Are you partial to absurd lists? So is Time Magazine! This bastion of old media has been developing a “World’s Most Influential” franchise over the past few years, addressing or cultivating some mysterious need to rank Vladimir Putin against Miley Cyrus on a fuzzy scale of “influence.” You can watch a Time editor fumble for …
Who is this woman, and why is she crying? This photo, from a collection of early news photos housed at the Library of Congress, is part of an experiment that has that venerable institution dipping a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. Compare the photo on LC’s own website, versus on Flickr. By publishing some …
From its earliest days, the promise of the Semantic Web has been to bring networked computers closer to the forms and priorities of human inquiry. This promise depends on mark-up language that gives data some structure, and frameworks that bring such structure into recognizable relationships. As a May 2001 Scientific American piece by Tim Berners-Lee …
In our last episode, we beat up a bit on the notion of “learning object repositories” (LORs), wondering whether the well-meaning assemblage of modular bits and pieces of educational materials was actually a frustration of coherent teaching. Educational practices, after all, are still grounded in settings and customs that predate the digital on-demand world. We …
