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Tom Woodward

Google Sends Reporter a GIF Instead of a 'No Comment' | WIRED - 0 views

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    "This adorable animated GIF is apparently the official answer Google sent to a Daily Dot reporter in response to his seeming scoop on a new YouTube livestreaming plan. "
sanamuah

Clever App Reveals a Snapshot of Your Location-In the Past | WIRED - 0 views

  • The app aims to bring glimpses of history to your smartphone screen, using images tied to wherever you happen to be. Users receive notifications when they’re near a “pivot” point; raising the phone brings up an image of that place as it appeared from that vantage point decades ago.
sanamuah

How Your Travels Around the Internet Expose the Way You Think | WIRED - 1 views

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    "What really intrigued Bush was that you could share your "trail"-the steps that took you from one document to another. This would be different, he noted, than sharing the results of your research. You'd also be sharing the process, a glimpse into the normally invisible life of a mind at work."
sanamuah

I'm So Totally Over Newton's Laws of Motion | WIRED - 1 views

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    "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."
Jonathan Becker

The Emoji Is the Birth of a New Type of Language ( - 0 views

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    "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. "
sanamuah

If Your Science Professors Aren't Confusing, They're Doing It Wrong | WIRED - 2 views

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    "OK, so how do we fix this problem? How do I help these students understand that there is value in being confused? I think the only solution is to keep confusing students. Sorry students, there is no shortcut to real understanding."
Tom Woodward

Writing From Photographs : Digital Literacy - 1 views

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    "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."
Jody Symula

Can Online Social Networks Replace Real Socializing? | WIRED - 6 views

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    Thank you for posting this! I am very much an in person kind of communicator and appreciate this perspective.
sanamuah

The Reeducation of Blackboard, Everyone's Classroom Pariah | WIRED - 3 views

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    "Many view Blackboard as the embodiment of everything wrong with education technology: it's old-fashioned, it's hard to use, and once a school system has bought into it, it's even harder to get rid of."
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    Maybe there's hope?????? "Which is why, since joining the company in 2012, Bhatt has vowed to refocus Blackboard's products to serve the students who use them and not just the IT administrators who buy them. Now he's ready to show the world just how he plans to do that. Later today, Bhatt will take the stage at the company's annual BbWorld Conference, where he will announce the launch of the company's redesigned core products and the introduction of new ones, all of which aim to make Blackboard a service that its 100 million existing users actually want to use."
sanamuah

The Problem With Putting All the World's Code in GitHub | WIRED - 1 views

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    "possible to follow the development of a particular piece of software and see how it all came together. That's made it an irreplaceable teaching tool."
sanamuah

A Videogame That Teaches You to Write Poetry, Even if It Intimidates You | WIRED - 2 views

  • Elegy lets players write prose and poetry as they explore distant planets and dead civilizations. The player faces 27 challenges in three worlds, each riffing on a specific British Romance-era poem: “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” by John Keats, and “Darkness” by Lord Byron. The different challenges find the player in various roles: an emperor rallying his troops before a doomed battle, for example, or a schoolgirl evacuating a city being bombed. Players travel through beautifully designed backgrounds, while on-screen text narrates the story. But much of the text is left blank—that’s when players tap their inner Wordsworths, finishing the tale with their own imaginations.
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    I very much wish to try this.
sanamuah

How a Tweet Turned Into the Best New Multiplayer Game in Years | WIRED - 1 views

  • One of the weirdest, coolest, most hyped multiplayer games in years is here, and it started with a tweet: “Contemplating building a game entirely with friends on twitter/fb. Totally open and ‘Mad Lib’ style. Could be fun or totally awful.” The tweet, posted by Mike Mika a little more than a year ago, was followed by another. It showed a crude red box among white and gray platforms. “Where to go with this?” it read. “I’ve started a new project, it draws a red box. Thinking platformer. #helpmedev.”
sanamuah

How to Use GIFs to Teach Computers About Emotions | WIRED - 0 views

  • The goal was to harness crowdsourcing to map emotions, a task at which computers are very poorly equipped. Eventually, Hu and Rich hope, all that subjective data will make it easier to write programs that deal with emotional content.
Yin Wah Kreher

How to Think Like a Maker: Values Your Company Should be Adopting | WIRED - 3 views

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    Embrace imperfection. Makers are more interested in learning and experimenting rather than perfection and that's OK. They try (and fail) often to perfect their projects and to make lots of small bets which eventually lead them to THE BIG IDEA. Makers do it for the fun first and iterate and refine as they go.

    Love the process. A focus on trusting the process rather than outcome is essential to the Maker mentality. Creativity and making is an ongoing rhythm, a lifestyle which is more a way of being than a hobby or isolated event.
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    Other thoughts on this interesting link. Writing a grant focused on the iterative process of improving health care this is exactly what the funders are looking for. How to set up teams (with the 'right' mix of individuals) that are working in an environment where they can fail (without hurting anybody) and improve processes both for the team and the rest of the organization. The later is much harder - how to disseminate good processes that others can then improve upon in complex organizations. But yes the goal is to always work on the process improvement (the makers mentality as it is called in this piece).
sanamuah

A Highlighter for Marking Up Whatever You Want Online | WIRED - 0 views

  • Paste any website URL into Pith.li’s website and it’ll strip the content into a clean version that you can mark all over like a piece of paper. Your cursor acts as your marker, allowing you to highlight bits of text and make notes in the margins while saving your highlights in a tidy little box on the left side of your screen. The idea is that over time you’ll be able to build an easily accessible file of the most interesting stuff on the internet and be able to share just share those bits with whoever you want.
sanamuah

The Next Big Thing You Missed: New Apps Instantly Convert Spreadsheets Into Something A... - 1 views

  • 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.
sanamuah

University Bans GitHub Homework (Then Changes Its Mind) | WIRED - 1 views

  • Recently, a computer science student at the University of Illinois did some class homework and posted the answers to GitHub, the code-sharing platform widely used by open-source software developers. And the university was peeved. Last week, using a DMCA takedown notice, the standard way to request removal of copyrighted material from the net, the university tried to force GitHub into vanishing the coursework from its service. After criticism from students, the school has rescinded the notice, but the incident goes a long way towards describing how the software world has changed in recent years. In short, the world’s developers are moving towards a model of open collaboration. And though that works well for them, it clashes with the way the world of programming traditionally operated—as embodied by the University of Illinois.
Tom Woodward

The Land That the Internet Era Forgot | WIRED - 3 views

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    " he starts with a rapid-fire primer on heady concepts like the Internet of Things, the mobile revolution, cloud computing, digital disruption, and the perpetual increase of processing power. ("It's exponential, folks. It's just growing and growing.") The upshot: If you don't at least try to think digitally, the digital economy will disrupt you. It will drain your town of young people and leave your business in the dust. Then he switches gears and tries to stiffen their spines with confidence. Start a website, he'll say. Get on social media. See if the place where you live can finally get a high-speed broadband connection-a baseline point of entry into modern economic and civic life."
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