Here’s another “will-somebody-please-tell-me-the-goddurned-truth-about-the-Presidential-campaign-issues” site in the same spirit as FactCheck.org. I have only had time to give it a cursory scan so far, but Spinsanity looks good at first glance. Plus, it has an RSS feed, unlike FactCheck.org. (Found via Wired.)
Two Thirds of Faculty for Online Courses Receive No Pedagogy Training
According to this survey, a lot of universities still don’t get that teaching online involves more than knowing which buttons to click. Right now the administrations probably don’t have to care; the demand for distance learning (even weak distance learning) outstrips the supply. But that won’t last forever, and when the market tightens up, universities […]
Site Themes Revamp
I just spent the afternoon editing e-Literate’s site theme organization. There are a number of reasons why I felt this was necessary: Too many posts were going into too many themes. While I deliberately chose to create a system of overlapping themes rather than a rigid taxonomy, an organization system starts to lose its value […]
Blogchalking: Shibboleth in Action
A while back I referred to Shibboleth–the idea of putting an arbitrary string into a post for search engine recognition. “Blog chalking” apparently uses this technique to map the blogosphere to terrestrial geography. Basically, you enter geographical and demographic information into the Shibboleth generator. It spits out a string which is encoded in an HTML […]
Using LiveJournal in EFL Classes
Aaron Campbell at Ryukoku University has a great piece out on how to use LiveJournal to teach EFL. It has everything you’d want in this sort of an article, including a rationale for choosing the particular technology and step-by-step instructions for educators. This is one of the clearest, most concrete examples I’ve seen for using […]
Why Google News Has an Anti-Kerry Bias
According to USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review, some quirks of linguistic usage may be effectively biasing the Google News algorithm toward hard-right anti-Kerry articles. Author J. D. Lasica claims that anti-Kerry pieces will tend to refer derisively to “John Kerry” repeatedly as a derisive rhetorical device, where more mainstream articles will tend to refer to […]
TiddlyWiki – a reusable non-linear personal web notebook
TiddlyWiki has some unusual affordances that makes it suited to somewhat different tasks than other wikis I’ve seen (though I remind you that I am a wiki newbie). To begin with, the display allows you to call up a number of posts (which the developer calls “tiddles”) on the same page. This makes it well-suited […]