Group items tagged

"Sleepless night and eyeball fatigue. Cyberbullying and profound device-separation anxiety. Research identifies harmful side effects of too much tech on teens with alarming regularity. But a new report from the Pew Research Center suggests parents are just as compromised by our portable screens. In "How Teens and Parents Navigate Screen Time and Device Distractions," researchers not only compiled data on the behavior of tech-addled kids (they're on their phones from the moment they wake up!) or the concerns of hand-wringing parents (what do we do about the fact they're on their phones from the moment they wake up!), but on the behavior of parents, too."

"A new report is shedding light on the state of children's health in Canada and found that more and more kids are dealing with mental health concerns. The study, which was released by Children First Canada and the O'Brien Institute for Public Health, examined various health-related issues including mortality rates, poverty and physical health by using data from various sources such as Statistics Canada, The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and Health Canada."

"The Maker Movement continues to grow, and makerspaces have hit a point where they are clearly no longer just a passing fad. Academic universities are conducting research and gathering data on makerspaces' impact on learning, and dozens of books have already been published. More and more makerspaces are being created in schools, some in separate labs and some in corners of classrooms. And some makerspaces, of course, are in the library. In these last four years of speaking at conferences, chatting on Twitter and talking to colleagues, I've fielded a lot of questions from two camps. One camp is made up of hesitant librarians. They're not really sure that a makerspace belongs in the library. They're afraid of it taking over their whole program and replacing the books. Their school already has a STEM lab, so why do they need a makerspace in their library too? The other camp is made up of librarians who are ready and eager to start a makerspace, but who are meeting resistance from their administration. We already have an art studio; why do we need a makerspace in the library too? Aren't those kids just playing and messing around with LEGO® bricks? Shouldn't the library be a quiet, clean, studious environment? How would a space like this tie in with curriculum, improve test scores or create better experiences for our students? This article looks to address some of these concerns and to explain why makerspaces do belong in libraries."

"Finding new and human ways to connect and empower the next generation to play is one of the ways that Ikea says it hopes to change the world, and bringing extra life to cardboard that would otherwise end up in the recycling bins is part of that push. It's an idea that came about quickly, and was revealed at a panel at Cannes today (20 June). Wunderman, Kantar Consulting and Mini Mad Things decided to put the pedal to the metal and workshop an idea in just five weeks. The catch? The idea had to be 'prototypeable' as the final would be presented on stage at Cannes Lions, alongside Ikea's chief marketing officer. Ultimately, the brief was to come up with an idea that shows how Ikea inspires and facilitates child's play, all while helping to improve home life for parents, whole families and even communities. After evaluating 17 years-worth of online conversation with parents and analyzing 15m rows of dialogue data, the team realized that behavior and development is the most talked about topic within childcare, second only to pregnancy. Pressing further in the research, the team learned that 50% of parents surveyed struggle to find ideas to encourage creative play amongst their children. Ikea, which has been one of the largest distributors of cardboard packaging, and team were able to flip their script so the brand could see the world through a child's eyes and create an interactive mobile app that brings cardboard waste to life. By following simple instructions any piece of cardboard can be transformed into something new. The Ikea Toybox app gives cardboard waste a new lease on life and, as play doesn't require a price tag, families will see big results with small means."

"In the last few years, machine learning applications have quietly entered every aspect of life: social media to speech recognition, radiology to retail, warfare to writing articles, coding to customer service, robotics to route optimization. During the 40 year information age, we told computers what to do. With advances in artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, and faster processing chips we can feed computers giant data sets and they can (in narrow slivers) draw some inferences on their own. As we reported in Ask About AI, the rise of code that learns marks the beginning of a new era of augmented intelligence. It's a great opportunity for us to expand access to a great education and for young people to make a big contribution. Given the importance of relationships in human development, AI will augment rather than replace the work of educators in many ways. We'll all have to get better at collaborating with teams that include smart machines. In other professions, augmentation will lead to automation with the potential for significant dislocation. Amazon's workforce, for example, is about 20% robots."

"The Best Technology Youtube Channels selected from thousands of Technology channels on youtube and ranked based on youtube channel subscribers and popularity. Data will be refreshed once a week. These Youtube Channels are ranked based on following criteria Total youtube channels subscribers, video views, and video uploads Quality and consistency of videos Youtube search ranking Feedspot editorial team' objective and subjective review"

"Today's workforce, as nearly everyone knows, is increasingly global. And with that global nature comes fierce competition-students will need an arsenal of workforce skills in order to stand out from their peers. According to a recent McGraw-Hill Education survey, just 40 percent of college seniors said they felt their college experience was helpful in preparing for a career. Alarmingly, that percentage plummeted to 19 percent for women answering the same question. That same survey also found that students in STEM majors were the most likely out of any group to report that they are optimistic about their career prospects (73 percent). According to data from the nonprofit Institute for the Future, there are 6 drivers of change in today's workforce:"

"The groundwork for machine learning was laid down in the middle of last century. But increasingly powerful computers - harnessed to algorithms refined over the past decade - are driving an explosion of applications in everything from medical physics to materials, as Marric Stephens discovers When your bank calls to ask about a suspiciously large purchase made on your credit card at a strange time, it's unlikely that a kindly member of staff has personally been combing through your account. Instead, it's more likely that a machine has learned what sort of behaviours to associate with criminal activity - and that it's spotted something unexpected on your statement. Silently and efficiently, the bank's computer has been using algorithms to watch over your account for signs of theft. Monitoring credit cards in this way is an example of "machine learning" - the process by which a computer system, trained on a given set of examples, develops the ability to perform a task flexibly and autonomously. As a subset of the more general field of artificial intelligence (AI), machine-learning techniques can be applied wherever there are large and complex data sets that can be mined for associations between inputs and outputs. In the case of your bank, the algorithm will have analysed a vast pool of both legitimate and illegitimate transactions to produce an output ("suspected fraud") from a given input ("high-value order placed at 3 a.m."). But machine learning isn't just used in finance. It's being applied in many other fields too, from healthcare and transport to the criminal-justice system. Indeed, Ge Wang - a biomedical engineer from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US who is one of those pioneering its use in medical imaging - believes that when it comes to machine learning, we're on the cusp of a revolution."

"Computational thinking is the set of skills you need to be able to get computers to do useful things. It includes logical thinking, planning ahead, working with data, being able to give precise instructions and make predictions. There are lots of activities that can help young children aged 4-7 to develop these skills. Computational thinking skills can be developed through coding but there are lots of other activities that help too. A lot of them are screenless which helps to develop modern skills while also developing other important skills including motor skills and communication. Some of the ideas here are classic kids games and activities that you might have tried anyway, they just happen to be great for computational thinking skills."

"Business adoption of artificial intelligence is accelerating, fueled by an explosion of data, the rapid growth in cloud computing and the emergence of advanced algorithms.1 In a survey of IT decision-makers that my company, CCS Insight, conducted in July 2017, 58 percent of respondents said they are using, testing or researching the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their organizations.  Respondents also estimated that as much as 30 percent of their business applications would be enhanced with machine learning within the next 24 months - a bullish view, considering the technology's well-documented problems with trust, cost and the lack of skills needed to train machine learning systems."

"Dr. Alison Head and her Project Information Literacy (PIL) research team recently released the findings of a new national study on college students and how they consume and interact with a vast and deeply polarized news ecosystem. The News Study findings are the result of an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 diverse colleges and universities. The research also included computational analysis of Twitter data associated with respondents, as well as a Twitter panel of 135,891 college-age people. In the study's press release, Dr. Head shared: News is fast, social, and visual and typically delivered to students in posts, alerts, tweets, and conversations that stream at them throughout the day. And young news consumers are left to assemble and interpret what news means, while many take this evaluative step, others do not. So what? The News Study's Executive Summary offers Five Research Takeaways as well as Six Recommendations."

"Over the years, Google has left its humble origins behind to become one of the largest companies in the world, offering a wide range of devices and services. To keep those services free, Google records data about you and uses it to display targeted advertising-their main source of revenue. As the debate around online privacy ramps up, many people are looking for an alternative. Fortunately, DuckDuckGo might be the privacy-focused search engine you've been looking for."

"What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? As the director of 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life."

"The Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies (F-10) comprises two related strands: Digital Technologies knowledge and understanding - the information system components of data, and digital systems (hardware, software and networks) Digital Technologies processes and production skills - using digital systems to create ideas and information, and to define, design and implement digital solutions, and evaluate these solutions and existing information systems against specified criteria."

Every year, Time magazine gets swamped with pitches from thousands of companies, all convinced their product deserves to be included in Time's "25 Best Inventions" list. This past December, the magazine reserved its cover for a Pixar-like, 11-inch armless robot named Jibo. Jibo - a so-called "social robot" - is just the latest example of a clear phenomenon: A new generation of exponentially more intelligent and capable robots is on the way. In fact, they're already everywhere we look: over our heads, in our cars and operating rooms, next to us on the assembly lines, in our military, and on the last mile. And the prospect of exponentially more robots, crunching exponentially more data, necessitates not just a lot more computing power but also an entirely new product architecture."

"Truth Decay - the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in political and civil discourse - appears to result, in part, from an increasingly complex information ecosystem. Technology, in particular, offers continual access to information of varying quality and credibility, information that can blur the line between fact-based evidence and opinion. Not everyone is equipped with the skills necessary to navigate such uncertain terrain. The purpose of this report is to describe the field of media literacy (ML) education and the ways in which ML education can counter Truth Decay by changing how participants consume, create, and share information. One limitation of this research base arises from the variety of ways that literature defines and measures ML outcomes; while a multiplicity of viewpoints can be beneficial, it also presents challenges in terms of aggregating findings across studies. Despite this, the authors describe existing evidence that ML could be a useful tool for combating Truth Decay. They also provide an inventory of ML offerings available to the public. Finally, the authors make suggestions for moving forward, with the specific recommendation that professionals in ML and related fields strengthen their communication and collaboration, considering where there are opportunities for a common approach to researching ML. The authors recommend that policymakers and practitioners increase participation from diverse constituencies in scaling ML efforts"

"Every classroom is different-and that's good because every student and teacher is, too. But are there any common elements that most/all classrooms should share? and more specifically, in a modern classroom? Screens and data and artifical intelligence and robots and Skype and holograms? Do these belong in every classroom? What ideas, practices, strategies, patterns, and technology belong in every classroom? Can we identify the kinds of 'things' that every modern, high-performing classroom should have? In the post linked to above, we explored some of these ideas in the form of 'characteristics.' And there were more-32, in fact. This post is a bit simpler and briefer. Some of the items are better suited to specific grade levels, content areas, teaching styles-even certain times of year. Still, most can remarkably improve the learning of students and the overall climate of your classroom. So then, that's the premise: What sorts of things belong in every modern classroom?"

"Tweetroot is an interesting app that is free today and only for a limited period of time. Tweetroot allows you to easily generate word clouds from tweets. Source data of your word clouds can be based on Tweets  a particular user shares, a hashtag, or mentions. For instance, creating a word cloud from the hashtag #edtech will enable you  to visualize the prominent words or topics being shared through this hashtag. You can also use the same strategy to analyze, for instance, your Twitter timeline and learn more about the things you have tweeted the most through a word cloud based on your 1000 most recent tweets. To use Tweetroot, you will obviously need to allow the app access to your Twitter account."

"The earth is a big place to keep clean. With Litterati - an app for users to identify, collect and geotag the world's litter - TED Resident Jeff Kirschner has created a community that's crowdsource-cleaning the planet. After tracking trash in more than 100 countries, Kirschner hopes to use the data he's collected to work with brands and organizations to stop litter before it reaches the ground."