"Another type of newsletter has taken off recently, aggregating links like Rusty Foster's Today in Tabs, Alexis Madrigal's 5 Intriguing Things, and 5 Useful Articles by Parker Higgins and Sarah Jeong. This what Jason Kottke and Things Magazine have done for more than a decade on the web. Who? Weekly from Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber -all about "wholebrities" the not particularly famous people who somehow make their way in celebrity gossip magazines - definitely would have been a blog ten years ago (or a zine twenty years before that). A couple of TinyLetters are written in a voice that I haven't heard since the early years of blogging. Dan Hon's Things That Have Caught My Attention and 6 by Charlie Loyd write commentary that is somewhere in between editorial and diary, for friends and potential friends.
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"20 Day Stranger is an app that reveals intimate, shared connections between two anonymous individuals. It's a mobile experience that exchanges one person's experience of the world with another's, while preserving anonymity on both sides.
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The idea is that, when someone emails a spreadsheet to your iPad, the app will open it up—but not as a series of rows and columns. It will open the thing as chart or graph, and with a swipe of the finger, you can reformat the data into a new chart or graph. The hope is that this will make is easier for anyone to read a digital spreadsheet—an age-old computer creation that’s still looks like Greek to so many people.
Resisting the urge to pull out your phone in class is quite difficult for many students, apparently. There are texts to answer, emails to read, snapchats to send, and rude comments to post on Yik Yak. But two students at California State University at Chico have created something they hope will persuade students to keep their phones tucked firmly in their pockets: An app that rewards them with coupons for local businesses when they exhibit self-control and leave their phones untouched during class.
We have divorced school from learning, and this is the result.
For most of my students, the purpose of school is to do well in school so you can climb the ladder to the next part of school.
Other than its credentialing function, much of school is viewed as unrelated to their futures.
In fall 2002, about 27 percent of administrators said faculty members accepted online courses as a legitimate method of delivering education. When the Babson Group ran its survey last fall, 29.1 percent of administrators said the same. The report describes that lack of progress as a “continuing failure of online education.”
“We’ve basically reached a point where everybody for whom [online education] is important for their institution is fully on board,” Seaman said.
Other than helping students who may not have been able to physically attend classes pursue higher education, distance education has had “very little impact,” he said.