Leo Tolstoy is scribbling furiously in the light of a dimly burning candle. At such close quarters, its searing heat has covered his forehead in a permanent patina of sweat, making the great novel a true work of toil. Suddenly, in the middle of a particularly vivid war scene, he curses out loud and blows…
Using the iPad requires more than just a change in mindset; it involves a cultural change, one that can be painful. One of the drawbacks I found this semester was that students used and discussed the iPad only in my class. That made my class unique, but it also meant that students defaulted to familiar…
The content is great, but I’m really blogging this because I’m tickled by the writing. Kickstarter is off-the-showroom polished in this regard – the web pages are clean without being sparse, sharp without being oblique, informative without being overwhelming. It feels like french-kissing a Nicholas Felton chart while Edward Tufte snaps photos for his personal…
Apple just released an update of its very nice iBooks. The Kindle still is my preferred ereader for personal reasons, but I prefer to teach with iBooks. Last year when I taught a literature survey, I experimented with asking students to use out-of-copyright free etexts, and to annotate them in iBooks. The fact that iBooks…
With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as making automatic spelling corrections personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive]) finding results that match similar terms to those in your query…
In general, I find Turnitin.com’s GradeMark function a time-saver, though the process of creating rubrics is tedious. Over the years, I’ve collected a big list of stock comments that I can drop into a paper easily. Just now, I was re-alphabetizing those comments in order to make them more useful, when the screen started acting…
Testing out the new WordPress iOS app on my iPod Touch. Improved authoring tools, very much appreciated.
A fantastic series of photos exploring the world as it was. The photo of Louie Armstrong playing his trumpet in front of the Egyptian pyramids is pretty cool, but I’m going to call out this one. NASA’s Project LOLA or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related…
The blog format relieves publishers from the tiresome duty of producing covers and front pages and things to make their content more attractive and make readers want it. In some cases, it enables publishers to surrender any responsibility for making content attractive in the first place. There is a prophetic scene in the magnificent movie…
In his “Confessions,” which dates from the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine famously hears a voice telling him to “pick up and read.” He interprets this as a command from God to pick up the Bible, open it at random and read the first passage he sees. He does so, the scales fall…
Just after training camp closed last year, Offensive Coordinator Cam Cameron wondered if the Ravens could put their several-hundred page playbook on some sort of tablet reader. A few weeks later, Head Coach John Harbaugh asked the same question. Now, after almost a year of development, the Ravens’ playbook is completely on a set of…
Basic tablets (they’re available with all sorts of bells and whistles, the most notable being multitouch), are cheap additions to the classroom, and affordable enough that teachers and professors can simply buy the tablets themselves. The overhead projector might be dead, but for educators who miss the great lessons they could deliver with a few…
There is a lot to like about Google+, and getting to 25 million users so quickly certainly seems promising for the Google social network. But, it doesn’t bode well if the excitement is already fading. Google needs to not only create a capable social network, but it needs to make that social network compelling enough…
On July 8, I went on the Google+ Diet, using Google’s new social network for all my online communication. As part of the diet, I stopped using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and several other services. I even stopped using e-mail. As I explained in my column last week, the purpose of the experiment was to see if…
Predictably, Wired celebrates the freedom that comes from depending on computers instead if your own memory. (The story includes a link to Nicholas Carr’s opposing view.) By sharing and comparing our memories, we can ensure that we still have some facts in common, that we all haven’t disappeared down the private rabbit hole of our…
My to-do do list and my “Follow Up” folders aren’t empty, but going into the July 4 weekend, it’s nice to see an empty in box. GMail’s strategy or replacing the “delete” button with “archive” means I felt more comfortable moving things out of my in box. I also like that GMail uses tags, not…
The world is divided into two types of people: those who prefer Track Changes in Word and those who prefer to write collaboratively in Google Docs. Which one are you? —Blog U.: Are You a Word Track Changes or Google Docs Person? – Technology and Learning – Inside Higher Ed.
Our wonderful IT folks have set up a push-the-button-and-it-just-works conversion from MS Outlook to GMail. My only real concern is that this gives me yet another GMail account where I might lose something… is there a way to cross-link GMail accounts? Time to Google for an answer. Update: As part of the transfer process, I…