton 68” dashboard track Russian-linked accounts in real time to show what links, phrases and hashtags are circulating.
The Trump administration detailed the threat — without any specific mention of the 2016 interference — in the new National Security Strategy it released at the end of December.
The Republicans might have been tarnished by the St Petersburg troll factory, but Democratic fantasies about social media were rubbished in the process
The ads in question were memes, manufactured and posted to a number of bluntly named, pseudo-American Facebook accounts in 2016 by workers at a troll farm in St Petersburg, Russia. There were thousands of these ads, it seems, plus parallel efforts on Instagram and Twitter. Between them, they reached over 100 million people.
The memes were big news for a while because they showed what Russian interference in the 2016 election actually looked like, in vivid color. Eventually the story faded, though, in part because it was superseded by other stories, but also, I think, because the Russian ad story was deeply distasteful to both sides of our atrophied political debate.
The ads were clumsily written. They were rife with spelling errors and poor grammar. Their grasp of American history was awful. And over them all hovered a paranoid fear that the powerful were scheming to flip the world upside-down in the most outlandish ways: to turn our country over to the undocumented … to punish the hardworking … to crack down on patriots and Christians … to enact Sharia law right here at home.
The social media platforms aren’t neutral arbiters, selflessly serving the needs of society. As is all too obvious now, they are monopolies that manipulate us in a hundred different ways, selecting our news, steering us towards what we need to buy. The corporate entities behind them wield enormous power in Washington, too, filling Democratic campaign coffers and keeping the revolving door turning for trusted servants. Those who don’t comply get disciplined.
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Russia calls for answers after Chechen leader’s Instagram is blocked
Internet watchdog demands explanation after Ramzan Kadyrov claimed Facebook also suspended him without explanation
Kadyrov has accused the US government of pressuring the social networks to disable his accounts, which he said were blocked on Saturday without explanation. The US imposed travel and financial sanctions on Kadyrov last week over numerous allegations of human rights abuses.
The former rebel fighter, who is now loyal to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is a fan of social media, particularly Instagram, which he has used in recent years to make barely veiled death threats against Kremlin critics.
Leonid Levin, the head of the Russian parliament’s information technologies and communications committee, suggested the move by Facebook and Instagram was an attack on freedom of speech.
Dzhambulat Umarov, the Chechen press and information minister, described the blocking of Kadyrov’s accounts as a “vile” cyber-attack by the US.
Neither Instagram nor Facebook had commented at the time of publication.
In 2015, Kadyrov urged Chechen men not to let their wives use the WhatsApp messaging service after an online outcry over the forced marriage of a 17-year-old Chechen to a 47-year-old police chief. “Do not write such things. Men, take your women out of WhatsApp,” he said.
I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets
The dating app knows me better than I do, but these reams of intimate information are just the tip of the iceberg. What if my data is hacked – or sold?
Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder.
With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye from personaldata.io and human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for.
Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, links to where my Instagram photos would have been had I not previously deleted the associated account, my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many Facebook friends I had, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.
Reading through the 1,700 Tinder messages I’ve sent since 2013, I took a trip into my hopes, fears, sexual preferences and deepest secrets. Tinder knows me so well. It knows the real, inglorious version of me who copy-pasted the same joke to match 567, 568, and 569; who exchanged compulsively with 16 different people simultaneously one New Year’s Day, and then ghosted 16 of them.
“What you are describing is called secondary implicit disclosed information,” explains Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “Tinder knows much more about you when studying your behaviour on the app. It knows how often you connect and at which times; the percentage of white men, black men, Asian men you have matched; which kinds of people are interested in you; which words you use the most; how much time people spend on your picture before swiping you, and so on. Personal data is the fuel of the economy. Consumers’ data is being traded and transacted for the purpose of advertising.”.
In May, an algorithm was used to scrape 40,000 profile images from the platform in order to build an AI to “genderise” faces. A few months earlier, 70,000 profiles from OkCupid (owned by Tinder’s parent company Match Group) were made public by a Danish researcher some commentators have labelled a “white supremacist”, who used the data to try to establish a link between intelligence and religious beliefs. The data is still out there.
I heard back from Steam, with exactly the response I expected: Our service model (users reserve our own PC and VR headset, using our Steam software) needs to use their site license program. And even if it’s just on that one PC, we’d still have to run their site license server locally to manage it.
We did an inventory of what it would cost us to purchase a site license for our most popular games: Of our top 25 most played VR games, only 10 have site licenses available at all. Those 10 games would in total cost us slightly more than $3000 per year to license, which strikes me as ridiculous.
But Tara, thanks for pointing out Springboard VR! At a glance it looks really promising. I’m really glad to hear about another option.
-Chad
We ran into the same problem last year with Steam. However, we are now working with Springboard VR. Our head VR specialist says you can test run their interface on a machine for free and that they are putting together an academic package that should be available soon! https://springboardvr.com/
Tara
Amazing timing, Laura! I was just looking into the site license program this week. I wrote up what I’ve learned so far for someone else this morning, shared below. But to sum up, it’s not very promising either from a financial or practical view of the way we use Steam currently (one PC with Steam titles that we’ve purchased under our account, with an attached HTC Vive).
I originally thought this was just a different kind of license for each game, one which allows public use in a library, cafe, etc. But I got some clarification questions answered by Steam support – it’s actually designed for users to log into one of our computers using their own Steam account. They can then check out a game we’ve purchased a site license for, and play it under their account while they’re on our computer.
This also requires running some sort of server locally to handle the checkouts.
So I don’t think this is going to work for us. The pricing is also pretty wild. One of our most popular titles is Space Pirate Trainer – currently $10 paid one time to own individually, or $30/month/seat for a site license subscription. And I’ve seen at least one title that’s free for individual ownership, but somehow costs $20/month/seat for site license.
Much of their documentation is contradictory and out of date.
Even more annoying is that you can’t even see the site license prices until you sign up for a site license account and fill out some legal forms.
Last but not least, many titles, even free ones, do not have site licenses available at all.
I have one more request into Steam support asking how they prefer we purchase things as a library. I’ll let you know what I hear.
Oh, also – you can’t convert an existing Steam account or purchases. You need to create a new one and start from scratch.
-Chad
We’d also like to know if any other libraries had set up the Steam/Valve Site license, which we were just starting to look into ourselves: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3303-QWRC-3436 – which sounds like it solves many of these problems. Our general counsel has a few issues with the license terms but are willing to consider especially if I can find examples of other institutions utilizing it!
Associate Director Library Information Technology and Digital Strategies
Echoing what Peter said there are no good solutions right now. It would be great if Steam or HTC or Oculus offered site licenses or group accounts, but they don’t. We have 2 HTC Vives that share an account. This causes problems occasionally as it doesn’t like it if two headsets are using the same program. Going offline usually takes care of it. Our 4 Oculus Rifts also share an account but the Oculus store is less problematic than Steam since it only contacts the mother ship when doing an update. If you have the option prepaid cards and individual accounts would be the best way to go but our purchasing department said no.
Edward Iglesias
In our library’s VR Studio, we have a separate library-owned Steam account for each of 7 VR workstation computers. Some have Vives, some have Oculus Rifts at them. We purchase content for each account. We also allow patrons to download free games/tools to those computers.
If a patron owns Steam content that we don’t, they may log in to their personal account and download the game to our computer. So far, this hasn’t posed a problem, except that the added game will show up in that workstation account’s game list, but will not be playable to other patrons. I occasionally delete personal games that are causing confusion to other patrons. Not too many patrons have downloaded content yet so if it gets to be too troublesome we may disallow it in the future.
For the Oculus Rift stations, there is a Steam account as mentioned above, plus the Oculus library. For Oculus, I’ve been able to use one account for all of the workstations. We purchase content once and it’s usable on all the computers from the one account. This has worked fine so far except for playing multi-player online. The single account will not support multiple instances of online play for the same game.
None of these is a perfect solution but they are mostly working as this is a continuous work in progress. Feel free to get in touch off list if you’d like more specific info, etc.
Thanks,
Pete
Hi all,
I was curious if any of your libraries have Steam from Valve installed on your public workstations to drive PC gaming and an HTC Vive? Any tips on how to set that up? Obviously the licensing issue with purchased programs/games through Steam is a problem when you are providing access for a large user base. There are multiple free games/programs available.
How do you handle providing each user with HDD/SSD space on your machines for downloaded games/programs through Steam?
Thanks,
Alex
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Elisandro Cabada
Engineering and Innovation Liaison Librarian
Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering Librarian
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