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"We feel the pernicious practical effects of lengthy copyright terms every day. For example, a study last year of books on Amazon showed that books published after the critical public domain cut-off date of 1923 are available at a dramatically lower rate than books from even an entire century before. The result is a "missing 20th century" in the history of books."

"Worse, the first-order barriers often become self-fulfilling prophecies. For instance, the time needed to learn about a new technology is greatly extended by an individual's sporadic use of it. Lots of time is spent just logging in or setting up or getting back in the groove with the basics, making people feel like they are starting over-again and again."

"If you find yourself working longer hours or maybe feeling a bit more stressed at the end of the day, you're not alone. Fifty percent of college faculty who completed the annual Faculty Focus reader survey said that their job is more difficult than it was five years ago. Only nine percent said their job is less difficult, while 33 percent said it's about the same."

Many companies now search candidates' social-media accounts to get a better feel for their personalities, to see if they have creative flair, and to find out how well they communicate. Done right, your profile can work in your favor. Of 2,184 hiring managers recently surveyed by CareerBuilder, one-fifth said a candidate's online profile helped them land a position. More often, though, it backfires: 43 percent said they found information that led them not to hire a candidate, up 9 percentage points from last year. That trend means either that more job applicants are behaving badly online or that human resources is getting stricter in sniffing out problems.

I think this article raises a point that we should absolutely acknowledge. Although I don't believe I am "behaving badly" online, what if some of my viewpoints do not entirely mesh with a future employer. Are they less likely to hire me because I have critical opinions about certain policies, etc.? I think it is this issue in particular that makes people reticent to fully participate. However, this is our new reality. How to balance it?

"A sinking feeling came over me and I realized that my LinkedIn profile did not portray me as a top notch professional. My LinkedIn profile did not sell my skills or show any differentiation between me and the millions of other LinkedIn users out there. My profile basically said, "This lady doesn't have anything that sets her apart from the crowd.""

"So what makes an online class feel less like it's taught by a bot and more like it's a human-centered experience? The following three principles and related strategies will help faculty keep humans front-and-center of their online courses:"

""Relate" videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course. "Narrate" videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky. "Demonstrate" videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world. "Debate" videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."

"The infographic below, based on data by CPP, publishers of the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, details the qualifiers for each of the test's characteristics, but furthermore, predicts the psychological types most likely to participate on specific social networks. More extroverts reported using Facebook than introverts, for instance. And people with inclinations toward Feeling spend more time browsing and interacting with people on Facebook, rather than those who tend toward Thinking."

""Most campuses are seeing that we can't just keep firing this content out on all channels," says Malcolm Brown, a director at Educause, the higher-education-technology consortium. Not only do students feel inundated, but staff members may be overwhelmed by the extra work of reporting events and messages on multiple sites."

"A comprehensive and groundbreaking new report released Monday by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project has found that only four users of Facebook derive pleasure of any kind from the popular social networking website. According to the report, the remainder of the 950 million people registered with Facebook, despite using the site on a regular basis, take no joy in doing so, and in fact feel a profound sense of hopelessness and despair immediately upon logging in."

"In combining the classic feeling of handling a book with the interactivity of the computer, Waldek Węgrzyn of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland, has created a new human-computer interface. His "Electrolibrary" project connects the custom made book to a PC. Providing additional information, relevant to the page being viewed, on-screen. Turn a page in the book, and you "turn a page" on the website as well."

"I had expected that people signing up for a course like this, a non-traditional course where we work mostly on our own or together with other students in the class, would be students who embrace that kind of learning, students who feel a sense of independence and self-determination as learners. What I've learned, though, is that this is not the case for at least some students in the class, who are very much expecting the teacher to function as the voice of absolute authority in the class."

Isn't that the nature of humans? We want freedom for creativity and original thinking, but ultimately it makes us uncomfortable when people actually do achieve it; ultimately it seems that humans instinctively cling to rules, tradition and order.

Good point Tammy. Still, the "grading" paradigm is a strong one. We should expect today's students to start being a little more autonomous in their learning process.

"With all of the new technologies that are surrounding us, and to the many school administrators that are not feeling comfortable with Twitter, Facebook, etc., I would like to suggest three ways (as opposed to the typical round number of 10) that you can focus on your own professional development over the summer. Less is oftentimes more in the digital world as we move from simply being "literate" to "fluent" in this language. "

"Being consumed in constant judging leaves us with the feeling of being mediocre or, alternately, with narcissistic pride. Both antithetical perceptions absorb us in the vicious cycle of comparison with friends, family and unknown others. What's most important -- which I wish I had realised in my teens -- is to learn to be comfortable in our own skin."

"We force our youth into taking virtually all the same classes, subject them to the same standardized tests, and judge their future worth and potential off an average. In doing so, we bring smart students down to an average level, ignore average students, make under-achieving students feel absolutely hopeless, and leave brilliant students unchallenged and completely unmotivated. By destroying this natural variation we suppress the best parts of our human condition; the unique strengths and individualistic tendencies that lie within all of us."

You are struggling with your online classes or homework and you want someone to do it for you. We can handle almost any subject and customer service is a priority. Our company culture revolves around making sure you feel safe and satisfied knowing that your work is being done by an expert within your specified deadline. We are here to serve you around the clock by email, live chat, and phone. For all of your academic needs, WeTakeYourClass wants to be the one you turn to time and time again.

It seems pretty legit.

In this same thread, I just saw the article in Inside Higher Ed called "Paying for an A" and I thought it flowed with this conversation-they actually review the site you mention here. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/21/sites-offering-take-courses-fee-pose-risk-online-ed

"As a parent, I really cannot cover everything I want my kids to learn from me in the four hours I have them at home. I really like my kids teachers and I really appreciate all the work they do during the day, but due to the short amount of time I have my kids at home, I'm going to have to send some work back to school with my kids to complete during the seven hours they spend in the classroom. I apologize for the negative impact this work might have on the teachers and the rest of the class. I know only too well how that feels. However, the lesson plans I have in the evening are better learned if there is some additional follow through done during the day, parent/home connection and all that. None of these assignments should take up much time, thirty minutes tops."

" instead of professors and students, there's facilitators and participants, instead of one-directional lectures, you have discussions, and instead of tests and quizzes you create projects and artifacts. If it all sounds too squishy and feel-good, make no mistake, this is serious learning, tackling the amazingly heady topic of feminism and technology and created by bona fide, longtime professors in their fields. It's rigorous, complex and in San Antonio, you don't need to be a college student (past or present) or even own a computer to access it. That's the new international network FemTechNet in a nutshell, one of those ideas that seems to have suddenly arrived fully formed, like Athena springing out of Zeus' head. Obviously a lot more work went into it than that, but the actual creation timeline for the Network took a little more than a year-and-a-half according to co-creators Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, Dean of the New School's Media Studies program and professor of media studies at Pitzer College, respectively."

"The search giant is collaborating with the Saatchi Gallery in West London to host a number of looped moving images, displayed on giant TV screens, which it feels are worthy of public recognition. There's a hint of competitiveness, as a panel of judges (including His Artiness, Baz Luhrmann) will select a single winning GIF tonight. In the meantime, we've embedded the finalists from six different image categories after the break, ranked according to how much we like them and whether any of the artists are mates of ours."

"Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Essays on meaning and learning networks May 19, 2012. Connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. The bulk of this work is devoted to tracing the implications of this thesis in learning. Yes, this could have been a shorter book - and perhaps one day I'll author a volume without the redundancies, false starts, detours and asides, and other miscellany. Such a volume would be sterile, however, and it feels more true to the actual enquiry to stay true to the original blog posts, essays and presentations that constitute this work."