The Meth Lab

Jef Raskin, my father, (below) helped develop the Macintosh, and I was recently looking at some of his old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh.

Real identity has improved the tone and tenor of interaction online.

Anonymity has its place. It protects the speech of Chinese dissidents, Iranian protestors, and corporate whistleblowers. It allows Wikileaks to expose secrets. It helps people share, for example, medical data and benefit others without having to reveal themselves.

But anonymity is often the cloak of cowards.

The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.

Pianopub is a free Pandora internet radio player for OS X.

Continuous deployment is the idea that you push out changes to your code base all the time instead of doing large builds and pushing out big chunks of code.

At Etsy, they push out code about 25 times per day. It has worked out very well for Etsy and has led to faster cycles, improved morale, and a more stable and reliable web service.

I asked how to roll back the changes. He said "we don't roll back, we fix the code."

Percentage of Americans with 4 or more TVs: 31% Number of Mobile Phone Users (13+): 228M Percentage of U.S. Mobile Subscribers with Smartphones: 31% Number of mobile phone web users: 83.2M

Yesterday, I attended a 90 minute presentation by one of the most well-known CMS vendors.

teaching, learning, knowing, and thinking. Once you have begun to grapple with these messy and essential questions, sitting through presentations aimed at describing content delivery and administrative efficiences sucks a little more of your soul out of your being.

Ultimately, then, our conversations about technologies must grapple with our larger community’s values — and what code we think enacts these values.

Aimed for Google’s 10 million Google Apps for Education users, the category offers over 20 applications from 19 vendors including specialized apps for schools and universities such as social learning game Grockit, grading software LearnBoost, math teaching tool DreamBox, design apps Aviary and more.

An open-ended student response system is an electronic service or application that lets students enter text responses during a lecture or class discussion. Open-ended systems give faculty the option of collecting such free-form contributions from students, in addition to asking the true/false or multiple-choice questions that conventional clicker systems allow. Such tools open a channel for the kind of individual, creative student responses that can alter the character of learning. The great strength of open-ended student response systems may be that they create another avenue for discussion, allowing students to join a virtual conversation at those times when speaking out in live discourse might seem inappropriate, intimidating, or difficult.

Just as the real computing revolution didn't happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won't happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment.

Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we've already made for them won't do. Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances. For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged.

To provide students the guidance they need to reach these goals, faculty and staff must be willing to lead by example — to demonstrate and discuss, as fellow learners, how they have created and connected their own personal cyberinfrastructures. Like the students, faculty and staff must awaken their own self-efficacy within the myriad creative possibilities that emerge from the new web.

In the Internet age, walls are everywhere falling in academe. Online education, all but cleansed of its original stigma, has become commonplace. This is especially true among big public universities, which have clamored to capitalize on new markets by enrolling far-flung students. The University of Massachusetts and Penn State University rake in tens of millions of dollars each year from their online programs.

there is no way to tell how much actual learning these expensive projects are creating. “If you take away OCW completely,” said Ira Fuchs, former vice president at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, of MIT’s celebrated OpenCourseWare project, “I’m not sure that higher education would be noticeably different.”

Though often designed primarily for external audiences, these projects have also made an impact closer to home, aiding efforts to improve alumni relations, recruit prospective students, and provide a welcome study aid (and a kind of enhanced course catalog) for the university’s enrolled student population.