Group items tagged

"Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet-and how the Internet uses them back. By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi's bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they're more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation-ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free. "

love me some serendipitous learning!

h/t David C.

OER in MedEd. Thanks to Laura Gogia for pointing me to this via a Twitter conversation.

Case-based "discussion service" aimed at trainee anaesthetists. Uses Twitter.

" And here is what those 6,341,973,478 tweets look like on a map, at any scale you want."

"Now, I realize in saying this I am merely expressing my Old Fartdom. "Why, in my day, there were groups and not all these little networks of people with their twittering and their facial books."" I think this is a pretty important distinction. And, groups are dead... mostly.

"We provide a tokenizer, a part-of-speech tagger, hierarchical word clusters, and a dependency parser for tweets, along with annotated corpora and web-based annotation tools. "

Something I might consider as an alternative to Feedly. It has some nice features like looking across your Twitter network for the most shared items.

"In case you can't tell, I'm incredibly proud of all of my students.  They were permitted to choose their own subjects and conduct their own research, and they really enjoyed writing for a wider public beyond their professor. "

"Despite our best efforts, presentations can sometimes turn into one-way communication- us talking and students passively listening. You may be stationed at the front of the classroom, perhaps using PowerPoint slides or showing a video on a screen, while the class follows along silently in their seats. Or, any discussion that is generated might be dominated by the verbal few, with quieter students too intimidated to jump in. Also, when you look at the multiple studies that indicate the brevity of a student's attention span, ranging from two to ten minutes, a lengthy presentation can lose the audience it was designed to teach."

""In sum, plaintiffs were deceived into spending tens of thousands on tuition alone for a program that functionally required them to teach themselves the material," the complaint reads. "They paid more than their peers who completed the same degree in a classroom, and yet received far less.""

"It's not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideas with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don't have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name. When I need the title of a novel someone recommended, I just scroll back to the day we were at the bookstore together. Looking through my photo stream, there is a caption about Thomas Jefferson smuggling seeds from Italy, which I want to research; a picture of a tree I want to identify, which I need to send to my father; the nutritional label from a seasoning that I want to re-create; and a man with a jungle of electrical cords in the coffee shop, whose picture I took because I wanted to write something about how our wireless lives are actually full of wires. Photography has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write. Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return."