Twitter has a new policy for dealing with those who post stuff you do not want to read. In addition to blocking them (which I guess lets them know you do not want to read their content), you can now also “mute” them. The mute options creates a “you have to view my stuff, but I do not have to put up with your stuff” scenario. I am guessing this is not how Twitter wants it explained, but isn’t that the way it works?
I do not get it, but Twitter seems especially popular among educators. Unless pointing readers to additional information, 140 characters just do not seem to be enough to convey information – great for keeping in touch and developing a sense of community, but not sufficient as a content source.
Daniel Willingham is a favorite of mine when it comes to challenging practicing educators to differentiate education myth from reality. I assign one of his books and encourage reading of his blog. He recently took on the claim that online reading has retarded the development and application of reading skills. A good “read” for all. (additional comment by Larry Cuban).
Augmented reality sounds like science fiction, but it may be on your phone soon if you use Google Now. I have been frustrated much of my professional career by the notion that technology distances you from the world. Consider the possibilities in the opportunity to actually have some way be in a place and to understand what it is you are looking at.
Given all of the things I write about, I feel required to bring the latest effort by scientists to encourage our serious response to climate change. Reality is often convenient to ignore, but the long view requires that we take collective action.
I read the analyses provided by Tom Friedman (Hot, flat & crowded) who is not a scientist, but has a great way of integrating the important factors shaping our future. The notion any of us has that we are doing the right thing by focusing on our own personal causes will simply not work. There are some things we all need to address.
I do not purchase Word for my own equipment, but I do use Word on the machine in my office purchased by the university. Students tend to submit their major work (theses, dissertations) to me in a Word format. I have an oral this morning and found myself attempting to get at my comments on a proposal without Word on my Mac Pro (I always work with files in DropBox so access was not the problem).
After putting several hours of work into the manuscript, I assumed I would have to open in Google Docs during the oral and then send my detailed comments to students for her review. I work back and forth when writing, but I had not investigated the translation of comments across software. It turned out that Docs did a great job of converting the comments with the standard translation procedure. You may have already worked with this feature, but it was new to me. Knowing this, I can now rethink my work flow.
