Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
https://liu.se/en/news-item/man-hindras-att-ta-sig-in-i-kvinnodominerade-yrken
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more on discrimination in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=discrimination
For the purpose of this chapter, Cross Reality or XR refers to technologies and applications that involve combinations of mixed reality (MR), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and virtual worlds (VWs). These are technologies that connect computer technology (such as informational overlays) to the physical world for the purposes of augmenting or extending experiences beyond the real. Especially relevant to the definition of XR is the fact that this term encompasses a wide range of options for delivering learning experiences, from minimal technology and episodic experiences to deep immersion and persistent platforms. The preponderance of different terms for slightly different technologies indicate that this is a growth area within the field. Here we provide a few definitions of these technologies.
MR—Mixed reality refers to a blend of technologies used to influence the human perception of an experience. Motion sensors, body tracking, and eye tracking interplay with overlaid technology to give a rich and full version of reality displayed to the user. For example, technology could add sound or additional graphics to an experience in real time. Examples include the Magic Leap One and Microsoft HoloLens 2.0. MR and XR are often used interchangeably.
AR—Augmented reality refers to technology systems that overlay information onto the real world, but the technology might not allow for real-time feedback. As such, AR experiences can move or animate, but they might not interact with changes in depth of view or external light conditions. Currently, AR is considered the first generation of the newer and more interactive MR experiences.
VR—Virtual reality, as a technological product, traces its history to approximately 1960 and tends to encompass user experiences that are visually and auditorily different from the real world. Indeed, the real world is often blocked from interacting with the virtual one. Headsets, headphones, haptics, and haptic clothing might purposely cut off all input except that which is virtual. In general, VR is a widely recognizable term, often found in gaming and workplace training, where learners need to be transported to a different time and place. VR experiences in STEM often consist of virtual labs or short virtual field trips.
VW—Virtual worlds are frequently considered a subset of VR with the difference that VWs are inherently social and collaborative; VWs frequently contain multiple simultaneous users, while VRs are often solo experiences. Another discrimination between virtual reality and virtual worlds is the persistence of the virtual space. VR tends to be episodic, with the learner in the virtual experience for a few minutes and the reality created within the experience ends when the learner experience ends. VWs are persistent in that the worlds continue to exist on computer servers whether or not there are active avatars within the virtual space (Bell 2008). This discrimination between VR and VW, however, is dissolving. VR experiences can be created to exist for days, and some users have been known to wear headsets for extended periods of time. Additionally, more and more VR experiences are being designed to be for game play, socialization, or mental relaxation. The IEEE VR 2020 online conference and the Educators in VR International Summit 2020 offered participants opportunities to experience conference presentations in virtual rooms as avatars while interacting with presenters and conference attendees (see Sect. 2.5 for more information).
CVEs—Collaborative virtual environments are communication systems in which multiple interactants share the same three-dimensional digital space despite occupying remote physical locations (Yee and Bailenson 2006).
Embodiment—Embodiment is defined by Lindgren and Johnson-Glenberg (2013) as the enactment of knowledge and concepts through the activity of our bodies within an MR (mixed reality) and physical environment
https://hyp.is/mBiunvx3EeudElMRwHm5dQ/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7948004/
Human-Centered Design philosophy that involves putting human needs, capabilities, and behavior first (Jerald 2018: 15). XR provides the opportunity to experience just-in-time immersive, experiential learning that uses concrete yet exploratory experiences involving senses that result in lasting memories. Here we discuss opportunities for social applications with XR.
https://hyp.is/wJSoFPx3Eeu1mAPmeAp2tQ/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7948004/
XR learner activities are usually created for individual use, which may or may not need to be simultaneously experienced as a class together at the same time or place with the instructor. Activities can be designed into instruction with VR headsets, high-resolution screens, smartphones, or other solo technological devices for use inside and outside of the classroom.
https://hyp.is/wJSoFPx3Eeu1mAPmeAp2tQ/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7948004/
Ready to go relationship between STEM courses and XR. In bullet points!
https://hyp.is/wJSoFPx3Eeu1mAPmeAp2tQ/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7948004/
Do we address the challenges in the grant proposal?
some learners will be held back from full XR activity by visual, physical, and social abilities such as stroke, vertigo, epilepsy, or age-related reaction time. It should also be noted that the encompassing nature of VR headsets might create some discomfort or danger for any learners as they can no longer fully see and control their body and body space.
An executive guide to artificial intelligence, from machine learning and general AI to neural networks.
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.
There are a vast number of emerging applications for narrow AI:
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.
Another area of AI research is evolutionary computation.
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
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.
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.
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.
Robots and driverless cars
Fake news
Facial recognition and surveillance
Healthcare
Reinforcing discrimination and bias
AI and global warming (climate change)
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more on AI in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence+education
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-06-10-humanizing-education-s-algorithms
predictive algorithms to better target students’ individual learning needs.
Personalized learning is a lofty aim, however you define it. To truly meet each student where they are, we would have to know their most intimate details, or discover it through their interactions with our digital tools. We would need to track their moods and preferences, their fears and beliefs…perhaps even their memories.
There’s something unsettling about capturing users’ most intimate details. Any prediction model based off historical records risks typecasting the very people it is intended to serve. Even if models can overcome the threat of discrimination, there is still an ethical question to confront – just how much are we entitled to know about students?
We can accept that tutoring algorithms, for all their processing power, are inherently limited in what they can account for. This means steering clear of mythical representations of what such algorithms can achieve. It may even mean giving up on personalization altogether. The alternative is to pack our algorithms to suffocation at the expense of users’ privacy. This approach does not end well.
There is only one way to resolve this trade-off: loop in the educators.
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more on algorithms in this IMS blog
blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=algor
Paul Goodman
Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science
The process of making technology is design
Design is a branch of moral philosophy, not of a science
System design reflects the designer’s values and the cultural content
Andreas Orphanides
Fulbright BOYD
Byzantine history professor Bulgarian – all that is 200 years old is politics, not history
Access, privacy, equity, values for the prof organization ARLD.
Mike Monteiro
This is how bad design makes it out into the world, not due to mailcioius intent, but whith nbo intent at all
Cody Hanson
Our expertise, our service ethic, and our values remain our greatest strengths. But for us to have the impat we seek into the lives of our users, we must encode our services and our values in to the software
Ethical design.
Design interprets the world to crate useful objects. Ethical design closes the loop, imaging how those object will affect the world.
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile, ut the traffics jam. Frederic Pohl
Victor Papanek The designer’s social and moral judgement must be brought into play long before she begins to design.
We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we love the cleverness of our ideas Mike Monteiro
Analytics
Qual and quan data – lirarainas love data, usage, ILL, course reserves, data – QQLM.
IDEO – the goal of design research isn’t to collect data, I tis to synthesize information and provide insight and guidance that leads to action.
Google Analytics: the trade off. besides privacy concners. sometimes data and analytics is the only thing we can see.
Frank CHimero – remove a person;s humanity and she is just a curiosity, a pinpoint on a map, a line in a list, an entry in a dbase. a person turns into a granular but of information.
Gale analytics on demand – similar the keynote speaker at Macalester LibTech 2019. https://www.facebook.com/InforMediaServices/posts/1995793570531130?comment_id=1995795043864316&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D
personas
by designing for yourself or your team, you are potentially building discrimination right into your product Erica Hall.
Search algorithms.
what is relevance. the relevance of the ranking algorithm. for whom (what patron). crummy searches.
reckless associsations – made by humans or computers – can do very real harm especially when they appear in supposedly neutral environments.
Donna Lanclos and Andrew Asher Ethonography should be core to the business of the library.
technology as information ecology. co-evolve. prepare to start asking questions to see the effect of our design choices.
ethnography of library: touch point tours – a student to give a tour to the librarians or draw a map of the library , give a sense what spaces they use, what is important. ethnographish
Q from the audience: if instructors warn against Google and Wikipedia and steer students to library and dbases, how do you now warn about the perils of the dbases bias? A: put fires down, and systematically, try to build into existing initiatives: bi-annual magazine, as many places as can
Jules Polonetsky and Omer Tene January 16, 2019
https://www.ourworld.co/law-is-code-making-policy-for-artificial-intelligence/
Twenty years have passed since renowned Harvard Professor Larry Lessig coined the phrase “Code is Law”, suggesting that in the digital age, computer code regulates behavior much like legislative code traditionally did. These days, the computer code that powers artificial intelligence (AI) is a salient example of Lessig’s statement.
Yet even with code as law and a rising need for law in code, policymakers do not need to become mathematicians, engineers and coders. Instead, institutions must develop and enhance their technical toolbox by hiring experts and consulting with top academics, industry researchers and civil society voices. Responsible AI requires access to not only lawyers, ethicists and philosophers but also to technical leaders and subject matter experts to ensure an appropriate balance between economic and scientific benefits to society on the one hand and individual rights and freedoms on the other hand.
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more on AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence
Reimagining Minnesota State
Monday, January 14, 2019
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Session 2: The Digital Age: The Impact and Future Possibilities Offered by Data and Technology
Thank you for registering to participate in the second Reimagining Minnesota State forum. The Forums have been designed to spark not only individual reflection but what we hope can serve as catalysts for discussions in a variety of venues. The Forum will be recorded and available for viewing on the Reimagining website.
Below are the directions whether you are attending in person or by live stream.
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notes Plamen Miltenoff
John O’Brien, President and CEO of EDUCAUSE
from ad hoc to systemic institutional innovations
ask Rachel for the two books announced
Bryan Mark GIll AR library tour
Bryan Rachel OER “visit”
Catherine Haslag: Is there any research to show students retention in an online class vs a face-to-face course?
the challenge is not collecting, but integrating, using data.
silos = cylinder of excellence.
technology innovation around advising. iPASS resources.
adaptive learning systems – how students advance through the learning process.
games and simulations Bryan Mark Gill. voice recognition,
next 3 to 5 years AR. by 2023 40% with AR and VR
AI around the controversial. Chatbot and Voice assistants.
Unizin: 13 founding members to develop platform, Canvas, instructional services, data for predictive analytic, consistent data standard among institutions,
University innovation Alliance. Analytics as the linchpin for students’ success. graduation rates increase. racial gap graduation. Georgia State.
digital ethics. Mark Gill and Susana Nuccetelli. digital ethics: Susana Nuccetelli brought her students from the Philosophy Dept to Mark Gill’s SCSu Vizlab so we can discuss ethics and AI, last semester. jobrien@educause.edu
http://www.minnstate.edu/board/reimagining/docs/Mfume-Minnesota.State.1-14-2019.pdf
assistant vice president for student success and prevention Morgan State U
the importance of training in technology adoption
Dr. Peter Smith, Orkand Endowed Chair and Professor of Innovative Practices in Higher Education at University of Maryland University College
social disruption, national security issue,
Allan Taft Candadian researcher, 700 hours / year learning something. 14 h/w.
learners deserve recognition
free range learning.
how do we get a value on people from a different background? knowledge discrimination. we value it on where they learned it. then how you learned it and what you can do with it. talent and capacity not recognized.
we, the campus, don’t control the forces for a very first time. MIT undergrad curricula is free, what will happen. dynamics at work here. declining student numbers, legislation unhappy. technology had made college more expensive, not less. doing the right thing, leads to more disruption. local will be better, if done well. workplace can become a place for learning.
learning is a social activity. distance learning: being on the farthest raw of 300 Princeton lecture. there is a tool and there is people; has to have people at the heart.
what will work not only for MN, but for each of the campuses, the personalization.
staying still is death.
Panel discussion
what is the role of faculty in the vendor and discussions about technology. a heat map shows that IT people were testing the vendor web site most, faculty and student much less.
Fukuyama, F. (2018). Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy. Foreign Affairs, 97(5), 90–114. Retrieved from http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dkeh%26AN%3d131527250%26site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite
For the most part, twentieth-century politics was defined by economic issues. On the left, politics centered on workers, trade unions, social welfare programs, and redistributive policies. The right, by contrast, was primarily interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector. Politics today, however, is defined less by economic or ideological concerns than by questions of identity. Now, in many democracies, the left focuses less on creating broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and lgbt people. The right, meanwhile, has redefined its core mission as the patriotic protection of traditional national identity, which is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity,
or religion.
Again and again, groups have come to believe that their identities—whether national, religious, ethnic, sexual, gender, or otherwise—are not receiving adequate recognition. Identity politics is no longer a minor phenomenon, playing out only in the rarified confines of university campuses or providing a backdrop to low-stakes skirmishes in “culture wars” promoted by the mass media. Instead, identity politics has become a master concept that explains much of what is going on in global affairs.
Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities,
threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure. Unless such liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity,
they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict.
But in liberal democracies, equality under the law does not result in economic or social equality. Discrimination continues to exist against a wide variety of groups, and market economies produce large inequalities of outcome.
And the proportion of white working-class children growing up in single-parent families rose from 22 percent in 2000 to 36 percent in 2017.
Nationalists tell the disaffected that they have always been core members of a great
nation and that foreigners, immigrants, and elites have been conspiring to hold them down.
January 9, 20185:06 AM ET https://www.npr.org/people/575178882/ashley-brown
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more on online dating in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+dating
The digital attack that brought Estonia to a standstill 10 years ago was the first shot in a cyberwar that has been raging between Moscow and the west ever since
It began at exactly 10pm on 26 April, 2007, when a Russian-speaking mob began rioting in the streets of Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, killing one person and wounding dozens of others. That incident resonates powerfully in some of the recent conflicts in the US. In 2007, the Estonian government had announced that a bronze statue of a heroic second world war Soviet soldier was to be removed from a central city square. For ethnic Estonians, the statue had less to do with the war than with the Soviet occupation that followed it, which lasted until independence in 1991. For the country’s Russian-speaking minority – 25% of Estonia’s 1.3 million people – the removal of the memorial was another sign of ethnic discrimination.
That evening, Jaan Priisalu – a former risk manager for Estonia’s largest bank, Hansabank, who was working closely with the government on its cybersecurity infrastructure – was at home in Tallinn with his girlfriend when his phone rang. On the line was Hillar Aarelaid, the chief of Estonia’s cybercrime police.
“It’s going down,” Aarelaid declared. Alongside the street fighting, reports of digital attacks were beginning to filter in. The websites of the parliament, major universities, and national newspapers were crashing. Priisalu and Aarelaid had suspected something like this could happen one day. A digital attack on Estoniahad begun.
“The Russian theory of war allows you to defeat the enemy without ever having to touch him,” says Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. “Estonia was an early experiment in that theory.”
Since then, Russia has only developed, and codified, these strategies. The techniques pioneered in Estonia are known as the “Gerasimov doctrine,” named after Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian military. In 2013, Gerasimov published an article in the Russian journal Military-Industrial Courier, articulating the strategy of what is now called “hybrid” or “nonlinear” warfare. “The lines between war and peace are blurred,” he wrote. New forms of antagonism, as seen in 2010’s Arab spring and the “colour revolutions” of the early 2000s, could transform a “perfectly thriving state, in a matter of months, and even days, into an arena of fierce armed conflict”.
Russia has deployed these strategies around the globe. Its 2008 war with Georgia, another former Soviet republic, relied on a mix of both conventional and cyber-attacks, as did the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Both began with civil unrest sparked via digital and social media – followed by tanks. Finland and Sweden have experienced near-constant Russian information operations. Russian hacks and social media operations have also occurred during recent elections in Holland, Germany, and France. Most recently, Spain’s leading daily, El País, reported on Russian meddling in the Catalonian independence referendum. Russian-supported hackers had allegedly worked with separatist groups, presumably with a mind to further undermining the EU in the wake of the Brexit vote.
The Kremlin has used the same strategies against its own people. Domestically, history books, school lessons, and media are manipulated, while laws are passed blocking foreign access to the Russian population’s online data from foreign companies – an essential resource in today’s global information-sharing culture. According to British military researcher Keir Giles, author of Nato’s Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, the Russian government, or actors that it supports, has even captured the social media accounts of celebrities in order to spread provocative messages under their names but without their knowledge. The goal, both at home and abroad, is to sever outside lines of communication so that people get their information only through controlled channels.
Tim Dowling Wednesday 29 November 2017 12.39 EST
According to its detractors, RT is Vladimir Putin’s global disinformation service, countering one version of the truth with another in a bid to undermine the whole notion of empirical truth. And yet influential people from all walks of public life appear on it, or take its money. You can’t criticise RT’s standards, they say, if you don’t watch it. So I watched it. For a week.
Suchet, the son of former ITV newsreader John Suchet and the nephew of actor David Suchet, has been working for RT since 2009. The offspring of well-known people feature often on RT. Sophie Shevardnadze, who presents Sophie & Co, is the granddaughter of former Georgian president and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Tyrel Ventura, who presents Watching the Hawks on RT America, is the son of wrestler-turned-politician Jesse Ventura. His co-host is Oliver Stone’s son Sean.
My note; so this is why Oliver Stone in his “documentary” went gentle on Putin, so his son can have a job. #Nepotism #FakeNews
RT’s stated mission is to offer an “alternative perspective on major global events”, but the world according to RT is often downright surreal.
Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, about Putin’s Russia, and now a senior visiting fellow in global affairs at the London School of Economics, was in Moscow working in television when Russia Today first started hiring graduates from Britain and the US. “The people were really bright, they were being paid well,” he says. But they soon found they were being ordered to change their copy, or instructed how to cover certain stories to reflect well on the Kremlin. “Everyone had their own moment when they first twigged that this wasn’t like the BBC,” he says. “That, actually, this is being dictated from above.” The coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 was a lightbulb moment for many, he says. They quit.
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more on Russian bots, trolls:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/11/22/bots-trolls-and-fake-news/
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more on state propaganda in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/11/21/china-of-xi/