Section archive - Technology & Computers

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the creation of a National Center for Cyber Education to train young people in a sector he views as key. The new facility will have a $6 million budget over the next five years, Netanyahu told students on Tuesday in Tel Aviv on the sidelines of the Cybertech 2017 international conference. Its aim will be to “increase the number and raise the level of young Israelis for their future integration into the Israeli security services, industry and the academic world,” he said in a statement released by his office. It will focus on “the development of programs and education for children, youth and graduates in the cyber sphere,” it added.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, is one of several museums and institutions tapping into the potential of online presence and social media campaigns to raise awareness among an audience that increasingly has little first-person contact with the horrors of the Holocaust. “We realized in the last couple of years, particularly in social media, that people want to do something more participatory. It’s fine to read, learn and explore, but with the opportunity to engage with a particular topic or issue, people really want to do something,” said Dana Porath, Yad Vashem’s Internet Department Director. Porath, who was a Jewish educator for 15 years in North America before moving to Israel, began working at Yad Vashem in 1994 and joined the fledgling internet department in 1999. Today, the museum’s online presence is robust and growing. Five years ago, Yad Vashem began the IRemember Wall project in which participants are linked with specific names of victims. The algorithm is purposefully random, because, said Porath, “Every victim deserves to be remembered.” The project is held only once a year for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Said Porath, it becomes “a collective experience” that combines the wall and the comments it garners. She said she expects to reach at least 3,000 participants this year.

Digital safety concerns, socio-economic status, pedagogical beliefs, and religious beliefs can all impact technology decisions within a school. Despite the unique contextual factors that influence school technology decision-making, teachers and students are still charged with using technology for teaching and learning in order to be 21st century learners. The purpose of this study was to explore how one Bais Yaakov school community, an all-girls private Jewish school, navigated the tensions of context and technology innovation through their adoption of 1:1 Chromebooks. Grounded theory ethnographic methods and activity theory were employed for data collection and analysis.

As gaming culture continues to proliferate and innovations are constantly being made in the field, Rabbi Owen Gottlieb, an assistant professor of interactive games and media at the Rochester Institute of Technology, found a unique purpose for his latest project: teaching Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah through gaming. During the second day of the two-day conference this week organized by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion on “Crafting Jewish Life in a Complex Religious Landscape,” Gottlieb hosted a session exploring the implication of contemporary and near-future digital and analog technologies for the rediscovery, transformation and extension of various pathways for Jewish learning.