Last week, Facebook asked me what sportsing teams I cared about (and helpfully supplied me with a list of the teams I’d be statistically most likely to favor if I had any interest in sportsing). Now Facebook is asking me what TV shows I’ve watched. Well, yes, I’ve watched episodes of each of these shows, but I…
When a Facebook executive whines about all these shallow viral links clogging our feeds, Slate’s Jordan Wiessmann clicks him a new one. If only we, the American people, could summon a champion. Someone who could, with the change of a single algorithm, turn the entire media ecosystem on its head. But who? –Jordan Weissmann, Slate.…
Blogging in education is about quality and authentic writing in digital spaces with a global audience, while observing digital citizenship responsibilities and rights, as on documents, reflects, organizes and makes one’s learning and thinking visible and searchable! Blogging is not analog writing in digital spaces. Blogging is not an activity, but a process. The process…
“From a photographer’s perspective it makes our photography process more similar to the days of film, where you went out you did your assignment, dropped off your roll of film, and went off to do another assignment. Now you download your cards, color correct and caption it. It takes away from the creative process of…
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed: “Google Classroom is not an LMS. It does not have a grade center, a discussion tool, an assessment engine, or a way to integrate with a Student Information System. (I think). Nobody is going to replace an existing campus LMS with Google Classroom. And yet — “
The links under your friend’s post got your attention. What the hyperbolic, go-for-the-gut click-baity blurb did to your lizard brain will make steaming blood gush out of your empty eye sockets. Ok, probably not, but still… [A] Facebook official made clear that the company does not apply the same fact-checking standard when offering readers related…
Forced Google+ integration in Google Reader and YouTube, both of which had strong communities of their own beforehand, are prime examples of how Google+ fostered hostility rather than goodwill. The time is right for Google to rethink its approach. I still like the idea of Circles as a way of controlling who sees what, but…
“After 112 years as The Daily Emerald, they saw the tidal wave of change,” he said. “They re-branded themselves from a daily student newspaper into a multiplatform student media company.” It was not financial worries alone that prompted Ryan Frank, its publisher, to announce the decision in 2012 to print two instead of five days…
Someone is regretting this PR move. The official @NYPDnews Twitter account made an attempt at social media outreach today only to get promptly torn to shreds by users resisting the PR push. Hijacked hashtags are a common Twitter phenomenon, but tend to be played more for giggles (“trolling,” some call it) than to make a…
It’s one thing to be able use a service like Facebook or Instagram, and to use it well; it’s quite another thing to code a web page by hand, tweak a CSS file, or design the navigation for a large website. While I don’t expect my English students to be professional programmers, I do aim…
I am not a fan of Adobe Flash, which is a closed, proprietary system that requires your users to install a specific, resource-intensive player. Don’t build your business on someone else’s property. Long live HTML5. Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and … Flash. All three of these mediums need a player to work, and all three mediums…
“We have about 850 graduates, and we have a professional photographer snapping their picture when they shake my hand and get their diploma,” said Ronald Machtley, the president of Bryant. “I don’t think their mom and dad and grandma want to get a picture of them holding up their cellphone.” —Go Forth and Conquer, but…
Users are now able to create audio and video playlists with WordPress 3.9. They work as a shortcode, just like the image galleries do currently. Uploading audio and video is handled through the usual media uploader, with images and everything else. From there, you have the option to add them to a playlist. —Smashing Magazine.…
I played the open-source version of Uru with my daughter for a few weeks when she was about six or seven. I enjoyed the opening tutorial game, but after that found little to do and found the learning curve was too steep to keep my daughter interested. She was happy running around and endlessly re-dressing…
What sex was for the Puritans, technology has become for us. We’ve focussed our collective anxiety on digital excess, and reconnecting with the “real” world around us represents one effort to control it. | And yet the “real” world, like the “real” America, is an insidious idea. It suggests that the selves we are online…
The real concern here is that the little guys—the Pies ‘n’ Thighs, the charitable causes, the artists and merchants trying to scrape by with the help of their Facebook fans—will find that they can’t reach even the users who really do want to see their updates. So far, the data suggest that they’re being spared…
A digital story is essentially any combination of a spoken narrative and a number of visuals, perhaps with a soundtrack – along with new technologies to edit and share the story. Although the concept of digital storytelling is closely linked to the use of new technology, we shouldn’t forget that it is always the story…
However there’s a particularly sad tale tied up in Versu’s fate (literally) and it’s why you won’t find me applauding this clean up any time soon. Versu was co-developed by acclaimed interactive fiction writer Emily Short, and for over a year most of the stories she’s made have been strictly for Versu. The unfortunate result…
Facebook Inc. changed its newsfeed algorithm. You’ll never believe what happened to Upworthy’s traffic next. —Bloomberg. Similar:New data on the first three jobs held by graduates of six popular majors“There is an enormous part of the econom…AcademiaProgress over 11 years of Blender3D practiceOver the past few years I have created l…AestheticsIn March, 2002, I was…
When I find something interesting that an online friend has shared via a linkbait site, I hereby pledge that I will link to the origin of the story, rather than a third-party site that republishes it without commentary. The people who share and like and respond to Upworthy and similar linkbait websites are just responding…