Pee-wee Gets an iPad

Pee-wee Gets An iPad! from Pee-wee Herman Similar:By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edg…In Purgatory's Shadow #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 14) Garak's answers a code…This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule…

Technology and Innovation

Great collection of essays that capture the wonder of now-ubiquitous technology that was once strange.  Oliver Wendell Holmes on photography in 1859, Mark Twain on telephones in 1880, Philip G. Hubert Jr. on the phonograph in 1889, up to James Fallows on the personal computer in 1982. These eight excerpts show the attempts of writers,…

digital digs: the future of the magazine? or the textbook?

Alex Reid offers his commentary on this Sports Illustrated promotional video, that imagines how the magazine experience might work on a color tablet reader. In this YouTube video, the WonderFactory and Time present the “future of the magazine” (including more interactive advertisements, oh goody). Hmmm…. I wonder if the future of Sports Illustrated (the magazine)…

Death to the file, long live the URL

Part of an Ars Technica review of Google’s new operating system. Longtime Ars readers may be familiar with my periodic rants about the increasing disutility of the “volume/directory/file” metaphor for modern networked machines. Saving files, copying them, syncing them–this is all pointless clerical work that I want my computer to do for me. Bravo. Similar:This…

Listening to the Kindle

I’ve had a Kindle DX for a few weeks now. I’ve been using it as I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland to my daughter. I haven’t yet used the Kindle to buy any books, but I’ve stuffed it with out-of-copyright classics and academic PDFs. It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to set up the text…

Alright, already! Sheesh.

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Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance

Listservs, a trademarked software for running e-mail lists whose name is often used to refer to the lists themselves, were once a “killer app” that tempted many professors to try the Internet in the first place, back when many established scholars were skeptical of computers. A Chronicle article nearly 15 years ago proclaimed the exciting…

Let e-Readers Be e-Readers: Let's not turn them into all-purpose devices until we get the reading details right.

From a thoughtful review of the Kindle: The Kindle DX’s five-way joystick is quick, convenient, and expertly designed. (Plastic Logic’s touch screen really isn’t markedly better than using Amazon’s joy stick, but that’s because the touch options are fairly rudimentary.) The problem is the dearth of good places to direct the cursor. That’s a real…

Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user’s choices. — Jakob Neilsen Similar:This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding skil…More…

Open Source, Open Access, and Commons-Based Peer Production: Creating a Sustainable University Culture — Computers and Writing 2009

Roundtable Chair. Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University Scott Banville, University of Nevada, Reno David Blakesley, Purdue University How can open source software, open access publishing, and commons-based peer production (CBPP) principles help us to create a sustainable university? How can they positively impact the social and economic development of the university and expand the…

Audience and Surveillance: Who is Watching? Who is Reading? — Computers and Writing 2009

I arrived late and completely missed the first talk, so I’ll start with the three I did see. Surveillance of Power and the Power of SurveillanceMike Edwards, United States Military Academy at West Point Hansel and Gretel in Cyberspace: Following Breadcrumbs in a Forest of HypertextMary Karcher The Digital Emergence of the Public/Private AuthorityCasey McArdleBall…