As a kid, I loved the feeling of confidence that came when my mom handed me a few bucks at the pool and told me I could get what I wanted from the concession stand. Since my main responsibility for the afternoon was to keep the kids occupied, and I was in no rush to…
I’m generally ambivalent about the whole “LinkedIn experience,” but if it wants to inspire confidence, the company should devote the same amount of attention it currently places on badgering its members on tightening its security. —LinkedIn: now officially the most annoying of all social media | Loren Steffy | a Chron.com blog.
In an age when the concept of “separation of church and state“ was unthinkable, the Corpus Christi Play was an integral part of the religious, economic, political and artistic context of life in medieval York. —York Corpus Christi Play
And there was much rejoicing. The journals of the Modern Language Association, including PMLA, Profession, and the ADE and ADFL bulletins, have adopted new open-access-friendly author agreements, which will go into use with their next full issues. The revised agreements leave copyright with the authors and explicitly permit authors to deposit in open-access repositories and…
By 2015, all food and beverage products that are advertised, promoted or sponsored on the Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior, Radio Disney, Disney.com and Saturday morning programming for kids on ABC-owned stations (Disney owns ABC) will have to meet the company’s nutrition criteria for limiting calories and reducing saturated fat, sodium and sugar. Many…
In 1975 a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the world’s first portable digital camera by cobbling together parts scavenged from a Super-8 and a cassette player. Baffled colleagues asked, “Why would you want to look at photos on a TV?” —The Pocket Camera Moment | Raw File | Wired.com.
Almost all the promise once held by virtual worlds has since been realized by Facebook. For every social interaction, brand engagement or persistent multiplayer social experience that Second Life or World of Warcraft or MTV’s Virtual Lower East Side was supposed to provide, there’s something the same or very similar available on Facebook — probably…
An American child could go to a public school run by Pearson, studying from books produced by Pearson, while his or her progress is evaluated by Pearson standardized tests. The only public participant in the show would be the taxpayer. If all else fails, the kid could always drop out and try to get a…
Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices…
JoAnne Boyle says she thinks women should stop worrying about child-rearing choices they make and stop criticizing other women’s choices. Boyle, president of Seton Hill University in Westmoreland County, raised six sons and a daughter — now ages 37 to 50 — while working full-time. She said she “often felt like I wasn’t doing a…
I’d like my students to be co-creators, too. The richest exchanges on day two of the Hewlett Open Educational Resources Grantee Meeting came from those who challenged the fundamental premises of the meeting. In designing the meeting, Berkman staff imagined three groups: Learners, Facilitators (teachers, librarians, coaches, educators, etc.), and Builders. They assumed a kind…
This is why 12-year-olds aren’t excited about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram | ZAGGblog
“Whether in the lecture hall or in a textbook, anyone is obviously free to teach the subjects biology, economics, or psychology, and can do so using, creating, and refining the pedagogical materials they think best, whether consisting of ‘open source educational content’ or otherwise,” it reads. “But by making unauthorized ‘shadow-versions’ of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,…
I often have a gentle chuckle to myself at some of the random combinations that are generated by our bot chums. Vaksman Innes, Hoaglin Little, Marylou Freas – surely the names of previously anonymous guests from one of Jay Gatsby’s parties? Tanisha Hendricks, Lee Buffet, Tish Dreith – straight from a Jilly Cooper novel? Tia…
Thanks for the link, Kary. To subscribe to the New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ, The Atlantic, Details, New York, and Time, you’ve got to have seven different apps, many of which are bloated. Some issues of Wired, for example, have weighed in at 500MB each. And what do you get inside? Aside from the…
“We think it’s a terrific time to be making investments in the leading brands behind providing Moodle services,” [Blackboard’s] Henderson told Inside Higher Ed on Monday. In a blog post, he called the growing popularity of open source “the most important new dimension shaping the LMS market today.” Henderson acknowledged that some advocates might look upon Monday’s news…
“If you strip out marketing and advertising from the Internet, nothing would be left,” says a worried suit, who seems to have forgotten about, you know, all that content. —New FTC “Do-Not-Track” Recommendations: Clueless? | PCWorld.
Space seems like a fitting locale for the casual gaming franchise Angry Birds, considering its meteoric rise in popularity since launching 2009. —Review: Angry Birds Space out of this world. Excuse me, but do meteors actually rise?
Since its November release, Skyrim has won award after award and led reviewers to call it the “greatest role-playing video game ever made.” In its first month, it made $650 million, almost double the entire year’s gross in the United States for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the bestselling movie of 2011.…
After taking a whole bunch of new high-quality images, I found myself running out of space on my production machine. I briefly toyed with the idea of uploading a big chunk of files to The Cloud — thinking I could just get it back if I ever needed it — but then the voice of…