An article by Malcolm Gladwell on the reasons why paper refuses to go away. [link via Tech Architecture Lodge].
Gladwell rocks. One of the reasons I like him so much is that he takes the big view of technology, in this article tracing the development of many contemporary organizational principles back to Melvil Dewey (yes, the Dewey of Dewey decimal system fame) who invented the vertical filing cabinet. The vertical filing cabinet! Of course someone had to invent it, but you never think about one guy sitting around his office in pre-filing cabinet days, with stacks of papers and pigeonholes in his desk — pigeonholes! — thinking “How the hell am I going to organize all these papers?” But someone had to do it. And Gladwell had to write about it. Another great example is his article, King Road Drag where he traces the e-commerce revolution back to a tool called the King Road Drag used to smooth out dirt farm roads. Yup. Read the article. It makes sense in a roundabout kind of way.
Gladwell’s articles remind of the old late 70’s/early 80’s PBS series, Connections, hosted by James Burke. Burke would take all these seemingly unrelated historical/technological events and show how they all worked together integrally to create a particular historical outcome. Fascinating stuff to my junior high mind…and apparently still fascinating to my 30-something noggin.
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In the previous post, I linked to an earlier post that mentioned Malcolm Gladwell. That earlier post was really about the network economy, though, and referred to an article I read about the economist, Brian Arthur. Looking at that old post reminded me that on the plane from DC to LA this afternoon (yes, this blog coming to you from LA tonight), I read an article in Business 2.0 magazine by Brian Arthur. In Is the Information Revolution Dead? he gives a great overview of the development of technological revolutions.
Staying up late with jetlag and making odd connections between old posts is fun. :-)
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This article from Microcontent News, “a New Magazine about Weblogs, Webzines, and Personal Publishing” (and, apparently, gratuitous capitalizatoin) talks about how blogs generate information epidemics, using their own new blog as the test case. It follows the ideas Malcom Gladwell put forth in The Tipping Point which is a damn fine book I’ve written about before.
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It’s true. Google really has changed the Internet. I can’t imagine how I would get through a day without it. This article, “O’Reilly Network: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon,” gives a great explanation of why Google is great at what it does. [link via Peterme.com]
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Cyborg Not Allowed Through Airport Security: You think I’m kidding but this article is for real. From the New York Times, no less. (Free registration required.)
We live in a weird world.
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Michigan Virtual University has created and published a set of Instructional Design Standards for Quality Online Courses. [link via SiT]. Looks well-thought out and useful.
Will faculty use it? I’m sure MIVU faculty use it, because MIVU is aimed at workforce training. However, it has been my experience that in higher education (as opposed to K12 or corporate training), faculty resist instructional design. Higher Ed is an oddity in the education marketplace. Everyplace else, instructional designers work with subject-matter experts to develop a curriculum, but frequently in Higher Ed, the faculty (who are almost always subject-matter experts with no formal training in education or instructional design) are left to their own devices to design courses. In the traditional face-to-face classroom, this often doesn’t show problems because methods are fairly well-established. Transition those same faculty to online courses, and their lack of familiarity with instructional principles really begin to show. These MVU standards or something similar could be very effective in helping with that, if faculty can overcome their resistance to “being told how to teach their course.”
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This article from the Chronicle asks “should colleges require students to buy computers?” It’s a conversation (RealPlayer or an MP3 download required) between Dave Brown of Wake Forest University (which was one of the first to require computers) and Michael Sperling of Fairleigh Dickinson University, which didn’t require students to purchase computers, but does require them to take at least one online course every year.
I haven’t listened to the entire conversation yet, but I’ve studied the Wake Forest program (it was a model used for a pilot laptop program at Gallaudet University, my last job) . It’s a great program. I think the key to making required computer purchases a success is threefold: (1) most important, it must be made affordable, especially for the students who have financial aid, (2) the infrastructure (networking, access points, hardware & software support, etc.) must be in place, and (3) training training training. Without the infrastructure and the training, you’re selling the student $1500 paperweights.
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My teaching days pre-date Slashdot, so I was never a teacher and a Slashdot user at the same time. To me, this thread on Slashdot is interesting more for the misinformed views the rest of the Slashdot users posed about teachers (stuff like “There’s always a demand for them…and teachers can work anywhere,” as just one example) than for the posts from the few Slashdotters who actually are teachers. [link via Tech Architecture Lodge]
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So I’m sitting up surfing blogs on a Sunday night with VH1 on in the background. (Which, by the way, has become a disturbingly frequent habit…I just can’t hack MTV anymore. I’m so clearly not-young.) And I’m watching Behind the Music: Sheryl Crow and this thought popped to mind: If she walked up to me and asked, I’d marry Sheryl Crow in a second.
So I’m sitting here cogitating over the sheer unlikeliness that Sheryl Crow would walk up to me and propose marriage, if for no other reason than she probably just doesn’t know Greg’s sitting here on his futon ready to tie the knot (never mind all the more complex reasons, like I need to lose ten pounds and she lives on the other side of the country). Then this thought pops into my head: Well, maybe if I can get this idea to the top of Google searches, someone who knows Sheryl will let her know I’m available.
Basically, I want to googlebomb my way into Sheryl Crow’s consciousness! So my request to you is link to this post. The direct URL is in the permalink, the little ¤ symbol at the end of the post. Just link to that and tell all your friends. :-)
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The Washington Post reports a monkey’s thoughts can move a cursor (washingtonpost.com). “When the monkeys realized they didn’t have to move their hands to achieve the computer tasks, Donoghue said, they occasionally stopped moving the mouse and moved the cursor with their thoughts.” Cool . . .and kinda creepy.
(For a second, I thought they might be talking about former Webmonkey, Captain Cursor.)
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