154 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2022
    1. Crowdfunding

      This is a good inclusion. Studies show a 40% increase in crowdfunding for non-profits in the last two years. This is becoming an integral part of funding for similar organizations in mid-western cities.

  2. Aug 2020
    1. Moodle has over 50% of market share in Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.[48]

      Importance of Moodle internationally

    1. Course Management Systems (CMS)

      This is a good snapshot of the CMS / LMS in higher-ed in 2003.

    2. Meanwhile some institutions in the USA have created various open source products which are providing an alternative to commercial vendors.

      Was Moodle not a thing at this point? Tracking the rise of open source LMS is important. I wonder what the current market share for open source & home brew is in the US; in Canada; in Europe; in Africa; etc. My understanding is that Moodle has a much bigger market share outside the US than inside.

    3. The most significant vendors by volume and size are WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com). There are many other vendors in this market place such as desire2learn (http://www.desire2learn.com/), a system in use at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

      WebCT, Blackboard, and D2L were already the big 3 in 2003.

    1. The following table reflects a summary of the previous research we have conducted in which we generated a conceptual framework of major features in order to evaluate and compare the major K-12 LMSs (Watson, Lee, & Reigeluth, 2007).

      Table of k-12 LMS with core functionalities (PLATO, Pearson Digital Learning, and Achievement Technologies)

    2. LMSs are more typically utilized in corporate settings with many available systems on the market, including NetDimensions EKP, Saba and SumTotal Systems (Carliner, 2005), as well as Lotus, Oracle iLearning and Cornerstone OnDemand, among others (Learning Circuits, 2005). A 2006 survey highlights the features most common-ly found in the corporate LMSs currently being utilized (2006 Survey of Learning Management Systems, 2006).

      Description of the corporate LMS market.

    3. While LMSs can currently perform some of these functions, limitations exist which are hindering the full realization of LMSs’ potential

      OK. They do acknowledge that their describing an ideal rather than an actuality.

    4. In an Information Age model of education, an LMS will assess learners’ current knowledge and skill level, work with teachers and learners to identify appropriate learning goals, identify and sequence instruction appropriate for the individual learner, assess learner performance products, store evidence of attainments, sup-port collaboration and generate reports to pro-vide information to maximize the effectiveness of the entire learning organization.

      This is a vision for the LMS, not a description of. It feels like their definitions are overly optimistic throughout this article.

    5. Or as Connolly (2001) puts it, “LMS provides the rules and the LCMS provides the content” (p. 58).

      Again, this feels like a dated distinction, one that has since been flattened.

    6. A CMS “provides an instructor with a set of tools and a framework that allows the relatively easy creation of online course content and the subsequent teaching and management of that course including various interactions with students taking the course” (EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee, 2003, p. 1). Examples of a CMS include Blackboard, Angel, Sakai, Oncourse and Moogle. However, Blackboard is a good example of the confusion that exists regarding these terms as it is commonly referred to in the literature as an LMS.

      This is interesting. What they are calling a CMS comes to be the fairly standard (I think) definition of the LMS. They even identify Blackboard (the model LMS) as a CMS.

    7. The American Society for Training & Development (Learning Circuits, 2005), recommendsthese following functional requirements for a corporate LMS:

      Functional definition of the LMS from 2005. This might be useful in tracking change.

    8. Lessons are provided based on the individual student’s learning progress.

      Individualization / Adaptive Learning as an early functionality (goal?) of the LMS

    9. Bailey, G. D. (1993). Wanted: A road map for understanding Integrated Learning Systems. In G. D. Bailey (Ed.), Computer-based Integrated Learning Systems (pp. 3-9). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

      This seems like one of the earliest sources in this article. I wonder how early this article is in explicitly discussing the LMS qua LMS.

    10. n LMS is the infrastructure that delivers and manages in-structional content, identifies and assesses in-dividual and organizational learning or training goals, tracks the progress towards meeting those goals, and collects and presents data for super-vising the learning process of an organization as a whole (Szabo & Flesher, 2002). An LMS deliv-ers content but also handles course registration and administration, skills gap analysis, tracking and reporting (Gilhooly, 2001).

      Defining the LMS based on its functionalities. Some of these pieces surely have been added or subtracted from LMSs over time. Course registration for example is now part of systems like Elucian's Banner. Surely there could be a heuristic model of the LMS with concentric rings of functionalities.

    11. The term ILS was coined by Jostens Learn-ing, and LMS was originally used to describe the management system component of the PLATO K-12 learning system, content-free and separate from the courseware (R. Foshay, personal com-munication, October 24, 2006).

      Claim that ILS was coined by Jostens Learning. LMS was the management system component of the broader ILS.

    12. LMS has its history in another term, integrated learning system (ILS) which offers functionality beyond instructional content such as management and tracking, personalized instruction and integration across the system (Bailey, 1993; Becker, 1993; Brush, Armstrong, Barbrow, & Ulintz, 1999; Szabo & Flesher, 2002).

      Earlier term for LMS is ILS, "integrated learning system." They also make a claim here about the functionalities that are central to an LMS.

  3. Jul 2019
    1. WordPress Database Switcheroo First, do a MySQL database export of the old database on the old server, create a new blank database on the new server, import the old data either in PHPMyAdmin or mysql directly in the command line. Make sure you have the new database selected, then run some SQL updates and replacement commands on the tables notably, wp_options, wp_posts, wp_postmeta. Use the code as below and swap in your old and new URLs, no trailing slashes. Also if necessary change the table prefix values where applicable (ie wp_ ) UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://www.oldurl', 'http://www.newurl') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl'; UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.oldurl','http://www.newurl'); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.oldurl', 'http://www.newurl'); UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value,'http://www.oldurl','http://www.newurl');

      This is really helpful when you're manually cloning a WP site. If you have a Domain of One's Own and you want to move a site from one user's account to another or fork a site into another user's account, this is really helpful.

  4. Apr 2019
    1. Marx’s research for Capital included careful study of Justus von Liebig’s work on agricultural chemistry, which he described as “more important for this matter than all the economists put together.”

      Marx was reading Liebig and conceived a "matabolic rift" between capitalist society and nature.

    1. It hardly needs to be added that these new conditions also established the foundation for new and more effective forms of colonial expansion and imperialism, as well as new needs for such expansion, in search of new markets and resources.

      Again, connection between emerging capitalism and imperialism.

    2. This pattern signifies more than is apparent at first glance. It testifies, among other things, to the transformation of social property relations in the heartland of agrarian capitalism, the south and southeast, and the dispossession of small producers, a displaced and migrant population whose destination would typically be London. The growth of London also represents the growing unification not only of the English state but of a national market. That huge city was the hub of English commerce—not only as a major transit point for national and international trade but as a huge consumer of English products, not least its agricultural produce. The growth of London, in other words, in all kinds of ways stands for England’s emerging capitalism, its integrated market—increasingly, a single, unified, and competitive market; its productive agriculture; and its dispossessed population.

      We see this repeated in 18th c. Scotland, but with the dual poles of Edinburgh for finance and Glasgow for trade.

    3. And market dependence was a cause, not a result, of mass proletarianization.

      Strong claim

    4. Unimproved land, land not rendered productive and profitable (such as the lands of indigenous peoples in the Americas), is “waste,” and it is the right, even the duty, of improvers to appropriate it.

      Again the tie in with colonialism / imperialism

    5. the productive and profitable utilization of property, its improvement.

      This also ties into the Georgic ethic. The good landlord is he who has his feet in the soil and is improving it.

    6. New conceptions of property were also being theorized more systematically, most famously in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Chapter 5 of that work is the classic statement of a theory of property based on the principles of improvement.

      This ties into both Malthus and Kames.

    7. It meant, even more fundamentally, new forms and conceptions of property. “Improved” farming, for the enterprising landlord and his prosperous capitalist tenant, ideally required enlarged and concentrated landholdings. It also—and perhaps even more—demanded the elimination of old customs and practices that interfered with the most productive use of land.

      changes in tenancy

    8. Improvement was also a major preoccupation of the Royal Society, which brought together some of England’s most prominent scientists (Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle were both members of the Society) with some of the more forward-looking members of England’s ruling classes—like the philosopher John Locke and his mentor, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, both of whom were keenly interested in agricultural improvement.

      Science and agricultural improvement

    9. so that, for example, some radical thinkers in the nineteenth century might embrace “improvement” in the sense of scientific farming, without its connotation of commercial profit

      I wouldn't be so sure about this separation of science from profit motive.

    10. The word “improve” itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just “making better” in a general sense but literally (based on the old French for “into,” en, and “profit,” pros, or its oblique case, preu) doing something for monetary profit, and especially cultivating land for profit. By the seventeenth century, the word “improver” was firmly fixed in the language to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable, especially by enclosing or reclaiming waste. Agricultural “improvement” was by then a well established practice, and in the eighteenth century, in the golden age of agrarian capitalism, “improvement,” in word and deed, came truly into its own.

      Improving for profit

    11. The result was an agrarian sector more productive than any other in history. Landlords and tenants alike became preoccupied with what they called “improvement,” the enhancement of the land’s productivity for profit.

      Again, Scots in the 18th. century were explicitly adopting this language.

    12. This pattern would be reproduced in the colonies, and indeed in post-Independence America, where the independent small farmers who were supposed to be the backbone of a free republic faced, from the beginning, the stark choice of agrarian capitalism: at best, intense self-exploitation, and at worst, dispossession and displacement by larger, more productive enterprises.

      This goes to the question of the relationship between the rise of agrarian capitalism and imperialism.

    13. To meet economic rents in a situation where other potential tenants were competing for the same leases, tenants were compelled to produce cost-effectively, on penalty of dispossession.

      For 18th c. Scots, rather than simply being a member of the same clan and being able to rely on those bonds, tenants now had to be outbid even the members of other clans in order to maintain their access to the land.

    14. The effect of the system of property relations was that many agricultural producers (including prosperous “yeomen”) were market-dependent, not just in the sense that they were obliged to sell produce on the market but in the more fundamental sense that their access to land itself, to the means of production, was mediated by the market.
    15. Landlords had a strong incentive, then, to encourage—and, wherever possible, to compel—their tenants to find ways of increasing their output. In this respect, they were fundamentally different from rentier aristocrats who throughout history have depended for their wealth on squeezing surpluses out of peasants by means of simple coercion, enhancing their powers of surplus extraction not by increasing the productivity of the direct producers but rather by improving their own coercive powers—military, judicial, and political.

      I think we see the same thing in 18th c. Scotland. Landlords are trying to encourage their tenants to maximize yields in order to justify increasing rents. The landlords look to chemists and agriculturalists to help in this effort.

    1. We cannot care about the internet or the digital. That is not the sociologist’s job. Our job is to understand the means by which, the conditions under which, the context of internet technologies. We study process. And, if we are to matter, sociologists study inequality.

      This answers the earlier question about leaving people behind. Sociologists can't ignore the digital, because it is core to understanding the processes and actions of people in our age. Digital Sociology has the same problems as Digital Citizenship. In order to be a modern citizen, you need to be aware of the digital. In order to be a sociologist, you need to be aware of the digital.

    2. In our line of work, branding a new disciplinary conversation is all about politics

      I worry that if we bifurcate the discipline we leave people behind.

  5. Mar 2019
    1. Probably because WebSec hasn’t been a huge concern for me, I was surprised by what I found on Google Maps Timeline.

      This is a great point.

  6. Jan 2019
    1. alchemy itself

      I've just finished watching the Red Devils try to turn trash into gold. Very exciting stuff. Can't wait to chat.

    2. al-kīmiyā

      Literally "The Chemistry." Alchemy has, from the coining of the term, been either chemistry or an extension of chemistry.

  7. May 2018
    1. The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), also known as Levelized Energy Cost (LEC), is the net present value of the unit-cost of electricity over the lifetime of a generating asset.

      Key definition

    1. Portfolio pedagogy is process-oriented. As students gather work from different classes and semesters, there is an opportunity for every student, as well as their instructors, to assess how their ideas and interests have evolved over time.

      It would be great to plan times / spaces for student reflection about their digital presence, college career, etc. You could introduce the concept in an introductory freshman course, and then revisit it in courses throughout college. The Capstone course would then have a component of gathering and reflecting at the end. Within an R1, integrating these pieces into multiple courses would take an effort on at least the college level though, if not at the university level.

    1. Introducing students to metadata early in the semester is important because for their Omeka project they will need to input metadata for each item as it relates to the Dublin Core (used by Omeka). Initial conversations with students about metadata often reveal their unfamiliarity with the concept, even if in practice they do know something about it. In a few class periods, we consider metadata specifically: What is it? How is it created? How is it used? Why does it matter?[11] “A Gentle Introduction to Metadata” by Jeff Good (2002) serves as the launching point for our discussion about creating metadata for objects and images versus written texts. Students today are familiar with tagging, especially on social media, which serves as a useful starting point for creating metadata. After our initial discussion, and during a lecture on Aztec art, I will project for students the famous Coyolxauhqui monolith and ask them to create metadata, specifically as it relates to the Dublin Core. They will complete this activity in a team Google Doc so they can see the metadata generated by other students—and how this might differ greatly from their own choices. Time pending, I will also introduce students to the Getty’s Cultural Objects Name Authority® Online, or CONA (still in development), which provides metadata about visual culture specifically. In other classes where I have used Omeka, one of the biggest hurdles for students has been learning the language of Dublin Core. My intention with this assignment is to introduce it before students even begin to interact with Omeka so they develop familiarity with metadata and how to create it.

      This thinking about metadata is key in thinking about using Omeka in translating archives into digital collections.

    2. In my Renaissance and Spanish Colonial art history classes, I have found that an effective way of introducing students to some core DAH methods and tools is asking them to produce an Omeka exhibition. The creation of this type of project relates to broader issues in art history and digital humanities, including classifications or labels, digital versus print sources, reading and interpreting images, access, collaboration, and visuality.[6] It also introduces students to “digitization, organization, presentation, exhibition, [and] metadata creation,” as Jeffrey McClurken (2010) notes in his article on teaching with Omeka. Omeka is a content management system (CMS) available on the web that allows users to curate digital archives and exhibitions, providing students with opportunities to think like a curator or archivist. I prefer Omeka to other CMSs, such as Drupal, because it allows my class to create both an archive of items and a narrative exhibition even if students have no programming skills. In addition, I agree with teachinghistory.org regarding Omeka’s potential to help students gain certain skills transferable to many careers (Roy Rosenzweig Center 2010–2018). In some of the classes in which I have introduced Omeka (or something similar to it), students often felt unease with a DAH project rather than the traditional research paper of approximately 8–10 pages. This unease largely stemmed from their unfamiliarity with using Omeka and presenting art-historical arguments in a non-linear fashion, but it also sometimes resulted from my own missteps: not introducing Omeka early enough in the semester, forming ineffective teams, or not scaffolding activities to help them understand how and why Omeka is an important manner in which to present knowledge.[7]

      Introduction to the tool and its pedagogical value

    3. This essay describes the development of a joint DAH and Pre-Columbian art survey class that will run in Fall 2017.[5] Specifically, through the semester-long activities and Omeka course project students complete to explore digital visuality, I discuss how DAH can transform the practice of traditional art history and the production of knowledge in this digital age. At Pepperdine, a new digital humanities minor was approved for Fall 2017. One of the first classes to be offered as an elective is my Pre-Columbian art history class, an ambitious survey that explores some of the cultures of what is today Latin America prior to the arrival of Europeans [for an overview, see Appendix A]. Most students enter with little to no background in the subject matter, so it functions as a general survey course. I have taught this class for many years (not at Pepperdine), but never as one that also introduces students specifically to DAH. Knowing that it fulfills the digital humanities minor elective means I have had the opportunity to reconceptualize the class to both introduce some DAH methods and tools and focus on pre-Columbian art and history. What does DAH look like in the survey classroom? More specifically, how do I introduce the methodologies and tools of DAH to undergraduates of all levels in an art history survey class, or even what do I choose to introduce within a single semester? How do I reconfigure a class I typically teach in a slide-style lecture format to incorporate DAH as I have done with some of my other art history classes?

      Good statement of the point of the article.

    4. For instance, Chris Johanson and Elaine Sullivan (2015) have discussed creating a class focused on digital cultural mapping as a way to “develop students’ critical thinking skills and visual sophistication” (123). T. Mills Kelly’s Teaching History in the Digital Age (2013) considers how digital tools and methods encourage students to “produce either new knowledge about the past, or old knowledge presented in new ways.” Kelly also offers guidance and narratives intended to promote reflection on how historians can use digital media in the classroom to “create active learning opportunities.” In other words, he makes suggestions about how historians can embrace digitally inflected technologies to create new methods of historical inquiry (“Introduction”; see also Iantorno 2014, and the various essays within the issue; Mourer 2017; Silva 2016).

      Lit review for me. The author's DAH lit review is in the following paragraph, but I'm more interested in these sources for my project.

    5. considers herself “tech-averse.”

      This is how we lure them into DH. Baby steps.

    6. Omeka Exhibition

      JITP has a few different articles that focus on building Omeka resources. This one is certainly the most recent and seems to be most relevant for my interests.

  8. Feb 2018
    1. This class is a four-legged stool in which we focus on integration of educational technologies, project based learning, digital and web literacies, and digital identity construction.

      Sounds like a great course

    2. I also create a private group in Hypothesis and expect that they read, annotate, and discuss on the PDF with their peers over the week.

      How do you see the balance between using a private group in your class and having the students annotate in the public? I imagine it's a trade off for privacy and comfort vs expanding the public well, and I'm wondering how you balance the two?

  9. Nov 2017
  10. Oct 2017
    1. The article's analytical triad is overly restrictive and limits the applicability of the conclusions. I don't agree with the structure of the triad. Thus while the article is well researched and well written, I think it could be improved by shifting the analytical framework and adopting broader conceptions of play, fidelity, and simulation.

    2. These literatures provide a rich theoretical basis for the serious game design process, however it is clear that due to the inherent incongruities between game design (which prioritises entertainment), simulation design (which prioritises fidelity), and peda-gogy (which prioritises education), difficulties persist in balancing these elements during the design process and indeed in reconciling these elements into one coherent theoretical frame-work for serious game design:

      The paper is very interesting, but the analytical framework, seen here, results in specific findings about 3D, video games, rather than broader generalized conclusions about the pedagogical value of games generally. The suggested conflict between game design, simulation, and pedagogy does not necessarily apply to all games (or even I would suggest to all video games).

    3. King argues that while this may be a less “authentic” depiction of the real world, it is a more “playful” and therefore pleasurable experience.

      This might be the wrong conclusion. I would say that the experience with save options and status icons lowers the difficulty curve, providing improved flow for the game. This moves away from the juxtaposition of fidelity and playful as opposed metrics.

    4. Physical fidelity

      Again, usually more pertinent for 3D, video games than other types of games.

    5. Taking a different slant, Lombard and Ditton (1997) conceptualise im-mersion in a 3D gaming environment in two ways: psychological immersion and perceptual immersion.

      This seems like a narrow conclusion for immersive 3D video games. I'm not entirely sure that what they are calling perceptual immersion is necessary to create a 'situated immersion,' 'total immersion,' or 'presence.' Surely high level immersion is achieved in table-top gaming and even novels without the sensory element. Perhaps these higher levels of immersion are defined around the sensory component, but is it a psychologically qualifiable or quantifiable different thing?

    6. Adams (2010) states that “the goal of a game is to entertain through play” (p. 30) with the essence of game play comprising the challenge/action relationship whereby a player is permitted to take various actions in order to address the challenges underpinning the game. With serious games where the non-entertainment objectives of educating and informing enter the game de-sign process, most experts argue that achieving an effective balance of play and pedagogy is key to their effectiveness (de Freitas, 2007; Seeney & Routledge, 2009).

      I disagree with both this definition of game's and the idea that play and pedagogy need to be balanced. Play and pedagogy should not be disassociated or juxtaposed. Games create an experience and the playful elements can be used within a pedagogical framework to increase motivation, internalization, and retention.

    7. The article seems to focus on games developed for students rather than by students.

    8. This article has a really useful bibliography for work on Games as pedagogical tools

    1. The fact checkers read laterally, meaning they would quickly scan a website in question but then open a series of additional browser tabs, seeking context and perspective from other sites.

      I'm surprised that the historians aren't trying to verify through multiple sources. That seems like a fairly fundamental part of historical training. Perhaps we're overly trusting of authority or overly used to partial historical information.

  11. Aug 2017
    1. interpretivist framework

      How was this framework picked/built and implemented?

    2. a purposeful sampling method that involved a two-stage process whereby potential faculty were nominated by campus administrators and then selected to the final participant list based on whether they had enough experience developing and teaching MOOCs to sufficiently answer the interview questions.

      How do we avoid selecting those people that we want to listen to and either purposefully or inadvertently omitting critics.

  12. Jul 2017
    1. looming showdown between Mr. Trump and Mr. Mueller

      This can't end well for anyone.

    2. President Trump’s lawyers and aides are scouring the professional and political backgrounds of investigators hired by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III

      This seems to be a pattern for Trump - constantly jumping into battles in which he's overmatched. The battle of wills and trust with the former head of the FBI, Comey always seemed like a losing effort. Similarly, investigating (and thereby irritating) the investigators seems like a good way to motivate people who have made extremely successful careers in this field.

    1. By inviting others to see our work in progress, we also open new avenues of interpretation, uncover new linkages between things we would otherwise have persisted in seeing as unconnected, and create new opportunities for collaboration with fellow travelers.

      I don't think Caleb fully explores the possibilities for collaboration in this blog post, but he certainly seems open to them. With Hypothes.is, we can see how browsing through other people's reading notes might help us to identify a book or article of interest or grok an insight that eluded us on first reading.

    2. Ultimately, however, the prevention of error is not the most exciting promise made by Open Notebook Science or Open Notebook History.

      One of the things I find exciting about open notebook science and history is not the prevention of error, but rather the sharing of error. Caleb might say it later in this blog post, but much of science and history is the finding of null results. In chemistry you might try 30 experiments to eliminate possible reagents or identify the most potent reagent. We tend to publish the 31st experiment, the ultimate, positive finding, but if we also shared our notes on the 30 earlier experiments, we would more rapidly advance knowledge and save each other time. Similarly, sharing that an archive doesn't have certain resources is often as valuable as publishing on the cool resource they do have.

    3. What would happen if historians made their research notes public? What would it look like to make our notebooks “open source”?

      This is the article that got me excited about open notebook history a couple years ago.

    1. Sunrise on Methodology and Radical Transparency of Sources in Historical Writing

      Looking back on this article from nearly a decade down the road, I find the optimism of this article really interesting. While we can see the use of the hyperlinks in this article and in most modern blogging, scholarly articles are still most often rendered as ersatz versions of traditional paper journals. I would love for all articles (or even a majority) to be well linked, but I'm not sure who the labor of this work falls on (authors or editors).

  13. Feb 2017
    1. In the European world, the construction of the armillary sphere was taken from models found in Andalus (modern-day Spain).  In the 16th century, well-known European astronomer Tycho Brahe constructed and used several armillary spheres.  He built them of steel, brass, and wood held together by screws, in order to avoid warping materials which would render the instrument inaccurate.  His armillary spheres were quite large, over 1.5 meters in diameter, and very accurate in their readings.  Our good friend Copernicus also constructed armillary spheres in this time period, and gave rise to ideas which would lead to a different take on the instrument altogether.

      Do you think there was any connection between the astrolabes of al-Tusi and the other Islamic observatories and those built by Copernicus?

    2. This Armillary Sphere was made of laser cut particle board.  We debated whether we should build the model out of wood, metal, or 3D print it, but we settled on cutting it from wood.  Once we settled on a material and method of building, we then went through several different images and models to decide how to build it.  The design we went with worked best with a solid stand that would allow the meridian to rotate between the horizon.  Next, we used Adobe Illustrator to create the rings and print the cardinal directions and degrees, which was then cut or etched into the wood by the laser cutter.  The pieces were fit together, and two nails were used to allow the globe and its parts to rotate.  The Earth is a Styrofoam ball suspended by a wooden dowel.  Once the pieces were cut, it was a matter of putting them together and making sure that the zodiac was in the correct orientation.

      This is a fantastic example of what humanities students can do in a maker space.

    3. the Maragha Observatory (modern-day Iran)

      This was the observatory where al-Tusi worked: Wikipedia entry for al-Tusi

  14. Jan 2017
    1. After an instructor has joined Wiki Edu and set up a course, she receives an email with a link for their course dashboard. The link that Wikipedia sends will have an enrollment c

      This is a key point.

  15. Dec 2016
    1. every time I go to the Open Education Conference I feel this really strong sense of tension about the communities that are there because there is the open community, and I say that kind of broadly, and then there is an OER community, and those are different things. And, yes, sometimes they overlap and sometimes people are members of both, but there’s something about the ideological and practitioner differences in those two communities. They run in completely parallel, but when they cross paths, there’s tension. There’s a lot of tension. And you would think they would be the same community, but they’re not.

      It felt like people were trying to address this tension at the most recent Open Ed Conference, but that the tension was still there. What is it about the non-overlapping parts of these two fields that are mutually opposed?

    1. syllabus page shows a table-oriented view of the course schedule, and the basics of course grading. You can add any other comments, notes, or thoughts you have about the course structure, course policies or anything else.

      What does this do

  16. Aug 2016
    1. A couple of days ago I read a study by Civitas of more than 600,000 students, which found that low student engagement with the LMS was significantly correlated with dropping out. Having just returned from #InstCon, I immediately started thinking about how we at OU could use some of the reports and API tools from Canvas to identify students with low LMS engagement levels.

      Great point john

    1. I'm a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer

      In case anyone was unaware of her work, check out Bonnie Stewart's PhD, articles, and subsequent work on the uses of social media in academia: http://bonstewart.com/

    2. In the wake of the EU referendum, I have seen many using social media to voice very strong opinions, often criticising the general public en masse. Given that taxpayer money forms a substantial portion of our research funding, this kind of outburst risks alienating the very people we are trying to engage with.

      This plays on the fallacy that scientists are objective observers of nature, removed from society and culture. I think this version is even more problematic in usual though in that it admits that scientists and academics in general do have opinions about politics and social issues but encourages them to stay quiet so as not to upset the public.

  17. Jun 2016
    1. David Price, vice-provost (research) at UCL, said that the vote was “likely to be a disaster for the long-term future for UK research and HE sector”.

      succinct

    1. But 40 percent said they would be more likely to leave Britain in the event of what’s being called the Brexit, with just 1 percent saying they would be more likely to leave Britain in the event of vote to remain in the E.U.

      That's incredible.

    1. UK universities currently get around 16% of their research funding, and 15% of their staff, from the EU.

      15% of UK university staff come from EU

    1. A Universities UK analysis found that the country’s universities received more than 836 million pounds (more than $1.2 billion) in E.U. research grants and contracts in 2014-15, representing 14.2 percent of all U.K. income from research grants and contracts that year.

      The EU contributed 14.2% of all research money taken in by UK universities in 2014-15.

    1. It would be prudent to assume we'll lose £60m of EU money, £20m from fees, £10m from English teaching and £5m each from industry and charities.

      Anderson puts the conservative estimate at 95m pounds in annual revenue for Cambridge lost in the Brexit.

    1. The impact of our universities on our local communities and economy should not be underestimated.  Every year, universities generate over £73 billion for the UK economy – £3.7bn of which is generated by students from EU countries, while supporting nearly 380,000 jobs. Strong universities benefit the British people - creating employable graduates and cutting-edge research discoveries that improve lives.

      Some economic numbers on the impact of EU students in British universities.

    1. UCL among first to confirm it will not change tuition fees for EU students next year, as European University Association says British institutions are - and remain - 'an essential part of the European family'

      Good starter article for diving into Brexit and Higher Ed

    1. Generally, literature in the game-based context reflects similar understanding of the phenomenon that the challenge in games may drive a players' sense of flow and engagement (e.g. Wang and Chen, 2010 and Hwang et al., 2012).

      General acceptance of idea of difficulty curve, but little empirical study of it

    2. Challenging games help students learn: An empirical study on engagement, flow and immersion in game-based learning

      This might be useful for the resources list in GOBLIN and as validation for our claims on difficulty curves and flow.

    1. it requires less computing power, and hence the developed educational games can be executed on the computers of most elementary schools in Taiwan; third, we wanted to avoid situating elementary school students in a complex 3D interface, which may increase the difficulty for them to learn with the game.

      I like the focus on minimilism

    2. RPG Maker

      I need to check out RPG maker

    3. 3. Research questionsIn this study, a contextual educational computer game was developed to situate students in inquiry contexts for social studies courses. Furthermore, an experiment was conducted to probe the effects of the proposed approach on students' learning performance and perceptions. The research questions explored in this study are shown below.(1)Can the contextual educational computer game improve the students' learning achievement in comparison with the web-based inquiry learning approach? What are its impacts on the learning achievements of the students with different learning styles?(2)Can the contextual educational computer game improve the students' learning motivation in comparison with the web-based inquiry learning approach? What are its impacts on the learning motivation of the students with different learning styles?(3)Can the contextual educational computer game promote the students' learning satisfaction degrees in comparison with the web-based inquiry learning approach? What are its impacts on the learning satisfaction of students with different learning styles?(4)Can the contextual educational computer game promote the students' flow states in comparison with the web-based inquiry learning approach? What are its impacts on the flow states of students with different learning styles?

      These research questions might be useful in formulating the research questions we are working on for the GOBLIN FLC project

    4. Digital game-based learning (DGBL) is a student-centered educational approach which adopts the form of simulations situating students in a learning environment (Hung et al., 2012, Hwang, Yang, et al., 2013 and Prensky, 2003). Thus, DGBL is a kind of learning context in which players compete while acquiring educational goals according to specific rules and principles, contributing to the development of their cognitive skills and their construction of knowledge, while at the same time promoting their motivation (Erhel and Jamet, 2013, Huang et al., 2010, Moreno, 2012 and Moreno-Ger et al., 2008). Moreover, Hwang, Sung, et al., 2012, Hwang, Tsai, et al., 2012 and Hwang, Wu, et al., 2012 indicated that educational computer games can be considered as a situated learning environment in which students acquire skills and knowledge from the process of playing the games. Specifically, DGBL can afford a meaningful environment for developing students' problem-solving abilities (Kiili, 2007 and Kim et al., 2009).

      Beginning of a lit review section on DGBL

    5. A contextual game-based learning approach to improving students' inquiry-based learning performance in social studies courses

      Research article on blending GBL and IBL in elementary school social studies courses

    1. I did not approach the topic of my researchentirely as a social phenomenon, but rather a sociomaterial one(Law, 2009) in which technological infrastructures, differential identity markers, and norms of practice and prestige all combine to formthe particular techno-cultural system of networked scholarship

      techno-cultural system of networked schoalrship

    2. Networked scholars may post ideas online long before they commit them to an academic format, or may explore particular concepts entirely outside formal publicationchannels and nonetheless distribute, disseminate, and discuss those ideas with widespread peers. Formal peer review still has a place of privilege within many networked scholars’ vitae, but is no longer the sole means by which bodies of work can be sharedwith mediaor the public. These shifts in the ways in which content can be circulated as knowledge challenge the terms on which the academy has based its authority and its understanding of scholarship.

      Key Point

    3. 13 scholars actively engaged in both institutional and networked participatory scholarship.

      I'm interested in the methodology for studying this small sample size

    1. How do the professors and staff structure the learning process so that use of DoOO is not yet another required course task but one that is empowering? How do you move from a tool taught by a professor to one a student can use as she chooses? How can we use DoOO within a course framework while not inhibiting students’ own creative impulses? Students are often at a loss as to what to do with all this unstructured freedom, or maybe don’t yet believe that they are capable of this type of work. How do we create a safe space where students can practice that freedom?
  18. May 2016
    1. Wenzler and Cartier (1999) make an effective case for the use of games in organizational learning by asserting that “Games and simulations help organizations develop symbolic thinking and gestalt understanding; help them create memories of the future; enable shared experiences and the building of shared intelligence; and, possibly most important, develop their members' motivation and confidence to act,” (p. 375). A number of books and manuals (e.g., Pike & Busse, 1995; Stolovich & Keeps, 2002; Thiagarajan, 2003) advocate this kind of learner or trainee involvement

      Really nice quote and several sources on the utility of games in corporate training. I don't see why these same principles couldn't be applied in higher ed setting.

    2. Cruickshank, D. R., & Telfer, R. (2001). Classroom games and simulations. Theory into Practice, 19(1), 75-80.

      I should get a copy of this

    3. Games promote transfer because they require student participation and active involvement with the material within a rich context (Cruickshank & Telfer, 2001).

      Games promote transfer is an assertion rather than evidence based argument. I hope Cruickshank and Telfer provide the evidence.

    4. In the second part of the study, five faculty members were mentored to change traditional lectures to interactive games. A review of their perceptions of success and difficulty in using such activities in the college classroom, their students’ perceptions of the exercise, and student performance identified both benefits and costs. Suggestions are made for strategies to successfully implement games in the college classroom, based on consideration of these benefits and costs and the survey results.

      It sounds like there was some PD on game based teaching and then an evaluation of how well the faculty applied games in their classrooms.

    1. Students who were part of the experimental group (35.41%, N = 7) performed worse than their peers (38.54%, N = 43) onthe pre-test. On the post-test students who participated in collaborative note-taking did significantly better (72.49%) than their peers (64.17%). Presumably this means that the students who participated in the study had lower levels of baseline knowledge at the outset, but they had a more robust level of knowledge by the end of the class and the experiment than did their peers who had taken notes individually. The difference of 8.28% is strikingly similar to the difference in grades. As the results indicate, these are difficult tests for students. The experimental group did not just perform almost a letter grade better in grades; they also performed almost a letter grade better on the pre/post tests

      Pre-post tests showed better gains (again by about 8%) for collaborative note-takers than for students who did not take notes collaboratively.

    2. Table 2 shows that the average grade across all classes and groups (experimental and control) was 72.02%. Students in the experimental group had an average grade of 79.66%, while the control group average was a 71.87% (a difference of 7.79%). Students who participated in collaborative notes performed nearly a single letter grade better than did their peers in the same classes. The ANOVA result found significance at the .01 level (F = 5.47, p < 0.01). Further, Bartlett’s test for equal variance returned a non-significant value, indicating a reliable ANOVA model. It is possible to say there was a statistically significant difference between the control group and the experimental group.

      Students who took notes collaborative scored nearly 8% higher on their course grades than students who did not.

    3. The problem found in the literature is that students are not efficient note takers, meaning they only successfully capture information about 20% of the time, and they are organizationally flawed and therefore miss how information should fit together. These shortcomings, efficiency and organization, are particularly acute in individuals taking notes on a computer alone (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014). Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) specifically find that computers –when used in isolation –lead to lower levels of information retention, and they postulate this is due to students trying to bestenographers with keyboards instead of actively engaging with the material.

      Summary of the problem with taking notes on computers as opposed to by hand, ie the temptation to try to be a stenographer rather than engaging with and interpreting the material.

    4. “learners must be actively engaged in learning” to achieve deep understanding (Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2005, p. 10).

      This might be a useful reference for further study into active learning

    5. writing across the curriculum, critical thinking, and active learning, Bean (2011)

      Good source for "Writing across the Curriculum"

    1. Spain, Philip II, to prepare an account of the plants and animals of Spain’s newly conquered territories in what is today Mexico. Hernández spent seven years in Mexico (1571-77) and prepared an extens

      Thesis of this argument

    1. Since the dawn of civilization, there have been a number of irrefutable ‘golden laws’ of business, including the following:

      Terrible intro, but really good overview of the financial issues facing academic publishing

    1. The new title and pricing trends in Table 1 and Table 2 were also evident in Table 3. University press totals for these three years was 1,908. Even if statistics were excluded from the final totals of commercial presses, the output of commercial presses in 2012 was higher than the university press totals for all three years; and their tally for 2012–14 reached 14,493 (which is 659.59% more than for university presses). The suggested retail price differences were again rather dramatic between university presses and commercial publishers in several marker fields, including sociology (+75.48%); political theory (+45.52%); political science [End Page 109] in North and South America (+113.26%); mathematics (+33.56%); physics (+66.55%); and natural science (+128.24%). The cost to buy one copy of the university press books in Table 3 in these seven fields was $1549.51, while commercially published books cost $2379.84 (+53.59% higher) (see Table 3 for the details).

      Commercial presses are publishing more books and charging more for those books than are university presses. This might support the claim made in Jones and Courant (2014) that Academic Librarians are more likely to purchase books from university presses than from commercial presses, thereby increasing pressure on the commercial presses to publish more books and charge more for them.

    1. At the University of Ottawa, Canada, the UO Press and the UO Library have developed a strategic partnership to publish and disseminate selected new monographs as gold open access (OA). Starting in 2013, the Library agreed to fund three books at C$10,000 per book (a total of C$30,000 per year) in order to remove barriers to accessing scholarship and to align with scholarly communication goals of the University.

      Univeristy of Ottawa's Library & Press joined together to underwrite OA books for $10k (Canadian) each.

    1. “The monograph has been at risk for a long time,” Sisler notes. “Journals, in science in particular, have eaten up library budgets that were formerly spent on humanities and social-science monographs. As the number of units in print goes down, the price per book goes up, and you sell fewer; it becomes a vicious cycle.

      This points to a cycle that I read about elsewhere. Academic monograph publishers are printing more books, but a lower percentage of them are being bought by the libraries. Thus the number of sales per book is decreasing. The price for the books then goes up, as does the demand to print more books, further contributing to the cycle.

    1. And although this trend does decline eventually, the decline starts much later than is commonly asserted, starting only in 2000, and thus coinciding less with the serials crisis than with the succession of economic downturns that have squeezed university funding since the turn of the century.

      The authors are arguing that the 'serials crisis' predated the downturn in book purchasing. However, it's not clear why the date the 'serials crisis' when they do. Their data seems to support the idea that rising periodicals pricing in the 21st century has squeezed the purchasing of academic monographs.

    1. Variable costs of academic journals are paid by the publisher and, as long as journals were printed and distributed physically, these costs were sizeable. In the print era, publishers had to typeset the manuscripts, print copies of journals, and send them to various subscribers. Hence, each time an issue was printed, sent and sold, another copy had to be printed to be sent and sold. However, with the advent of electronic publishing, these costs became marginal.

      Digital era lowered the costs of publication

    2. In that sense and contrary to any other business, academic journals are an atypical information good, because publishers neither pay the provider of the primary good—authors of scholarly papers—nor for the quality control—peer review. On the publisher’s side, average first-copy costs of journal papers are estimated to range between 20 and 40 US dollars per page, depending on rejection rates [37];

      The authors note that much of the editorial work is done for free by academics, and put a price tag on the per page cost to publish journals.

    3. The possibility to increase profits in such an extreme fashion lies in the peculiarity of the economics of scholarly publishing. Unlike usual suppliers, authors provide their goods without financial compensation and consumers (i.e. readers) are isolated from the purchase. Because purchase and use are not directly linked, price fluctuations do not influence demand. Academic libraries, contributing 68% to 75% of journal publishing revenues [31], are atypical buyers because their purchases are mainly controlled by budgets. Regardless of their information needs, they have to manage with less as prices increase. Due to the publisher’s oligopoly, libraries are more or less helpless, for in scholarly publishing each product represents a unique value and cannot be replaced [19,20,33,34].

      Reasons for the high profit margins

    4. Data from the mid-1990s by Tenopir and King [12] suggests an increase of commercial publishers’ share of the output; by then, commercial publishers accounted for 40% of the journal output, while scientific/professional societies accounted for 25% and university presses and educational publishers for 16%.

      Data from mid-1990s on the publication of academic journals.

    5. Despite the fact that it is generally believed that the digitalization of knowledge diffusion has led to a higher concentration of scientific literature in the hands of a few major players, no study has analyzed the evolution over time of these major publishers’ share of the scientific output in the various disciplines. This paper aims at providing such analysis, based on all journals indexed in the Web of Science over the 1973–2013 period.

      Thesis: digitization has contributed to the consolidations of the academic journal publishing market

    6. On the other hand, papers in arts and humanities are still largely dispersed amongst many smaller publishers, with the top five commercial publishers only accounting for 20% of humanities papers and 10% of arts papers in 2013, despite a small increase since the second half of the 1990s.

      Why have the arts and humanities not experienced a similar consolidation?

    7. scientific societies such as the ACS or the APS publish many journals in the specialties of chemistry and physics respectively, for which they successfully managed the shift from print to electronic.

      Larger scientific societies can float the costs of digital conversion and avoid being snapped up by commercial publishers.

    8. Profit margins decreased, however, between 1998 and 2003, although profits remained relatively stable. Absolute profits as well as the profit margin then rose again, with the exception of the 2008–2009 period of economic crisis, resulting in profits reaching an all-time high of more than 2 billion USD in 2012 and 2013. The profit margin of the company’s Scientific, Technical & Medical division is even higher (Fig 7B).

      Profits rose across Reed-Elsevier's business, and rose fastest in the company's Sci,Tech, and Med division. The focus of the commercial interests in publishing Sci,Tech,Med is entirely logical from a profit-oriented perspective.

    1. Accessibility is the problem. However good your chapter is, if readers don’t have access to the book, they won’t find it. In the past, there was at least a faint hope that they may happen upon the book in a library, but these days, most of us don’t bother with any articles that we can’t download from the Internet.

      Main point here

    2. (I’m a recent convert to data-scraping in R, but you get a firm rap over the knuckles for improper behaviour if you attempt to use this approach to probe Google Scholar too closely).

      I want to follow up on data-scraping with R

    3. Google Scholar reveals, however, one factor that exerts a massive impact on whether a paper is cited or not: whether it appears in a journal or an edited book.

      Interesting point about the difficulty in discovering book chapters. Often not indexed in bibliographies. They're also less accessible than journal articles - in part because they're not digitial usually.

    1. The prospects of audience theory challenges this problem in requiring students write term papers which will have a real, tangible audience beyond the instructor.

      Nice resource for thinking about audience

    1. The mentee should not be expected to contribute to the professor’s research

      If a class presents its research as a digital product and both the class and the constituent students receive attribution, what then is fair use of that product in terms of further research by the professor?

    2. We can develop and share resources for constructively encouraging students to produce durable public work in the classroom, and for engaging student labor in digital projects in a way that is meaningful to students, as well as to the faculty. One outstanding example of this is the Perseus Project which incorporates student-translated texts into its database. The Perseids platform “offers students an opportunity to produce original scholarly work, which they can then list on their resumes in the context of a job search or when seeking admission to graduate school.” Student translators are credited by name, and the site provides durable URIs to student work which can be incorporated into C.V.s or e-portfolios. The Perseus Project offers a model of digital pedagogy that combines academic rigor with technical innovation, allowing students to produce durable products demonstrating their skills and to receive equally durable credit for their labor.

      Key point of the paper

    3. There is no metadata field for author, and author is not a searchable term in the site’s advanced search function. In the process of producing work for the site, work which students are “fully aware that future classrooms will engage with and critique,” the student author is erased and anonymized. While the site claims it is providing students with the experience of writing and publishing as an historian, it is in fact structured to ensure that students’ contributions are unidentifiable.

      What was the reasoning behind this design? Was it somehow an attempt at FERPA compliance or at allowing students to maintain anonymity. If so, student choice in attaching their name might have been a better solution.

    1. I can be in Egypt and in my home office at the same time. And because I can communicate with her at any moment, unexpectedly, I am always in Egypt and in my home office.

      We saw this with Maha and Keegan via Twitter at OLC Innovate. Virtually Connecting added a dimension to the meeting, both bringing people together and challenging the pay to play standard of conferences.

    1. Where proprietary courseware (textbooks, etextbooks, or online courseware) stand apart is in pedagogical organization and the unique value of authorship

      If your "proprietary courseware" is providing the pedagogical organization of a course, you're probably already doing it wrong.

    2. Is it up to each individual instructor?

      Yes, absolutely. It is both the privledge and responsibility of instructors to teach their courses, without being dictated to by proprietary textbooks.

    1. I don’t think it would be controversial to say that this “content worldview” was encouraged by publishers.

      Exactly. The Pearson 'op-ed' assumes a priori that courses should be built within the "content worldview."

    2. A growing number of peer-reviewed studies and other research reports are demonstrating that when faculty who previously used commercial products as their core instructional materials replace them with OER, student learning either stays the same or increases. Hilton’s review of this research suggests that this “same or better” outcome for OER users holds about 93% of the time.

      Actual data-driven studies supporting

    3. There are no results from the instructional design, learning science, or cognitive science literature demonstrating that the language on the copyright page is a critical factor in promoting student learning.

      Well put. The assumption (without argument) on Pearson's part that a 'proprietary' resource is necessarily better is ridiculous.

    1. Digital Humanities instead aims to archive materials, produce data, and develop software, while bracketing off the work of interpretation to a later moment or leaving it to other scholars — or abandoning it altogether for those who argue that we ought to become “postcritical.”

      Feels like the definition and establishment of a strawman. DH definitely is interested in developing data, tools, etc., but I'm not willing to concede without argument that practitioners want to leave interpretation to others or abandon it all together.

    2. the outcome was the establishment, essentially by fiat, of Digital Humanities as an academic and not a support field, with the accompanying assertion that technical and managerial expertise simply was humanist knowledge. The unavoidable implication was that other humanists were wrong — not so much about how they went about answering humanist questions as about the very definition of the humanities.

      Why should the establishment of a new field of the Humanities imply that all other humanities fields are invalid? Why can't it just be one of many fields. Why should the existence of DH be threatening?

    3. The problem to which Liu draws attention is a theme that has recurred throughout this article: purported technical expertise trumps all other forms of knowledge, including critique of the uses to which such expertise is put. (What counts as “expertise,” however, turns out to be highly variable. For example, most of the senior scholars mentioned here — Moretti, Liu, McGann, Drucker, and Smith — openly disclaim any ability to code, even as other major figures in the field insist on this as a minimum qualification.)

      Isn't this self-contradictory. Technical expertise trumps all and the practitioners refuse to be critical, but all of these people we've cited have little technical expertise and have made their name by being critical.

    4. A parallel can be drawn with the often-remarked raced and gendered makeup of Digital Humanities, whose key figures remain (mostly) white men even as greater numbers of female scholars and scholars from minoritized backgrounds have entered the “big tent.” The problem has been highlighted again and again, yet nothing changes besides the occasional invitation of female scholars to speak alongside the established male stars. At the Digital Humanities 2015 conference, noted media studies scholar Deb Verhoeven addressed the men present as follows:

      This may be the first critique with which I unequivocally agree. If the entire article were reshaped around this point - How Supposed Techno-Meritocracy Promotes a Homogenized, Exclusive System - it would be a more useful article.

    1. To take just one example, neoliberalism accounts in part for the enclosure of common goods by private interests, and the subjection of all areas of life to a strictly economic logic. In contrast, much work in DH involves either detourning commercial tools and products for scholarly purposes, or building Open Access archives, databases and platforms that resist the pressure to commercialize, as Alan Liu points out. That’s why DH projects (including my own) are so often broken, unworking or unfinished, and far from anything “immediately usable by industry.”

      Yeah, I didn't understand how the original LARB article somehow twisted the often open nature of DH projects into a Neoliberal consolidation of resources. The libraries and archives that are at the heart of the research university system are simply being opened to a broader audience through online distribution. This costs money, but isn't spending public money to provide goods to the people more of a socialist model than a neoliberal one?

    2. As many online have already protested, their genealogy of DH omits a great many areas of inquiry that have contributed to the field’s variegated and contested formation, including history, classics, archaeology, hypertext and hypermedia studies, cybercultural studies, electronic literature studies, critical media studies, maker culture, game studies and platform studies, to name but a few.

      Good list of the many fields mutually influenced by the development of DH.

    1. This is a good summary of the existential crisis of being an academic. How do you do more than write for a tiny audience and slowly drown in a dense, jargon-rich stream of navel-gazing?

  19. Apr 2016
    1. In the teacher-student relationship, the student has the right to expect that his work is evaluated fairly and that he retains intellectual property and will receive attribution for the work he produces.

      Is the main point, that the student maintains IP and receives proper attribution? If so, it feels like this should be stated towards the beginning of the talk as a generalizable best practice and the goal for the paper.

    1. specific guidelines gear them toward your learning goals. But if you are looking for a way to keep the discussion focused on the text, web annotation is a useful tool. Instead of having students post one comment or question to a discussion board after reading, consider having

      Good point

    1. I would be interested to see something added to the text or perhaps this annotation stream relating to TateGate, ie the concern over possible use of annotation tools (like Hypothe.is) to deface or oppress people.

  20. Mar 2016
    1. Lavoisier paid particular attention to the apparatuses he intended to use in his experimental pursuits. Lavoisier engaged many instrument makers in Paris, the French provinces, and abroad, and he made several efforts, more or less successful, to design a new environment for chemical experimentation. In addition to working with famous instrument makers such as Fortin, Mégnié, and Ramsden, Lavoisier had his instruments made by more than seventy other different makers. In this essay, I outline their contributions and make a preliminary attempt to establish their role in the design of Lavoisier's instruments and in the changes that occurred in chemical experimentation.

      I agree with Beretta's concept here.

    1. But according to a 2011 study from the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of Americans use the site, up from only 36 percent in 2007.

      The phrase 'only 36 percent' of Americans is ridiculous. That's nearly as many people as vote, more than the number that vote in midterms.

    2. Interestingly, the more educated someone is, the more likely he or she is to consult Wikipedia. Almost 70 percent of Americans with college degrees read Wikipedia. Google now pulls directly from the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, so even people who never visit the site read it. Today, it’s the seventh most-visited website in the world.

      Interesting that greater attainment of education is correlated with higher use of Wikipedia.

  21. Feb 2016
  22. Jan 2016
    1. This will allow you to specify exactly where you want Hypothes.is to be automatically enabled.

      You can set generalized rules and then control the application of those rules in each post and page.

    2. Further, you can also see other peoples public comments as well, allowing for a community to form/discuss a particular text.

      How do you think public annotations in a text like Campbell's or this text promote a digital pedagogy community? How do they limit the individualistic interpretation of the articles in favor of group think?

    3. any piece of text via annotation and threaded replies

      Even this one

    1. Faculty members, librarians, administrators and staff should actively promote the principles of ethical student engagement described by Posner and her collaborators.

      Is this the positive statement of what needs to be done? Is complying with the standards set in the "Student Collaborators' Bill of Rights" sufficient?

    2. digital projects

      What's the significance of digital projects? Is it being suggested that this doesn't happen with non-digital projects?

    3. write content for blogs and wikis

      Does this criticism include course blogs? Whats the delineation between an instructor's digital projects and course projects?

  23. Oct 2015
    1. In the world before Columbine, people like LaDue played with chemistry sets in their basements and dreamed of being astronauts.

      This is again suggesting that appropriate heroes would set appropriate goals for youths. Is this too simple?

    2. He disapproved of Adam Lanza, because he shot kindergartners at Sandy Hook instead of people his own age: “That’s just pathetic. Have some dignity, damn it.”

      This model of a dialectic suggests that the narrative can be shaped, both by the individual reader and each actor. Can it also be shaped by the media? If these mass-murderers are portrayed as pathetic or deranged would that dissuade others from joining their ranks?