Features

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Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learning and memory.

Fairly early in the semester, I can spot the students who will struggle to complete big assignments, because they are often the same ones who can’t resist the urge to check up on their Facebook friends. Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their [...]

Academia | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Education | Humanities | Technology | Writing

Grading writing: The art and science — and why computers can’t do it

Tech companies and university administrators get excited from time to time about the value of software that purports to evaluate student writing. This article does a great job explaining exactly what it is that writing teachers do when they respond to student writing. (We’re doing a lot more than looking for misplaced commas.)

The past [...]

Cyberculture | Design | History | Media | Social_Software | Technology

Restoring the first website

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Very important bit of history.

For a start we would like to restore the first URL – put back the files that were there at their earliest possible iterations. Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share. We will also sift [...]

Culture | Cyberculture | Ethics | Journalism | Writing

Churnalism Search

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At the University of Virginia, one summer when I had a summer job writing press releases for a theater company, and I also volunteered for one of the campus papers, I was amused to see how much of my press releases would appear under a different author’s name in the competing student paper. One time [...]

Cyberculture | Design | Essays | History | Literature | Media | Social_Software | Technology | Writing

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story

It’s not that hypertext went on to become less interesting than its literary advocates imagined in those early days. Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Education | Media | Social_Software | Technology

Grading the MOOC University

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The MOOC classrooms are growing at Big Bang rates: more than five million students worldwide have registered for classes in topics ranging from physics to history to aboriginal worldviews.

It creates a strange paradox: these professors are simultaneously the most and least accessible teachers in history. –Grading the MOOC University – NYTimes.com.

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Current_Events | Cyberculture | Ethics | Government | Media | Social_Software | Technology

Police, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probe

In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials. Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were [...]

Aesthetics | Amusing | Business | Culture | Cyberculture | PopCult | SciFi

The GE Mascot That Proves They’ve Never Seen ‘The Matrix’

On a scale of 1 to 10, this definitely rates a WTF.

Seriously, has no one in GE ever seen The Matrix? Literally any other robot in the history of film would have been a better choice — even RoboCop would’ve made people feel more at ease, because at least he’s a police officer. Agent [...]

Culture | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Essays | Ethics | Media | Social_Software | Sociology | Technology

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

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A thoughtful analysis.

Problem-solvers in the Information Age must train themselves to ignore floods of true-but-trivial and unreliable-but-accessible information. I see this all the time with students who Facebook their way through my class presentations on the function of scholarly peer review, but then submit pages from content farms in their term paper drafts.

According [...]

Current_Events | Cyberculture | Ethics | Journalism | Media | Writing

Boston marathon bombing: All the mistakes journalists make during a crisis like the Boston attacks.

First, do not pass on speculation. For much of the day, the New York Post was sharing unconfirmed reports, which were later proven erroneous, that 12 people had been killed in the attack. I actually retweeted BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, one of [...]