Group items tagged

"In a previous post, I commented on the Massive Teaching course at Coursera and that something odd was happening. Either Coursera deleted the prof from the course or the prof was running some type of experiment. It now appears to be primarily the latter. (...) 3. Criticism ranging from a poorly designed course to poor ethics has been directed to Paul-Olivier Dehaye. Most of it is unfair. There have been some calls for U of Zurich to discipline the prof. Like others, I've criticized his deception research and his silence since the course was shut down. Several days before the media coverage, Dehaye provided the following comments on his experiment: "MOOCs can be used to enhance privacy, or really destroy it," Dehaye wrote. "I want to fight scientifically for the idea, yet teach, and I have signed contracts, which no one asks me about…. I am in a bind. Who do I tell about my project? My students? But this idea of the #FacebookExperiment is in itself dangerous, very dangerous. People react to it and express more emotions, which can be further mined." The goal of his experiment, Dehaye wrote, was to "confuse everyone, including the university, [C]oursera, the Twitter world, as many journalists as I can, and the course participants. The goal being to attract publicity…. I want to show how [C]oursera tracks you." There it is. His intent was to draw attention to Coursera policies and practices around data. Congrats, Paul-Olivier. Mission accomplished. He is doing exactly what academics should do: perturb people to states of awareness. Hundreds, likely thousands, of faculty have taught MOOCs, often having to toe the line of terms and conditions set by an organization that doesn't share the ideals, community, and egalitarianism that define universities (you can include me in that list). The MOOC Mystery was about an academic doing what we expect and need academics to do. Unfortunately it was poorly executed and not properly communicated so th

Alternative URL: http://todoele.org/todoele20/content/congrats-paul-olivier-dehaye-massiveteaching

"Dr. Alice Christie's "Virtual Field Trips" Resource Guide     Virtual field trips (VFTs) are alternatives to more costly real-world field trips. In addition to being inexpensive, they are engaging to students becasue they enable students to make connections between themselves and the wide-ranging environments they can explore virtually. They also offer authentic, inquiry-based learning experiences to students.     This Resource Guide provides links to numerous: profesionally-created VFTs tools to create VFTs teacher-created VFTs other resources helpful to teachers wishing to use VFTs in their classrooms"

"Babelfish 101 (also appliable to the Google translator) Babelfish is not a little polyglot genius lurking in your computer or in cyberspace Babelfish is A computer program made of lists of words and phrases in different languages complex, but not all-covering, rules applied to these lists in order to produce translations Babelfish will not give you a publishable or even editable version of your text in another language analyse and render correctly complex sentence structures always choose the meaning you had it mind if two or more words have the same spelling confuse two words due to approximate memory Babelfish will produce apparent gibberish give you a rough idea of what someone else's original text is about Therefore, when dealing with Babelfish, you must use commonsense Don't use Babelfish to produce a translation into another language, especially if you don't know that language If you know others will use Babelfish to read you, use simple sentence structure and avoid terms that can have several meanings If you read something absurd or outrageous in a Babelfish translation, don't immediately attribute the absurdity or outrage to the author. Try to guess from the context what the author might have meant Compare what the author might have meant with what you know of Babelfish's limitations, to see if these limitations are the likely cause of the apparent absurdity or outrage be wary of commonsense The author may indeed have expressed something that would baffle you even if you both used the same language: because your cultural references are different, because s/he is using irony because (make your own list) ask when in doubt ;-)" Avevo scritto questo post su un blog del Digital Divide Network (DDN) che non c'è più. Questa è la copia salvata sull'Internet Archive il 13 agosto 2007

"if the world's governments continue to insist that wiretapping capacity must be built into every computer; if the state of California continues to insist that cell phones have kill switches allowing remote instructions to be executed on your phone that you can't countermand or even know about; if the entertainment industry continues to insist that the general-purpose computer must be neutered so you can't use it to watch TV the wrong way; if the World Wide Web Consortium continues to infect the core standards of the web itself to allow remote control over your computer against your wishes-then we are in deep, deep trouble. The Internet isn't just the world's most perfect video-on-demand service. It's not simply a better way to get pornography. It's not merely a tool for planning terrorist attacks. Those are only use cases for the net; what the net is, is the nervous system of the 21st century. It's time we started acting like it."

"At my place of employment Diigo is blocked through our server under the social network category. I have administrator rights and can override the block for a set time period, eg 30 minutes. Diigo opens and I am able to surf from my bookmarks satisfactorily. However, there is no way I can add new bookmarks to my Diigo account, using a "Post To Diigo" bookmark in Internet Explorer, or the "Add+" button at the top of "My Items" in "my library" view. Somewhere, somehow our server is preventing this to happen. Needless to say I am disappointed. The work around is to email my new urls to my home address and then ad them to Diigo once I return home."

Opening Remarks WIPO DIP Com 18 June 2013 By: Maryanne Diamond on behalf of the WBU [World Blind Union] "...I urge you to play your part in making a difference in the lives of these millions of people, by agreeing a treaty that is simple, usable and meaningful. We cannot accept a treaty which has no substance, nor, can we accept a treaty full of bureaucratic and cumbersome requirements. We cannot accept a trophy treaty that will not work in practice. When considering your proposals, changes or amendments to the text, please stop and think about what that change will make on the ground to the people this treaty is about. You have received copies of our positions on the key issues in the current text of concern to us. * Commercial availability in articles D and E will ensure the treaty fails * The treaty must allow for distribution to individuals * The treaty must not allow TPMs to be a block to access to a book by blind people Please ask us if you're not sure what the impact of text you are considering will be on the ground. We are here for the entire conference. ..."

by Shara Tibken - January 30, 2014 11:10 AM PST "Things are about to get tougher for Apple. Google late Wednesday made an unexpected announcement that it's selling Motorola Mobility to Chinese PC giant Lenovo for $2.91 billion, or less than a quarter of what it paid for the handset vendor just a couple of years ago. During the years Google owned it, Motorola lost money and market share, and the relationship caused tension between Google and the other Android vendors, particularly Samsung. It also led those other phone makers to develop their own software and services, rather than push those from Google. That amplified Android's fragmentation in the market. Overall, Google's purchase of Motorola turned out much better for iPhone maker Apple than for Google. That's now going to change. Google, sans Motorola, can go back to focusing on what it does best -- making a really great operating system and apps. It can mend its relationship with Android leader Samsung and the other vendors. And it can concentrate on unifying and streamlining the Android experience, rather than worry about bolstering its own hardware operations. All of those factors mean that Apple may not be able to win over customers as easily as it has in the past. Related stories: Google sells Motorola unit to Lenovo for $2.9B With Motorola out, can Samsung, Google be BFFs again? Apple's higher standard: How 51M iPhones is somehow disappointing Apple's iPhone 5C misses the low-cost mark By ditching Motorola, Google frees Android from distractions Behind Samsung's push to rule the world"

"Our mission is to promote and provide equal access to communication and learning through described and captioned educational media. The ultimate goal of the DCMP is for accessible media to be an integral tool in the teaching and learning process for all stakeholders in the educational community, including students, educators and other school personnel, parents, service providers, businesses, and agencies. The DCMP supports the U.S. Department of Education Strategic Plan for 2014-2018 by committing to the following goals: Ensuring that students (early learning through grade 12) who are blind, visually impaired, deaf, hard of hearing, or deaf-blind have the opportunity to achieve the standards of academic excellence. Advocating for equal access to educational media as well as the establishment and maintenance of quality standards for captioning and description by service providers. Providing a collection of free-loan described and captioned educational media. Furnishing information and research about accessible media. Acting as a gateway to Internet resources related to accessibility. Adapting and developing new media and technologies that assist students in obtaining and using available information."

"Why a supposed German breakthrough in e-book DRM is just as dumb as the old e-book DRM By Cory Doctorow | Jul 06, 2013 " > The idea that copyright owners might convince a judge, or, worse, a > jury that because they found a copy of an e-book on the Pirate Bay > originally sold to me they can then hold me responsible or civilly > liable is almost certainly wrong, as a matter of law. At the very > least, it's a long shot and a stupid legal bet. After all, it's not > illegal to lose your computer. It's not illegal to have it stolen > or hacked. It's not illegal to throw away your computer or your > hard drive. In many places, it's not illegal to give away your > e-books, or to loan them. In some places, it's not illegal to sell > your e-books. > > So at best, this new "breakthrough" DRM scheme will be ineffective. > But worse, what makes anyone think this kind of implicit fear of > reprisal embedded within one's digital library is acceptable, or, > for that matter, preferable to old-school DRM?

"The Ultimate Section 508 Guide for Students In 1973, the United States government passed a sweeping piece of legislation known as the United States Workforce Rehabilitation Act. Intended to aid those with disabilities, this legislation provides funding for ...vocational rehabilitation, supported employment, independent living, and client assistance (and) authorizes a variety of training and service discretionary grants administered by the Rehabilitation Services Administration. As technology advanced, and both the workplace and society as a whole underwent significant changes, the need of those with disabilities also evolved. In order to foster equal access to the Internet and related technologies for all, the government added Section 508 to the Workforce Rehabilitation Act in 1998. What is Section 508? As amended by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (P.L. 105-220), Section 508 ...requires federal agencies to develop, procure, maintain and use electronic and information technology (EIT) that is accessible to people with disabilities - regardless of whether or not they work for the federal government. In short, federal law requires government agencies to create and use electronic devices, and content developed to be used with them (e.g., websites, media files, etc.), that people with disabilities can readily access. "

Questa guida è scritta in lingua molto semplice e illustrata da video, mentre la sezione 508 dell'ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act, un po' come la legge Stanca in Italia) in legalese originale è più difficile da capire.

"...Our vision is to encourage the growth of a more open set of intellectual communities than those spawned by the traditional university system. In particular, we focus on the ideal of introducing inventive methods of interaction to allow these communities to form in new ways. Rather than segregating users based on which university they happen to attend (or indeed, whether they happen to attend a university at all) or even the large subject areas encompassed by university classes, the system allows users to interact with one another in focused ways based on the specific ideas they are addressing at the time: users can gather around the specific details of a recently passed piece of legislation or the implications of a particular article, rather than around larger subject blocks. H2O encourages users to share the content they create through these interactions by making archives of previous materials easily available and browsable and by enabling the sharing of content among different intellectual communities. ..."

"This site helps you navigate in e-Learning sources and MOOCs. We try to systematize information about MOOC education. You can use this service to find MOOCs, online courses, share comments and reviews. Our mission is to help people to build a personal education path using free or cheap online courses as alternative to traditional higher education. We help to find free alternatives to expensive college/university courses."

Forse la IUL si potrebbe iscrivere come fornitrice di corsi / MOOC?

"Your payment to Ning was declined - First Notice : My point is it will always decline * Posted by Badan Barman on August 23, 2010 at 1:02am in Plans and Pricing * View Discussions Just one minute before, I received this message. Its frustrating. If not hundred, I request several time to Ning to come forward to make the payment successfully. I open help ticket, I post in forum, (CHARGE MY VISA CARD FOR THE IMMEDIATE PAYMENT, I Need Personal Assistant from Ning to Make the Payment Successfully) I personally wrote to Ning employee through email (Eric Suesz), i post as scrap. Still why you are charging my card after 23 hours of validity. You will absolutely get nothing after 23 hours from my card. Hey Ning can you please let me know exactly at what time of tomorrow you will again charge my card.So that I can enter the details of a fresh card just before you charge the card for payment?"

Google Faces searching for faces on Google Maps,  The way we perceive our environment is a complex procedure. By the help of our vision we are able to recognize friends within a huge crowd, approximate the speed of an oncoming car or simply admire a painting. One of human's most characteristic features is our desire to detect patterns. We use this ability to penetrate into the detailed secrets of nature. However we also tend to use this ability to enrich our imagination. Hence we recognize meaningful shapes in clouds or detect a great bear upon astrological observations. Objective investigations and subjective imagination collide to one inseparable process. The tendency to detect meaning in vague visual stimuli is a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia, and captures the core interest of this project.  video tutorial: http://vimeo.com/66055499#

What encourages students to do well in school? Often, it comes down to grades. Many students will work harder in order to earn a higher grade. Colleges want to see good grades. Parents want to see good grades. Grades are good, right? Of course they are, but the grades should not be the only goal. Learning for the sake of it should be a goal, including what they learned, how long they remembered it, and how they applied it to new situations.

"Chapter 5 There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed. p. 55 (p. 46 in Simon & Schuster 2004)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yeGMaT3PvI for same scene in the movie

"ELAN is a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources. With ELAN a user can add an unlimited number of annotations to audio and/or video streams. An annotation can be a sentence, word or gloss, a comment, translation or a description of any feature observed in the media. Annotations can be created on multiple layers, called tiers. Tiers can be hierarchically interconnected. An annotation can either be time-aligned to the media or it can refer to other existing annotations. The textual content of annotations is always in Unicode and the transcription is stored in an XML format. ELAN provides several different views on the annotations, each view is connected and synchronized to the media playhead. Up to 4 video files can be associated with an annotation document. Each video can be integrated in the main document window or displayed in its own resizable window. ELAN delegates media playback to an existing media framework, like Windows Media Player, QuickTime or JMF (Java Media Framework). As a result a wide variety of audio and video formats is supported and high performance media playback can be achieved. ELAN is written in the Java programming language and the sources are available for non-commercial use. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Main other features navigate through the media with different step sizes easy navigation through existing annotations waveform visualization of .wav files support for template documents input methods for a variety of script systems multi-tier regular expression search, within a single document or in a selection of annotation documents support for user definable Controlled Vocabularies import and export of Shoebox/Toolbox, CHAT, Transcriber (import only), Praat and csv/tab-delimited text files export to interlinear text, html, smil and subtitles text printing of the annotations multiple undo/redo Download ELAN"

Il software serve ad annotare video e audio: sembra piuttosto complesso ma è prodotto e offerto dal progetto The Language Archive dell'Istituto Max Plank dei Paesi Bassi, perciò sembra abbastanza sicuro. Ho installato la versione per Mac: poi provo e riporto

January 19, 2016 "Starting today, when you enroll in certain courses, you'll be asked to pay a fee (or apply for Coursera's financial aid program) if you'd like to submit required graded assignments and earn a Course Certificate. You can also choose to explore the course for free, in which case you'll have full access to videos, discussions, and practice assignments, and view-only access to graded assignments. You'll see the options for each individual course when you click "enroll" on the course information page; courses that aren't part of this change will continue to show the options to enroll in the course either with or without a Certificate. Most courses that are part of Specializations will begin offering this new experience this week, and certain other courses will follow later this year."

Ironia: quando ho fatto questo segnalibro, il solo tag raccomandato (dal blog Coursera) che è apparso era "mooc"...

"Here's the problem: web video is beginning to rival television, but there isn't a good open resource for subtitling. Here's our mission: we're trying to make captioning, subtitling, and translating video publicly accessible in a way that's free and open, just like the Web. Our approach: Make a simple and ubiquitous way to request, create, and translate subtitles for any video Work with others to define open protocols so that whenever subtitles for a video exist, any website or video player will be able to retrieve them Create a community space for people who subtitle video, to encourage contributions and facilitate collaboration" Posted April 13, 2010 by amarasubs.

Se avessi lasciato l'intitolato basato sul tag "title", questo segnalibro sarebbe intitolato: "Subtitles and Captions for Every Video on the Web | Amara - Buy captions, video translations, transcriptions, and crowd subtitling". - con la parte prima del | il titolo del primo post del 13 aprile 2010 del blog di Amara (allora Universal Subtitles": "Sottotitoli tradotti e per sordi per ogni video online" - e con la seconda parte dopo l'|, che dà il titolo attuale del blogo, cioè "Amara - Compra sottotitoli, traduzioni di video, trascrizioni e sottotitolazione di massa" Quite a change...

I am currently investigating file formats for long-term preservation. Obviously they must be free of proprietary ownership and publicly accessible and avoid vendor-locking - even if the vendor is a non-profit organization. What I wonder: which conditions must a video file format fulfill to permit captioning / subtitling? Are there public and open standards of formats for captioning / subtitling? Where do I find them? Can they be enriched with metadata about the author of the subtitles?

"K-8 Intro to Computer Science is a free course that aims to demystify computer science and show K-8 students that it's fun, collaborative, and creative. The course is designed to motivate students and educators to continue learning computer science to improve real world relationships, connections, and life. Educators will foster an environment of communal learning that emphasizes risk-taking. This course will teach students about computer science, computational thinking, and programming. It will also teach that success does not come on the first try, just like the world's most difficult problems aren't solved on the first try. Challenge is good when it is supported by plans and tools that lead to success. This course will help students persevere in solving problems."