Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure while I’m on vacation.
I was never concerned as to whether or not today’s school-age kids were going to be considered fully functioning adults someday; anyone who can seemingly mind-meld with a computer (or a cell phone or anything gizmo-ish), understand it, and make it work is probably going to do just fine once they’re let loose on the world.
Despite feeling that kids these days were good to go on the technology front, I was a wee bit worried that the whole writing portion of their lives was headed for much suckage. I was caught in the admittedly old-fashioned (lame!) idea that all forward progress in the land of tech can only lead to less and less well-rounded humans. The telephone, for instance, led to a severe decline in letter-writing. (Of course, the electric light bulb led to everyone staying up later and getting more work done, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)
Clive Thompson’s article in Wired has calmed me down. Thanks to all the e-mail and texting that goes on these days, kids are doing more writing than anyone has since correct cursive and perfect penmanship were qualities to strive for. Now we’ve got technologically savvy kids who can express themselves with the written/typed word like nobody’s business. I’m stoked that society will not be taking one-way trips in any hand baskets.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
On the surface, saving images for the web can be a pretty straightforward process. However, if you dig deeper there’s a wealth of information and techniques you might be missing out on.
This article will focus primarily on the diverse features of Photoshop’s “Save for Web & Devices” command along with some best practices related to saving images that are optimized for web use. More…
Watch it, people. Just because information is second only in volume to pollution on this planet, it does not mean all info is available for you to use and then slap your name on to it like you wrote it or something. Plagiarism, for those of you who missed that day in class, is when you take someone else’s work and falsely claim it as your own. It’s very bad, and it makes you look like an ass@$%*.
The NY Times has an article up about plagiarism and the tech-savvy information generation. The lines are blurry for Gen-Y, apparently.
If you’d like to avoid being an uninformed cheating ass@#$%, the following links are helpful.
I must go. The line above regarding information and the volume of it is freaking me out. Can digital information have volume at all? And is it possible to measure the volume of every printed word on the planet? What about all the still-intact newspapers in old landfills? Do those count as existing information? Crap!
– New partnership links IonE with Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund –
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/30/2010) —The University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment today announced a new partnership with the Natural Capital Project, a worldwide effort to align economic forces with conservation. The other partners include Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.
Founded in 2006, the Natural Capital Project aims to mainstream the values of nature into major resource decisions. Working with public, private and nonprofit partners around the world, “NatCap” is developing practical, science-based software for mapping and valuing societal benefits provided by healthy ecosystems. The Natural Capital Project is using this software in major policy decisions now underway in Canada, China, Hawaii, Indonesia, South America and Tanzania.
The Natural Capital Project is led by an interdisciplinary team of scientists and project leaders from Stanford, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund. U of M applied economics professor Steve Polasky, an IonE resident fellow, is one of the leaders of the project’s ecosystem service mapping and valuation effort. This new partnership will increase opportunities for collaboration between IonE and other Natural Capital researchers and collaborators.
“We would be nowhere without the world-class expertise and experience from U of M, and we’re thrilled to recognize that formally now by teaming up as full partners,” said Gretchen Daily, Stanford-based co-founder and chair of the project.
“The Natural Capital Project is one of the most important environmental projects in the world,” said Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment. “It’s answering one of the really big questions: How much is nature worth, and how do we start to include ecosystem goods and services into our economic system? By joining this project, the Institute on the Environment will be working with world-class ecologists, economists and practitioners, and in return, we will be contributing our expertise in ecological economics, land use and agriculture, and environmental systems modeling. It’s a fabulous partnership for everyone involved.”
Screwed anyone over publicly lately? Virally or plain old socially? Don’t be an ass@#$%. Pay attention to what you’re putting out there. Nikki Massaro Kauffman at .eduGuru wrote an enlightening and educational post about Teaching Privacy: Friends Don’t Let Friends Post to Facebook.
From the post:
I’ve been wanting to do a post about some of the privacy training I’ve been doing for faculty and staff since the last time Facebook updated its privacy policy. It’s hard to keep track of when, where, and how many times Facebook has changed its privacy policy. But this is not a post about quitting Facebook. It’s not a how-to on tweaking your privacy either.
We are constantly learning how to handle our relationships and privacy. Preschoolers eventually learn that they can’t blurt out every observation they make lest they reveal a surprise or offend someone. School aged children eventually learn that keeping a friend’s secret is more important than gossip. Adults wrestle with the ethics of keeping a confidence over revealing a truth. All of our struggles with privacy are hard enough when we’re just talking about the ethical issues of face-to-face communication. But now we’ve supplied an arsenal of communication tools to everyone with a computer and access to the Internet. More…
Being so deeply smitten with brick-and-mortar university campuses, it’s likely I will forever be a hard sell when it comes to the whole online learning extravaganza. Viewing online education from strictly budgetary and global society angles, then yes, I’m totally on board with the shift toward online education. And I’m even one of those perfect-for-online-coursework nerds who is intense and focused and driven toward knowledge-consumption like a surfer is driven to a perfect set at dawn; it’s cold and dark and I haven’t had enough sleep but I can’t not get it done.
Janine Yancho Swenson wrote an article, How Online Universities Really Stack Up about the state of online higher education today, including her own experience with an online graduate program.
Global colleges and universities are competing for the title of “Ivy League virtual university.” But debate rages as to whether online education — also called distance learning — can deliver the same quality of degree as traditional schooling.
In 2007, a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education determined that 12.2 million students were enrolled in 11,200 college-level distance learning programs. Of these students, 77 percent completed their programs either away from campus or away from their instructors. More…
Researchers analyzed 30,000 teens and the relationship between screen time (tv, video games, surfing the net, etc.) and the teens’ tendency toward experiencing routine backache and headaches. The study was just released, and the findings boil down to this: cumulative screen time, even in young, healthy bodies, causes headaches and back pain.
I’m pretty sure this can easily be applied to college students and full-fledged adults as well. Ergonomics, massage therapy, and a reduction in screen time: Know it. Live it. Love it.
One more reason to be paranoid and mistrusting: virus-writing bastards who want to send their flying monkeys out to the ether and into your helpless, naïve little computer, wrecking college, career, and any hope of a happy future for you and your currently non-existent spouse and children. How could you let this happen? When are you going to grow up and take responsibility for all factors within your control?
Not yet paranoid enough to make you feel the urge to be responsible? Watch this SANS security expert discussing security issues with modern technological gadgetry:
No one could ever hope to describe me as a rabid Star Trek fan. Ever. It’s a cool show, interesting concept, blah blah blah. But I never have and never will go out of my way to sit still and watch it. (I do confess to having a bit of a crush on Spock; what girl can resist a tall, dark, pointy-eared man who’s saturated with logic and utterly lacking in emotion? What am I, made of stone?)
The best thing Star Trek has to offer (excepting Spock, obviously) is not Next Generation’s Picard walking along a beach in a disturbingly non-Shakespearian banana hammock*, but the fact that the first season of the show came on as a flippy little wisp of a wacky television series seemingly destined for cancellation, and has engrained itself inextricably in the pop-culture knowledge of several generations of television viewers.
Where are the original Star Trek cast members now? Alive and well in society’s cellular makeup. I have seen probably less than ten episodes of Star Trek (either series), and I am aware, down to my ribosomes, of all that is Star Trek. Upsetting to be sure, but a phenomenon nonetheless.
Is there any other television series that has utilized synthetic fabric to such an extreme degree? No. And I find it hard to believe that any other series has inspired for-credit college courses in cultural anthropology and linguistics, including: “Xenolinguistics: The Anthropology of Alien Language.” The students were required to learn Tribble, Klingon, Vulcan and Romulan, as well as creating their own fictitious language. I don’t feel like I need to learn those languages, but that’s just damn cool.
I think this is where I say, “Live long and prosper,” and I do the Vulcan hand sign thing. (Which I can totally pull off, by the way.)
Here’s a list of all the stuff you thought you didn’t know about Star Trek. I knew more than I should have. Click it and it’ll get bigger and actually readable.
*I have it on good authority that there’s an episode in which Picard does a flashback/memory/holodeck thing and is walking along a dreamy beach wearing a very small Speedo-type get-up. I searched the Internet and am so happy to have found no such image to share. You’ll thank me later.
Wired magazine calls him “the explainer.” Michael Wesch is a social anthropologist who teaches at Kansas State University. In his 15-minute TED talk, he explains the effects of media (social and otherwise) on learners, on humanity, and on the classroom environment.
Wesch also manages to squeeze in a bit telling other educators how to take advantage of all the media and the technology humans have available as a way to make students more “knowledge-able” than just knowledgeable. It’s not just memorizing facts and theories anymore—all the information is out there, students need to learn how to find it and ponder it and bring their own thoughts and theories to the table.
Watch it. It takes about 15 minutes; that’s less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee. And no way one cup of caffeine will blow your mind like Michael Wesch can.
