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Forget the Cellphone Fight — We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own

As long as Congress focuses on just unlocking cellphones, they’re missing the larger point. Senators could pass a hundred unlocking bills; five years from now large companies will find some other copyright claim to limit consumer choice. To really solve the problem, Congress must enact meaningful copyright reform. The potential economic benefits are significant, as [...]

Cyberculture | Media | Personal | Social_Software | Technology | Usability

Can’t upload photos to Facebook from my MacBook

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I spent 30 minutes trying to upload about 10 photos, but I only succeeded in uploading two. I’ve tried Safari and Chrome… I’ve tried uploading photos individually and in groups.

The rest uploaded part of the way, and then froze, seemingly forever, with this bar.

Oh, well… I guess that’s why I don’t upload [...]

Cyberculture | Design | History | Modding | Rhetoric | Technology | Usability

From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

Apple’s marketing strategy in the 1980s presented its products as democratic and liberating, but the freedoms the Apple users enjoy include the inability to customize or otherwise access the working interior. Apple users trade freedom for security. In short, expansion slots made standardization impossible (partly because software writers needed consistent underlying hardware to produce widely [...]

Aesthetics | Books | Cyberculture | Design | Media | Modding | Technology | Usability

Kindle App Vs. iBooks. (Spoiler: They’re Virtually Identical Now!)

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I noticed with interest that Kindle now lets you highlight text in different colors. It’s also very easy now to tweet a brief quote.

Is it time to revise the blog-based pedagogy I’ve developed over the past 10 or so years, and ask students to tweet a few passages while they read them for the [...]

Academia | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Design | Education | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Usability

The MOOC Honeymoon is Over: Three Takeaways from the Coursera Calamity

The honeymoon with MOOCs is over. The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Education | Modding | Technology | Usability

Essay on the flaws of distance education

MOOCposter

The web also creates the illusion that all information is available and accessible to anyone at any time. This common view represses the real disparities of access in our world and also undermines the need for educational experts. After all, if you can get all knowledge from Wikipedia or a Google search, why do you [...]

Culture | Cyberculture | Media | Psychology | Technology | Usability

Smartphones, Silly Users

Frequent smartphone use imposes significant psychological costs on the user, and negatively impacts our personal and professional lives. –Daniel Gulati – Harvard Business Review.

Business | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Design | Essays | Journalism | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Usability | Writing

What the New York Times’s ‘Snow Fall’ Means to Online Journalism’s Future

The New York Times debuted a new multimedia feature Thursday so beautiful it has a lot of people wondering — especially those inside the New York Times — if the mainstream media is about to forgo words and pictures for a whole lot more. Unlike a standard words-on-page article that doesn’t diverge too much from [...]

Cyberculture | Design | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Usability | Writing

The end of history and the last website

Something else has changed, too, beyond the proliferation of screens. Today, I don’t think—and I’m almost afraid to write this, because it’s like the tolling of some great bell—today I don’t think the amateur’s best effort is good enough. We as internet users have less patience and less charity for janky, half-broken experiences. (Which is [...]

Aesthetics | Culture | Design | History | Media | Modding | Technology | Usability | Writing

Crazy-looking keyboards that never caught on

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As the typewriter become popular, it was sometimes referred to it as a “literary piano,” or “the sewing machine of thought.” But the piano and the sewing machine both require a more complex interaction between fingers and machine parts than does the keyboard, which essentially requires you to press whatever button features the letter [...]