"an inevitably incomplete typology of bookmarks" #wymhm

something like this:

  • Pointer: a bookmark with no additional content. Underlining. A bare quote.
  • Note: a bookmark with some additional content. Marginalia. Adding something to the text, alongside it.
  • Reference: a bookmark with a link to some other content. Adding something to the text, pointing elsewhere.

This seems simple, but it’s quite key, with regard to inline bookmarking. Then there’s the more general stuff associated with the whole text, or groups of texts.

"The Rock Band 3 story deals with every aspect of embargoes" #wymhm

One site has information that could endanger the exclusive going to someone else, so they're threatened in order to have it removed. Other news outlets ignore a story they know is true because it might break their embargo, only to find out that USA Today has the exclusive, so their own stories are going to feel like yesterday's news by the time they're allowed to publish. In some cases, writers go see a game, only to have the details, images, and gameplay details published by the developer before the embargo drops, destroying the value of the pre-release briefing.

 

"move beyond one dimensional text-only performances in order to assess student learning" #wymhm

Through performances like web log portfolios, slide presentations, digital stories and visually differentiated text, students can demonstrate learning in ways that require them to analyze, synthesize, evaluate and *apply* what they know about a particular content domain.

Today's pedagogical toolbox contains many new media tools that are inexpensive, easy-to-use and widely available.

The new media forms addressed in this site are "low end" in that they employ common hardware, as well as easy to use and free or inexpensive software. As such they represent the media forms that students should be able to read critically and write proficiently today. But tomorrow is a different story. Media forms evolve rapidly, and we are still waiting for educational structures to develop that can recognize and support them within the context of teaching and learning.

"What do I need to maximize my writing this summer?" #wymhm

Academic writers have lots of different needs. For example, some people need to physically share space with others while writing, some need a stern authority figure to answer to, some need solitude and the kind of support that is silent, some need a quantitative accounting of their progress, some need to be in groups with similar others, some need to be regularly inspired, some need ongoing substantive feedback by those in their specialty field, some need regular cheerleading, some need therapy, and some need an occasional exorcism (from the demons of bad academic socialization). It’s even OK if you need all of these things at different times! The important thing is to identify what you need without judgment, shame, or self-flagellation.

"There is a mismatch between institutions of higher education and digital natives on...education" #wymhm

Universities focus on teaching, the process of education, exposing students to instruction for specific periods of time, typically a semester for a course, and four years of instruction for a bachelor’s degree; digital natives are more concerned with the outcomes of education — learning and the mastery of content, achieved in the manner of games. which is why an online game pro will never boast about how long she was at a certain level, but will talk about the level that has been reached.

Higher education and digital natives also favor different methods of instruction. Universities have historically emphasized passive means of instruction — lectures and books — while digital natives tend to be more active learners, preferring interactive, hands-on methods of learning such as case studies, field study and simulations. The institution gives preference to the most traditional medium, print, while the students favor new media — the Internet and its associated applications.

"Twitter is something like a casual conversation among friends over dinner" #wymhm

Twitter is now a part of my daystream. I check in first thing every morning, and return at least once an hour until bedtime. I'm offline, of course, during movies, and don't even usually take my iPhone. The only tweeting I've done with mobile devices was when our internet went down one day, and when my laptop was lost in Cannes. But you can be sure that before I write the next three paragraphs I will tweet something.

Twitter for me performs the function of a running conversation.

"Forget man-made threats – the catalyst for the apocalypse will come from outer space" #wymhm

A hundred million years sounds like a safe buffer, but the next one could happen at any time. But you can take it off your worry list – astronomers have it covered. A network of ground-based telescopes scans the skies for bits of rogue rubble larger than a few hundred meters. That's ample time to dust off the nuclear arsenals for an interception mission if we had to. Unfortunately, the Dr Strangelove approach creates lethal shrapnel travelling in the same direction as the original object; a smarter strategy is to send a spacecraft alongside it and gently "tug" it with gravity onto a slightly different trajectory.

"Times is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice" #wymhm

It bewilders me to visit big law firms that clearly spent top dollar on their websites and their Aeron chairs but that still use Times for their correspondence and internal documents. It equally bewilders me to visit small firms that don’t have to go through twenty layers of approval that are also still using Times.

Did you make your business cards and letterhead on a photocopier at Kinko’s? No, you didn’t, because you didn’t want them to look shoddy and cheap. If you cared enough to avoid Kinko’s, then you care enough to stop using Times

"Writing, before it is anything else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts" #wymhm

even those of us who write for publication can conclude, once we have clarified certain thoughts, that these thoughts are not especially valuable, or are not entirely convincing, or perhaps are simply not thoughts we want to share with others, at least not now. For many of us who love the act of writing—even when we are writing against a deadline with an editor waiting for the copy—there is something monastic about the process, a confrontation with one’s thoughts that has a value apart from the proximity or even perhaps the desirability of any other reader. I believe that most writing worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page.
via tnr.com

"The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity" #wymhm

Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.

Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing.

On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.