Exploratory Blog: October 2013

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Freelance Nation: “The Greatest Economic Transformation in Human History”?

More and more micro-entrepreneurs are using online services like Etsy, Kickstarter, Uber and Lyft to create their own jobs. Welcome to the new DIY economy.

Uber is evolving the way the world moves. By seamlessly connecting riders to drivers through our apps, we make cities more accessible, opening up more possibilities for riders and more business for drivers. From our founding in 2009 to our launches in over 35 cities today, Uber's rapidly expanding global presence continues to bring people and their cities closer.

Kickstarter We’re a home for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since our launch in 2009, 5 million people have pledged $830 million, funding 50,000 creative projects. Thousands of creative projects are raising funds on Kickstarter right now.

The startup with the tagline, “your friend with a car,” has developed an iPhone and Android app that lets you order a ride from a stranger in a matter of minutes. Lyft

Dirty Wars

Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the heart of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

William H. Masters ‘Masters of Sex’ Out of the Bedroom, Into the Clinic

"It often begins in the back seat of a parked car. It's hurry up and get the job done. The back seat of a car hardly provides an opportunity for the expression of personality." — William H. Masters
'Masters of Sex,' by Thomas Maier: Out of the Bedroom, Into the Clinic

Male readers took some solace in the fact that Masters and Johnson dismissed the “wide-spread concept that ejaculation, whether accomplished through masturbation or coition, is detrimental to the physical condition of men in athletic training programs.” They also noted that men with larger penises are not necessarily more effective lovers.

Dr. Masters had begun his early research by studying prostitutes. But he came to realize they did not lead representative sex lives. The pair put signs up on the Washington University campus looking for volunteers to participate in their sex research and soon had more than they could handle.
It was a different world in the late 1950s. There was an aversion to speaking about sex in public, much less studying it in private. Before Masters and Johnson, for example, no one had photographed the inside of a woman during intercourse. (They employed a clear Plexiglas dildo nicknamed Ulysses for the task.) “Before they could fix things sexually,” Mr. Maier writes, “they had to know how it worked.”

Couple Who Taught America How to Love" by Thomas Maier
MASTERS OF SEX The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love By Thomas Maier

Virginia E. Johnson, a writer, researcher and sex therapist who with her longtime collaborator, William H. Masters, helped make the frank discussion of sex in postwar America possible if not downright acceptable, died on Wednesday in St. Louis. She was 88.

Dr. Masters was a gynecologist on the faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis when he began his research into human sexuality in the mid-1950s. Ms. Johnson, who joined him in 1957 after answering an advertisement for an assistant, worked alongside him for more than three decades. She was variously his research associate, wife and former wife.

The book made Masters and Johnson an institution in American popular culture. They were interviewed widely in the news media, wrote for popular magazines including Playboy and Redbook, and on more than one occasion caused heated public controversy. Their work was discussed in rapt half-whispers at suburban cocktail parties and even inspired a band, Human Sexual Response, a Boston-based New Wave group of the late 1970s and early ’80s.

More than any investigator before them, Masters and Johnson moved sex out of the bedroom and into the laboratory, where it could be observed, measured, recorded, quantified and compared. ... Masters and Johnson gathered direct physiological data on what happens to the human body during sex, from arousal to orgasm.

It’s hard to believe, but the word clitoris did not appear in Playboy magazine until 1968, in an interview with Masters and Johnson, the famous sex researchers.

Women As Journalists

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Your Money 101

http://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/your-money-101/

What is the worst kind of debt to carry? Is it student loan debt, credit cards, a mortgage — or something else? Even the experts don’t always agree on which debts are “good debt” and which ones are “bad” so imagine how confusing it can be to consumers who are dealing with debt!

Getty Images/Thinkstock -

Monday, October 7, 2013

Anyone Still Listening? Educators Consider Killing the Lecture

Teachers are wrong to assume that their role is to only convey information, and that merely saying the magic words will translate into learning for students, Lahey said. “Our students can access lots of information really efficiently now online, probably more efficiently than we could ever relay it,” he said. “So the added value of interactions with faculty should be talking through difficult concepts, refining difficult decision-making, and otherwise doing the challenging stuff that can’t be done with a laptop or phone. I try to structure lectures with that in mind.”

Studies show lecturing to be an effective tool for transferring information: for example, a 2011 study of classroom teaching methods performed by Guido Schwerdt of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and Amelie C. Wuppermann at the University of Mainz, Germany, found that larger amounts of class time lecturing increased junior high math and science students’ test scores over time spent on problem-solving activities.

One of Lahey’s main goals as head of Dartmouth medical school’s curriculum redesign is to incorporate more interactive work, what he calls the “evidence-based (and fun) teaching tools,” that he believes will revitalize medical school learning

Peer instruction was first introduced by Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University and Area Dean of Applied Physics, to his classes in 1991. Mazur, who found that this method helped students understand better, said lectures are much like musical concerts — they can still be appreciated, especially as a motivational tool. But what’s changed is that the lecture is no longer the only way to transfer important information.

Mazur’s method of peer instruction for physics classes involves two steps: first, he “primes the pump” by assigning reading or watching an online video of a lecture outside of class, and has students annotate the parts they had trouble understanding. Part two happens at the next class, when Mazur revisits concepts students stumbled over. “I say, here’s a question, think about it individually,” he said. “Then, commit to an answer, write it down on a piece of paper, or sometimes we use clickers, or handheld devices, or whatever. But here’s the crucial step: After you have committed to an answer, turn to the people around you, find a person with a different answer, and try to come to some agreement.”

Transmedia storytelling

Transmedia storytelling is the “technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies” (Wikipedia). These platforms include film, online video, alternate reality games, social media tools, and mobile technologies.

But learning professionals have not yet explored in much detail the possibilities of transmedia storytelling for learning. Often touted as the future of television and film, does transmedia storytelling represent the future of mLearning as well?

Transmedia Storytelling

Seven Myths About Transmedia Storytelling.

Recently in Fast Company, Henry Jenkins authored a great article about the seven myths surrounding transmedia storytelling. The original article can be found here.

In transmedia, elements of a story are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms, each making their own unique contribution to the whole. Each medium does what it does best–comics might provide back-story, games might allow you to explore the world, and the television series offers unfolding episodes.

To make your transmedia experience accessible you need to connect with your audience

on their terms
where they already are
with tools that they’re already using, and
in ways that they already understand.

Add Transmedia Storytellingcaption

Lawrence Lessig argues that the one-to-many mass media model of the 20th century was a stifling of culture and creativity. “Culture moved from a read-write to a read-only existence,” he said in a 2007 TED conference. In making his point that digital technology has moved culture back to a read-write existence, he shows amateur remix videos that became viral phenomena. “The importance of this is not the technique you’ve seen here,” he notes about the work, “because every technique you’ve seen here is something that television and film producers have been able to do for the last 50 years. The importance is that that technique has been democratized. It is now anybody with access to a $1,500 computer who can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use them to say things differently.”