Tuesday, April 30

Tag: digital

Making the most of K-12 digital textbooks and online educational tools
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EDUCATION

Making the most of K-12 digital textbooks and online educational tools

Whether children are currently going to school in person, learning remotely or doing a mix of both, digital tools and texts are becoming much more commonplace for K-12 education during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m a professor who researches the use of technology in education. I’m also the father of three children between the ages of 4 and 9 who are all learning from home. You might think it would be easy for me to get used to this new normal. Sadly, that’s not true. Despite all my technical know-how, even I struggle to manage the large variety of digital tools and apps that my children use for schoolwork, let alone the numerous websites, accounts and passwords from their classes that my family has to keep track of. Beneficial but complex The transition from relying mainly on physical textb...
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Race and class can color teachers’ digital expectations for their students – with white students getting more encouragement
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EDUCATION

Race and class can color teachers’ digital expectations for their students – with white students getting more encouragement

Schools that rely on remote learning during the pandemic are trying to ensure that all kids have the devices and internet bandwidth they need. While important, it takes more than everyone having comparable equipment and working WiFi for all children to get an equal shot. In my new book based on the sociological research I conducted at three middle schools before the COVID-19 pandemic, I explain how even if all students could get the same hardware and software, it would fail to even the academic playing field. I saw many technologies used in unequal ways. And I observed teachers responding differently to students’ digital skills depending on the race or ethnicity and economic status of most of their students. Learning from digital play Previous research by a team of University of Californ...
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COVID-19 lockdowns expose the digital have-nots in rural areas – here’s which policies can get them connected
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COVID-19, POLITICS

COVID-19 lockdowns expose the digital have-nots in rural areas – here’s which policies can get them connected

The current public health emergency has shown just how critical adequate and affordable broadband infrastructure is for communities and individuals trying to work, access health care and attempt to teach kids from home. Yet over one-fifth of rural Americans lack access to broadband, while some estimates suggest that figure could be much higher. The problem has spurred many state governments to take an active role in trying to connect more rural communities to high-speed internet, whether it’s by incentivizing providers to serve rural areas or creating dedicated offices aimed at helping more people get online. As part of our ongoing research on how broadband access affects economic development, we conducted a study that examined which of these state policies are actually working. Why bro...
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Digital contact tracing’s mixed record abroad spells trouble for US efforts to rein in COVID-19
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COVID-19

Digital contact tracing’s mixed record abroad spells trouble for US efforts to rein in COVID-19

Two public health measures – testing, to identify those infected, and contact tracing, to identify those who may have encountered an infected person – have become essential as countries around the world reopen their economies and fresh surges of COVID-19 infections appear. Even as testing ramps up, contact tracing with a wide enough net remains a daunting task. Contact tracing involves public health staff conducting interviews with infected people. Public health experts are calling for 180,000 more contact tracers, but progress on contact tracing has not been going well, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Enter digital innovations that offer a tantalizing promise: to automate the laborious task of alerting people who hav...
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Coronavirus-related debt will live in digital profiles for years – hurting Americans’ ability to get jobs, apartments and credit
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COVID-19

Coronavirus-related debt will live in digital profiles for years – hurting Americans’ ability to get jobs, apartments and credit

Long after the COVID-19 health emergency ends, many Americans will still suffer from the long tail of the pandemic’s economic devastation. For people on the country’s economic fringes, the proliferation of data analytics tools to monitor consumer life – driven by companies that profit from gathering personal data – will magnify today’s financial hardship. These companies scrape data from your public records, social media interactions, purchase history and smartphone location tracking. Using powerful technologies, they fuse your data into digital profiles that landlords, employers, lenders and other gatekeepers to life’s necessities use to sort and screen people. As a clinical law professor who represents low-income people in consumer cases, I’m concerned that the pandemic’s economic fall...
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Online learning and the digital divide will make it even harder for some kids
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COVID-19, Journalism, VIDEO REELS

Online learning and the digital divide will make it even harder for some kids

More than 10,600 of the nation’s public and private schools were closing at least temporarily by March 12 as communities scrambled to protect themselves from the COVID-19 viral disease pandemic. With little or no time to prepare for this disruption, families from Seattle to the New York City suburbs are suddenly having to figure out how to help their kids learn at home. This is an unprecedented effort that so far involves at least 7 million children. The total is rising fast with closures in entire states like Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, Oregon, New Mexico and Kentucky. Indiana University, where I teach, recently announced that we’ll stop offering in-person classes and move all instruction online after spring break ends on March 22. On top of setting up live-streaming channels for the 250 ...
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Don’t fear a ‘robot apocalypse’ – tomorrow’s digital jobs will be more satisfying and higher-paid
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TECHNOLOGY

Don’t fear a ‘robot apocalypse’ – tomorrow’s digital jobs will be more satisfying and higher-paid

If you’re concerned that automation and artificial intelligence are going to disrupt the economy over the next decade, join the club. But while policymakers and academics agree there’ll be significant disruption, they differ about its impact. On one hand, techno-pessimists like Martin Ford in “Rise of the Robots” argue that new forms of automation will displace most jobs without creating new ones. In other words, most of us will lose our jobs. On the flip side of the debate are techno-optimists such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee. In “The Second Machine Age,” they contend that continued investments in education and research and development will offset the job losses and generate many new human tasks that complement AI. While I can’t predict who will turn out to be right, I do ha...
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How Steep Is That Sidewalk? A Digital Map for People With Disabilities
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SOCIAL JUSTICE

How Steep Is That Sidewalk? A Digital Map for People With Disabilities

For disabled people, getting around Seattle is a constant challenge. This app wants to make it easier and safer. Most people know about Seattle’s rain, but they’re surprised to learn that the city, especially the downtown area, is steeper than Denver, the “Mile High City.” Seattle’s hills can render many buildings and businesses, including places like City Hall, inaccessible to people with mobility needs. For those people, apps such as Google Maps are not especially helpful because they show only the fastest way to get from point A to point B; nonmotorized routes are usually calculated based on the assumption that people will be on foot and can get into any entrance. They don’t take into account the angle of the hill needed to negotiate, whether there’s a curb cut, or ...
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TECHNOLOGY

Facebook: No digital currency until regulator concerns addressed

Amid its privacy scandals, the company is drawing new criticism over its plans for a new cryptocurrency. Facebook Inc. won't launch Libra, the controversial cryptocurrency it's planning to build with dozens of partner firms, until regulators' concerns are fully addressed, according to the company's top executive on the project. David Marcus, who will appear before members of both houses of U.S. Congress to discuss the project this week, said Facebook will also get "appropriate approvals" before launching Libra. The cryptocurrency isn't intended to compete with countries' national currencies and won't interfere with central banks on monetary policy, Marcus said in testimony prepared for a July 16 hearing before the Senate Banking Committee. "T...
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Digital Marketing Trends – Targeting the African-American Consumer
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Journalism

Digital Marketing Trends – Targeting the African-American Consumer

Do you plan to market or sell products and services to African-American consumers? If so, in order to successfully market to this community, it is to your advantage to understand certain digital marketing trends: how today's African-Americans shop, where they hang out, where they are most likely to be receptive to advertising and, more importantly, how they feel about marketing and media. It's been said that "2014 is going to be a killer year for social media and small business." It's also been said that properly implemented digital marketing strategies can help small businesses grow. So, what does this mean for small businesses that plan to primarily target Black American consumers? It means you need a realistic understanding of where Black consumers fit in this new media and cybercul...
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