Our technology story rests on three strong pillars. First, like many personal services, including much of health care, the law and banking, higher education remains essentially an artisanal industry. These are industries in which technological progress has not reduced the number of labor hours needed to “produce” the service. By contrast, labor productivity in basic…
The very efficient mobile phone version of Yahoo! Mail, m.yahoo.com/mail, no longer works for my iPad. A purple screen with a spinning animation just hangs. What gives? The full web version is way too busy for a touchscreen. Similar:Never trust a corporation to do a library’s jobThe Internet Archive is mostly known for…BooksMelissa Terras Reports Her Success…
[A] new study indicates that computers alone can’t keep students from falling into their same weak study habits from their ink-and-paper days…. The research, published in The Journal of Educational Psychology, found that students tend to study on computers as they would with traditional texts: They mindlessly over-copy long passages verbatim, take incomplete or linear…
Doom was a ground-breaking 2003 1993 first-person shooter, with a successful business model that involved releasing the first few levels as shareware and charging for the full game. From GoldenEye to Modern Warfare 2, I’ve played first-person shooters made of polygons. As the years advanced, I’ve watched the worlds and figures these games depict advance…
A skillful exercise, this sonnet blog. Such parser game nostalgia warms my heart. You might be int’rested in Graham Nelson’s Command-line Shakespeare remix, The Tempest. Similar:Partisan Pa. websites masquerading as local news threaten trust in journalism, new report …People with financial interests to prote…CultureI Made Cheerful Maze Game in ScratchWell, it’s cheerful unless you touch…
Here’s the proposal for an in-house “Teaching and Learning Seminar” I’ll be presenting October 13: There is no scholarship on the academic use of iPads, because people like us — who have just begun teaching and advising and facilitating with iPads — haven’t published it yet. We can, of course, draw on related academic inquiry…
Sheaffer Pen celebrates the art of writing, highlighting (predictably) the technological advances of the fountain pen. (Thanks to Ryan Trauman, who posted this on techrhet.) Near the climax of Death of a Salesman, Biff confesses that he has totally blown a business opportunity because he stole a big-shot’s fountain pen. When I first read the…
A new federal law requires publishers to provide textbook price information to professors and calls on colleges to identify course textbooks during registration, giving students more time to shop around. Experts call it a step in the right direction, but not a game-changer. At the same time, a robust online marketplace of used books and…
Katie Fritsch, Seton Hill Government Association president, said the school is unique. “Seton Hill is unique because it is rooted in tradition but very progressive in its approach to education,” she said. “I love that Seton Hill was the first school in the nation to create a program that will deliver an iPad to every…
The volunteers at the Busy Run Battlefield (in southwestern Pennsylvania) put on a fantastic event today, commemorating the high point of Pontiac’s War (the last major unified attempt of the native Americans to oppose British colonization in the aftermath of the French and Indian War). The event continues tomorrow, with a very engaging series of…
There was no leaflet in my mailbox this morning, but I did find something much better — a copy of Jason Scott’s text adventure game documentary.My commemorative coin… Similar:Let's face it, it's time to give up on those Portal and Half-Life sequelsReserving judgments is a matter of infin…BusinessAm I a Bad Father Because I Let…
Anthologize is a WordPress 3.0 plugin that turns the WordPress installation into a platform for publishing electronic texts. From within the plugin in your WordPress dashboard, you can grab posts from your existing blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within the tool. At that point, you can outline, order, and…
Shirky’s right that those inclined to create have more possibilities than ever before; today, you can run not just a software company from your living room, but a manufacturing company, thanks to advanced design applications and a web of contract suppliers in China. But just because there is more possibility than ever to do something…
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that. But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that…
I recently started a new Google Docs, and as part of my drafting, looked up a few things online. When I was ready to go back to my document, I habitually looked for the Word icon. But I’m not using Word at the moment, I’m using Google Docs. Because I’ve spent the summer doing quite…
Now available for Windows-based PCs, Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby is a downloadable casual game that lets you interact with familiar characters, locations and story lines from the legendary American novel. As Nick Carraway, a young idealist back from the Great War, you must unravel secrets buried behind the decadence of the Roaring ’20s. This…
Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they’re right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family. But how should they get started? —Ask Slashdot…
I recognize that people who sell laundry detergent are more interested in selling soap than using gender-neutral language, but as a married man who does his own dang laundry, I was a little miffed by the language that presumes the winner of this marketing stunt will be female. If the team tracks a consumer to…
I’ve been a fan of the faux-historical Boilerplate website for many years, so I was very happy to see this news. J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot banner are tackling the tale of a robot set in the Victorian Age. Paramount has picked up rights to “Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel,” a graphic novel-picture book hybrid…
Gameplay in Cow Clicker is insultingly simple — Bogost has described it as “Facebook games distilled to their essence.” Users obtain a cow on which they can click every six hours, and every time they click, they earn more opportunities to click their cow or their friends’ cows. Users can buy custom “premium” cows or…