Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
Cory Turner offers a primer on how private school vouchers work, why they’re controversial, and the arguments for and against them
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more on vouchers and charter schools in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=voucher
For details, go here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/behind-the-scenes-with-microsoft-vr-in-the-wild-tickets-128181001827
Behind the Scenes: Microsoft’s Principal Researcher Eyal Ofek speaking about technical and social perspectives of XR
About this Event
The XR Bootcamp Open Lecture Series continues with Microsoft’s Principal Researcher Eyal Ofek!
Agenda:
Virtual Reality (VR) & Augmented reality (AR) pose challenges and opportunities from both a technical and social perspective. We could now have digital, and not physical objects change our understanding of the world around us. It is a unique opportunity to change reality as we sense it.
The Microsoft Researchers are looking for new possibilities to extend our abilities when we are not bound by our physical limitations, enabling superhuman abilities on one hand, and leveling the playfield for people with physical limitations.
Dr. Ofek will describe efforts to design VR & AR applications that will adjust according to the user’s uncontrolled environment, enabling a continuous use during work and leisure, over the large variance of environments. He will also review efforts to the extent the rendering to new capabilities such as haptic rendering.
His lecture will be followed by a Q&A session where you can ask all your questions about the topic.
Lead Instructors:
Eyal Ofek is a principal researcher at the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, WA. His research interests include Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR), Haptics, interactive projection mapping, and computer vision for human-computer interaction. He is also the Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Virtual Reality, for the area of Haptics and an Assoc. Editor of IEEE Computer Graphics and Application (CG&A).
Prior to joining Microsoft Research, he obtained his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has founded a couple of companies in computer graphics, including a successful drawing and photo editing application and developing the world’s first time-of-flight video cameras which was a basis for the HoloLens depth camera.
This event is part of the Global XR Bootcamp event:
The Global XR Bootcamp 2020 will be the biggest community-driven, FREE, online Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality event in the world! Join us on YouTube or AltspaceVR for a 24 hour live stream with over 50 high quality talks, panels and sessions. Meet your fellow XR enthousiasts in our Community Zone, and win amazing prizes – from vouchers to XR hardware.
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more on XR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=xr
https://www.socialeurope.eu/a-cautionary-tale-to-be-had-from-swedish-school-reforms
One of the issues dividing the two main parliamentary blocs is whether there should be a cap on profit margins for publicly funded private schools.
The Swedish school system has received considerable international attention in recent years due to alarming test scores in the OECD’s international PISA study
Segregation is one of the most serious social problems facing Sweden and many other wealthy nations.
A recent report (the English title would be “A Nation Divided – School Choice and Segregation in Sweden”) that I have co-authored for the Stockholm based think tank Arena Idé shows that well-educated and Swedish-born families increasingly opt out of schools where the children have parents with lower educational attainments and an immigrant background. We also show that this “white flight” in Swedish municipalities throughout the country is increased by school choice and other reforms introduced in the early 1990s, whereby publicly financed private schools are allowed to compete with municipal schools for school vouchers allotted to each individual student.
The results in our study should be viewed in light of two recent reports: one from the OECDand another from UNICEF, both highlighting the inequality in the Swedish school system.
The results make it painfully clear that the Swedish school system effectively works against the very idea that schools should level the playing field for students from all backgrounds and give every child equal opportunity. Even after the rise of right-wing populism in Sweden, our established political parties have proven themselves unable, or unwilling, to rein in the highly unregulated Swedish school market.
Sweden: Market-based Education Produces Poor Results, Segregation https://t.co/YcAYe4sDe4
— Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) December 7, 2018
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more on educational systems
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=educational+system
The way we learn is continuously evolving. In the coming years we should expect to see organizations of all kinds start experimenting with the increasing number of badge platforms out there. While Mozilla Open Badges seems to be leading the way in the development of badging, other networks including Badge Alliance, Credly and Digital Me are growing their networks as they launch their own competing platforms. Students and professionals use social networks and other digital platforms daily, and with that comes a different way to showcase professional skills.
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more on digital badges in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=badges
Cryptocurrency scheme is part of wider UN effort to revolutionise aid with blockchain technology, increasing financial transparency
The UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, has launched a futuristic pilot project to utilise the cryptocurrency Ethereum to raise money for Syrian children.
the “blockchain” technology associated with the cryptocurrency – the world’s second largest after the controversial Bitcoin – to revolutionise not only how aid organisations raise money but also to increase transparency in their financial transactions.
Blockchain – which emerged as one of the underpinnings of Bitcoin – is a shared record of transactions maintained by a network of computers. It has become a key technology because of its ability to record and keep track of assets or transactions with no need for middlemen.
With a valuation of some $88bn (£62bn), Ethereum – which launched in 2015 – has an equivalent market value to Starbucks, according to Forbes magazine
The World Food Programme (WFP) has used Ethereum to deliver $1.4m in food vouchers, via the use of iris recognition scanners in camp supermarkets, to around 10,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan,
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more on cryptocurrency in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cryptocurrency
Roger Riddell Nov. 8, 2017 https://www.educationdive.com/news/altschool-shift-raises-concerns-of-profits-placed-over-educational-promise/510293/
Education historian Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, has been among the chief critics of these increasingly close ties, especially as it pertains to charter schools and voucher programs, decrying efforts to “turn us from citizens into consumers.” Public schools, she has said, should be focused around “building a sense of community, having a sense of democracy at the local level, having people from different backgrounds coming together to solve problems and learn how to be citizens.”
But AltSchool’s intentions with its lab schools and approach to developing its platform have seemed noble enough, with the company partnering with schools of varying sizes to learn how to best scale up successful approaches to personalized learning for traditional public schools. Its lab schools have been noted for eschewing traditional grade level structures and curriculum, attracting funding from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.
Earlier this year, we visited one of the company’s partner schools — Berthold Academy, a Montessori in Reston, VA — to find out more about what AltSchool was looking to model and how its partnerships worked, finding a promising approach in action.
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more on charter schools in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=charter