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Being careless with education history
Being careless with education history
Earlier today, Duke professor Cathy Davidson uploaded a rebuttal to the New York Times article by Matt Richtel on technology’s limits, a retort that included the following passage: Keep in mind public, compulsory school was invented in the 19th century because of the industrial age which needed a certain kind of focused worker who understood the new divisions of labor. Keep in mind one product of the industrial age was the steam-powered press and machine made paper and ink that put books into the hands of the middle class for the first time in history. Pundits worried that people wouldn’t know how to read those books wisely and well.  No preacher mediated the message. But schools could do just that. If our forefathers mandated school for the first generation of mass readers, why wouldn’t we mandate that schools today address the technology that is in the hands of our students today? Wouldn’t that be utterly irresponsible?… Those tests… were invented for the industrial age, and for a model of efficiency exemplified by the Model T.  We cannot keep educating kids for the efficiencies of 1914 (when the multiple choice test was invented).1 I will let others address Davidson’s vision of what teaching with technology is supposed to do, but I cannot let this misunderstanding of education history pass unnoticed. The bulk of this entry is an explanation of how Davidson’s thumbnail history is wrong, and the last part is an exploration of why she and many others misuse such thumbnail myths.
·shermandorn.com·
Being careless with education history
The World Wide Web was first revealed 25 years ago — Quartz
The World Wide Web was first revealed 25 years ago — Quartz
Twenty-five years ago, on Aug. 6, 1991, someone asked a question on an internet forum. The response was the first public acknowledgement of the World Wide Web—the backbone on which all websites function, and the genesis of our modern internet culture and arguably the start of the digital communication revolution in which billions of people can now talk to each other, access any piece of information or order pretty much anything they want instantaneously. The first website, which was literally a website explaining what a website was, went online in November 1992. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, at the time a researcher at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). But before the site went live, Berners-Lee brought up the project he was working on—hyperlinks, the technology that allows pieces of information to be linked to each other on the internet—on a Usenet page. Usenet was a pre-internet forum when just a couple million people were on the internet; its archives have since been acquired by Google. If you want to find the first rumblings of the modern web online now, you have to trudge through some incompletely archived pages on Google Groups. Berners-Lee was responding to a question someone asked about whether anyone knew anyone working on the concept of hyperlinks. As one of the people directly working on that exact topic he seemed perfectly situated to respond.
·qz.com·
The World Wide Web was first revealed 25 years ago — Quartz
The Eight Sequences - The Script Lab
The Eight Sequences - The Script Lab
This Sequence Outline is NOT an absolute formula or perfect recipe to building a feature script, but it is something to work from. Because each script is a prototype: new, unique, custom-made just for its own story. 
·thescriptlab.com·
The Eight Sequences - The Script Lab
Disney Movies (In 5 Easy Steps)  ·  Tufts Admissions
Disney Movies (In 5 Easy Steps)  ·  Tufts Admissions
One of my favorite science fiction authors, Kurt Vonnegut, once graphed the story of Cinderella in order to examine human happiness. He argued that the story followed a particular story arc, moving from misery to ecstasy, back to misery, and off to a happy ending. "People love that story," he told a New York audience, "And because of it, people think their lives are supposed to be like this...So people pretend there is drama where there is none." This ties in nicely to a recent XKCD comic, Connoisseur, which argued that "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit." Randall (the comic writer)'s point, here, is once again that we invent drama when our lives otherwise lack it. Now back to Vonnegut for a second. If Cinderella follows a particular story arc, is it possible that the other Disney stories do, too? Could it be that every single Disney movie, perhaps, follows the exact same story arc? I think so, and I've graphed it.
·admissions.tufts.edu·
Disney Movies (In 5 Easy Steps)  ·  Tufts Admissions
User Memory Design: How To Design For Experiences That Last – Smashing Magazine
User Memory Design: How To Design For Experiences That Last – Smashing Magazine
The two charts pictured below changed the way I think about thinking. Reproduced from a classic 1996 psychology study, the story behind these charts is a vivid illustration that the way we humans feel in the moment as we experience the world can be very different from how we feel when we think back on those experiences later. Understanding the difference between experience and memory — and the ways they are related — can make us more sophisticated experience designers.
·smashingmagazine.com·
User Memory Design: How To Design For Experiences That Last – Smashing Magazine
Eager
Eager
Build one plugin, ship it to one hundred million websites. Eager makes it easy to deliver your tool as a plugin on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more in minutes.
·eager.io·
Eager
The History of Email - Eager Blog
The History of Email - Eager Blog
The history of computing moves from massive data processing mainframes, to time sharing where many people share one computer, to the diverse collection of personal computing devices we have today. Messaging was first born in the time sharing era, when users wanted the ability to message other users of the same time shared computer.
·eager.io·
The History of Email - Eager Blog
Building Online Communities: GitHub Teacher — Medium
Building Online Communities: GitHub Teacher — Medium
We talked to the GitHub Training team about the free GitHub courses they offer to both developers and non-developers, as well as about the community that formed around them on Gitter. Check out what they say and enroll in the course!
·medium.com·
Building Online Communities: GitHub Teacher — Medium
A framework for modern User Stories — Medium
A framework for modern User Stories — Medium
Though the User Story has entered its teenage years as a customer-focused software development mechanic, I still find a lot of confusion out there on how to structure modern Stories for success. ‘How much is too much detail?’ ‘Should it be as complete as a spec?’ There’s often an uneasiness from team members when they’re reviewing Stories they’ve authored with their team. Over the last 18 months, we’ve built up a lot of confidence in the method below. You’ll see how I write stories, what its done for our team, and how to make sure it works for yours. So let’s start writing…
·medium.com·
A framework for modern User Stories — Medium
OldNYC: Mapping Historical Photographs of New York City
OldNYC: Mapping Historical Photographs of New York City
This site provides an alternative way of browsing the NYPL's incredible Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection. Its goal is to help you discover the history behind the places you see every day. And, if you're lucky, maybe you'll even discover something about New York's rich past that you never knew before!
·oldnyc.org·
OldNYC: Mapping Historical Photographs of New York City
ETEC 510
ETEC 510
This is the eighth iteration of the Design wiki, a collaborative knowledge base that has been entirely authored by ETEC510 students. You will be responsible for building on the ETEC 510 knowledge base by creating a stop motion artifact for one of the very specific sub-headings. Stop motion artifact is a technique that uses individual images of static objects in rapid succession so that they appear to be moving. Consider how the addition of a stop motion artifact can enhance this community knowledge building space, and the kind of information that can be uniquely contributed through the affordances offered by stop motion artifact. You are responsible for creating one dynamic and informative 2-5 minute stop motion artifact for the wiki. Originality, resourcefulness, and creativity are encouraged. The ETEC 510 Wiki is an ongoing project in ETEC 510, and students from the previous seven iterations of the course have contributed to the content on the wiki. Your stop motion artifact will be available to future students in the course. This Wikispace is a shared resource that will continue to evolve as students post more content relating to ETEC 510. The Media/Education/Design wiki takes the form of an online set of entries that follow the standard Wikipedia encyclopedia entry genre. Wikipedia represents an important contemporary example of how a specific medium and a particular environment intersect in such a way as to enable the most prolific and significant example to-date of public knowledge production that blurs the boundaries between producers and consumers. At present, the design Wiki is primarily text-based, with some entries incorporating photographs and links to outside media. The ETEC 510 Stop Motion Artifact assignment requires you to add visually-designed knowledge to the ETEC 510 WIKI.
·etec.ctlt.ubc.ca·
ETEC 510
A Brief History of the Command Line — Free Code Camp
A Brief History of the Command Line — Free Code Camp
This post by Andy Trevorah, Engineer at Gitter, has been adapted from a talk that he originally gave at codebar, a non-profit initiative that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by running regular programming workshops. This post is in two parts: a little history, followed by some live command line examples. A Brief History Way back in the 1960s — 70s, computers were becoming more than just calculators. They could save files to disk and have multiple running applications with multiple users. But these things were difficult to control and easy to break. Thankfully, there was a very smart idea to cover all these internal bits in a nice, usable shell.
·medium.freecodecamp.com·
A Brief History of the Command Line — Free Code Camp
Maxistentialism
Maxistentialism
Werewolf is based on the game Mafia, which was created in 1986 by Dimitry Davidoff, a psychology student in the USSR. In 1997 Andrew Plotkin added the Werewolf theme and documented the rules. Werewolf has gone on to become a staple of tech conferences and gaming conventions, and many players, including myself, consider it to be one of the most difficult and elegant games ever created
·maxistentialism.com·
Maxistentialism
Exploring the Physical Web (Without Buying Beacons) — Medium
Exploring the Physical Web (Without Buying Beacons) — Medium
The Physical Web is still pretty new, but the basic idea is that the Physical Web lets you broadcast any URL to the people around you. Awesome, right? The Physical Web lets you anchor URLs to physical places by way of a BLE beacon, effectively allowing you to “park” a webpage, link to a file, etc., wherever you want. It’s kind of like putting your own “Pokémon Go” wherever you want for people to find — except without making them surrender all their data ;)
·medium.com·
Exploring the Physical Web (Without Buying Beacons) — Medium
Integrate and Back Up Your Cloud - cloudHQ
Integrate and Back Up Your Cloud - cloudHQ
Even if your organization might be using one primary cloud storage platform like Google Apps, your employees, partners, and clients will use other cloud apps like Evernote for note-taking, Dropbox for sharing with clients, Salesforce for CRM, Basecamp for project management. Since data is scatter over so many different cloud apps and platforms collaboration is nightmare and important data might be lost. cloudHQ will ensure that everybody can collaborate via primary cloud storage platform (i.e., Google Apps) and that all data is protected: regardless in which cloud app or account it resides.
·cloudhq.net·
Integrate and Back Up Your Cloud - cloudHQ
The Movie Database (TMDb)
The Movie Database (TMDb)
Our History Staying In Touch Logos & Attribution Apps API Editing Content FAQ Our History The Movie Database (TMDb) was started as a side project in 2008 to help the media center community serve high resolution posters and fan art. What started as a simple image sharing community has turned into one of the most actively user edited movie database on the Internet. With an initital data contribution from a project called omdb (thank you!), the goal was to create our own product and service. We launched the first version of the database in early 2009. Along with the website we also launched one of first and only free movie data API's. Today, our service is used by tens of millions of people every week and is often regarded as the single best place to get movie data and images. Whether you're interested in personal movie and TV recommendations, what movies have won the Oscar for best picture, maintaining a personal watchlist, or like to develop applications of your own, we hope you'll love everything our service has to offer. So explore a little. Search for your favorite movie. Build a list of movies you want to watch. We're really proud of the service we've built and hope you find it as useful as we do.
·themoviedb.org·
The Movie Database (TMDb)
Let stories speak - Elm - European lifelong learning magazine
Let stories speak - Elm - European lifelong learning magazine
This issue of Elm is built around eight short documentaries from Denmark, Finland, the UK and Portugal. Among them you will find Lee and Sigrid. You could also watch how Veli-Antti, a Finnish music educator builds a learning team out of him amateur symphony orchestra. Or how Portuguese Idalina fulfilled her ambition to become a solicitor after 30 years of working in a textile factory. Each country features two videos, one of a learner, one of an educator. This reflects the two main target groups for the videos: The learner stories are intended to be testimonies of the power of learning, aimed at the general public. The educator stories are more geared towards sharing good practices among European adult educators. In this issue each educator video is complemented by an article elaborating on the practices and methods seen on the screen. The videos were produced within an Erasmus + project, coordinated by Elm's publisher the Finnish Lifelong Learning Foundation. They are a free resource for anyone to use and spread, also available on our Vimeo channel.
·elmmagazine.eu·
Let stories speak - Elm - European lifelong learning magazine
Quantifying the Clickbait and Linkbait in BuzzFeed Article Titles
Quantifying the Clickbait and Linkbait in BuzzFeed Article Titles
I decided to determine which phrases in BuzzFeed headlines are the most successful in order to see if it’s possible to reverse-engineer BuzzFeed’s business model. Therefore, I scraped BuzzFeed’s website (after initial frustration) and obtained 60,378 distinct articles and the corresponding number of Facebook Shares for each article. From there, I decomposed each headline into its component n-grams, allowing me to perform quantitative analysis for each possible permutation of words in the article titles. You probably don’t know that the 3 most interesting things I found will blow your mind.
·minimaxir.com·
Quantifying the Clickbait and Linkbait in BuzzFeed Article Titles
Coding with 'heart': An Arabic programming language that understands calligraphy | Al Bawaba
Coding with 'heart': An Arabic programming language that understands calligraphy | Al Bawaba
Computer programming languages already execute billions of commands and can be used to create art. But with most programming languages being based on Latin characters, they tend to fall apart when it comes to Arabic. Even people who aren't programmers, but have tried typing in Arabic have encountered problems: the text doesn't align right, the letters don't connect, you need special plugins to make the text work at all, and so on. Alb, meaning "heart," an Arabic programming language, aims to change that. And it understands the traditional Arabic art form of calligraphy. Ramsey Nasser, a computer scientist based in New York with a degree from the American University in Beirut, thinks anyone should be able to learn how to code. But that also means you most likely need to be able to at least read and write Latin characters, much of it containing English words.
·albawaba.com·
Coding with 'heart': An Arabic programming language that understands calligraphy | Al Bawaba