Group items tagged

To extend Friday's conversation even further . . . "The second type of busyness also results in health problems, but it is a sickness we bring on ourselves. Like voluntarily licking the door handle of a preschool bathroom or having a sweaty picnic in the Ball Pit at Chuck E. Cheese's. It's busyness we control. Self-created stress. Ever since my conversation a month ago, I realized that my busyness is this second type. Busyness we control. In fact, many times I create rush and worry where none exists. Any typical morning, you can find me riding my kids like a couple of three-dollar mules in a sea of marbles, begging them to move faster." h/t D'Arcy Norman

"These constructive quotes communicate that mistakes are desirable, which is a positive message and part of what we want students to learn. An appreciation of mistakes helps us overcome our fear of making them, enabling us to take risks. But we also want students to understand what kinds of mistakes are most useful and how to most learn from them. "

"Two empirical questions were of interest: (1) what types of students participated in the blog and (2) did blog participation contribute to better learning outcomes? "

"In order to make it easier to track activity in Hypothes.is, I created a program called Hypothes.is Collector. The idea is that you can type in user name, a URL, a tag, or a group ID and click the button to see all of the related annotations. The program will create a new sheet with an archive of up to 200 annotations based on the search terms.  It will then create a third sheet that will count how many of these annotations were made on each URL in the set by each user."

"Which of Newton's Laws (First, Second or Third) says that an object will move in a straight line at a constant speed without a net force? This is a terrible question for the following reasons: Does it really matter which law is First, Second, and Third? Technically, both the First and Second Law would be correct answers. It misses the main point about forces and motion and instead gives some type of recall-based question. I just think we can do better. Just because most physics textbooks (but not all) have been very explicit about Newton's Laws of Motion, this doesn't mean that is the best way for students to learn."

"This past year, Davidson College introduced "A Domain of One's Own" to a portion of the student body through faculty willing to use it in their teaching. I saw two styles of 'Domains' rise out of the initiative. The first type of 'Domain' took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn't necessarily empower. The problems with the second approach can be wrapped up into two key questions beginning with: Why post an assignment online if…"

Also related to the distinction between having an eportfolio program and creating a domain of one's own; very different creatures that sometimes get discussed as if they're the same thing.

Voice typing one of the many new features in Google Docs

"A common phenomenon at the time was that people would start blogging on Blogger - because it was free, popular, and easy to set up - and then "graduate" to more powerful tools. Movable Type, Greymatter, and, later, Wordpress, had a much higher barrier to entry (before WP had turnkey hosting). But once someone had discovered the joys of sharing thoughts on the Internet, they were willing to invest the effort in order to get the added features and flexibility that the install-on-your-server software afforded."

"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. "

"Three types of courses make up the CopyrightX Community: - a residential course on Copyright Law, taught by Prof. William Fisher to approximately 100 Harvard Law School students; - an online course divided into sections of 25 students, each section taught by a Harvard Teaching Fellow; - a set of affiliated courses based in countries other than the United States, each taught by an expert in copyright law."

"In this portfolio, there are only four pieces so far. I plan on adding to the collection and changing the format of the site around as I get used to blogging like this. I decided the best pieces to showcase how I started out would be the first few things I wrote and then some of the last things I did. So, I posted the first journal we did: Preliminary Self-Analysis. Upon reading it now, I remember how I decided just go for the "type like I talk" format just to see what would happen. It doesn't look too bad, but I can tell I overdid it a little. "

"What follows is - depending on how you want to think about it - either a gallery of technologies we lost or an invitation to consider alternate futures. Some of what might have been is fantastical: a subway powered by air, an engine run off the heat of your palm. Some of what we lost, on the other hand, is more subtle, like a better way to bowl or type. As new standards emerge, variety fades, and a single technology becomes entrenched. (That's why the inefficient Qwerty keyboard has proved so difficult to unseat.) We can take heart, however, in the fact that good ideas never disappear forever; the Stirling engine didn't pan out in the Industrial Revolution, for example, but it can keep the lights on for a small village. As you look through the images, then, please consider not only what might have been but what could still be again."

Game making can be one of the best ways to get students thinking creatively while cultivating useful technical literacies, and there's a ton of absorbing tools that students won't tire of over the long break. Here are three options to choose from depending on the type of technology students have at home.

"It was 2:45 a.m. on a Thursday last April. Matthew Rognlie was still awake, like a lot of graduate students. He had just finished typing 459 words and a few equations. They totaled six paragraphs, which he posted to the comments section of a popular economics blog. Thus begins the unlikely story of, arguably, the most-influential critique of the most influential economics book of this century."

"A group of almost 40 mathematicians wrote a 600 page textbook on Homotopy Type Theory in less than six months. They taught themselves git, and they used GitHub for hosting, pull requests, and discussions. The book simply wouldn't exist without GitHub. That. Is. Amazing. I subscribed to the project on GitHub and I receive email updates every single day. The book has been released, but they're still iterating constantly. I can't even begin to comprehend the complex mathematics racing through my inbox, but the fact that these brilliant mathematicians are collaborating like this, creating something that has never existed before, out in the open, and I have a front row seat... it just blows my mind."

"All you social dystopians can unclutch your pearls; no linguist thinks this bodes the end of writing. Text is our most powerful, go-to communication tool. For most people, these ideograms are an upgrade. And what an unusual one! Language always changes, of course; slang is born, prances, and dies. But it's exceedingly rare-maybe unprecedented-for a phonetic alphabet to suddenly acquire a big expansion pack of ideograms. In an age where we write more than ever, emoji is the new language of the heart. Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article. "

"Mobile devices like iPads and Androids have transformed the way we experience boredom. No longer is a wayward commuter forced to play Snake or Tetris, occupying themselves in a hardly satisfying, and utterly pixelated virtual reality. The tablet or smart phone-wielding travelers can now immerse themselves in an entire library of art and culture-related distractions, finding solace in everything from a Vincent van Gogh game to a digital version of the Louvre."