EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"Any visual communication can be improved with an understanding of design principles that help ensure viewers correctly perceive and interpret the elements of a graphic. To be effective, an infographic should accurately communicate its message, attract attention with its aesthetic appeal, and be visually efficient so it is easy to scan and perceive. Let's look at some ways to accomplish this in infographic design."

"Companies are in constant pursuit of building simple and usable products. More features, new technologies, and advanced capabilities but still in a lightweight and simple to use format. More often than not, making it simple is the hardest thing there can be."

"In the United States, about half the people who start college don't finish, leaving 37 million Americans with some college credits but no degree. That's more than 20 percent of the working-age population. In an economy that increasingly demands workers with knowledge and skills, it is imperative that more opportunities are provided for individuals to obtain a university degree. By serving as the key link between universities and employers, InStride will facilitate partnerships that will positively impact the lives of thousands of people who will benefit from a high-quality education."

"a quiet movement is brewing in U.S. high schools to reboot curriculums with the objective of better preparing students for a different future of work. The same is happening at a handful of universities - in this case roiling the traditional major model."

"Nelson says the new version of the system lets professors quickly divide a large class into groups of up to 12 students. Those break-out groups of students can then participate in a small-group discussion while each student fills out a "structured worksheet" that can be graded later by a TA following a rubric to make sure each student was following along and participating. During the live class, the professor can peek into any of the breakout sessions, either by appearing as one of the participants, or lurking in the background so that he or she can see and hear the students but they don't know the professor is there. The requirement of filling out the worksheet, or doing some other activity like a poll or quiz, makes sure students in breakout groups stay on task, Nelson says."

"What Anbar has in mind is something he calls "active OER." That's taking the standard digital textbook and expanding it with the addition of digital resources, including simulations that are both interactive and adaptive. "The learner doesn't just move something around in the simulation but actually gets prompting feedback that guides them to success," he explained. That's where Smart Sparrow comes in: The company produces aero, a learning platform that allows the instructor to pull together lessons from a set of templates that can include text, tests, assessments, virtual labs and field trips, and other digital components. For the purposes of the consortium, those elements would be pulled from OER materials."

"The internet should be either a post-capitalist good, or a public good. A public utility. Like a town square. Things like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter never should have been capitalist at all. Like all town squares, the rules of civilized speech should apply. I can't call someone a nasty name, harass them, intimidate them, bully them there - nor should I be able to here. The capitalist internet is one of history's great failures, my friends. Whether we know it now or not, our grandkids will certainly regard it that way. They'll be incredulous that we were seduced and then addicted by its garbage culture, its trash spectacles, its junk food for the human mind and spirit, all so we could get a desperate hit of feeling power and control…while our planet, democracies, future, and lives were all melting down. It's up to us to build a better internet, and do it now. And whether we do that through post-capitalism, or through public goods - or both - that challenge is very real, very urgent, and very noble."

"When a college goes out of business, all of its alumni can suddenly find themselves in an unexpected dilemma: How can graduates prove they actually earned their degrees when no one is left at the institution to send academic transcripts to prospective employers or graduate schools? That scenario is one reason that a group of nine universities, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, today announced a collaboration to build a system that would let institutions issue digital diplomas and credentials in a way that can be verified without needing to check with a human registrar. The idea is to encourage widespread use of digital credentials across all kinds of academic institutions, and even at more informal places of learning, so that students end up taking ownership of how to communicate their learning to employers."

"Our mission is to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that will become the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying academic credentials, digitally."

"McGraw-Hill and Cengage plan to merge in a deal that would create the second-largest provider of college textbooks and other higher-education materials in the country."

"Welcome to the other side of the uncanny valley of profile photographs. The attention of generated imagery has so far focused on "deepfake videos," in which a real person's face is grafted semi-realistically (for now) onto someone else's body. There's a different impact with deep-learning AI-generated fake still-photo faces that look realistic but aren't attempting to match the appearance of any actual person. And they're so new that these images have yet to get a name-perhaps deepfaces will win out. Deepfaces have a greater potential to add to the noise of troll farms, social-media griefers, and outright scammers and fraudsters because they look legitimate and fail reverse-image searches. As Craig Silverman, a long-time exposer of online frauds and BuzzFeed media editor, says, "I think it presents a big challenge for some of the existing approaches used by investigators, journalists, and police and others to follow a breadcrumb trail.""

"The challenge of presenting alternative "views" of symbolic and semantic content makes up the leading edge of accessibility research today and many problems have yet to be solved. This document presents an overview of approaches currently in development or in use in fields such as: Mathematics Sciences Simulations and immersion Robots and telepresence Charts, diagrams, and tables Geography and maps Music Languages"

"Peter Molyneux demos Milo, a hotly anticipated video game for Microsoft's Kinect controller. Perceptive and impressionable like a real 11-year-old, the virtual boy watches, listens and learns -- recognizing and responding to you."

"Cognii VLA is a type of an intelligent tutoring system that engages learners in a real time, one to one coaching conversation, helping them revise their answers. Unlike other tutoring systems, Cognii VLA uses learners' own natural language, not their selections in multiple choice items, as the basis for assessment. Because open response questions are more accurate than multiple choice questions in assessing deep understanding and critical thinking, Cognii VLA can provide better coaching than earlier systems. "

"David-John Palmer, an instructor at FIU and associate director of educational technology at FIU Online, has spearheaded the recent AI initiative in his own Introduction to Information Systems course in partnership with Cognii Inc., a leading provider of AI-based educational technologies. His course, offered through the College of Business, is the first online FIU course to feature AI in instructional design."

"Part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way."

"Knewton's pivot in 2018 toward tools that combine adaptive-learning technology with open educational resources was a big part of the attraction for Wiley. With its Alta digital-courseware platform, Knewton is primarily an OER company now, Wiley's president and chief executive, Brian Napack, told The Chronicle. The product costs students about $40 per course. Wiley wants to "double down" on low-cost options, Napack said. "We're doing this because we think the future needs to look different than the past.""

""I'm a survivor of that teardown mode of the '70s and '80s, that college-for-all thing," he said. This has had the unintended consequence of helping flatten out or steadily erode the share of students taking vocational courses. In California's community colleges, for instance, it's dropped to 28 percent from 31 percent since 2000, contributing to a shortage of trained workers with more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor's degree."

"What I am looking for is a stackable certification solution, which blockchain for learning or education can provide. This stackable way of organising or linking learning could enable a validated, personalized certification procedure covering both formal learning (e.g. certification, degrees, micro-credits) and informal learning (e.g. badges, skills, experiences). Practically: each learner has a learning wallet or portfolio, and you - as a learner - can add each learning step as you 'earn' it and you are issued a certificate/badge of what you learned by a learning authority/individual/group).  "