Group items tagged

"As a follow up to my post, Whatever Happened to iBooks????, I thought a lot about how iBooks and the Camera may be two of the most powerful apps on the iPad, and yet the most under appreciated. In many ways, they are essentially "invisible apps.""

"KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice."

"A story I like to tell to get teachers thinking about managing their personal wellness is one I've come to call "My Apple Basket". Every day we carry an invisible apple basket around with us. In it we carry all our "apples", those positive energies we have collected through the things we do for ourselves each day to contribute to our personal wellness. There's the apple for the exercise session I did this morning, the good night's sleep, the healthy breakfast, the time spent in reflection, the one for time spent with family, friends and significant others. You get the idea. If we do things wisely our basket should be getting filled each day."

"Comic book writers are indebted to scientists, and they demonstrate their gratitude by giving these real life mega-minds special places in the pantheon of superhero mythologies. Bruce Banner, who goes Hulk when angered, developed the Gamma Bomb for the US government. Susan Storm, also known as the Invisible Woman, holds four doctorates in biochemistry and still finds time to save the world. Even the X-Men's Beast is a much-lauded biochemist. Close study of comic book universes and the science concepts upon which they are founded can be enlightening for students and teachers alike. Boys and girls are riveted by the unique powers and compelling personalities and histories of superheroes."

""Technology should be like oxygen, "ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible." Chris Lehmann "

" The challenge for educators, especially directors of educational technology, is not to limit how our teachers teach, but to focus on the foundational skills and provide a clear and concrete formula for how different technological devices and applications will enhance these skills in order to give a learner the ability to create a product that will change the world."

"The Pages app is the Mac word processor similar to Microsoft Word on the Windows side of things, and by default any Pages document is saved as a Pages format file with with a ".pages" file extension. Typically that's invisible to Mac users, but if you send a Pages file to someone on a Windows computer, the .pages extension is visible and the file format is unreadable by default by most Windows apps and by Microsoft Office. At first glance that may seem like Windows can't use the file, but that's not the case."

"The new information landscape is a product of algorithmic data collection used by social media platforms, like Facebook and YouTube, news sites, and even our cellphones. Companies use invisible computer codes to track users' interactions in order to personalize their web experiences and influence their buying and viewing behavior, leading to concerns about privacy, accuracy of information, the preservation of shared norms, and authenticity. Data is collected everywhere. Even schools, from elementary schools to higher education institutions, collect data on students through learning management systems (LMS), thrusting schools directly into debates that consider how these companies, like Canvas, protect or use data. While the ethics and impact of algorithmic-driven content on platforms like Facebook or an LMS are murky and just emerging, the Project Information Literacy study raises immediate flags."

"Last week, Mona Lisa smiled. A big, wide smile, followed by what appeared to be a laugh and the silent mouthing of words that could only be an answer to the mystery that had beguiled her viewers for centuries. A great many people were unnerved. Ars Technica Join Ars Technica and Get Our Best Tech Stories DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX. SIGN ME UP Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy Mona's "living portrait," along with likenesses of Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dali, and others, demonstrated the latest technology in deepfakes-seemingly realistic video or audio generated using machine learning. Developed by researchers at Samsung's AI lab in Moscow, the portraits display a new method to create credible videos from a single image. With just a few photographs of real faces, the results improve dramatically, producing what the authors describe as "photorealistic talking heads." The researchers (creepily) call the result "puppeteering," a reference to how invisible strings seem to manipulate the targeted face. And yes, it could, in theory, be used to animate your Facebook profile photo. But don't freak out about having strings maliciously pulling your visage anytime soon. "Nothing suggests to me that you'll just turnkey use this for generating deepfakes at home. Not in the short-term, medium-term, or even the long-term," says Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative. The reasons have to do with the high costs and technical know-how of creating quality fakes-barriers that aren't going away anytime soon."

"The Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition Model offers a method of seeing how computer technology might impact teaching and learning. It also shows a progression that adopters of educational technology often follow as they progress through teaching and learning with technology. While one might argue over whether an activity can be defined as one level or another, the important concept to grasp here is the level of student engagement. One might well measure progression along these levels by looking at who is asking the important questions. As one moves along the continuum, computer technology becomes more important in the classroom but at the same time becomes more invisibly woven into the demands of good teaching and learning."

Google's "Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition" model of tech in ed