betajames

This new world owes its origin to the rampant sharing of photos, résumés and personal news bites on services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, which have acclimated people to broadcasting even the most mundane aspects of their lives.

To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification.

In addition to having its own specialized vocabulary, academic language is more concise, using complex grammatical structures to express complicated ideas in as few words as possible. This is especially true when it comes to scientific writing. Students who prefer reading Web content over books have fewer opportunities to learn this language on their own.

Nicknamed "Blog Muse," it solicits suggestions from a pool of prospective readers, proposes them to potential writers, alerts readers upon publication of the requested post, and encourages comment. Topic ideas can go viral and build audience interest ahead of publication, as prospective readers can see which suggested topics are the most popular. The tool can also generate topic suggestions automatically.

Video games are exercises in learning and growing. The designer acts as the teacher, giving the player problems that escalate in difficulty, hoping their course will help them learn as they go, get better, and feel good about what they achieve.

When you are trying to teach someone something, you don't punish them when they make a mistake. You let them learn from it and give them positive reinforcement when they do well.

Which brings us back to Eyjafjallajökull. Like all of Iceland’s volcanoes, this one is fueled by the tectonic spreading of the Atlantic seafloor and a “hotspot” of upwelling material from the Earth’s deep interior. This confluence of geology has caused periodic eruptions for more than ten thousand years; on human timescales, there’s nothing new about it. On the other hand, only in the last half-century has flinging winged tubes of steel and aluminum through the air become a common method of high-speed transportation. Mix this development with increasingly powerful and ubiquitous information technology and telecommunications networks, stir, and at a stroke all is transformed. The interdependent biological, technological, and cultural systems of the planet now freely mingle and tightly meld in a globalized milieu, with surprising effects. Leaving its volcanic ash aside, just the pronunciation of Eyjafjallajökull’s Icelandic name placed international news organizations into momentary disarray. In a merging world, nothing is too trivial to gain significance through disruption.

Over the years, Matt has accumulated a flock of snide nicknames from his band mates, including the Dark Lord, the Naysayer, Mumbleberry Pie, Mr. Knee Jerk, Mr. Sony Headphones and the Echo Chamber — the last for the coterie of musically astute persons whom Matt frequently invokes supporting his opinion of whatever song they are arguing about.

the field is exciting because of its collaborative character and its impulse for multimedia scholarship. Nevertheless, new technologies should not be adopted based upon their newness alone. The rationale for teaching and learning must be there, and within that rationale is precisely where the digital humanities rest.

We contend that its inadequacy stems from three specific weaknesses of the CMS—(1) the organization of learning experiences into discrete, artificially time-bound units, (2) the predominance of instructor-focused and content-centric tools in the CMS, and (3) the lack of persistent connections between learners, instructors, content, and the broader community across semesters and across class, program, and institutional boundaries.

What happens, for instance, as you add more participants to a carefully-designed environment? The online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) provides an intriguing example. More than 11.5 million people around the world now play World of Warcraft. Performance in the game is measured by experience points, which are awarded to players as they successfully address progressively more difficult challenges. It takes roughly 150 hours of accumulated game play to earn the first 2 million experience points but players on average are able to earn another 8 million experience points in the next 150 hours of accumulated game play. Even though, within the game, experience points become more difficult to acquire as you advance, World of Warcraft players are improving their performance four times faster as they continue to play the game.

In pseudo-documentary style, it tells the story—or rather, presents a series of vignettes—of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad and their potentially deadly work of disarming planted bombs. This choice is deeply symptomatic: Although soldiers, they do not kill, but daily risk their lives dismantling terrorist bombs that are destined to kill civilians. Can there be anything more sympathetic to our liberal sensibilities? Are our armies in the ongoing War on Terror (aka The Long War), even when they bomb and destroy, ultimately not just like EOD squads, patiently dismantling terrorist networks in order to make the lives of civilians safer?