See the Appvent calendar from ICT Evangelist

Excerpt from this posting:

Welcome to day 21 of the 2021 Appvent Calendar. It’s been so much fun sharing all of these amazing tools each day across the month so far. With Google featuring twice already on the calendar, it’s great to share again the awe and wonder of human history in the arts and within our cultures with the sharing of this amazing free app. Thanks to Gustavo Calderón De Anda for suggesting it!

Also see:

  • 14 measurement apps for teaching math & science — from teachthought and Glenda Stewart-Smith
    Glenda Stewart-Smith of Surrey School District #36 in Canada, along with TeachThought staff, helped put together this collection of iPhone and iPad apps that offer all of these measuring abilities and more.
 

Web 3.0 vs Metaverse: What’s the difference? — from homo-digitalis.net by Fabian Schmidt

Excerpt:

So what is Web 3.0?

On Twitter, a user asked if someone could explain the term in baby talk. I thought one answer was good:

    • Web 1.0 = Read
    • Web 2.0 = Read/Write
    • Web 3.0 = Read/Write/Own

This is a sufficient simplification to gain an initial understanding. Yet a bit more information is still important.

Let’s get one thing straight right away. As with all things in the making, there is not yet a clear-cut definition of Web 3.0. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the classic web, thinks of the semantic web as the next big step.

Since 2020/2021, there is another idea of Web3, and it is inspired by a new form of technology: Blockchains. At its core is a new wave of decentralization.

Besides decentralization, other key topics related to Web 3.0 include Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), Non-fungible-tokens (NFT), and Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

The metaverse is a digital world that is meant to feel as real as possible and can represent all concerns of human existence. From leisure to work.

Fabian Schmidt, Homo Digitalis, 2021


Bill Gates: Most Work Meetings Will Happen In The Metaverse In 3 Years — from vrscout.com by Kyle Melnick

Excerpt:

“Within the next two or three years, I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me—to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars,” said Gates in the post. “Both Facebook and Microsoft recently unveiled their visions for this, which gave most people their first view of what it will look like”.


Adidas to enter the metaverse with first NFT products — from dezeen.com by Rima Sabina Aouf

Excerpt:

Adidas has announced its next collection will be a mix of digital and physical items, and will be sold as NFTs produced with collaborators such as Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Titled Into the Metaverse, the collection will comprise virtual wearables that buyers can use in online platforms, but also the physical clothing to match.

It is Adidas’ first collection of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens – essentially, digital collectibles with proven authenticity. NFTs act as a blockchain-based certificate of ownership, allowing pieces to be authenticated, bought and collected.


How Coinbase thinks about the Metaverse — from blog.coinbase.com by Brian Armstrong & Alex Reeve

Excerpt:

Primitive Metaverse platforms are selling virtual land for millions of dollars. Billions more are being invested in Metaverse startups. And Mark Zuckerberg recently renamed his entire company to reflect a focus on building the Metaverse.

Recently, our team put together an internal presentation about the Metaverse, who’s working on it, and how crypto will help make it real. I thought the presentation was well done, so I’m sharing most of the slides here.

Like Matt[hew Ball], we define the Metaverse as:

The future of the internet: A massively-scaled, persistent, interactive, and interoperable real-time platform comprised of interconnected virtual worlds where people can socialize, work, transact, play, and create.

The Metaverse is the distant evolution of Web3. In its most complete form, it will be a series of decentralized, interconnected virtual worlds with a fully functioning economy where people can do just about anything they can do in the physical world.

Who is building the Metaverse today?

 

 

From DSC:
The following items are from a recent presentation by Zach Abramowitz entitledLegal Disruption: Key Trends to Watch in 2022.” By the way, you can sign up for Zach’s legal newsletter at zachabramowitz.substack.com/


Marble Law

 

Darrow raises $20 million to uncover corporate legal violations and bring justice to all — from calcalistech.com by Meir Orbach
The Israeli startup is focused on locating violations that have caused damage to millions of people on average – the threshold for a potential class-action lawsuit

Excerpt:

Darrow has developed a machine learning-based platform which discovers legal violations by some of the biggest corporations in the world. Operating chiefly in the U.S., the company is focused on locating violations that have caused damage to millions of people on average – the threshold for a potential class-action lawsuit.

 

TermScout

Term Scout

 

 
 

DeepMind Says Its New AI Has Almost the Reading Comprehension of a High Schooler — from futurism.com by Victor Tangermann
A provocative claim!

Excerpt:

Alphabet’s AI research company DeepMind has released the next generation of its language model, and it says that it has close to the reading comprehension of a high schooler — a startling claim.

It says the language model, called Gopher, was able to significantly improve its reading comprehension by ingesting massive repositories of texts online.

 

Antonio Sacre on the Power of Storytelling in Education — from spencerauthor.com by John Spencer

Per John:

I had the honor of interviewing celebrated author Antonio Sacre on the power of storytelling in education. Check out the podcast below.

The power of story in education -- Spencer and Sacre

Born in Boston to a Cuban father and Irish-American mother, Sacre is an internationally touring storyteller, author, and solo performance artist, based in Los Angeles. He has performed at the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, the National Storytelling Festival, as well as museums, schools, libraries, and festivals. Deemed “a charismatic, empathetic presence” by the Chicago Tribune, his stories have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and on National Public Radio.

 

VRJAM -- the metaverse platform for music

The VRJAM metaverse platform is coming to transform the world of live entertainment 

VRJAM, the UK’s leading creator of live music experiences in virtual reality, today teased the launch of the VRJAM platform, a revolutionary new metaverse events platform and NFT creation solution. 

To bring the VRJAM metaverse platform to life, VRJAM has partnered with market leading NFT software developer Enjin.io to launch a rich virtual reality world that offers a host of new solutions for artists to render and monetize their music and live shows in amazing new ways using NFT’s, blockchain and immersive technology.  

The VRJAM platform promises to open up completely new ways for both fans and artist to experience live music events and represents the next step in the evolution of live music. 

Ownership of this virtual world will be shared by a guild of globally recognised artists and record labels who will cooperate to create value and define new possibilities for music inside the metaverse. 

VRJAM’s metaverse platform offers solutions for true live performance using technology that is years ahead of other similar platforms. It provides unsurpassed user experience and offers fans, artists and labels an array of unique features:

VRJAM's metaverse -- a vivid virtual world built for music

At the heart of the VRJAM metaverse platform is a blockchain based trading and finance system, VRJAM Coin. This revolutionary new cryptocurrency will create ways for both artists and fans to earn money inside the metaverse and promises to create entirely new business models for artists, venues and labels at a time when their traditional ways of making money have been turned upside down by the Covid 19 pandemic. 

The VRJAM cryptocurrency is backed by investment from 5 of the world’s leading blockchain specialist investment and venture capital firms, demonstrating the exciting potential of VRJAM’s tech.

The VRJAM platform is scheduled to go live in early 2022, follow on social media to stay up to date.


From DSC:
Hmmmmm….might this type of thing spill over into the worlds of teaching and learning? More direct-to-consumer (learner) types of offerings? Will this open up the doors for new methods of earning a living or for  those interested in building a teaching & learning-based brand?

Alternatively, will this impact what actors, actresses, and comedians will be able to do?


Addendum on 12/2/21:


 

EduMAX 2021 recap: Together for student success around the globe — from blog.adobe.com by Sebastian Distefano

Excerpt:

University CIOs, deans, provosts, faculty and staff from more than 100 institutions convened online for the Adobe EduMAX 2021 conference, where academic leaders shared how they are transforming teaching and learning practices across their campuses. Key discussion points included:

  • How digital literacy increases engagement to bring faculty and students together, whether they are in-person, online or in a hybrid environment.
  • How digital literacy closes the skills gap in higher education and industry by fostering critical essential skills that employers value.
  • How faculty can integrate digital literacy across the curriculum for all students.
 

The State of Student Success & Engagement in Higher Education -- from Instructure

The State of Student Success & Engagement in Higher Education — from instructure.com (authors of the Canvas LMS)
Our 2021 Global Student engagement and success study uncovers vital stats and key trends to help education institutions thrive through today’s education challenges.

Excerpt:

  • Connect students with alumni and potential employers through virtual networking, internships/externships, mentorship programs, and strategic partnerships.
  • Align curriculum with workforce outcomes and offer opportunities for students to showcase skill sets.
  • Close the perceived awareness gap of work/career readiness programs on campus with alumni programming highlighting the success of campus career resources.
  • Embed career exploration throughout the higher education experience and provide actionable insights into employment trends.

 

 
 

Fastcase Unveils NextChapter Docs Form Preparation, Client Management Tools, and Workflow Tools for All Practice Areas — from legaltechmonitor.com by Jaime Houssami

Excerpt:

To that end, NextChapter is soon releasing a Forms Exchange, where seasoned attorneys can upload their form templates to the marketplace for other attorneys to purchase for their own use. “Providing access to pre-built forms designed by subject matter experts will be useful for many of the solo and small firm practitioners,” said NextChapter’s first Forms attorney author Carolyn Elefant.

TechReport 2021: Websites & Marketing — from lawtechnologytoday.org by Allison C. Johs

Excerpt:

The COVID-19 pandemic brought changes to the practice of law–many of which were overdue–including virtual meetings and client conferences, remote document signings, court appearances by Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and more. But according to the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center’s 2021 Legal Technology Survey Report results on the use of technology in the legal profession, there is still work to be done.

Linklaters launches virtual global business teams internship — from legaltechnology.com by Caroline Hill

Excerpt:

While most law firm internships are focussed exclusively on attracting future lawyers, magic circle law firm Linklaters has launched a virtual global business teams internship programme aimed at 16- to 18-year-old students. The new internship, which will be welcomed by many for shining a light on the key functions that enable a law firm to run and succeed, will help interns to become aware of the wide range of career options available at Linklaters.

Linklaters Internships For 16-18 Year Olds To Cover Legal Ops + Tech — from artificiallawyer.com

 

Also see Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer (excerpt below from this page) — with thanks to Annie Zhang for this resource:


“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”


Jacob Navok: Computing and Network Needs of the Metaverse — from hellometaverse.fm by Annie Zhang

Excerpt:

to progress towards this vision of the metaverse, jacob is focused on tackling the hard problem of improving concurrency. how do you get millions of people to concurrently be participating and interacting in one live experience with no lag? 

he breaks this down the problem into two components:

  1. limitations of the traditional network to handle multiplayer experiences: coordinating, say, positional data of where you and all the other players in a game, gets very complicated, especially when latency needs to be low. meaning, if you want to see everything that everyone is doing at all times, coordinating the traffic of that data is very difficult

  2. with more connection, internet speed slows: the internet was not built for true real time communication, but rather optimized for cost and routing efficiency. when you load a fb page, it’s okay if it takes 10 milliseconds, but when you are in a shooting game, a delay of 10 milliseconds is a matter of life or death


Everything You Need To Know About The Metaverse — from protocol.com by Janko Roettgers

Excerpt:

Silicon Valley has a new favorite buzzword: Ever since Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook’s future would be in the metaverse, everyone has been rushing to figure out what a metaverse even is. And when Facebook rebranded as Meta in October, metaverse fever swept the tech industry. From Microsoft to Nvidia, every company is suddenly in the metaverse business, and seemingly overnight, countless people became metaverse experts.

But what actually is the metaverse? Why does it matter, and who needs to worry about it? If the metaverse is truly “the next chapter for the internet,” as Zuckerberg put it, it’s important to understand and define it so as not to be caught flat-footed when (or if) the metaverse wave catches on.

 
 

We Need to Make Schools Human Again. That Means Treating Teachers With Respect. – from edsurge.com by Jennifer Yoo-Brannon

Excerpts:

The first thing I noticed when we returned to school after remote learning was that my conversations with teachers got real deep real fast.

But we are not just educators, of course. We are mothers of multiple school-aged children, parents of special needs students who need a high level of support, individuals with anxiety disorders exacerbated by the worldwide anxiety of the pandemic. We are human too. While we transform our schools into welcoming spaces for students, we must also make them a human place to work for educators as well. We can’t forget that we saw each other’s humanity—shared a universal human experience—and then return to business as usual. We must make schools human again.

Avoid toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is the belief that no matter how bad a situation is, we should all have a positive mindset about it. Toxic positivity isn’t optimism. Toxic positivity rejects or refuses to acknowledge how difficult things can be. This message is for administrators in particular.

From DSC:
When I read this…

In other words, the question is not “How do we get teachers to participate in professional development?” but rather, “How can we create a context in which everyone will want to engage in professional learning?” To feel human in our workplace, we all need to feel like we have choices and teachers need to feel trusted and empowered to make those choices.

…I’m thinking to myself…isn’t this the same for our students?

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian