November 2007
Deeds of Gaijin Occupiers →
My grandmother has recently started telling everyone she owns a house in Japan (gaijin cannot own land?). In the 1950s, my grandfather was stationed in Japan. He went over by himself, acquired a house, and sent for his wife and six kids to come. The most common story my grandmother tells is this trip over there. It has several humorous elements to portray the personalities of all the kids. They...
The Shot Heard Round the Vista World →
What is the worst possible outcome of an event from an admin’s perspective? You lose everything.
Next worst is lose a large portion of the data. Losing days worth of data, as Utah did, is huge. This is the biggest news since the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, I think. To Utah’s credit, they have done their best to let people know their SAN and not a Blackboard code error was the culprit.
Still,...
Personal Learning Environments - the future of... →
Hey, Young Americans, Here's a Text for You... →
Social Marketing →
Normally, I consider John Dvorak a crotchety old-timer who doesn’t get human-computer interaction due to his myopic self-centered view. (His use isn’t usually my use, so he gripes seem inapplicable.) Finally, he got one right… almost. In his most recent blog post… er… opinion article, he described people using social networks as “marketing” themselves. Actually, the phrasing is identity...
links for 2007-11-28 →
On failure.
(tags: research science)
Hey, Young Americans, Here’s a Text for You
(tags: democracy)
Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning?
(tags: education learning online_learning)
On failure. [del.icio.us] →
VLE vs PLE →
PLEs reflect the needs of a student information gatherer. VLEs (aka LMSs) reflect the classroom and institution online. (PLEs vs VLEs) Blackboard Vista is a VLE. Its competitors are all VLEs. Vista is the worst VLE of them all as its designed to host multiple institutions in one site. The GeorgiaVIEW project takes the VLE approach to the extreme by getting a number of institutions to...
links for 2007-11-27 →
Taking Science on Faith - New York Times
(tags: Science)
Taking Science on Faith - New York Times... →
Taking Science on Faith - New York Times... →
M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster →
M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster Credit & Copyright: Antonio Fernandez-Sanchez
Explanation: Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and closest open clusters. The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is...
Race, Class, and the Choice of Social-Networking... →
Sure, both MySpace and Facebook are social networks, and both are beloved by college students. But the two sites are hardly created equal—at least not in terms of the significantly different groups of students who tend to frequent them.
Now Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, has shed some light on what sets MySpace partisans apart from...
Philosophy for kids →
Teaching children the art of collaborative philosophical inquiry brings them persistent, long-term cognitive benefits, according to psychologists in Scotland. Keith Topping and Steve Trickey first reported the short-term benefits of using “Thinking through Philosophy” with children in an earlier study. One hundred and five children in the penultimate year of primary school (aged...
Tunguska: The Largest Recent Impact Event →
Tunguska: The Largest Recent Impact Event Credit: Leonid Krulik Expedition, Wikipedia
Explanation: Yes, but can your meteor do this? The most powerful natural explosion in recent Earth history occurred on 1908 June 30 when a meteor exploded above the Tunguska River in Siberia, Russia. Detonating with an estimated power 1,000 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped over...
Dumb security questions →
Yesterday, my ISP required me to choose two “security questions” from a drop-down list of dumb choices: the name of my first pet or my favorite book, movie, food, or place to visit.
Why dumb? First, these questions assume I don’t have an Evil Sibling who knows these things; the same is true, of course, of common questions such as where you were born and your mother’s...
Unintelligent Question →
Is this little girl less intelligent because of her race? Here we go again. My father-in law just sent me an article from the New York Times. It seems the genetics, race and IQ debate continues. Are we living in the 21st century or the 19th century? Here is a bit of the article: “We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we have to be very careful,” said William Henry Gates...
what are you willing to trade for an answer to... →
Sorostitute: (dressed in knee-high boots and a very short skirt) I had some random guy ask me if I had been hanging out on any street corners today. What the hell was he talking about? @slc overheard by: kristen rate or email this quote | visit oia
