The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT — Backchannel — Medium ““If I hear one more person tell me I can’t use New Relic,” he said. “I’ll punch them in the face.”” tags: weekly Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It? | EdSurge News “This past year, Davidson College introduced “A Domain of One’s Own” to a portion of the student body through faculty willing to use it in their teaching. I saw two styles of ‘Domains’ rise out of the initiative. The first type of ‘Domain’ took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn’t necessarily empower. The problems with the second approach can be wrapped up into two key questions beginning with: Why post an assignment online if…” tags: weekly domain grading audience Animate your way to glory “This article is significantly longer than previous installments. It features 4 interactive slideshows, each introducing a new tool as well as related concepts around it. In one way, it’s just another math guide, but going much deeper. In another, it’s a thesis on everything I know about animating. […]

The Morbid Fascination With the Death of the Humanities – Benjamin Winterhalter – The Atlantic “He claims, in essence, that literary modernism’s insights about the relationship between abstract thoughts and tangible objects are now being understood by neurological research. “This thesis of Ezra Pound’s that poetry should yoke ideas to particular objects—so that the thing and the thought are brought together in a single manifold,” he said, “actually anticipates a very recent neuroscientific insight, which is that, in certain aesthetic states, processing and perception happen in the same cortical centers of the brain.” Matt’s big idea, in other words, is that literature sometimes comes to important conclusions about the nature of consciousness and reality before science can catch up. “The point is—and this is a major claim of literary theorists—that literature allows us to feel our way around insights that we don’t yet have a clean, conceptual articulation of.” By his logic, then, the way to drive science forward might be to fund the study of literature. “ tags: english science weekly humanities How the “Hype Cycle” explains MOOCs, big data, VR, and Google Glass. “Virtual reality, Novak suggests, has undergone a similar metamorphosis. Look around a crowded room, and you won’t see a bunch of people wearing VR headsets. Instead, you’ll see them peering into tiny screens, through which […]