I was reading the twitter transcripts from a recent conference and it struck me that the most prolific tweeters weren’t necessarily contributing the most meaningful insights to the backchannel conversation. In fact, given the audience, those with the most to contribute seemed to be relatively quiet…perhaps they were participating in a live discussion, or maybe…
My sixth grade teacher, Mr. Zahn, passed away over the weekend. As I was remembering his class, two things stood out. First, he led our choir and always included Beatles’ songs, even at Christmas. We must have been a sight, a group of 11 year-old girls singing When I’m 64. Thanks to him, I’ve always…
Yesterday, while waiting for a flight in the Denver airport, I picked up a Barron’s article, but didn’t get a chance to finish it. This morning, I figured I’d quickly access it through the UCSB Library and finish reading it. I want to share my convoluted journey of information access and suggest solutions. The article,…
Motoko Rich’s latest article in her Future of Reading series for the New York Times, “A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like,” describes Lynne McNeill’s use of reading workshops in her junior high classroom. Instead of reading assigned texts, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, McNeill encourages students to select their own books and present…
Over the past week, a few articles have caught my attention, all in one way or another addressing the future of reading. What if the future of reading isn’t so different from the present? Sure, in the future we may be floating in our anti-gravity reading rooms and whatever we’re reading will light up and…
A colleague of mine recently shared that a friend of his in Texas had suffered a terrible accident and was in a coma. To make matters worse, the man’s wife was 8 months pregnant at the time of the accident. I offered to pray for him. A month has passed, so I asked my colleague…
Great news about online learning from the Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning report released by the U.S. Department of Education in June — students perform better in online environments than in traditional face-to-face instruction. But, how do we know this? The study is based on a meta-analysis of roughly 99 studies published between…
Mike Wesch illustrates that finding information was laborious before the web, but not necessarily less complex.
Posted in web science by monica [For the full entry, please see the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme wiki] During her presentation to our SDP group, Wendy Hall mentioned that if two people type the same thing into Google, regardless of their purpose for the search, they will get the same results. Jim Hendler…
While still in many ways an elusive topic, the study and definitions of web science became more tangible during our SDP discussions. Before attending OII, I thought web science simply meant the study of how people use the Web. This definition in many ways reflected my disciplinary bias by focusing on the who of the…