It took only a couple decades for the internet to transform from a weird underground hobby to an entirely new medium for the self. One of the earliest draws of internet society was the invitation to become someone else — to obscure the dull strains of your real life behind a veil of mysterious text or behind an avatar, the image or persona you create to represent you online. In those days, it often seemed like people had collectively assented to participate in some degree of fiction about one another. The person on your forum or in your channel who loved to say inflammatory things was just some troll; you could even assume that he wasn’t like that in real life. That these were only mechanisms specific to the character he lived as online.

Open Access Explained!, an 8-minute animated video from PHD Comics.

HornetsHornets are biologically not bees in nature, but in the Queen Bees’ Beehive, they slightly qualify as a bee. Although hornets have the ability to be bees, they are a bit dysfunctional and a pest to the Beehive. These insects always want something from the Queen Bee. They are “horny” for her do something new and different. All bees experience this feeling once and a while, but they move on from their desires. Hornets however, will not stop buzzing about what they want. They complain too much. These are the type of bees that are easy to be stung within the Beehive. Once they are stung, they will try to sting back, but their stinger is weak because it is not nourished with appreciation of all that the Queen Bee does.

most systems try to adapt the paper-and-pen paradigm to the digital world. That’s why many systems suffer from several shortcomings inherent in the paper-and-pen paradigm.

The growth in web-based learning materials and information sources has created requirement for systems that allow annotations to be attached to these new sources and, potentially, shared with other learners.