Friday Varia and Quick Hits
It is supposed to get to a balmy 30 F today. So with the hope of spring-like weather, I offer some modest varia and quick hits:
One of our first posts over at Teaching Thursday was on the EduPunk movement, now there is (and ironically constructed) Center4Edupunx. Pretty cool if a bit inconsequential.
A longish New Yorker piece on how the Internet gets inside us. It’s a nice review of recent literature on the influences of the internet on our daily lives.
It’s hardly surprising that most innovation does not originate in complex institutions. A recent New York Times article describes a study that seems to prove just that, and it makes reference to Fargo’s own Dan Reetz of the DIY Book Scanner, a super righteous guy.
For those of you who missed it East Grand Fork’s Whitey’s has closed. Let’s hope that it re-opens soon.
Some cool thoughts from Henry Jenkins on open book exams in the digital age.
For fans of cool design, Nicholas Feltron has released his annual report. I love his Daytum site and it has become part of my daily routine.
For another kind of report, check out the 2011 Horizon Report. It may not be cutting edge, but it’s still required reading for anyone interested in higher education, teaching, and technology.
Has anyone tried Sparrow Mail?
I just got my brand new 15-inch Dell Precision M4500. It is completely pimped out with a quad-core i7 processor, highest end NVIDIA graphics card, 256 GB SSD, great screen, and all the bells-and-whistles. It’s replacing Big Diesel II, a 17-inch Dell XPS. In contrast to the Big Diesel, the Precision is almost catastrophically ugly. And not just ugly, it has lots of poorly conceived features like the button to eject the media drive drawer (I’ve been installing software!) is immediately above the button that allows you to eject the entire media drive. How convenient! And despite being an $4,000+ computer, it is still made of cheap and flimsy black plastic. I purchases the computer for its functional characteristics, but some attention to form would seem to be warranted! My MacBook Pro which coast nearly $1000 less is a much more elegant (and almost as high powered) a computer.
I’ve been thinking a good bit about pseudo-ascetic technomads and Byzantine monasticism.
I’ve also been thinking of the Grande Hotel in Mozambique (and this haunting trailer for the documentary) and the evidence for subdividing, spoliating and squatting in Late Antiquity.
What I’m listening to: Alexander “Skip” Spencer, Oar.
What I’m reading: Peter Gay, Freud for Historians. (Oxford 1985)
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