Feb
2018
Eastern Europe and holocaust
Rewriting History in Eastern Europe
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more on history in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=history
Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
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more on history in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=history
. Link VR content to course outcomes. If you want to VR to succeed in your college classroom, you have to look at how 360-degree audio and video adds value. The forensic-science department, for example, is trying to get a close approximation of a crime scene so that students can acclimate to the job environment and take a real-world approach to investigations. Adding VR without adding value will not be effective.
2. Do a proof-of-concept app first. The history reenactment app was a great starting point, as it was a simple-to-film, single-location shoot that didn’t require much editing. You want to start simple to get an early win. They learned valuable lessons during that shoot, such as best camera placement to minimize distractions.
3. Get buy-in at the highest levels. Marketing students in the capstone project are presenting the final apps to the President, Provost, and other administration officials. Once you get buy-in at an administrative level, it’s easier to secure funding for more equipment and more promotion of your work to other departments.
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more on VR in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality+education
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more on VR in education in this IMS blog
January 19, 20184:54 AM ET STEVE INSKEEP
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/19/578899804/in-munich-neville-chamberlain-gets-the-best-of-hitler
My note:
and the Darkest Hour (2017) – IMDb
Britain is seriously looking into its WWII history
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more on history in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=history
at RMG’s Annual Presidents’ Seminar:
The View from the Top on Friday February 9, 2018, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
ALA Midwinter Conference, Denver Colorado Convention Center Room 505
Who, When, Where?
Library Industry ?
The Seminar is open to everyone for dialogue on topical issues and concerns — registration is not required.
Attendees are invited to ask questions of Library Industry executives entrusted with delivering platforms and solutions for global library systems, services, and content to thousands of libraries serving millions of library users worldwide.
Participating companies & executives include:
Axiell (Ann Maelerts), BiblioLabs (Mitchell Davis),
Demco Software (Ravi Singh), Easy Mile, Index Data (Sebastian Hammer), Innovative Interfaces (James Tallman), Overdrive (Steve Potash), ProQuest (Rich Belanger), SirsiDynix (Bill Davison), The Library Corporation (Annette Murphy)
Rob McGee will moderate the session with assistance from Marshall Breeding and RMG’s Geoff Payne (Melbourne Office).
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more on artificial intelligence in this ims blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence
John Richard Schrock is Professor of Biology Emeritus at Emporia State University in Kansas. He is currently in China. While China is growing its universities, the U.S. is retreating from its historic commitment to make higher education accessible to all qualified students.
the elderly administrators soon retired. There was no supply of experienced junior administrators due to a Cultural Revolution that had closed many universities for a decade. That left China’s Ministry of Education with an opportunity to completely re-build its university system nationwide.
So by 1998, the situation was different. Weak universities were closed or merged with strong institutions. China doubled its university capacity, then doubled it again in the early 2000s, and doubled it again by 2010. The cities of Xi’an and Guangzhou built “university cities” with 10 new universities each. Chongqing built their “university city” with 17 different universities totaling 300,000 faculty, students and staff. –An area equivalent to the size of Wichita! -But all just universities. This was the greatest expansion of higher education in human history.
Now, the majority of their students who passed the gao kao high school leaving exam could now attend college. But students would now pay full tuition. And that greatly improved the faculty salaries and living conditions. Classrooms and labs soon became state-of-the-art.
In 1995, China selected over a hundred universities for its “211 Project,” feeding federal money toward building modern universities.
And as of two months ago, China began its Double World-Class Project. Their Ministry selected 42 universities to move to world-class status by 2050. 36 are Category A and 6 are Category B with a focus on applied research. It also has over 400 “key disciplines” spread across these and another 50 provincial universities that will receive additional generous governmental support.
Their National Natural Science Foundation announced a dramatic increase in grant funding two years ago. With a decade of substantial cash incentives for publishing in high ranked English journals, Chinese researchers have rapidly risen in authorship of research papers in the top science journals Science and Nature, second only to the U.S. in authorships. If this trend continues, China will be the top producer of research in a few more years.
For nearly four decades, China has invested in roads, railways, and other infrastructure. But the most important of these investments was education. Roads and rails move people around. Education moves people ahead. And it has paid off in raising the productivity of China’s population beyond expectations. The affluence of their institutions and the majority of their students reflect that payback. China understands that education is not just for filling those jobs needed today.
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more on China in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=china
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/04/21/ai-china-education/
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.
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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
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/
Campus Academic Technology Teams Webinar:
Online Education Report:
PALS: Enhancing Library System Solutions
PALS is housed in Mankato, 40+ years, shared by all MnSCU institutions. smaller libraries with smaller staff benefit.
Funding: Centrally from the Chancellor Office and privately.
Ex Libris. Alma (management software) discovery software is Primo. Implementation from Sept 2017 to 2019
value-added services? A value–added service (VAS) is a popular telecommunications industry term for non-coreservices, or, in short, all services beyond standard voice calls and fax transmissions. However, it can be used in any service industry, for services available at little or no cost, to promote their primary business.
Taylor, C. (2017). Our evolving agenda. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 43(3), 274-275. doi:10.1177/0191453716680433
Neo-Kantian ethics, for its part, tends to separate issues of the good life from what it considers the central questions of justice.
The reigning neo-liberal ideology, and the order it lauds, is meant to produce a maximization of wealth, and hence of means to fulfil our goals, without asking in what ways our frenetic attempts to increase GNP run counter to some of our most important goals: solidarity, the ability to discern and pursue a truly meaningful and fulfilling life, in keeping with our endowment and inclinations. We are either induced to neglect these in favour of playing our part in increasing GNP and/or we never pause to consider questions about what kind of life is best for us and, above all, what we owe to each other in this department
One of the central issues that arises in this context is that of democracy. After 1945, and then 1989, and then again in 2011 with the Arab Spring, we had the sense that democracy was on the march in history. But not only have many of the new departures been disappointing – Russia, Turkey, Egypt – but democracy is beginning to decay in its historic heartlands, where it has been operative for more than a century.
Inequalities are growing; in fact, democracy has been sacrificed to the supposed path of more rapid growth, as defined by neo-liberalism. This has led to a sense of impotence among non-elites, which has meant a drop in electoral participation, which in turn increases the power of money in politics, which leads to an intensified sense of impotence, and so on.
Taylor, C. (1998, October). The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion. Journal of Democracy. p. 143.
Liberal democracy is a great philosophy of inclusion. It is rule of the people, by the people, and for the people, and today the “people” is taken to mean everybody, without the unspoken restrictions that formerly excluded peasants, women, or slaves. Contemporary liberal democracy offers the spectacle of the most inclusive politics in human history. Yet there is also something in the dynamic of democracy that pushes toward exclusion. This was allowed full rein in earlier democracies, as among the ancient republics, but today is a cause of great malaise.
The basic mode of legitimation of democratic states implies that they are founded on popular sovereignty. Now, for the people to be sovereign, it needs to form an entity and have a personality. This need can be expressed in the following way: The people is supposed to rule; this means that its members make up a decision-making unit, a body that takes joint decisions through a consensus, or at least a majority vote, of agents who are deemed equal and autonomous. It is not “democratic” for some citizens to be under the control of others. This might facilitate decision making, but it is not democratically legitimate.
In other words, a modern democratic state demands a “people” with a strong collective identity. Democracy obliges us to show much more solidarity and much more commitment to one another in our joint political project than was demanded by the hierarchical and authoritarian societies of yesteryear.
Thinkers in the civic humanist tradition, from Aristotle through Hannah Arendt, have noted that free societies require a higher level of commitment and participation than despotic or authoritarian ones. Citizens have to do for themselves, as it were, what the rulers would otherwise do for them. But this will happen only if these citizens feel a strong bond of identification with their political community, and hence with their fellow citizens.
successive waves of immigrants were perceived by many U.S. citizens of longer standing as a threat to democracy and the American way of life. This was the fate of the Irish beginning in the 1840s, and later in the century of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. And of course, the long-established black population, when it was given citizen rights for the first time after the Civil War, was effectively excluded from voting through much of the Old South up until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
For although conservatives often lump “postmodernists” and “multiculturalists” together with “liberals,” nothing could be less fair. In fact, the “postmodernists” themselves attack the unfortunate liberals with much greater gusto than they direct against the conser-vatives.
the two do have something in common, and so the targets partly converge. The discourse of the victim-accuser is ultimately rooted in certain philosophical sources that the postmodernists share with procedural liberalism—in particular, a commitment to negative liberty and/or a hostility to the Herder-Humboldt model of the associative bond. That is why policies framed in the language of “postmodernism” usually share certain properties with the policies of their procedural liberal enemies.
The struggle to redefine our political life in order to counteract the dangers and temptations of democratic exclusion will only intensify in the next century (My note: 21st century). There are no easy solutions, no universal formulas for success in this struggle. But at least we can try to avoid falling into the shadow or illusory ways of thinking. This means, first, that we must understand the drive to exclusion (as well as the vocation of inclusion) that democratic politics contains; and second, that we must fight free of some of the powerful philosophical illusions of our age. This essay is an attempt to push our thought a little ahead in both these directions.
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Taylor, C., & And, O. (1994). Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition.
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Taylor, C. A. (1996). Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory: Toward a Constructive Analysis of Scientific Rhetorics. Communication Theory (10503293), 6(4), 374-387.
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Taylor, C., & Jennings, I. (2005). The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment: Christianity and Morality. South African Journal Of Philosophy, 24(3), 224-239.
a passage from Paul Bénichou’s fa mous work Mo rales du grand siècle: ‘Hu man kind re presses its mis ery when ever it can; and at the same time for gets that hu mil i at ing mo ral ity by which it had con demned life, and in do ing so had made a vir tue of ne ces sity.2 ’ In this ver sion, the la tent hu man ist mo ral ity suc ceeds in es tab – lish ing it self, and in so do ing helps to throw the theo log i cal-as cetic code onto the scrap heap. On this view, it is as if the hu man ist mo ral ity had al ways been there, wait ing for the chance to over throw its op pres sive pre de ces sor.
The re la tion ship was something like the fol low ing: As long as one lived in the en – chanted world, where the weather-bells chimed, one felt one self to be in a world full of threats, vul ner a ble to black magic in all its forms. In this world God was for most be liev ers the source of a pos i tive power, which was able to de feat the pow ers of evil. God was the chief source of coun ter-, or white, magic. He was the fi nal guar an tor that good would tri umph in this world of man i fold spir its and pow ers. For those com pletely ab sorbed in this world, it was prac ti cally im pos si ble not to be – lieve in God. Not to be lieve would mean de vot ing one self to the devil. A small mi nor – ity of truly re mark able – or per haps truly des per ate – peo ple did in deed do this. But for the vast ma jor ity there was no ques tion whether one be lieved in God or not – the pos i – tive force was as real a fact as the threats it coun ter acted. The ques tion of be lief was a ques tion of trust and mem ber ship rather than one of the ac cep tance of par tic u lar doc – trines. In this sense they were closer to the con text of the gos pels.
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more on philosophy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=philosophy