e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Hart InterCivic Responds

    I sent an email yesterday to Hart InterCivic with the same tone and some of the same words that I used in my rant yesterday. I did so hoping that I would get a reply; I don’t think it’s fair to attack somebody publicly without giving them a chance to respond. And within hours, I received a reply from Michelle Shafer, the very person quoted in the Wired article. Apparently, the interview was conducted at 1 AM on election day and the quote was lifted from the context of a much larger interview. (To be clear, Ms. Shafer is not accusing the journalist of anything. The point is simply that it was one comment from a much longer conversation.)

    At any rate, her response to me was thoughtful and considerate enough to merit publication here. (I did ask for and receive Ms. Shafer’s permission before publishing this.) So here it is: (more…)

  • E-Voting Machines and Arrogance

    Wired is running a deeply disturbing story on problems with electronic voting machines. I won’t run through the litany of problems here, but I do want to point out a particularly heinous quote from one of the manufacturers: (more…)

  • Group Processes (Including Learning Processes) Should Be Wiki'ed

    As many of you know, I am a fan of JotSpot. One of the interesting things that came out of my interview with JotSpot co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer is that they plan to build workflow syntax and functionality into their wiki product. Which brings me to Scott McMullan’s post…. (more…)

  • The NYC Budget Game

    I love these sorts of simulation games. It’s too bad that they’re so time-consuming to design. At their heart, they are fairly simple branching simulations, not so diffierent from the original text-based branching adventure games. (Anybody remember “xyzzy”?) Some, like this one, are a bit more sophisticated because they include numerical computations. But they are really only a bit more sophisticated from a programming perspective. For example, this particular game was written in Flash, but you could probably do most of it in a simple tool like HalfBaked Software’s Quandary.

    No, the hard part about these games is the branching. Unless you’re incredibly clever about designing loops, the game either explodes into an exponentially growing tangle of story lines, each of which needs to be explicitly authored, or remains boring and obvious with mostly Pavlovian clicking.

    There is a craft to writing these branching simulations efficiently and well. Somebody should write a book about it. In fact, maybe somebody already has. If anybody knows of such a resource, please let me know.

    (Found via e-clippings.)

  • The NOSE: Navigating OpenSource

    Al Essa, MIT/Sloan School of Business’ CIO and the founding father of the Open Source dotLRN learning management platform, has a new (albeit goofily named) weblog about Open Source in higher ed (and related technology issues).

    Check it out.

  • Evaluating Students' Weblogs

    Here’s a great post on student blogging from Middlebury College professor Barbara Ganley’s bgblogging (which I just added to my blogroll).

    Here’s an excerpt:

    In the 1970s and 80s, following the lead of Peter Elbow and Donald Graves, among others, we focussed on process–how to get ideas stirring and on the paper, how to infuse the process with energy and excitement. This kind of writing instruction is now limiting–we have to move beyond this now codified approach. Of course, detractors think that blogging embraces the messiness, the anything-goes-mentality, the very worst of the writing-process; and on first view, student blogging can be extremely undisciplined and informal, dynamically unruly in its humor and irreverence, its disregard for rules and conventions. Yup, this work unsettles just about everyone–still–teachers, administrators, parents and even the students themselves. We hand over the reins of our courses in large part to the students themselves. At least, this is my approach. And sometimes our students write downright incoherent entries due to a lack of simple copyediting , (take this recent one on my artswriting blog, for example). What do we do? Do we jump in and correct the mistakes, clean it up before the world sees and judges? Or do we wait to see what the class will say or do? Will anyone notice? Will anyone care? And if they don’t?

    (more…)

  • Open Access, Furl, and Course Packs

    I just took a quick look at The Learner’s Library As far as I can tell, the service breaks down as follows:

    • LL contains a collection of academic journal articles that have been pre-cleared for copyright.
    • There’s a search interface to that collection that includes what appears at first glance to be pretty decent natural language search.
    • Searches return results including an appropriate excerpt, a full, formatted citation, and a link to the full text of the article.
    • Professors can assemble “course packs” of articles, essentially Furling the collection for one-click access by students.

    I bet we could assemble equivalent service for open access journals using free, loosely-coupled pieces. (more…)