What a Black tech movement might look like — from venturebeat.com by Khari Johnson

Excerpt:

That’s why, Wilson told VentureBeat, she is launching the National Black Tech Ecosystem Association. The group’s initial community gathering will focus on bringing together people in tech and the Black faith community.

“My ultimate vision is to build an association that allows for all of those entities to share information, to collectively organize, develop policy, and if needed protest moments around this new tech world that’s being built,” she told VentureBeat.

 

The increasingly essential role of the law librarian — from abovethelaw.com by Robert Ambrogi
Robots are not coming for law librarians’ jobs.

Excerpts:

Last year, I contributed a chapter to Law Librarianship in the Age of AI, a book published by the American Library Association. In my chapter, on the future of AI in law libraries, I described what I see as four roles of law librarians that exist already and that will become more essential as technology evolves.

    1. Librarian As Gatekeeper
    2. Librarian As Guide
    3. Librarian As Ethicist
    4. Librarian As Interpreter

 

 

Science apps for high school students — from educatorstechnology.com

Excerpt:

Below is a collection of some good educational science apps curated  specifically for high school students. This work is based on Biology Apps collection in iTunes App Store. The apps are arranged into four main categories: Applying Life Sciences, Anatomy and Physiology, Cell and Genetics, and Plants and Animals.

 

As school year approaches, parents and educators struggle with uncertainty — from kqed.org by Anya Kamenetz

Excerpt:

What’s at stake: An unknown number of lives, the futures of tens of millions of children, the livelihoods of their caregivers, the working conditions of millions of educators and people’s trust in a fundamental American institution.

 

Renters, homeowners face new phase of coronavirus crisis with evictions, foreclosures looming — from finance.yahoo.com by Alexis Keenan

Excerpt:

A potential housing crisis is on the way for millions of Americans whose mortgage and rent deferrals are about to sunset.

Evictions loom as the end of state and local moratoriums will no longer protect homeowners and tenants unable to make payments because of COVID-19 lockdowns. A minority of U.S. states have already expired orders against evictions, and a host of others across the country are set to expire over the next two months.

Once they do, residents are facing a possible flood of non-payment legal actions. The COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project (CEDP) predicted recently that by the end of September, more than 20 million U.S. renters —many of them Black and Latino located in big cities — will be at risk for eviction.

 

Microsoft Teams Rolls Out Virtual Rooms to Fight ‘Meeting Fatigue’ — from cheddar.com by Taylor Craig

Microsoft introduced Together Mode -- July 2020

 

A common background in meetings helps reduce extraneous cognitive load

 

A common background in meetings helps reduce extraneous cognitive load

 

From DSC:
Again, the longer the Coronavirus hangs around and we are learning and meeting like this, the more innovations like these will occur.

 


Addendums on 7/14/20:

Microsoft’s Together mode can help address executives’ concerns over remote work productivity — from businessinsider.com by Hirsh Chitkara

Excerpt:

Together mode offers an alternative to “grid view,” in which video call participants are displayed on-screen — instead, through AI segmentation, participants are placed in a single virtual environment such as an auditorium or coffee bar, creating the illusion that they are in the same space.

The future of work—the good, the challenging & the unknown — from microsofot.com by Jared Spataro

Excerpt:

Together mode is a new option in the Teams meeting experience that uses AI segmentation technology to digitally place participants in a shared background. The view makes it feel like you’re sitting in the same room, which reduces background distractions, makes it easier to pick up on non-verbal cues, and makes back and forth conversation feel more natural.

 

Eight ways Virtual Design Festival has set the agenda for architecture and design — from dezeen.com

Excerpt:

After three months, two million video plays, over 600 posts and more than 50 live interviews, Virtual Design Festival [ended on 7/10/20]. From defining a new design movement to imagining new planets and urban wildernesses, here are a few of the agenda-setting ideas it raised.

Eight ways Virtual Design Festival has set the agenda for architecture & design

 

Best practices for engaging students online — from edtechmagazine.com by Amelia Pang
Norma I. Scagnoli, a higher education instructional design expert, shares her advice on how to humanize online learning.

Excerpt:

EDTECH: How do your instructors strengthen student engagement in entirely online courses?

Scagnoli: We built that engagement by following the Community of Inquiry Framework. This model was created by online learning experts such as Dr. Randy Garrison and Dr. Norm Vaughan, who research distance education and blended learning. This model focuses on cognitive presence, teaching presence and social presence to keep students engaged with online content.

You want to use every opportunity to promote critical thinking and trigger more class interactions and discussions. 

 

Scientists engineer air filter that can kill SARS-CoV-2 instantly  — from interestingengineering.com by Loukia Papadopoulos
Virus tests found that 99.8% of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was killed in a single pass.

This filter could be useful in airports and in airplanes, in office buildings, schools, and cruise ships to stop the spread of COVID-19…

 

A new affordance of a 100%-online-based learning environment: A visual & audible “Table of Contents of the Key Points Made” [Christian]

What new affordances might a 100%-online-based learning environment offer us?

 

From DSC:
As I’ve been listening to some sermons on my iPhone, I end up taking visual snapshots of the times that they emphasize something. Here are some examples:

A snapshot of one of the key points made during a sermon

 

Another snapshot of one of the key points made during a sermon

 

Another snapshot of one of the key points made during a sermon

 

Which got me to thinking…while tools like Panopto* give us something along these lines, they don’t present to the student what the KEY POINTS were in any given class session.

So professors — in addition to teachers, trainers, pastors, presenters, etc. — should be able to quickly and easily instruct the software to create a visual table of contents of key points based upon which items the professor favorited or assigned a time signature to. I’m talking about a ONE keystroke or ONE click of the mouse type of thing to instruct the software to take a visual snapshot of that point in time (AI could even be used to grab the closest image without someone’s eyes shut). At the end of the class, there are then just a handful of key points that were made, with links to those time signatures.

At the end of a course, a student could easily review the KEY POINTS that were made throughout the last ___ weeks.

****

But this concept falls apart if there are too many things to remember. So when a professor presents the KEY POINTs to any given class, they must CURATE the content.  (And by the way, that’s exactly why pastors normally focus on only 3-4 key points…otherwise, it gets too hard to walk away with what the sermon was about.)

****

One could even build upon the table of contents. For example…for any given class within a law school’s offerings, the professor (or another team member at the instructions of the professor) could insert links to:

  • Relevant chapters or sections of a chapter in the textbook
  • Journal articles
  • Cases
  • Rules of law
  • Courts’ decisions
  • Other

****

And maybe even:

  • That’s the kind of “textbook” — or learning modules — that we’ll move towards creating in the first place.
    .
  • That’s the form of learning we’ll see more of when we present streams of up-to-date content to folks using a next-generation learning platform.
    .
  • Future webinars could piggyback off of this concept as well. Dive as deep as you want to into something…or just take away the main points (i.e., the Cliff notes/summaries) of a presentation.

At the end of the day, if your communication isn’t in a digital format, there is no playback available. What’s said is said…and gone.


* The functionality discussed here would take a day’s worth of work for a developer at Panopto (i.e., give a presenter a way to favorite existing TOC items and/or to assign a time signature to slots of time in a recording) — but it would save people and students sooooo much time. Such functionality would help us stay up-to-date — at least at a basic level of understanding — on a variety of topics.


 

 

Great Minds®, Louisiana Public Broadcasting, WCNY Public Television Make Free Video Lessons Available for Summer, Fall Distance Learning — from louisianabelieves.com with thanks to Jill Gerber for this resource

Excerpt:

Thursday, July 9, 2020—In an unprecedented effort to prevent summer learning loss, Louisiana Public Broadcasting is airing 60 lessons on Eureka Math® from Great Minds, starting this week, for Grades K–5 statewide. In addition, PBS affiliate WCNY-TV in Syracuse, N.Y., partnered with Great Minds to make 172 video lessons on math, English language arts, and science available to all 330 PBS stations across the country.

 

zzzzzz

 

 

Ephesians 3:20-21 New International Version (NIV) — from biblegateway.com

20 Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, 21 to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

 

More colleges cancel fall sports as COVID-19 cases rise — from edtechmagazine.com by Amelia Pang
A growing number of colleges and universities are canceling their athletic programs for the fall.

From DSC:
I appreciated seeing this article. The only part I found very hard to believe was this (emphasis DSC):

With that said, there are several Division I schools and other colleges that are still sticking with their decisions to resume sports in the fall. Careful planning, data analytics and emerging technologies can help keep student-athletes safe during training and games.

 

Alphabet’s Loon starts beaming internet from balloons in Kenya — from cnbc.com by Ryan Browne

Key points
  • Loon said its balloon-powered internet service will initially cover 50,000 square kilometers in western and central parts of Kenya.
  • It aims to take a fleet of 35 balloons to the skies above eastern Africa “in the coming weeks.”
  • The news represents a significant milestone after years of publicity about the Alphabet-owned venture.
 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian