04
May
2022
May
2022
Climate change class in VR
categories: VR
Searching for "climate"
25
Apr
2022
Apr
2022
VR teaching climate change
categories: VR
Virtual reality: A new frontier in climate change learning
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20220413115741390
Located in a building renovated over the past two years, the Dreamscape Learn centre welcomed 1,000 students in this, the first full semester. In place of traditional biology laboratory time, these students attend labs in the state-of-the-art virtual learning centre that cost US$20 million, paid for by Dreamscape Immersive, philanthropy and ASU.
What we’re doing with the alien zoo is replacing conventional biology labs with these highly immersive laboratory modules in which students get to enter into a virtual world and really deal with the way real scientists collect data, look at problems, collaborate, come up with solutions, try the solutions and then come up with other hypotheses.”
Making the abstract concrete
As is the case in many video games, the avatars can travel back in time, in this case to Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution, when widespread burning of coal began increasing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. We have an amazing tool, Schlosser told the conference, to put students next to where things happened, next to where they might look into the future. Doing this makes the abstract become concrete.
23
Jan
2021
Jan
2021
Twitter bots climate disinformation
categories: Twitter
Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation. Researchers determined that nearly 9.5% of the users in their sample were likely bots. But those bots accounted for 25% of the total tweets about climate change on most days from r/science
paper published last week in the journal Climate Policy is part of an expanding body of research about the role of bots in online climate discourse.
+++++++++++
more on climate in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=climate
03
May
2022
May
2022
Learning in Metaverse
categories: VR
A new study co-authored by Richard Mayer,
The study took place with about 100 middle school students taking a brief “virtual field trip” to learn about climate science. Some students experienced the field trip while wearing a VR headset, while others watched the same material in standard video on a computer screen.
“higher ratings of presence, interest, and enjoyment,”
The paper noted an obvious logistical benefit to virtual field trips over getting on a bus for an in-person outing. “Virtual field trips make it possible to experience things that are too expensive, dangerous, or impossible in the real world,” it says. The experiment did not address the difference in educational value between a real-world field trip and a virtual one.
for programs like nursing, pharmacy and medicine, VR seems promising for teaching some skills, as a piece of a broader curriculum that includes in-person hands-on learning as well.
26
Jan
2022
Jan
2022
higher ed predictors for 2022
14 Predictions for Higher Education in 2022
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2022/01/04/14-predictions-for-higher-education-in-2022.aspx
Forget Hyflex
our faculty will discover that effectively teaching in a hyflex environment without adequate support is extremely difficult and truly exhausting.
Adapt Hyflex — and Be Ready for Anything (security)
Move Beyond Zoom into the Metaverse
Reap the Rewards of 2 Years of Strategic Decision-Making
campus leaders who have intentionally put students at the center of organization and system design will reap a great reward.
Expect More Disruption and More Innovation
look for movement in the augmented and virtual reality space.
Online Ed Becomes the Norm
online education will become the norm rather than the step-sister of “traditional” education
Build Off the Threads that Are Here to Stay
Alternatives Will Continue Gaining Ground
The cultures within institutions may prevent these significant changes from occurring. If that occurs, alternatives will continue to build momentum.
Emphasize Choice and Support
Alumni will be looking for upskilling opportunities via microcredentials, to navigate growth and career change during the “Great Resignation.” Recent high school grads will expect a variety of online, hybrid and in-person courses to choose from, many bringing with them years of experience with virtual learning.
Students Need Faster Routes to Completion
Climate Change Ed Gets Embedded
Hybrid Learning Tech Will Step Up
many lecture theaters might come to look like professional TV studios, to meet growing quality and usability expectations. Also, technologies will likely be expected to make classrooms environments more “peer-learning friendly” and inclusive
Blockchain Will Gain Ed Pickup
The (Arizon State) university announced that in 2022 it would release Pocket, a digital wallet for students as a comprehensive learner record.
01
Jan
2022
Jan
2022
Metaverse and capitalism
The Metaverse as the new frontier of capitalism
https://medium.com/@connectingtotheworld/the-metaverse-as-the-new-frontier-of-capitalism-639c9494634
Baudrillard’s work from1981, Simulacra and Simulation
Geyh, Leebron, F., & Levy, A. (1998). Postmodern American fiction : a Norton anthology (First edition.). W.W. Norton & Company.
https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/qoo6di/alma990011637720104318
money and gaming are only the first of being completely pushed into a new all encompassing ‘reality’ of its own.
2021 also popularized the Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) — private property transferred to virtual reality. If on a first level a photo or film keep certain relation to the real, a NFT is a second level of dematerialization of our world and perceived ‘reality’. It simulates, in a virtual world (per se already a simulacrum), the simulacrum of an image/photo/video — and, as if magically, it acquires ‘value’ and it is deemed proprietary.
The future decade’s pressures are more and more on the deterioration of what is left of the real world — climate change, pandemics, automation of work, decreasing populations (first in the West, then in the rest of the world), and scarce resources. The work that produces material things were/are the first to be automated — first in agriculture, then manufacturing and now finally services. In such a decadent material world, continuous growth would not be possible anymore — but with virtual ones
There is never enough data.
super fast internet (5G), increasing data centers, quantum computing, health trackers on human bodies, machine-brain interfaces, internet of things… The goal is for the AI to know how to reproduce material things in a virtual setting.
The COVID-19 pandemic probably accelerated this ‘metaversing’ of reality in many years.
+++++++++++++++++++
more on metaverse in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=metaverse
01
Jan
2022
Jan
2022
cheaper internet for low-income Americans
A program for cheaper internet for low-income Americans launches today
The FCC extended assistance that started during the pandemic
There’s more funding on the way to close the digital divide in the US. The new $1 trillion infrastructure law includes $65 billion to boost broadband access. More than 30 million Americans live somewhere without adequate broadband infrastructure, according to a Biden administration fact sheet.
26
Oct
2021
Oct
2021
teaching
The Damaging Myth of the Natural Teacher
Despite decades of evidence, good teaching is still considered more art than science. That’s hurting faculty and students alike.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-damaging-myth-of-the-natural-teacher
Even as universities have become more bureaucratic and centrally controlled, teaching continues to operate largely independent of oversight
when she was a college administrator, before becoming a professor, she was expected to spend two to four hours a week on professional development. It was written into her job description. Her training as a faculty member, by contrast, “has all been self directed, self led, things I want to do. It’s never been part of my annual evaluation.”
At most research universities if you were publishing in pedagogy journals they would not be counted or weighted as heavily as if you were publishing in a traditional journal.
Valencia College, a community college in Central Florida that relies heavily on part-time instructors, encourages them to improve their teaching by offering certificates and pay increases for participating in 60 hours of professional development.
Some of the most notable reform efforts are coming from external funders and academic associations. The National Science Foundation, the Association of American Universities, the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, the American Historical Association, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and others have sponsored research and projects on teaching reform, including work on how to advance discipline-based education research.
a pilot program at Kansas to reinvent the evaluation process, as part of a multi-campus project called TEval. The new process, she says, considers seven benchmarks, including course planning, class climate, and evidence of student learning. Teaching reviews consider, for example, how well course content is aligned with the curriculum, whether a faculty member is involved in scholarship about pedagogy, and how much time they spend advising and mentoring students. Departments are also encouraged to develop “peer triads,” in which small groups of faculty members whose coursework is related meet regularly to talk about their teaching and course design.
He and his peers were heavily involved in pedagogical innovation on campus, including the Center for Project Based Learning and discipline-based education research.
++++++++++++++++++
More on teaching in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=teach
22
Aug
2021
Aug
2021
Unity for Humanity Summit
categories: VR
Imagining a better world at the Unity for Humanity Summit
https://blog.unity.com/news/imagining-a-better-world-at-the-unity-for-humanity-summit
On October 12, the Unity for Humanity Summit will once again take place virtually to celebrate creators who are using real-time 3D (RT3D) for social impact.
Since the inaugural Unity for Humanity Summit in October 2020, we have awarded more than $2.5 million to support current and future social impact creators who are building RT3D experiences that have a positive and meaningful impact on society and the planet through the Unity for Humanity program and the Unity Charitable Fund.
four content tracks and some of the exciting topics and workshops
Education and Inclusive Economic Opportunity
- Workshop: How to make your first Unity build
- Different global models for creating inclusive economic opportunity
- How to leverage real-time 3D for workforce development and training
Environment and Sustainability
- What the gaming industry can do to support a healthier planet: From decarbonization of gaming operations to activating users
- Visualizing the future of climate change
- How the fashion industry is innovating for sustainability using RT3D
Digital Health and Wellbeing
- Using AI for social good in and beyond the age of COVID
- The role RT3D can play in the advancement of patient care, healthcare training, and more
- Funding healthcare innovations and real-time 3D tools
Tools for Changemakers
- Monetizing your social impact mobile game
- An AR tutorial taught through multiple use cases
- Pitching brands to support your impact projects
- Visual scripting workshop
++++++++++++++
more on Unity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=unity
04
Aug
2021
Aug
2021
What is AI
What is AI? Here’s everything you need to know about artificial intelligence
An executive guide to artificial intelligence, from machine learning and general AI to neural networks.
What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
It depends who you ask.
What are the uses for AI?
What are the different types of AI?
Narrow AI is what we see all around us in computers today — intelligent systems that have been taught or have learned how to carry out specific tasks without being explicitly programmed how to do so.
General AI
General AI is very different and is the type of adaptable intellect found in humans, a flexible form of intelligence capable of learning how to carry out vastly different tasks, anything from haircutting to building spreadsheets or reasoning about a wide variety of topics based on its accumulated experience.
What can Narrow AI do?
There are a vast number of emerging applications for narrow AI:
- Interpreting video feeds from drones carrying out visual inspections of infrastructure such as oil pipelines.
- Organizing personal and business calendars.
- Responding to simple customer-service queries.
- Coordinating with other intelligent systems to carry out tasks like booking a hotel at a suitable time and location.
- Helping radiologists to spot potential tumors in X-rays.
- Flagging inappropriate content online, detecting wear and tear in elevators from data gathered by IoT devices.
- Generating a 3D model of the world from satellite imagery… the list goes on and on.
What can General AI do?
A survey conducted among four groups of experts in 2012/13 by AI researchers Vincent C Müller and philosopher Nick Bostrom reported a 50% chance that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would be developed between 2040 and 2050, rising to 90% by 2075.
What is machine learning?
What are neural networks?
What are other types of AI?
Another area of AI research is evolutionary computation.
What is fueling the resurgence in AI?
What are the elements of machine learning?
As mentioned, machine learning is a subset of AI and is generally split into two main categories: supervised and unsupervised learning.
Supervised learning
Unsupervised learning
Which are the leading firms in AI?
Which AI services are available?
All of the major cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform — provide access to GPU arrays for training and running machine-learning models, with Google also gearing up to let users use its Tensor Processing Units — custom chips whose design is optimized for training and running machine-learning models.
Which countries are leading the way in AI?
It’d be a big mistake to think the US tech giants have the field of AI sewn up. Chinese firms Alibaba, Baidu, and Lenovo, invest heavily in AI in fields ranging from e-commerce to autonomous driving. As a country, China is pursuing a three-step plan to turn AI into a core industry for the country, one that will be worth 150 billion yuan ($22bn) by the end of 2020 to become the world’s leading AI power by 2030.
How can I get started with AI?
While you could buy a moderately powerful Nvidia GPU for your PC — somewhere around the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or faster — and start training a machine-learning model, probably the easiest way to experiment with AI-related services is via the cloud.
How will AI change the world?
Robots and driverless cars
Fake news
Facial recognition and surveillance
Healthcare
Reinforcing discrimination and bias
AI and global warming (climate change)
Will AI kill us all?
+++++++++++++
more on AI in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence+education