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?
Why have they done this? I’m sure they have numerous reasons, but likely it comes down to one main thing – as nice a gesture as it might seem, Twitter simply does not work if you follow everybody back.
If you need specifics, think about this – your direct message inbox on Twitter is bad enough when you’re following just a dozen spammers or auto-DMers. Can you imagine what it must be like when you’re following hundreds of thousands? Even if we take a trip to la-la land and assume that all of those people are legitimate, they’re still going to bombard you with DMs, and when you get to those kinds of numbers it must be so overwhelming that one of the few legitimate options you have is to just ignore the darned thing.
He was less well-known, but no less talented, as a literary critic. Proof of it has resided, mostly unnoticed, in a small library in Redding, Conn., where hundreds of his personal books have sat in obscurity for 100 years. They are filled with notes in his own cramped, scratchy handwriting. Irrepressible when he spotted something he did not like, but also impatient with good books that he thought could be better, he was often savage in his commentary.
“The English of this book is incorrect & slovenly & its diction, as a rule, barren of distinction,” Twain scribbled in his copy of a 1906 autobiography of Lew Wallace, the Civil War general who wrote “Ben-Hur.”
Mr Bean said that face-to-face contact in universities had to be about more than simply passing on information that could be obtained digitally.
And he said that universities that embraced informal learning across a range of digital platforms would find that the approach encouraged enrolment into formal higher education.
"That's the world we are in today. I think it is the only way we are going to be able to deal with the challenges of globalisation and massification," he added.
Rohrer’s latest creation lets two players improvise a story over the internet, pairing constantly evolving story lines with crude graphics and comic book-style speech and thought bubbles. It can be hard to get the hang of at first, but the trade-off is a game that lets players have more control over their story than almost any other game allows.
Here’s how Sleep Is Death works: One person takes the role of “controller,” who steers the story and creates the assets the story will use. The other person, known as the “player,” can either go along with the story the controller has set up or try to subvert it to their own intentions. The controller and the player take turns performing their actions, with each having a 30-second time limit per turn.
To test the idea, they obtained data from the National Science Foundation on the number of researchers per capita in each state, and then randomly selected research papers that contained the phrase "test* the hypothes*". Those papers were characterized as either confirming (positive result) or rejecting (negative result) the hypothesis. To link the papers to the geographic data, the researchers used the address of the corresponding author, who is responsible for getting the paper to the journal and answering any further inquiries on it.
The end conclusion of the analysis is that "those based in US states where researchers publish more papers per capita were significantly more likely to report positive results, independently of their discipline." In other words, as local competition increases, the fraction of papers that confirmed a hypothesis went up.
The industry’s great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses—and help make them profitable. E-books are booming. Although they account for only an estimated three to five per cent of the market, their sales increased a hundred and seventy-seven per cent in 2009, and it was projected that they would eventually account for between twenty-five and fifty per cent of all books sold. But publishers were concerned that lower prices would decimate their profits. Amazon had been buying many e-books from publishers for about thirteen dollars and selling them for $9.99, taking a loss on each book in order to gain market share and encourage sales of its electronic reading device, the Kindle. By the end of last year, Amazon accounted for an estimated eighty per cent of all electronic-book sales, and $9.99 seemed to be established as the price of an e-book. Publishers were panicked. David Young, the chairman and C.E.O. of Hachette Book Group USA, said, “The big concern—and it’s a massive concern—is the $9.99 pricing point. If it’s allowed to take hold in the consumer’s mind that a book is worth ten bucks, to my mind it’s game over for this business.”
I am still using my computer to type; I'm just not connected to the Web. And I do have a student, Pat, who is helping me with this column. I dump my Word document and drawings (which have been scanned) onto his thumb drive, and he sends it along to my editor, who faxes me back edited copy to discuss. "Isn't that cheating?" I'm asked. "Pat is my shabbos goy," I reply.