From DSC: Interactive video — a potentially very powerful medium to use, especially for blended and online-based courses or training-related materials! This interactive piece from Heineken is very well done, even remembering how you answered and coming up with their evaluation of you from their 12-question “interview.”
But notice again, a TEAM of specialists are needed to create such a piece. Neither a faculty member, a trainer, nor an instructional designer can do something like this all on their own. Some of the positions I could imagine here are:
Script writer(s)
Editor(s)
Actors and actresses
Those skilled in stage lighting and sound / audio recording
Digital video editors
Programmers
Graphic designers
Web designers
Producers
Product marketers
…and perhaps others
This is the kind of work that I wish we saw more of in the world of online and blended courses! Also, I appreciated their use of humor. Overall, a very engaging, fun, and informative piece!
Virtual reality: The hype, the problems and the promise — from bbc.com by Tim Maughan It’s the technology that is supposed to be 2016’s big thing, but what iteration of VR will actually catch on, and what’s just a fad? Tim Maughan takes an in-depth look.
Excerpt:
For Zec this is one of VR’s most promising potentials – to be able to drop audiences into a situation and force them to react emotionally, in ways that traditional filmmaking or journalism might struggle to do. “We really cannot understand what the people [in Syria and other places] right now are going through, so I thought maybe if we put the viewer inside the shoes of the family, or near them, maybe they can feel more and understand more rather than just reading a headline in a newspaper.”
The aim of Blackout is to challenge assumptions New Yorkers might have about the people around them, by allowing them to tap directly into their thoughts. “You’re given the ability to pick into people’s minds and their motives,” says co-creator Alex Porter. “Through that process you start to realise the ways in which you were wrong about all the people around you, and start to find these kind of exciting stories that they have to tell.”
From DSC: Virtual Reality could have a significant impact in diversity training. (I don’t like the word diversity too much; as in my experience, everybody in the Fortune 5oo companies where I worked belonged in the realm of diversity except for Christians, but I’ll use it here anyway.)
The point is…when you can put yourself into someone else’s shoes, it could have some positive impact in terms of better being able to relate to what that person is going through.
What if there was a new way to start this journey? What if you walked into the room and boarded a starship instead? What would a school experience be like if we sent our students on a mission, joining a global team to learn and solve our world’s most pressing problems? What if they met in Virtual Reality? For example, literally experiencing the streets of Paris if they were studying French culture or urban planning. Examining first hand the geology of volcanoes or building the next generation transportation? What would happen if they are given a problem they could not answer on their own, a problem that requires collaboration and teamwork with colleagues to find a solution?
Here is how VR and AI can empower the future of learning. The Star Trek: Bridge Crew VR Game gives us a glimpse of how we can engage with our students. Or, as Levar Burton (Geordi La Forge from Engineering) in the video trailer puts it:
There is something different being in a shared virtual environment . . . The team does not succeed unless everybody does their job well.
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In the true spirit of Star Trek it is through cooperation rather than competition that we learn best. In VR, you can sit on any of the crew chairs and be the captain, engineer, or doctor and experience events from very different point of views. In Star Trek: Bridge Crew, you are flying the ship but have to work collaboratively with your team. You have to work with your crew to reach goals and accomplish the mission as this is virtual reality as a social experience. It demands that you be fully engaged.
Think “virtual reality,” and it’s probably video gaming that comes to mind. CSU is looking to expand the breadth and depth of this emerging technical field with a campus-wide Virtual Reality Initiative, launching this semester.
The initiative will give students and the science community hands-on experience with virtual reality, for research and educational applications.
Virtual reality (VR) is a way of experiencing virtual worlds or objects – the cockpit of a spaceship, an anatomy lesson, a walk through a historical building – through devices like computers, goggles or headsets designed to immerse someone in a simulated environment. VR touches fields ranging from design to art to engineering.
In case you haven’t heard, there is a lot of hype right now about virtual and augmented reality. Three months into 2016, investors have already spent 1.1 billion dollars to get a piece of the action.
Still, I am confident that virtual reality will revolutionize how we learn, and the reason is simple. Virtual reality is not just a technology, it’s a medium. And I’ve seen how powerful that medium can be.
A Chinese surgeon has discovered a practical application for augmented reality in the medical field. Using the same technology by which a Pokemon character is layered onto a real-life setting, two surgical images can be combined into a single view, eliminating the need for surgeons to watch two separate screens simultaneously.
Catherine Chan Po-ling, a surgeon in Hong Kong and co-founder of MedEXO Robotics, says that the use of augmented reality technology in keyhole, or minimally invasive, surgery can solve one of the biggest problems for surgeons performing these procedures.
Currently, surgeons in keyhole procedures must create and view two images simultaneously. In Chan’s example, when checking for cancerous cells in the liver, the surgeon operates a regular camera showing a view of the surface of the liver, and at the same time operates an ultrasound probe to check beneath the surface of the liver.
Given the explosion of interest in virtual reality among media organizations, we sought in January to establish best practices and ideal scenarios for using the technology in storytelling through our inaugural immersive journalism class at Stanford University.
During the 10-week course, 12 undergraduate and graduate students evaluated a range of virtual reality experiences published by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC News and others. We compared commercially available virtual reality headsets (Google Cardboard, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear/VR and Oculus Rift) for ease and quality as well as virtual reality cameras — the (more expensive but expansive) GoPro and the (more affordable) Ricoh Theta S.
Virtual reality used to be the thing of science fiction books and movies. Now, it’s inexpensive, works with the technology we carry in our pockets, and can transform us to real and imaginary places.
This is a big day for Virtual Reality. Today, Lytro is proud to announce “Moon,” the first ever live-action 6DoF VR experience in history.
To understand why this is a historic day for VR, let’s take a step back and look at the current landscape. Today, there are two kinds of experiences available in VR.
High Immersion (6DoF), Low Realism. The first type of experience is produced using real-time game engines. These experiences are highly immersive – they allow the viewer to move around a virtual space in six degrees of freedom – 6DoF (3 to rotate your head, and 3 to move around in the space). But, the imagery these experiences can show is limited to computer-generated content that renders in just a few milliseconds. Despite advances in real-time game-engine technology, these experiences cannot yet be photorealistic. And of course, they cannot capture the real world.
Low Immersion (3DoF), High Realism. The second type of VR experience available today is 360 video. These experiences are “high realism” – they can show imagery created by filming the real world or by spending tens or hundreds of hours rendering a single computer-generated frame. But, these experiences aren’t “high immersion” because the viewer is stuck to a single point in space – in fact, the viewer is really just watching video projected on a sphere around her head. We call this 3DoF – the viewer has only the 3 degrees of freedom to rotate her head.
Neither of these brings us the “jet-packs and flying cars” future VR has promised. The true promise of VR is to transport us to real and fictional places with full fidelity – to feel like we’re there with all our senses, and to believe that we’re there because of the realism of our new surroundings. This promised future requires BOTH “high realism” AND “high immersion” (6DoF) – a combination that no technology has been capable of. Until now.
The first truly awesome chatbot is a talking T. Rex — from fastcodesign.com by John Brownlee National Geographic uses a virtual Tyrannosaur to teach kids about dinosaurs—and succeeds where other chatbots fail.
Excerpt:
As some have declared chatbots to be the “next webpage,” brands have scrambled to develop their own talkative bots, letting you do everything from order a pizza to rewrite your resume. The truth is, though, that a lot of these chatbots are actually quite stupid, and tend to have a hard time understanding natural human language. Sooner or later, users get frustrated bashing their heads up against the wall of a dim-witted bot’s AI.
So how do you design around a chatbot’s walnut-sized brain? If you’re National Geographic Kids UK, you set your chatbot to the task of pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus rex, a Cretaceous-era apex predator that really had a walnut-sized brain (at least comparatively speaking).
She’s called Tina the T. rex, and by making it fun to learn about dinosaurs, she suggests that education — rather than advertising or shopping — might be the real calling of chatbots.
Dropping a child off at college is a stressful experience. I should know — I dropped off one last week and another today. It’s confusing because everything is so new, your child (who is actually a young adult, how did that happen?) is anxious, and you usually have to settle up on your finances.
This situation happens to be ideal for a chatbot, because the administrative staff is way too busy to handle questions in person or by phone. There might be someone directing you in the parking lot, but not everyone standing around in the student center knows how to submit FAFSA data.
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One of the main reasons for thinking of this is that I would have used one myself today. It’s a situation where you want immediate, quick information without having to explain all of the background information. You just need the campus map or the schedule for the day — that’s it. You don’t want any extra frills.
From DSC: My question is:
Will Instructional Designers, Technical Communicators, e-Learning Designers, Trainers, (and other positions as as well) going to have to know how to build chatbots in the future? Our job descriptions could be changing soon. Or will this kind of thing require more programming-related skills? Perhaps more firms like the one below could impact that situation…
Grush: Is there a signpost you might point to that would indicate that there’s going to be more product development in AR/VR/MR?
Christian: There’s a significant one. Several major players — with very deep pockets — within the corporate world are investing in new forms of HCI, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Magic Leap, and others. In fact, according to an article on engadget.com from 6/16/16, “Magic Leap has amassed an astounding $1.39 billion in funding without shipping an actual product.” So to me, it’s just not likely that the billions of dollars being invested in a variety of R&D-related efforts are simply going to evaporate without producing any impactful, concrete products or services. There are too many extremely smart, creative people working on these projects, and they have impressive financial backing behind their research and product development efforts. So, I think we can expect an array of new choices in AR/VR/MR.
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Just the other day I was talking to Jason VanHorn, an associate professor in our geology, geography, and environmental studies department. After finishing our discussion about a particular learning space and how we might implement active learning in it, we got to talking about mixed reality. He related his wonderful dreams of being able to view, manipulate, maneuver through, and interact with holographic displays of our planet Earth.
When I mentioned a video piece done by Case Western and the Cleveland Clinic that featured Microsoft’s Hololens technology, he knew exactly what I was referring to. But this time, instead of being able to drill down through the human body to review, explore, and learn about the various systems composing our human anatomy, he wanted to be able to drill down through the various layers of the planet Earth. He also wanted to be able to use gestures to maneuver and manipulate the globe — turning the globe to just the right spot before using a gesture to drill down to a particular place.
Audi’s traffic light information system is first step in vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) integration, set to launch in select smart cities Fall 2016 in the U.S. | Credit: Audi
Excerpt:
For more than a decade, the DOT has been researching the potential benefits of connected vehicle technology, which allows vehicles to communicate with each other, roadway infrastructure, traffic management centers and consumer mobile devices.
Smart machine technologies will be the most disruptive class of technologies over the next 10 years, including smart robots, autonomous cars and smart workspaces.
— Gartner’s research director Mike Walker (source)
Child psychologists have long argued that changing the approach we take to education would help many children learn to love school rather than hate it. We’ve all heard pre-schoolers talk about how they can’t wait to sit at their school desk and run to their next lesson with their rucksack over their shoulder. In fact, we probably remember that feeling of excitement ourselves the first time we went. But right from the first days of school, many children feel a huge sense of disappointment with what they encounter.
At the Saunalahti school in the city of Espoo, Finland, they’ve found a brilliant way to overcome this problem. Starting just with the school building itself, you’d look at it and never think it was a school. Instead, it’s more a like modern art museum – wonderfully light and airy. Experts from VERSTAS Architects made sure they moved well away from the typical dour design for a public school which we all can’t stand…
From DSC: How much longer before the functionalities that are found in tools like Bluescape & Mural are available via tvOS-based devices? Entrepreneurs and VCs out there, take note. Given:
the growth of freelancing and people working from home and/or out on the road
the need for people to collaborate over a distance
the growth of online learning
the growth of active/collaborative learning spaces in K-12 and higher ed
the need for lifelong learning
…this could be a lucrative market. Also, it would be meaningful work…knowing that you are helping people learn and earn.
But the classroom of tomorrow will look very different. The latest advancements in technology and innovation are paving the way for an educational space that’s interactive, engaging and fun.
The conventions of learning are changing. It’s becoming normal for youngsters to use games like Minecraft to develop skills such as team working and problem solving, and for teachers to turn to artificial intelligence to get a better understanding of how their pupils are progressing in lessons.
Virtual reality is also introducing new possibilities in the classroom. Gone are the days of imagining what an Ancient Egyptian tomb might look like – now you can just strap on a headset and transport yourself there in a heartbeat.
The potential for using VR to teach history, geography and other subjects is incredible when you really think about it – and it’s not the only tech that’s going to shake things up.
…
Artificial intelligence is already doing groundbreaking things in areas like robotics, computer science, neuroscience and linguistics, but now they’re now entering the world of education too.
London-based edtech firm Digital Assess has been working on an AI app that has the potential to revolutionise the way youngsters learn.
With the backing of the UK Government, the company has been trialing its web-based application Formative Assess in schools in England.
Using semantic indexing and natural language processing in a similar way to social networking sites, an on-screen avatar – which can be a rubber duck or robot – quizzes students on their knowledge and provides them with individual feedback on their work.
Description:
A new wave of compute technology -fueled by; big data analytics, the internet of things, augmented reality and so on- will change the way we live and work to be more immersive and natural with technology in the role as partner.
We haven’t even scratched the surface of the things technology can do to further human progress. Education is the next major frontier. We already have PC- and smartphone-enabled students, as well as tech-enabled classrooms, but the real breakthrough will be in personalized learning.
Every educator divides his or her time between teaching and interacting. In lectures they have to choose between teaching to the smartest kid in the class or the weakest. Efficiency (and reality) dictates that they must teach to the theoretical median, meaning some students will be bored and some will still struggle. What if a digital assistant could step in to personalize the learning experience for each student, accelerating the curriculum for the advanced students and providing greater extra support for those that need more help? The digital assistant could “sense” and “learn” that Student #1 has already mastered a particular subject and “assign” more advanced materials. And it could provide additional work to Student #2 to ensure that he or she was ready for the next subject. Self-paced learning to supplant and support classroom learning…that’s the next big advancement.
From DSC:
I read the article mentioned below. It made me wonder how 3 of the 4 main highlights that Fred mentioned (that are coming to Siri with tvOS 10) might impact education/training/learning-related applications and offerings made possible via tvOS & Apple TV:
Live broadcasts
Topic-based searches
The ability to search YouTube via Siri
The article prompted me to wonder:
Will educators and trainers be able to offer live lectures and training (globally) that can be recorded and later searched via Siri?
What if second screen devices could help learners collaborate and participate in active learning while watching what’s being presented on the main display/”TV?”
What if learning taken this way could be recorded on one’s web-based profile, a profile that is based upon blockchain-based technologies and maintained via appropriate/proven organizations of learning? (A profile that’s optionally made available to services from Microsoft/LinkedIn.com/Lynda.com and/or to a service based upon IBM’s Watson, and/or to some other online-based marketplace/exchange for matching open jobs to potential employees.)
Or what if you could earn a badge or prove a competency via this manner?
Hmmm…things could get very interesting…and very powerful.
More choice. More control. Over one’s entire lifetime.
The forthcoming update to Apple TV continues to bring fresh surprises for owners of Apple’s set top box. Many improvements are coming to tvOS 10, including single-sign-on support and an upgrade to Siri’s capabilities. Siri has already opened new doors thanks to the bundled Siri Remote, which simplifies many functions on the Apple TV interface. Four main highlights are coming to Siri with tvOS 10, which is expected to launch this fall.
CBS today announced the launch of an all-new Apple TV app that will center around the network’s always-on, 24-hour “CBSN” streaming network and has been designed exclusively for tvOS. In addition to the live stream of CBSN, the app curates news stories and video playlists for each user based on previously watched videos.
The new app will also take advantage of the 4th generation Apple TV’s deep Siri integration, allowing users to tell Apple’s personal assistant that they want to “Watch CBS News” to immediately start a full-screen broadcast of CBSN. While the stream is playing, users can interact with other parts of the app to browse related videos, bookmark some to watch later, and begin subscribing to specific playlists and topics.
From DSC: I postedan item yesterday warning parents of the potential dangers of Pokémon Go. But I don’t want to leave it at that. I’m generally pro-technology and there are many solid, good, positive reasons for using most technologies. So I also want to post some other, more positive items showing the enormous success of this augmented reality (AR)-based app.
But let’s end with some larger implications for learning, particularly organizational learning.
New hire training: tour facilities with augmented reality or virtual reality. Meet key folks in the organization. See behind the scenes production, or visit HQ virtually.
Skill refinement: once the basics have been taught, present ongoing practice scenarios. Could be internal, customer-facing, or software/equipment training.
Product training: provide the ability to interact with multiple customers and see how the product benefits them differently.
Application in context: how do you navigate a real-life complex environment effectively? Think busy retail, insurance adjusters, combat/disaster zones, crime scenes, etc.
Just in time geographically relevant support: have a question in context? What if an app let you access training and tips relevant to where you are?
Students with hearing disabilities face unique challenges inside the classroom. Many common learning modes that people take for granted — lectures, discussion groups and even one-on-one conversations — can be a struggle for those who have any level of hearing difficulty. However, that doesn’t mean a college degree is out of reach. Today’s wide range of tools, devices and systems can help students who are deaf or hard of hearing thrive in an educational setting. This guide focuses on those resources, tech tools and expert tips that students of all ages can use achieve academic success.
![The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV](http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian-July-2012.jpg)
