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Screens in the Classroom

To me, the crux of the issue of using devices in a classroom comes down to the culture of a specific classroom… is there a teacher at the front of the room sharing information and knowledge with an audience of students, or is there a collaborative environment (or something of a hybrid)?

This is written from a college professor’s point of view, but still valuable for k-12 educators and a good read (especially the elephant and elephant driver metaphor):

This is, for me, the biggest change — not a switch in rules, but a switch in how I see my role. Professors are at least as bad at estimating how interesting we are as the students are at estimating their ability to focus. Against oppositional models of teaching and learning, both negative—Concentrate, or lose out!—and positive—Let me attract your attention!—I’m coming to see student focus as a collaborative process. It’s me and them working to create a classroom where the students who want to focus have the best shot at it, in a world increasingly hostile to that goal.

via Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away… — Medium.

Very valuable read if you’re interested in the…

Very valuable read if you’re interested in the future of the web… time to rethink “Big Internet”

“Big Twitter was great — for a while,” says Jacobs. “But now it’s over, and it’s time to move on.”

These trends, if they are actually trends, seem related. I sense that they both stem from a sense of exhaustion with what I’m calling Big Internet. By Big Internet, I mean the platform- and plantation-based internet, the one centered around giants like Google and Facebook and Twitter and Amazon and Apple.”

Nicholas Carr at http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5010

Dave Winer on how to stimulate the open web

We were talking about this way back in 2006 (and probably before, but that’s when I started taking notice as the social web started accelerating) and it’s good to see that guardians of the web like Dave Winer are still hard at work thinking and talking (and making apps) about this:

Create systems that are ambivalent about the open or closed web. If I create a tool that’s good at posting content to Facebook and Twitter, it should also post to RSS feeds, which exist outside the context of any corporation. Now other generous and innovative people can build systems that work differently from Facebook and Twitter, using these feeds as the basis, and the investors will have another pile of technology they can monetize.

via How to stimulate the open web.

Go read and use RSS.

Back to iPhone

I’ve been using a Nexus 4 then the Nexus 5 as my daily mobile device for the last two years as I wanted to learn Android.

I enjoyed the experience for the most part (especially Google Now and apps integration) but I’ve missed the reliability and stability of Apple hardware.

So, I’m back on an iPhone 5s (until the 6 or whatever it’s called next month) for hardware and Google etc for software for now.

Airbnb’s New Logo

Airbnb Belo

Airbnb has released a revision of its site, which is very 2014 modern in its flatness and active card based structure. It’s interesting, but nothing revolutionary or forward looking inside the Silicon Valley bubble. The best aspect is that we’re finally seeing the transition of the cards interface from services to actual physical interactions / products.

The more exceptional part of Airbnb’s visual revision is how they are treating their otherwise lukewarm logo. Airbnb is a confederation of hosts and potential users. While it has to be centralized in terms of the service, listings, etc the very nature of the business is to be democratized. It’s interesting to see their logo embracing that and making the decentralized nature of the business part of its core identity:

“The most revolutionary thing about this brand evolution is we are giving it away to the community,” Mr Conley says. “We are moving from an era of mass production to more individualised production… This is an extension to that. A host with a singular listing in Notting Hill could create their own logo and now we’ve created a micro-entrepreneur with their own brand.”

via Airbnb says its new logo belongs to everyone | Tech blog.