Author Archives: Heather Stafford and Arabella Holzapfel

Friday Links for Halloween, October 31, 2014

10 reasons scholars should start writing BuzzFeed articles

Infographics in 3 Steps

NEW! Moodle Users Listserv – This group is for Moodle teachers who would like to use an email forum to ask, answer, and share Moodle questions and tips. To join the list you can either visit http://sites.middlebury.edu/ct and use the sign up form in the right hand column, or send an email message to listmanager@lists.middlebury.edu and include:

  • subscribe in the subject field
  • subscribe moodle-users in the text of the email

 

 

Friday Links – October 17, 2014

Time for a Thesis – From the Senior Admissions Fellows Blog, a self-reflective essay by a History major on the impact of our annual message to seniors about thesis carrel signup and research support. His conclusion is quite nice: “When I think ahead to the books and research, I am not so much nervous as I am excited,” he says.

Practicing Collaborative Digital Pedagogy to Foster Digital Literacies in Humanities Classrooms – This article presents two case studies of classes who employed different techniques to “foster digital literacies in humanities students using distinct approaches for each course.” My key takeaway hinged on one student’s observation: “Through creating an infographic in Easel.ly, I learned that it is very important to develop skills in being able to pick out important information from the vast amounts that you can easily find online.”

How Stress Affects the Brain During Learning – A fight or flight reaction may be useful in some situations, but it is highly detrimental in the classroom. Whether anxiety stems from test taking or from an unstable home environment, the brains of students experiencing high levels of stress look different than those who are not — and those brains behave differently, too. In this article, we’ll take a look at the neural and hormonal responses that underpin a student’s stress response, and make a few suggestions for continuing to teach through the challenges it presents.

Upcoming Battery Will Charge Phones And Electric Cars in Minutes – It takes about an hour to fully charge a cell phone, and the battery lasts about two to three years over 500 charge cycles. However, a new design could reduce charge time to only a few minutes and the battery is expected to last for 10,000 charge cycles over a 20 year lifespan.

FireChat in Hong Kong: How an app tapped its way into the protests
(CNN) — The revolution will not be televised but it will be tweeted, instant messaged or, in the case of Hong Kong, broadcast on mesh networks like FireChat.

 

Friday Links – July 11, 2014

At Sea in a Deluge of Data
By Alison J. Head and John Wihbey
Chronicle of Higher Education
People in charge of hiring at large organizations such as Microsoft, Nationwide Insurance and the FBI say that recent college graduates lack skills in research and analysis. “The new workers default to quick answers plucked from the Internet. That method might be fine for looking up a definition or updating a fact, but for many tasks, it proved superficial and incomplete…”

How unexpected opportunities can inform practice – As a part of some of my coursework I have had the opportunity to read some interesting educational research. I thought it might be helpful to share a brief overview of some of the articles that I’ve reviewed. This is the first post in a series that I was planning to share. Please feel free to contact me at hstafford@middlebury.edu if you’d like to discuss further.

11 University and Library Groups Release Net-Neutrality Principles – The nation’s colleges and libraries have a message for the Federal Communications Commission: Don’t mess with net neutrality.

Bicycle-powered charger

Friday Links – April 18, 2014

Photos: 15 gadgets to reduce your energy consumption – Earth Day is April 22, so it’s a great time to take a step back and look at your personal energy consumption.

The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind the Secretive Lab’s Closed Doors – Space elevators, teleportation, hoverboards, and driverless cars: the top secret Google X innovation lab opens up about what it does–and how it thinks.

Benjamin Bratton on “What’s wrong with TED Talks?” A, er, TED talk …

“… This is taking something of substance and value and coring it out so it can be swallowed without chewing.  This is not how we’ll confront our most frightening problems. This is one of our most frightening problems. …” [around 2:00]

There are a lot of digital stories being told at Middlebury. Check out a few here.

13 Ways To Be A Great Public Speaker – Rehearsing your body language and getting proper rest are effective tactics for reducing public speaking anxiety and ensuring that you give a memorable presentation.

Friday Links – April 4, 2014

The Terran Computational Calendar – Synchronized with the northern winter solstice and the UNIX Epoch, the terran computational calendar contains 13 identical months of 28 days each in addition to a short Month Zero containing only new year’s day and a single leap year day every four years (with the exception of every 128 years).

Why Facebook Acquiring Oculus Rift Is A Good Thing – Here are a lot of numbers with the word ‘billion’ in them. Facebook has 1.2 billion active users. In 2013 Facebook made $7.872 billion in revenue. Facebook could afford to pay $2 billion to acquire a technology that could have potentially been doomed to a niche market, squandering all its incredible potential, squandering a genuine chance to change the world through interactivity. This is now a potential that has an exponentially stronger chance of become a hard reality.

Infographic: See the daily routines of the world’s most famous creative people – Ever wonder how your routine stacks up against others? Check out this infographic from Info We Trust to compare your schedule to Darwin’s.

 

Friday Links – March 28, 2014

The faces of libraries change, but we still love them:
From Distant Admirers to Library Lovers–and beyond from Pew Research Internet Project

How MOOC Video Production Affects Student Engagement is a good read for anyone considering the use of video in an instructional context. For a more in depth analysis see Philip Guo’s published paper How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos.

Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral – 3D renderings of sixteen pages of the 8th-century St Chad Gospels: https://lichfield.as.uky.edu/models/gallery

3D printing: 10 companies using it in ground-breaking ways – A growing number of innovative companies are experimenting with 3D printers, propelling the technology closer to the mainstream market.

Friday Links – March 14, 2014

9 Tips for Creating a Sense of Community for Distance Learners – The article provides is geared towards fully online courses, but it is also good advice for faculty wanting to created engagement in a hybrid course.

Memes, Genes and Evolution on Facebook – The way memes evolve on Facebook is startlingly similar to the way genes evolve on Earth, say researchers who have carried out the first large-scale study of memetic evolution.

Photos: 3D printers, a tour of the top models – The MakerBot Replicator Mini is the cheapest of the versions at $1,375. It’s designed for home use and only weighs 18 pounds. Download the designs on the tablet app, connect the Mini to a USB cable, and print. The machine is optimized for PLA filament.

Two Middlebury Grads Offer Software to Help You See in 3D – Shane Scranton and Nate Beatty are developing software for the Oculus Rift to connect architecture, design and 3D modeling into an immersive experience.

Seduction in the Poster Session – Plan, learn and whatever you do – don’t use Comic Sans! This article provides poster making tips from Kathryn Everson, a PhD Student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks & University of Alaska Museum. Adobe InDesign and Illustrator are highlighted as two of the best tools to use for poster production and (GOOD NEWS!) these are both available at Middlebury in the Wilson Media Lab!

Five tips for creating a successful presentation with an iPad – connection and swapping between applications are just two of the considerations in this short list of recommendations.