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10 Developer Tips To Build A Responsive Website [Infographic] – ReadWrite

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The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity. Web designers love to show off that they can design the hell out of a website. They fall in love with their code and all the cool things that it can do.

“I think the challenge for me is to use [...]

Aesthetics | Cyberculture | Design | Education | Games | Modding | Social_Software

Scratchy “Cloak of Darkness” on Scratch

“Scratchy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification — a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments.

“Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Education | Media | Social_Software | Technology

The new marshmallow test: Resisting the temptations of the web

The Stanford marshmallow experiment is a famous study that linked the willingness to delay gratification (children were told they could have one treat now, or two if they waited about 15 min) to a range of positive life outcomes. Many of my students who can’t resist checking their phone in class or during one-on-one office [...]

Academia | Culture | Health | Psychology | Science | Social_Software | Technology

Brain, Interrupted

In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is [not multitasking, but] really doing something called “rapid toggling between tasks,” and is engaged in constant context switching.

As economics students know, switching involves costs. But how much? When a consumer switches banks, or a company switches suppliers, it’s relatively easy [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Education | Media | Social_Software | Technology

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]