June 14, 2011
Video: Zuckerberg Advises 8th Graders To Skip Shortcuts
Alexander Russo,
This Week In Education, June 14, 2011.
Via Alexander Russo: "The scene is Menlo Park's Belle Haven Community School. The principal introduces him as Zuckerman. The theme is not taking shortcuts and doing things you love and having fun (Mark Zuckerberg to 8th Graders via Gawker)." I remember my eighth grade graduation very clearly. I won two awards (public speaking and chess) and just missed out on a couple more. Mrs. lewis, my grade five teacher, introduced me by recollecting that I had once said I want to read every book in the library, and then attempted to do so in her math class! It's funny that I was constantly getting in trouble for reading in class, in retrospect. Anyhow, it's funny listening to multi-billionaire Zuckerman trying to talk over the wail of children's voices in the background.
Essential tools: Using Easy Bib
Judy O’Connell,
HeyJude, June 14, 2011.
I had a quick run through easyBib this morning and have favorable things to say. It does a lot of what I wanted gRSShopper to do, using forms to make submissions of bibliographical entries a lot easier, but goes well beyond that, looking up what's needed from various sources on the web. After all (the thinking must go) if the data exists in a database somewhere out there on the web, why should anyone type it in again? Of course, on the other hand, the data out there on the web should be good the data properly entered - this means citing On Liberty as being authored by John Stuart Mill, and not Mill plus a bunch of co-authors. Also, I didn't appreciate being blasted with an audio ad while I was trying to record something. So - great design, poor execution.
3 ideas you should steal from HubSpot
Pete Warden,
O'Reilly Radar, June 14, 2011.
Three smart ideas that originate in HubSpot and are retraced in this O'Reilly article:
- "giving people data and visualizations about things they truly care about can be a powerful tool for drawing them in to your service." Something for me to think about: how do I know what people truly care about? How can I animate it?
- Dan Zarrella, "crusading against "unicorns and rainbows" metrics that have no connection to the goals you want to achieve." Zarella writes, "The antidote to the puffery rampant in social media circles is science."
- while we are told that "anything that requires educating users is a losing proposition," in some cases, where people are motivated, they're willing to invest some time. Educating people who want to know is not a losing proposition.
protein synthesis dance
Robert Alan Weiss,
YouTube, June 14, 2011.
I'm not sure whether the science is accurate - the video is, after all, from the 70s - but the mechanism of using dance to explain protein synthesis is quite effective, and gave me an intuitive sense of what's happening. Art is life. Of course, you do have to have an appreciation for the music of the era... Shared by Alec Couros.
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