Educational Growth
Making Virtual Reality a Reality: Designing Educational Initiatives in Libraries with Emerging Technologies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ximin Mi, Ashley Schick, Alison Valk
This study steps readers through the key components of developing library-led research and programming that leverages virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) and augmented reality (AR) with the goal of engaging students and faculty. The authors present readers with tools for assessing their level of organizational readiness to begin such programs; and more importantly, how to sustain them with limited budgets, expertise, and resources. Building on their experiences, the authors present the steps for developing technology- rich classes, assessing student projects, and overcoming technical hurdles. By way of these methods, they spotlight how this kind of programming is integral to building strategic partnerships in an educational environment. Readers will also learn how to adapt and design programs or initiatives in which the necessary technologies are rapidly changing, not only in higher education institutions, but also in K-12 schools. Alison Valk and Ximin Mi are both librarians at Georgia Tech who work regularly with emerging technologies in support of the campus curriculum. Combined, the authors have led several hundred software workshops and coordinated a VR/AR for-credit undergraduate research course for the last two years. Ashley Schick is an artist and Upper School teacher at the Lovett School who works across curriculums, blending traditional and modern technologies.
Media Literacy Education: A Final Call to Act View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sam Nkana
Media scholars have for decades agitated for a need to incorporate media literacy components in school curriculums and make intentional efforts to teach them. Various countries such as England, Australia, Canada, and many others have played major roles in equipping schools with the ability to help students become media literate individuals. However, the United States, which produces massive amounts of media content, and has included media literacy elements in 50 states, has lagged behind all the other countries. With all the media messages we encounter today, it is imperative that action be taken now to foster students’ ability to encode, decode, criticize, and analyze these messages if they are to function well in today’s society.
Health Information on the Internet: Relevant Search Results about Radon
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Noel Pascual Presa, Lucía Ortigueira Piñeiro, Noemi Fernández Folgueira, David Losada, Berta García Orosa, Marcos Fernández Pichel
The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified radon as a type 1 carcinogen and scientific evidence proves that indoor radon exposure is the leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers and the second leading cause in smokers. Several studies rank the Internet as one of the most important sources of health-related information and highlight its ability to motivate behavioral changes to reduce the potential health effects associated with a risk. The objective of this research is to analyze the relevance of radon-related results when users submit certain information needs to search engines. This study is conducted by a multidisciplinary team (journalism-communication-computer science) that allows approaching this research from different perspectives and methodologies. To carry out this analysis, we ran the radon-related searches against a large web corpus (C4). This is a colossal, cleaned version of Common Crawl's web crawl corpus. We indexed this web collection and, next, searched for webpages relevant to 51 radon-related information needs. Given the retrieved webpages, we employed Deep Linguistic technologies to extract the passages that are the most related to the information need. A set of relevance assessment guidelines were then defined and the passages were tagged (non-relevant, relevant and highly relevant) by three different assessors. The obtained results highlight the difficulty of finding information on the Internet that is either relevant or highly relevant to users' information needs about radon gas. This is the first study of its kind on radon information on the Internet, allowing further in-depth research in this field.
