Also see:
- Microsoft’s crazy ambitions for augmented reality and HoloLens — from cnet.com
A New Morning — by Magic Leap; posted on 4/19/16
Welcome to a new way to start your day. Shot directly through Magic Leap technology on April 8, 2016 without use of special effects or compositing.
Also see:
The 3 instructional shifts that will redefine the college professor — from edsurge.com by Ryan Craig
Excerpts:
As faculty at colleges and universities are all too aware, it’s hard to do two jobs at the same time. Since the advent of the modern research university over a century ago, faculty have effectively held down two jobs: conducting (and publishing) research and teaching students.
Arguments for the dual-role professor seem logical. Knowledge production should make one a better instructor. Students should benefit from teachers producing the latest knowledge. But there’s precious little data to support that adding the research job to the instruction job improves student outcomes.
The downside is that both jobs require significant expertise and commitment to do well.
…
There is an emerging consensus as to what works best for onground instruction. It’s called the Dynamic Classroom, and it looks like this:
From DSC:
First of all, I second the idea of splitting up the responsibilities of researching and teaching. Both roles are full-time jobs and require different skillsets. With students paying ever higher tuition bills, students deserve to take their courses from professors who know how to teach (not an easy job by the way!).
But the unbundling doesn’t — and shouldn’t — stop with the splitting up of the teaching and research roles.
Let’s look at another of the instructional shifts that Ryan considers — and that is the move towards the use of smartphones and apps:
In this environment, we can imagine one app for Economics 101 and another for Psychology 110. They are also the ideal platform for simulations and gamified learning and can tailor the user experience further by incorporating real-world inputs (e.g., location of the student) into the material. But, like the dynamic classroom, apps require an unparalleled level of development and instructional expertise—a full-time job for faculty who will be teaching online.
I think there’s some serious potential with this approach, especially given the trend towards more mobile computing and the affordances that come with using mobile technologies.
However, when we start delivering teaching and learning experiences that involve the digital/virtual realm like this, we’re instantly catapulted into a world that requires additional skills. As such, I highly doubt that the majority of faculty members have the time, interests, passions, or the abilities/gifts to code such apps. They would have to simultaneously be (or become) a programmer/developer, an instructional designer, a graphic designer, a copyright expert, an expert in accessibility, instantly knowledgeable in user interface and user experience design, as well as continue to serve as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) — and I could list other roles as well. That is why we need TEAMS of specialists. If the trends towards moving more of our teaching and learning experiences online and/or into such digital realms continue, then our current models simply won’t cut it anymore, at least in the majority of cases.
I appreciate Ryan’s article and second the main idea of splitting up the teaching and researching responsibilities. But again, when we’re talking developing apps, we had better be talking employing the use of teams — or the students will likely not be better off.
—–
A related quote from “In Sign of the Times for Teaching, More Colleges Set Up Video-Recording Studios” — from The Chronicle
At some colleges, media teams sit down with professors ahead of time and lay out long-term strategies to determine how video may enhance the learning experience of students in their courses.
…The media team offers instructors a number of planning worksheets to encourage them to think more about the purpose of videos in their courses.
—–
Technology and The Evolution of Storytelling — from medium.com by John Lasseter; with a shout out to The Digital Rocking Chair for the Scoop on this
Excerpts:
“People aren’t going to sit still for a feature-length cartoon. Are you nuts?”
But Walt was a visionary.
Walt saw beyond what people were used to. They were used to the short cartoon.
There’s a famous statement by Henry Ford that before the Model T if you asked people what they wanted, they would say, “A faster horse.”
My own partner at Pixar for 25 years, Steve Jobs, never liked market research. Never did market research for anything.
“It’s not the audience’s job to tell us what they want in the future, it’s for us to tell them what they want in the future.” — Steve Jobs
It was because people didn’t understand what the technology ***could*** do. — John Lasseter
I wanted to learn as much as I could.
The more you dig into the technology and the more you learn it, you are going to get ideas you would never have thought of without knowing your technology.
The goal was to make the technology invisible.
New Media Consortium (NMC) 2015 Idea Lab Winners
Bring It On – A Formula for Successful BYOD Programming in Museums
Scott Sayre (Corning Museum of Glass)
Dickinson Makes – Connecting Campus Makerspaces
Brenda Landis (Dickinson College) | Andrew Petrus (Dickinson College)
Don’t Just Upload Your Videos, Annotate Them!
Sharon Hu (University of British Columbia) | Thomas Dang (University of British Columbia)
Exploring Visualization: Creating A Cross-Disciplinary Collaborative Course Enhanced By Technology
Dolores Fidishun (Pennsylvania State University) | William Cromar (Penn State Abington)
Jacob Benfield (Pennsylvania State University)
Leveraging 3D Technologies For Learning
Kirsten Butcher (University of Utah) | Madlyn Runburg (University of Utah)
Making Real from Real: Three “Tangible” Experiments from the Special Collection of the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University
Jared Bendis (Case Western Reserve University) | Melissa Hubbard (Case Western Reserve University)
Modding Games: Creating Historical Scenarios in Civilization V
Todd Bryant (Dickinson College)
Do you see what I see? Smart glasses, VR, and telepresence robots — from arstechnica.com by Megan Geuss
Heightened reality will hit industry and gaming before it changes anyone’s day-to-day.
Oculus VR unveils the version of Oculus Rift you’ll actually buy — from mashable.com by JP Mangalindan
Excerpt:
Oculus VR finally debuted the long-awaited consumer version of Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset, at a media event in San Francisco on Thursday [6/11/15].
“For the first time we’ll finally be on the inside of the game,” Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said onstage. “Gamers have been dreaming of this. We’ve all been dreaming of this for decades.”
Virtual reality apps market set to explode — from netguide.co.nz by
Excerpt:
Augmented Reality (AR) apps in the mobile games market will generate 420 million downloads annually by 2019, up from 30 million in 2014, according to Juniper Research’s research titled Augmented Reality: Consumer, Enterprise and Vehicles 2015-2019.
The emergence of Head Mounted Devices (HMDs) used in the home, such as Microsoft’s Hololens, will bring a surge in interest for AR games over the next five years, according to Juniper.
For the time being however, most AR downloads will occur via smartphones and tablets.
What the Surreal Vision acquisition means for Oculus — from fortune.com by John Gaudiosi
Oculus now has the technology to blend augmented reality with virtual reality.
Excerpt:
Oculus VR last week acquired Surreal Vision, a company creating real-time 3D scene reconstruction technology that will allow users to move around the room and interact with real-world objects while immersed in VR.
Microsoft pulls back curtain on Surface hub collaboration screen — from by Shira Ovide
Excerpt:
Microsoft announced on Wednesday [6/10/15] the price tag for a piece of audio-visual equipment that it first showed off in January. Surface Hub, which will cost up to $20,000 for a model with an 84-inch screen, is like the merger of a high-end video conference system, electronic whiteboard and Xbox.
The product plunges Microsoft headlong into competition with Cisco and other traditional providers of conference room audio-visual systems.
Microsoft is pitching Surface Hub as the best audio-video conference
equipment and collaboration tool a company can buy. It costs up to $20,000.
[From DSC: There will also be a $7,000, 55-inch version].
Bluescape launches new hardware program with MultiTaction, Planar Systems, and 3M — from Bluescape
Bluescape Showcases MultiTaction’s and Planar’s Interactive Displays Running Its Visual Collaboration Software at Booth #1690 at InfoComm 2015
Excerpt:
SAN CARLOS, CA–(Jun 15, 2015) – Bluescape, a persistent cloud-based platform for real-time visual collaboration, today announced the new Bluescape Hardware Program. Companies in the program offer hardware that complements the Bluescape experience and has been extensively tested and validated to work well with Bluescape’s platform. As collaboration spans across an entire enterprise, Bluescape strives to support a range of hardware options to allow an organization’s choice in hardware to fit different workspaces. The first three companies are market-leading interactive display vendors MultiTaction, Planar, and 3M.
…
MultiTaction, a leading developer of interactive display systems, offers advanced tracking performance that identifies fingers, hands, objects, 2D bar codes and IR pens. The unparalleled responsiveness of MultiTaction’s systems scales to an unlimited number of concurrent users and the displays are highly customizable to fit any existing corporate space. MultiTaction’s advanced interactive hardware combined with Bluescape’s software allows teams to connect content and people in one place, enabling deeper insights, meaningful innovation, and simultaneous collaboration across global time zones.