The Straw Man of Digital Dualism | FifteenEightyFour | Cambridge University Press
A new term has become popular among some social media researchers: “Digital Dualism.” Such researchers seemed to have invented this term in order to object to the concepts implied by it. They claim that advocates of digital dualism have created a false dichotomy of spaces as well as a false dichotomy of real versus virtual.
WebAIM’s accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 homepages was released to the public on February 27, 2019. I’ve had a few days to process it, and frankly, it’s left me feeling pretty depressed. In a sea of already demoralizing findings, probably the most notable one is that pages containing ARIA—a specialized language intended to aid accessibility—are actually more likely to have accessibility issues. I don't think this is intentional malice on the part of authors, but it is worth saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. These failures via omission and ignorance actively separate people from their civil rights.
FieldPress.ca is a demonstration website for displaying and testing the capabilities of the FieldPress plugin for WordPress. The FieldPress plugin allows instructors to create and manage field trips for their students. FieldPress is an open educational resource (OER) that was created by Open Geography at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Teaching in a Digital Age – The Open Textbook Project provides flexible and affordable access to higher education resources
The book examines the underlying principles that guide effective teaching in an age when all of us, and in particular the students we are teaching, are using technology. A framework for making decisions about your teaching is provided, while understanding that every subject is different, and every instructor has something unique and special to bring to their teaching.The book enables teachers and instructors to help students develop the knowledge and skills they will need in a digital age: not so much the IT skills, but the thinking and attitudes to learning that will bring them success.
This tool automatically colorizes your black and white photographs | Popular Photography
Colourise.sg was developed in Singapore by a company called GovTech during a January hackathon. According to the creators of the project Algorithmia produced colorized image that lacked intensity, which makes the final product appear inauthentic. The goal of Colourise was to create a program that was specifically trained to colorize old Singaporean photos. The creators did this by training the tool with historical images from Singapore. In contrast, Algorithmia was trained using 1.3 million images from ImageNet, a database often used by researchers at Stanford and Princeton specifically to train AI.
How People with Disabilities Use the Web | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C
This resource introduces how people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments, use the Web. It describes tools and approaches that people with different kinds of disabilities use to browse the Web and the barriers they encounter due to poor design. It helps developers, designers, and others to understand the principles for creating accessible websites, web applications, browsers, and other web tools.
Web Accessibility for Developers is a technical book aimed primarily at programmers. Learn how to develop accessible interactivity on the Web and gain expertise using WAI-ARIA, a W3C specification that enables optimal use of assistive technologies, like screen readers, when navigating the Web.
My name is Veronica Lewis, and I have four eyes, also known as low vision. I love to write, especially about assistive technology and vision impairment, so I created Veronica With Four Eyes to share positive, practical posts about the things I am passionate about.
Facebook extremism and fake news: How Facebook is training us to be conspiracy theorists — Quartz
To be as clear as I possibly can—by setting up this dynamic, Facebook simultaneously set up the perfect conspiracy replication machine and incentivized the creation of a new breed of conspiracy clickbait sites.
For those who have not had experience of creating a website or blog before, creating a site from the ground up can seem like an intimidating thing to do. This paper-based toolkit includes bite-sized, user-friendly information for those with limited web literacy, and takes a hands-on approach to guide learners through the initial steps of designing a website with WordPress. The toolkit prompts learners to consider elements such as: the purpose of their domain, the expected audience of their resulting site, what content to include, and how to structure their site. ‘Design Your Own Domain: Plan your WordPress site with paper’ has been designed by the Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL) to support staff and students to plan the structure of their websites as part of the CU Domain of One’s Own initiative. The tool provides a printable, offline means of introducing students and staff to the different elements and potentials of building a website, without needing any prior knowledge of web design or content management systems. The tool can be used in a classroom environment or be disseminated as a resource for self-guided practice.
How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Former Insider
I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked. When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite. Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses?
Can We Be Friends with Robots? – When Robots Rule The World – Medium
Can humans and robots truly be friends? This is an inescapably philosophical question. At the same time, empirical research on how consumers behave when they treat “products as pals” suggests it’s a pressing matter. It turns out that when humans interact with anthropomorphic robots or even just see images of them, they can feel like some of their social needs are being satisfied. Evidence suggests that people who feel socially excluded can rebound from their alienation, at least somewhat, by turning to humanlike devices, much like upset children cope by hugging teddy bears and other attachment objects. The cutesy products tech companies are putting on our phones and in our homes might be having an unfriendly — if not dehumanizing — impact: discouraging us from pro-social human contact.
danah boyd | apophenia » how “context collapse” was coined: my recollection
Various academic folks keep writing to me asking me if I coined “context collapse” and so I went back in my record to try to figure it out. I feel the need to offer up my understanding of how this term came to be in an artifact that is more than 140 characters since folks keep asking anew. The only thing that I know for certain is that, even if I did (help) coin the term, I didn’t mean to. I was mostly trying to help explain a phenomenon that has long existed and exists in even more complicated ways as a result of social media.
Kolibri : A Free, Open Source Education for All | Learning Equality
Kolibri makes high quality education technology available in low-resource communities such as rural schools, refugee camps, orphanages, non-formal school systems, and prison systems.
Dank learning system autogenerates memes | TechCrunch
We all know that in the near future humanity will come to a crossroads. With 99% of the world’s population currently tasked with creating memes and/or dank memes, what will happen when computers get better at it than humans? Researchers may have just found out. Using machine learning, a pair of Stanford researchers, Abel L. Peirson V and E. Meltem Tolunay, have created a system that automatically generates memes including the ones visible above. Their system, they’ve discovered “produces original memes that cannot on the whole be differentiated from real ones.”
The Internet is an ecosystem that billions of people depend for their lives and livelihoods. It adapts to our behavior and actions from one end of the globe to another. Every year, the Internet gets healthier in some ways and unhealthier in others. Getting the balance right is what we need for the Internet to be a resource for good. So what does it mean for the Internet to be healthy? And how do we measure progress and setbacks? That’s what the Internet Health Report is all about. By engaging you and a community of key thinkers on defining Internet health, we want to generate better understanding of what the world can do to make the Internet healthier. This project was initiated by Mozilla and combines Internet research and public comments from around the world towards the publication of an annual report.
An Internet Meme is in legal terms, a derivative work, and usually copyright owner is the only party with the legal right to create a derivative work. However, the rights of the copyright owner are not exhaustive or absolute. If the person who makes the “derivative work” makes “fair use” of the copyrighted image, this is a defense to a claim of Copyright Infringement.
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple collectively make products that we love, products that we hate (but can’t stop using), and products that dictate how we communicate and how we are seen. Their devices and services make our lives easier than they’ve ever been before, yet more complicated in unforeseen ways. They are so ubiquitous and fundamental to our lives that their offerings have replaced core functions of our brains. We’re now realizing it’s as possible to get addicted to these buttons, clicks, screens, and scrolls as it is to get hooked on nicotine or heroin. Who, after all, can deny the high that comes from an Instagram like? Maybe you’re in the camp of people who worry that these companies have too much access to our purchases, our movements, our social networks—and perhaps even our thoughts. Maybe you’re disturbed by the concentration of so much economic power in a handful of companies built on the West Coast’s fault lines. Or maybe you want them to have less insight into your life so they have less sway over our society. But how? How do you reduce their power? Is it even possible? The common retort to these concerns is that you should “just stop using their services.” So I decided to try.
Digital Archaeology is a project that seeks to document the formative years of digital culture and raise the profile of digital preservation. Its main focus is 64 Bits, an exhibition that celebrates the golden age of the website, showcasing classic sites on the hardware and software of their day.
InsertLearning was founded by two high school teachers who wanted to create a richer learning experience for their students. Our mission is to help teachers turn the Internet into an interactive learning experience.
The Paradox of Content in the Classroom – Bernie Bleske – Medium
And herein lies the tragic dilemma: you can’t learn skills without content. Because hammering nails into stray chunks of wood is a useless exercise. In fact, you cannot TEACH skills without content either, content that the teacher has chosen.
Dear Teachers: Don’t Be Good Soldiers For The EdTech Industry | HuffPost
There is an entire parasitic industry making billions of dollars selling us things we don’t need – standardized tests, Common Core workbook drivel, software test prep THIS, and computer test crap THAT. We didn’t decide to use it. We didn’t buy it. But who is it who actually introduces most of this garbage in the classroom? That’s right. US. We do it. Often willingly. We need to stop.
Focus EDU is the world’s first integrated classroom system that incorporates EEG detection technology. The system includes headbands for students and computer software for school administrators and teachers. We aim to create a smarter classroom using real-time attention level feedback that will redefine our understanding of education. Through personalized interaction between teachers and students, Focus EDU is able to improve the teaching and learning experience. It can provide a school or district-wide approach to quantitatively measuring student engagement in class.
FOCUSEDU Enhancing Education Outcomes Through Real-Time Attention Level Feedback in the Classroom BrainCo’s FocusEDU provides the world’s first technology that can quantify real-time student engagement in the classroom. With BrainCo’s brainwave-detecting headbands and software platform, educators can track student engagement and class attention levels as they’re happening. The FocusEDU platform provides insight into individual student and full classroom engagement.
How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it | Online Learning Insights
I don’t usually like to title a post with negative connotations, but there is no way to put a positive spin on my experience with the MOOC I’m enrolled in through Coursera, Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application. The course so far is a disaster—’a mess’ as numerous students have called it. Ironically, the learning outcome of the course is to create our own online course. To be fair, there are some good points to the course, but there are significant factors contributing to a frustrating course experience for students.
Coursera forced to call off a MOOC amid complaints about the course
Amid student confusion and frustration, Coursera calls off a course one week in. The subject? "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application."
