Started as a way to tutor his cousin, Sal Khan has developed an extensive library of online lessons in subjects ranging from Math to Science to History. While most online learning approaches are stuck in either the lecture format or the impersonal slide delivery (or worse, just a list of readings), Sal found a way…
The desktop revolution of the 80’s empowered us to create, not just consume texts. Desktop publishing is a concept most users take for granted, but was certainly a significant change from the typewriter. As Cynthia Selfe (1996) points out, prior to the 1980’s, most executives dictated texts to their assistants, rather than typing themselves. She…
Touch is barely taught in schools. There’s the basics, scratchy, softy, smooth, but for the most part, we develop our sense of touch informally, through experience. I’ve been thinking about touch and tactileness a lot since the introduction of the iPhone and now iPad. Directing text through our fingers seems different than using a mouse.…
I’m preparing for a talk on the future of reading and decided to keep track of what and how I read today. So, I started my morning checking e-mail, which involves two steps, my main e-mail (work) and my gmail (fun). In my gmail, there was a link to an article in the NYT about…
To ban or not to ban laptops in classrooms? What about cell phones? And calculators? Before we hand students a list of technologies to leave at home, let’s consider the real problem: attention vs. distraction. If you’re going to ban everything distracting students, you should consider what you’re wearing, how you talk, the guy in…
A few weeks ago, our friends M&D had us over for dinner. After an amazing meal, I wandered into the living room and discovered, for the first time McSweeney’s. Their Panorama publication was sitting on the sofa and compelled me to read it. In its pages, I found a book review like no other. Before…
When I was in high school in the late 80’s — early 90’s, it seemed that the U.S. education system was an abysmal failure — after all, weren’t the Soviets and the Chinese students scoring higher in math? Today, headlines still decry our education system as a failure. In a recent op-ed piece published in…
I recently attended a truly fascinating workshop, but I’m not going to blog about it…yet. I’m studying how a particular user group conducts research online, so if I discuss preliminary observations, I risk biasing my sample. To blog or not to blog seems to be a conundrum facing many researchers. Some choose to blog immediately…
Affinity-based browsing, the way I envision it, goes beyond the shallow targeting of Netflix, Amazon, or, from what I can tell, Glue. These programs base recommendations on, for example, people who viewed Ice Age also viewed Cars, so the system recommends Cars. Stumbleupon seems to address general similarities, but doesn’t approach the type of targeting…
Yesterday, I attended the RoSE Design Charrette, hosted by the Transliteracies Project at UCSB. Under Alan Liu’s guidance, many interesting, innovative interdisciplinary projects have emerged from this program. In anticipation of attending, I read the online description of RoSE. Like seeing a movie preview, I started to imagine what I thought RoSE would be. I…