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Bye Facebook, hello Instagram: Users make beeline for Facebook-owned social network

Instagram dialed in early to the power of building community through visual communication. From the start, Instagram was a mobile app that revolved around snapshots, not snippets of text. This visualization of social media was propelled by young people who, bombarded by text messages, status updates and blog posts, gravitated to a simpler, faster and more expressive medium to tell their stories. Seven out of 10 Americans ages 18 to 24 use the…

Text Wrangler Discontinued (Free Mac Text Editor)

I still miss Notepad++, a Windows tool on which I coded many an Inform 6 puzzle. When Seton Hill started handing out iPads and MacBooks, I switched to MacOS. I really don’t miss Windows at all, but I did miss my Notepad++ text editor. TextWrangler was a decent substitute, though over the years I have moved to Google Docs for light-weight word processing. But today I noticed that TextWrangler is…

The Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s Silence

Wired, obviously having worked on a thinkpiece about Zuckerberg’s silence, manages to repurpose it in light of this afternoon’s statement. The Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s SilenceWhat has happened in the last five days has been the biggest crisis of Facebook’s existence. But Zuckerberg’s five-day silent treatment may prove more damning for Facebook than any of the news that precipitated it. This wouldn’t be nearly the crisis for most companies.…

We Are the Product Facebook Sells

Facebook does not care what Hobbit you are, whether your name is on the list of people who deserve a nap, which side of the controversy your temporary profile supports, or whether the news you shared is fake. Or, to be more precise, Facebook cares only to the extent that it can control our behavior, keeping us consuming Facebook content, providing Facebook with demographically categorized eyeballs to sell to its…

Multimodal Composing, Sketchnotes, and Idea Generation

Using the mixed media of sketch notes, animation, and voiceover, this video explores the field of composition’s relationship between multimodality and composing. The piece illustrates how multimodal strategies such as sketchnotes can enhance idea generation and learning and provide classroom strategies for multimodal composition. […] We must remember that, yes, digital composition is multimodal but multimodal composition isn’t necessarily digital. In her introduction of Toward a Composition Made Whole, Shipka…