It was not an isolated incident. As other professors he met described their plans to follow his example, he suspected their classes would also flop. “They would just be inspired to use blogs and Twitter and technology, but the No. 1 thing that was missing from it was a sense of purpose.”
(emphasis mine)
You can’t just bolt on techy techtech and be a good and innovative teacher (or student). There has to be a reason. A purpose. A genuine, authentic need to use a tool or technique. Otherwise it’s just distracting busywork. Sometimes, no techytechtech is the best way to do something.
An awesome documentary on finding what you enjoy, and being brave enough to step up and learn. Even better, it was written, produced, directed, and stars my bestest friend Kim Faires as part of the NUTV Doc School program on campus. So good.
I tried an experiment, where I took a photo every hour on the hour (or as close to it as I could manage/remember) to see what documenting a full day might look like. It was surprisingly fun to do. Might make an interesting @ds106 daily create project…
Instagram’s CEO, talking about the awesome plans for ramping up ads in their service:
“I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry have joined Instagram.
“They’re sharing pictures of products and the message of their brands. That shows we’re at the beginning of what will come with brands,” he said.
Matt Gemmell just posted a great summary of some of the recent discussion about comments on blogs.
One line in his write-up stuck with me, because it’s basically what I experienced as well:
For most people in this discussion, the main worry about switching off comments has been a fear of reducing engagement or conversation. For me, that was about 50% of my concern; the other 50% was that I really, really liked getting those comments each day from people who (for the most part) agreed with what I’d written. I was in the absurdly privileged position that disabling comments amounted to switching off daily reassurance and validation. Accordingly, any accusation that I’m hiding from disagreement is frankly ridiculous.
I needed to archive several WordPress sites as part of the process of gathering the raw data for my thesis research. I found a few recipes online for using wget to grab entire sites, but they all needed some tweaking. So, here’s my recipe for posterity:
I used wget, which is available on any linux-ish system (I ran it on the same Ubuntu server that hosts the sites).
2 entire series of novels later, and a scattering of other standalone books. I’m reading more now than I have in years. But I haven’t bought the Big Ticket eBooks. Most of these are either free, or low-cost books put out by independent authors. Very cool stuff.
Every now and then, I have to pause a little when I realize that almost all of my photographs this year were taken with a cell phone. Many (most?) of the photos would have never happened otherwise - I’d grow tired of lugging out a DSLR and all that entails. But because a good-enough-camera is in my phone, in my pocket all of the time, I’m documenting stuff that would have gone forgotten otherwise. That’s worth far more to me than pixels and f-stops.
Fear of Apple is about losing control over the software on our computers. Fear of Google is about losing control over our privacy.
That’s the best, clearest description of the difference I’ve seen. I don’t care what anyone else uses. But I value my privacy more than I value the ability to compile the kernel behind my operating system.
