Scott Berkun on “social media:”
If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done.
I’m glad someone is pointing out the idiocy of calling Twitter, et al “social media.” I guess this makes the term “Social Media Expert” an even more ridiculous title.
The abstract of a paper published by a professor of Foreign Language and Literature at Whitman College:
This paper uses specific issues surrounding course blogging to provide a series of reflections regarding the articulation between pedagogy and technology in creating a next generation learning space and discourse community. It investigates the underlying structure and necessary constituent elements of a successful blog assignment and examines the notion of natural and unnatural virtual environments and the roles of the reader and the writer-reader. It suggests that blog assignments may not succeed equally well in all subject areas and gives a number of possible reasons. Furthermore, it posits a more nuanced criterion for the definition of goals and the evaluation of the success of a blog assignment as a learning community beyond the presence or absence of comments.
I can’t help but be cynical when someone writes a paper like this that is distributed online and yet shows utter incomprehension of the online medium. Perhaps it was the journal’s editor that is to blame, but here’s my list of gripes:
Ultimately in order to create a “next generation learning space and discourse community” we’re going to need to open up that community to those of all apsects of life, including people for whom this text is just plain unreadable.
The relative wealth of the world's population
An interesting but also frightening depiction of the disparity in wealth among the world’s population.
[ via Chris Bowler ]
You know that you’re making good software when you obsess over a 1 pixel abnormality:
Table headers are one of those things we have wanted to ‘fix’ for a long time, but somehow never got around to earlier. By default, table views in Cocoa apps show a little separator on the right-hand side of every column header, even in the rightmost one when theres a scrollbar under it. It has always bugged me to no end that in this situation, that rightmost 1px gray line – which, by the way, is completely unneeded – is exactly one pixel off to the left compared to the scrollbar drawn below it.
