AKA Review– August 26, 2022

From Inside Higher Education:

College in the Metaverse Is Here. Is Higher Ed Ready?

By Susan D’Agostino

Despite the hype, “metaversity” means little more than introducing VR technology into pedagogy—something this critical overview gets right in its analysis of the origins, development, and future of the metaverse in higher education. The article explores VR’s potential to boost student engagement, satisfaction, and achievement while balancing this with blunt description of threats to academic freedom, risks to data privacy, and expanded reproduction of biased narratives. Read this article

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Ungrading Light: 4 Simple Ways to Ease the Spotlight Off Points
By Michelle D. Miller
“Ungrading,” the practice of de-emphasizing or abolishing grades, has attracted an increasing number of proponents and body of scholarship. Rooted in solid psychology about learning, incentives, and communication, this overview, by a psychologist at Northern Arizona University, examines resistance to and the support for upgrading practices, and offers pragmatic guidance on how to begin de-emphasizing grades in courses and shifting the focus to learning. Read this article

From WIRED:
Humanity's Biggest Problems Require a Whole New Media Mode

By Leo Kim

The scale and complexity of society’s most pressing phenomena—climate change, the line between animal and machine intelligence—defy our perceptual capacities. Such crises are too large, nonhuman, and distributed to fit our current media, which assume (a) belief in a small number of discrete senses and (b) distinctly human meaning. The author reviews research and media that undermine these assumptions and argues for “chimeric media” as varied, human and nonhuman, particular, and monumental as the world they seek to represent. Read this article

From BBC:
The Visionary Artists Creating a Black Utopia
By Arwa Haider
Through conversations with artists participating in a new exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery, In the Black Fantastic, this article explores the intent and meaning behind this new exploration of the Afrofuturist realm. The exhibit features 11 international multi-disciplinary artists, whose far-ranging visions present fresh perspectives on our reality. The exhibition’s curator, Ekow Eshun, explains how “artists from the African diaspora are embracing myth and speculative fiction as a way to grapple with the paradoxes, uncertainties and inequities of the racialized everyday.” Read this article

From Times Higher Education:
Students should be defined by their creativity, not their governments
By Bashir Makhoul
While this article focuses on universities in the United Kingdom, the issues discussed are just as relevant to schools in the United States. With international relations heating up between some countries, it is important that universities maintain international collaboration between institutions. The author argues that closing down branch campuses in countries with questionable human rights practices, or restricting student intakes from these nations, would be a grave mistake breaking bridges rather than building them. Read this article