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…
This morning, our local radio host was ranting about people “cheating” on the Tuesday trivia question. She complained that they’re a small radio station and can’t afford to give prizes every week and, of course, now with Google, people always get the questions right. The radio host said the questions should be something that stump…
Recent releases of the iPad and Droid met with anticipation and enthusiasm. As users of technology, we seem to be excited by what’s next and new, but I wonder how long we will sustain this energy. Will we reach a point where we’re fatigued? With the release of Google Buzz this week, I’ve noticed that…
A colleague of mine recently asked for reading recommendations in the area of Educational Technology, and I started thinking about the trail I followed (a la, Vannevar Bush) to arrive at my current notions of the field. I taught college composition from 1998-2003. Some of my colleagues were teaching Dreamweaver or FrontPage in their composition…
My dissertation is now available online, thus increasing the chance that more than three people will read it. Here is the abstract: In university settings, students are increasingly required to conduct online research to complete course-related assignments, yet often receive little instruction in the skills necessary to proficiently locate, evaluate, and use the information they…
What do you do with the stacks of journals you amass annually as part of your professional memberships? Use them? All of them? Add them to the “free take one” stack in your department’s mailroom? I recycle them on a quarterly basis, after perusing the Table of Contents and any potentially relevant articles. Do we…