Paulo Simões

Digital technologies have made their way into all aspects of our lives that influence our wellbeing – affecting everything from social relationships and curiosity to engagement and learning.

Psychologists have generally focused on the negative impacts of using internet technologies or on the potential of these technologies to be used to help those suffering from mental health problems.

But recent advances in the development of tools go beyond prevention of disorders to actually promote well-being.

In fact, we may be entering an era of “positive computing”, in which technology will be designed specifically to promote wellbeing and human potential.

A positive outlook

The truth is, engineers such as myself aren’t known for our social and emotional intelligence. It’s no wonder we have seldom focused on the impact the technologies we create have on the psychological wellbeing of the people who use them.

The advent of positive computing provides us with an opportunity to put human potential and wellbeing front and centre when imagining and creating future technologies.

The press keeps the public anxious about the negative impacts of using internet technologies with regular articles on stress and suggestions for coping.

Psychiatrists themselves are planning to add “Internet Addiction” to their official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But we are less aware of how these same technologies can be used to help those suffering from mental health problems, or how they might help all of us live happier and psychologically healthier lives.

Researchers have begun to investigate how internet technologies such as e-mail, and social media platforms such as Facebook, could support young people in crisis, adults suffering from depression, and encourage smartphone users to be more mindful.

Those efforts come as we are seeing technology, psychology and neuroscience converge. On one hand, engineers are getting more involved in issues of human emotion, values and well-being, as well as recognising the need for it and the science behind it.

There is also an emerging interest among mental health professionals to understand how technology can be used – not only to treat illness – but also for a larger mission to promote positive psychology and optimum mental health in everyone.

New moves

Ian Hickie and I, at the University of Sydney, recently began a three-year project in collaboration with the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre and the Inspire Foundation, in which we will conduct research to inform the development of an online clinic, a semi-automated triage system and an online hub where young people can download tools and applications to help them improve their wellbeing.

The Young and Well CRC is engaging in multidisciplinary approaches that bring software specialists together with psychologists and other mental health experts to create novel technologies specially designed to promote mental health.

In this, it is not alone. An increasing number of engineers and computer scientists are working, within multidisciplinary teams, on systems that promote pro-social behaviours such as altruism, empathy, resilience and mindfulness.

In a recent study published in PLOS One, a team at Stanford University, led by the cognitive psychologist Jeremy Bailenson, used augmented virtual reality games to develop helping behaviours – altruism, in other words.

Simply super

Half of the 60 participants who completed the study were given the virtual power to fly like Superman (the “superhero” condition), while the other half flew in a virtual helicopter. In the two-by-two design, participants in each of these groups were also allocated to either helping to find a lost sick child or tour a virtual city.

At the end of the virtual-reality experience, participants were confronted by someone who needed help (the dependent behavioural condition).

The researchers measured the time to, and amount of, help provided by those in the different experimental conditions, and the results showed those in the superhero condition were significantly faster and helped more than those in the touring conditions.

Six of the touring participants didn’t help at all, while every one of the former superheroes did.

Although the researchers hypothesised that the embodied experience of helping facilitated the transfer of this behaviour to the real-world, other studies have shown similar correlations between “positive” pro-social games and pro-social behaviours with lower tech immersion.

No worries

Technologies that foster the factors correlated to psychological wellbeing are only likely to become more common.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has recently funded a project led by neuroscientist Professor Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to develop mobile applications that support the development of children’s mindfulness skills.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard recently launched wellbeing@school, a component of ReachOut.com, a highly successful online service delivered by the internet-based Inspire Foundation. These resources are mapped to the Australian Curriculum and will be offered at no cost to schools.

Research such as this, together with case studies from around the world, will be described in a forthcoming book I am co-authoring for The MIT Press with digital designer Dorian Peters at the University of Sydney.

The book, Positive Computing: Technology for a Better World, outlines the landscape of positive computing, an emerging field of research and practice dedicated to the investigation and design of technologies that support psychological well-being and human potential.

We believe that this research will bring together research and methodologies well-established in psychology, engineering, education and neuroscience, to begin a new era of digital experiences that are deeply human-centred.

It was Aristotle that said all our efforts in life are ultimately about seeking wellbeing – shouldn’t designers of technology be our allies on this journey?

Rafael A. Calvo receives funding from the ARC, the Young and Well CRC and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SCHRCA). Rafael A. Calvo has received funding from Google and the Office of Learning and Teaching

The curiously revered world of irrational nonsense has seeped into almost every aspect of modern society and is both complex and multifarious. Therefore rather than attempt a comprehensive taxonomy, I have opted instead for a gross oversimplification and a rather pretty Venn Diagram.

In my gross over simplification the vast majority of the multitude of evidenced-free beliefs at large in the world can be crudely classified into four basic sets or bollocks. Namely, Religion, Quackery, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal.

However as such nonsensical beliefs continue to evolve they become more and more fanciful and eventually creep across the bollock borders. Although all the items depicted on the diagram are completely bereft of any form of scientific credibility, those that successfully intersect the sets achieve new heights of implausibility and ridiculousness. And there is one belief so completely ludicrous it successfully flirts with all forms of bollocks.

Religious Bollocks ∩ Quackery Bollocks ∩ Pseudoscientific Bollocks ∩ Paranormal Bollocks = Scientology






UPDATE 24th March 2013

Many thanks for the retweets and shares.

I have also received the first translated copy of the Venn Diagram produced by Pavle Močilac of the Croatian Society for Promotion of Science and Critical Thinking.



Italian translation courtesy of Andrea Mirra



Spanish translation via @Cienciaaldía



If I receive any other translations I shall post them here with the original.




BTW, Its been awfully nice to have seen the Diagram popping up all over the interwebs in the last few days, but if you could so kind as to link back to here you'll be sure to have the latest version in case I make any updates.




FURTHER UPDATE 27th March


I conceived the Venn Diargram of Irrational Nonsense in the car on my way home from work last Wednesday, and quickly knocked it up when I got home. However, I didn't publish it immediatley as I was pondering the feasability of adding a fifth set.

I spent a few hours the following night attempting to add a fifth set, but the diagram was getting cluttered and the fonts too small, so eventually I reluctantly abondened the five set version and posted the original four set version from the previous night.

I have however, seen a fair few comments suggesting that the diagram might benefit from a conspiracy theorist dimension, however, before I've had a chance to have another crack at it, I noticed dehydrationstation has beaten me to it. I think it came out OK.(although I would have used the word "bollocks" a bit more myself.

Philadelphia — A lot of the discussion about massive open online courses has revolved around students and professors. What role can academic librarians play in the phenomenon, and what extra responsibilities do MOOCs create for them?

At a conference held here at the University of Pennsylvania last week, librarians talked about the chances and challenges that open online courses throw their way. The conference, “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?,” was organized by OCLC, a library cooperative that runs the WorldCat online catalog and provides other services and library-related research.

Lynne O’Brien, director of academic technology and instructional services at Duke University, said the “rapid uptake” of MOOCs had taken many people by surprise. As she put it, “These courses don’t seem to fit anything of the model that we have for how to do online education well.” She’s been hearing from instructors that “the process of preparing courses for this environment made them rethink” how they teach their on-campus courses. “Faculty have said it’s a huge amount of work but that it’s also a wonderful opportunity,” she said.

Librarians who get involved in MOOCs should be prepared to deal with “lots of interesting questions for an international audience” of students, Ms. O’Brien said. MOOCs attract students with very different skill sets, languages, technological setups, and knowledge.

Ms. O’Brien shared some statistics about the global distribution of students who have enrolled in Duke’s online courses: 37 percent come from North America, 31 percent from Europe, 16 percent from Asia, 10 percent from Latin America and the Caribbean, 3 percent from Oceania, and only 2 percent from Africa. Many don’t have reliable Internet connections or can’t view course materials that require Adobe Flash Reader.

Ms. O’Brien had one piece of basic advice for librarians wondering what to make of MOOC mania: Take a MOOC or two to see what they’re really like. “You can’t be a valued adviser if you don’t understand what it takes to do one of these courses,” she told the audience.

Brown University will start three MOOCs this June on a platform provided by Coursera. Sarah Bordac, the university’s head of instructional design, advised libraries to think carefully about the specific pedagogical requirements of each MOOC before they rushed to get involved. “There is a lot of new time being put into these new projects,” she said.

Ms. Bordac described some of the many jobs librarians could be called on to do in support of MOOCs. Library personnel might need to negotiate with publishers over course materials, help make fair-use decisions, track down public-domain images, provide digital production services, set up teaching spaces and equipment, and/or provide TAs with extra support, especially when the lead professor is also very busy with on-campus courses. At Brown, Ms. Bordac said, she serves as “a connector” among many several different offices and groups, including the university counsel’s office, media services, and the university library.

Several panelists said that working on MOOCs can be a great way to heighten instructors’ awareness about open access and the licensing of course materials. Jennifer Dorner is the head of instruction and user services at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is a real opportunity to educate faculty about the need for owning the rights to their content and making it accessible to other people,” Ms. Dorner said in one session. “This is a really good place for us to educate them about open source and push them in that direction.”

In the summer of 2012, Berkeley joined the nonprofit edX venture, founded by Harvard University and MIT. Ms. Dorner said the university had a wide assortment of online-education offerings beyond edX. That gives students a lot of options. It can also be a headache for librarians asked to provide support for many different kinds of courses. “The lack of coordination and lack of centralization really do pose challenges for the library,” Ms. Dorner said.

To help figure out strategies for dealing with those challenges, librarians from all of the edX partner institutions have formed two working groups, Ms. Dorner said. One group is looking into the issue of access to content; the other is talking about the research skills that MOOCs require and how librarians can help students develop those skills.

Merrilee Proffitt, a senior program officer for OCLC, helped organize the conference. In a phone conversation afterward, she said it’s very early days for MOOCs, too early for libraries to rush to build MOOC support into their core services. Not every online course “is going to require library support,” she said.

But librarians also can’t afford to sit back and let the phenomenon develop without their input. “It’s important for libraries to be engaged in the conversation and present and watching,” Ms. Proffitt said. “This is a great time for experimentation.”

I'm currently in the process of developing new digital handouts for my blogging workshops. One of the items that I'm adding to my handouts is a list of terminology and definitions for terms that I frequently use while talking about building blogs. My preliminary list is posted below. Are there terms that you think should be added to the list?

Theme: WordPress and many other blogging platforms use “themes” to describe the look of a blog. The theme can include the color scheme and the layout of elements on the blog. Changing the theme does not change the content of your blog posts.

Template: Blogger and some other blogging platforms use the term “template” to describe the look of a blog. The template can include the color scheme and the layout of elements on the blog. Changing your template does not change the content of your blog posts.

Tag: Tags are applied to WordPress (Kidblog, Edublogs) blog posts to identify the key ideas or purpose of a post. Tags make it easier for people to search and find older posts on your blog. For example, if you write a post about your Revolutionary War lesson, tag it with “revolution” or “revolutionary war” so that at the end of the school year when you have 150 posts on your blog your students can quickly click on the “revolution” tag and jump to the post that have that label. It’s a lot easier to locate older posts by tag than it is to click through archives by date.

Label: Labels are applied to Blogger blog posts to identify the key ideas or purpose of a post. For example, if you write a blog post about your Revolutionary War lesson plan, label it with “revolution” or “revolutionary war” so that at the end of the school year when you have 150 posts on your blog your students can quickly click on the “revolution” label and jump to the posts that have that label. It’s a lot easier to locate older posts by label than it is to click through archives by date.

Tag Cloud and Label Cloud: Tag and Label clouds can be added to your blog’s homepage to make it easy for visitors to see the tags or labels that you use, click on one of them, and jump to a list of all of the posts that have that particular label.

Categories: In WordPress-powered blogs you can use categories for broad descriptions of posts in addition to using tags. For example, on iPadApps4School.com I use the categories “pre-K,” “elementary school,” “middle school,” and “high school.” I assign each post to a category and use tags for describing the academic topic of the post. This way if someone visits my blog looking for math apps appropriate for elementary school he or she can click on the “math” tag then click on the “elementary school” category to find all of my posts meeting that search criteria.

Embed: To display a video, slideshow, audio recording, Google Calendar, Google Map, game, and many other multimedia elements in a blog post you will use an embed code provided by service hosting that media. Embedding media into a blog post does not make you the owner of it and as long as you follow the guidelines set forth by the hosting service you are not violating copyright by embedding something you didn’t create. For example, when you find a video on YouTube that you want your students to watch you can embed it into a blog post and ask students to comment on the blog post. If the owner of that video decides to take it offline the video will no longer play through your blog post.

Embed Codes: An embed code is a piece of code, often HTML, that media hosting services like YouTube provide so that you can easily display the media that they host in your own blog posts. On some services like SlideShare.net an embed code will be clearly labeled as such next to the media you’re viewing. On other services the embed code will be one of the options that appears when you click on the “share” option. YouTube, for example, currently requires you to open the “share” menu before you see the embed code option.

Widget: A widget is a small application that you can include in the posts and or pages of your blog. A widget could be a game, a display of Tweets, a display of RSS feeds, a tag cloud, a calendar, or any other application that offers an embed code.

Gadget: Gadget is the term that Blogger uses for a widget. A gadget and a widget do the same things.

Plug-in: A plug-in (sometimes plugin) is a small application that you can add to the software that powers your blog. Unlike widgets and gadgets plug-ins operate in the background and visitors to your blog will not see them working. A plug-in can add functions to your blog such as suggesting related posts to your visitors or detecting the type of device a visitor is using to view your blog then automatically displaying the mobile or desktop version of your blog’s layout.

Post: “Post” can refer to an entry on your blog as in “a blog post.” “Post” can also be used as a verb as in “I am going to post a new entry on my blog.”

Page: A page on a blog is different than a post because a page is designed for static content. Pages are good for posting information that you want visitors to your blog to be able to quickly access. For example, my classroom blog had pages for curriculum outlines and review guides.

Permalink: Each blog post is assigned its own separate URL this is known as a permalink (permanent link). This URL is the one that you would share if you wanted someone to directly access a post rather than going to your blog’s homepage then searching for the post.

This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers .

There is no doubt that you have heard about the uproar on Twitter and the blogosphere: Google Reader is shutting down.

As of July 1, 2013 Google will discontinue Google Reader and shut down the site. A lot of people, who have been using Buffer with Google Reader got in touch with us yesterday asking if there is any way to keep reading their RSS feeds whilst sharing their articles with Buffer. And most importantly a Google Reader alternative to be safe after the site shuts down.

And fortunately, the answer is yes. There are a few amazing apps you can check out that come with full Buffer integration who are awesome Google Reader alternatives. Here is a list of the top 8:

1.) Feedly (Web, iPhone & iPad)

Without doubt Feedly tops the list. Feedly comes with full Buffer support for both the web and iOS. And the integration, so users tell us, is the most seamless way to share great articles, links and more with Buffer.

On top of that Feedly also announced that they will be a complete replacement for Google Reader. They have created a clone of the Google Reader API and so will create their own infrastructure to support your RSS feeds. Just sign up with Google Reader and you are safe.

 

2.) Reeder (iPhone)

Another one of the favorite apps to used together with Buffer is Reeder. The app, shortly after the Google announcement, also promised all users that their support will continue.

Don’t worry, Reeder won’t die with Google Reader.

— Reeder (@reederapp) March 14, 2013

 

As for Buffer integration, Reeder has one of the slickest way to Buffer your articles from iPhone with the click of a button:

 

3.) Caffeinated (Mac) 

Another beautiful way to keep reading your RSS feeds was announced by Caffeinated. It’s a slick Mac app that lets you add to Buffer super easily whenever you are reading an article:

4.) Feeddler (iPhone)

Another great RSS reader for the iPhone also came to rescue for die hard Google Reader fans. Anyone who is using Feeddler on the iPhone with their RSS feeds connected will be able to do so even after Google shuts down Google Reader.

And the Buffer integration works super slick on Feeddler:

 

5.) Mr. Reader (iPad)

A fantastic way to keep using your RSS feeds from Google Reader for the iPad comes from Mr.Reader. It’s a beautiful app that comes with one of the most advanced Buffer integrations:

Mr.Reader let’s you create templates of how you want to share articles with Buffer. You can for example always use “quotes” a “via username” or a default link shortening option this way:

 

So Google Reader is dead – and that’s a good thing! 

Although at first I was at grief about the death of Google Reader I soon realized what lots of others have noted by now. The fact that Google Reader is dead is awesome. It will allow for lots of innovation in the space to happen that couldn’t before as Google Reader wasn’t changing.

Marco Arment put it very well:

“we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.”

And the fact that this isn’t just a prediction, but something that’s actually happening was quickly proven by Feedly. The startup has built a Google Reader API clone called “Normandy” that will have the exact capabilities that Google Reader had.

And now imagine a few months down the road the amazing things Feedly will be able to build as they continue to innovate as a platform from now onwards. I expect some incredible new things to happen here in the near future. I predict that a few years from now we might joyfully pronounce today even “happy Google-Reader-is-dead day”.

I hope the above apps will help you to seamlessly migrate from Google Reader to other awesome apps. What are your thoughts on these recent developments? Do you see it as much of an opportunity of new awesome things to happen as I do? 

The post Top 5 Google Reader Alternatives that work with Buffer appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..