These look pretty cool. You can use it to make custom-text worksheets in print, cursive, and D'nealian. If you have a color printer, so much the better, but it looked fine to me in black and white.
H/t to Christy P. for passing the link on to me.
These look pretty cool. You can use it to make custom-text worksheets in print, cursive, and D'nealian. If you have a color printer, so much the better, but it looked fine to me in black and white.
H/t to Christy P. for passing the link on to me.
27 January 2012 in Education, at home and elsewhere, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
This is very good news: The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that JSTOR, the database of academic journals, is about to beta-test a system that will allow users to access a limited number of journal articles for free.
It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.
But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.
To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals.
This is an exciting development. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it has always frustrated me that it's comparatively difficult to access peer-reviewed research. I know, it has always been possible to buy reprints of journal articles you want to read ($30 a pop is not an atypical charge), and it has always been possible (for me, an able-bodied resident of a major urban area) to trek physically to the libraries at the state university and do my searching from there, but face it ... with these obstacles, it's always been easier just to do the best one can with Wikipedia.
Besides, at least when I was working on my graduate degree, I found that I generally didn't know if an article was going to be useful until after I'd read it. That makes me rather unwilling to arrange childcare and cross town for a single article, or to pay $30 for the privilege of accessing it.
Make no mistakes, the program described in the Chronicle is severely limited: few people, however self-motivated, will be able to conduct significant independent research at the rate of six articles a month (partly because of that phenomenon I described -- with the exception of seminal "classic" papers or comprehensive literature reviews, it's hard to tell whether an article is useful until after you've read it). But maybe this will be a step forward into a new era that makes independent scholarship more accessible to everyone. As Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic points out,
Why is this important? Well, get a load of this stat. JSTOR told the Chronicle that each and every year, they turn away 150 million attempts to gain access to articles. That's right. 150 million attempts!
The way I see it, that's 150 million chances lost to improve the quality of the Internet. JSTOR, as the keeper of so much great scholarly work, should be one of the Internet's dominant suppliers of facts and serious research. But if something is not publicly available, key gatekeepers like journalists and Wikipedians, move to the best available source, even if they know that there probably is a better source behind JSTOR's paywall.
150 million potential pageviews is a lot of potential transactions, and if awareness grew that you could actually access the content of scholarly journals, it's likely there would be many more. If JSTOR can find a way to monetize these access attempts in a way that delivers decent bang-for-the-buck, a real win-win situation could be created: profit for the journal, which after all has to pay the bills, and a more fluid -- if not entirely "free" -- flow of information.
This would be good for everyone: patients who need to understand the latest research about their own medical diagnoses, activists who want to marshall the best arguments to rally people to their causes, independent scholars who seek to educate themselves, high-school level home-educated students, high school teachers, tech professionals temporarily absent from the workforce who need to stay current in their field -- and nerds like me who just like to go straight to the source and maybe blog about it. It could be good for the journals, too.
22 January 2012 in Books, Education, at home and elsewhere, Media, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
After I wrote the Internet safety lesson I described in a previous post, I learned that my good friend IRL The Road Scholar had put up a lot of good links related to Internet use in the homeschool. This included a set of "10 digital commandments for kids" in the form of a contract for kids to go over with their parents and sign. (The Road Scholar's commandments were, in turn, adapted from a set found at Komando.com.)
I thought the contract was a great idea. And no, I don't think it's overkill. Whenever there are complicated permission structures, where the rules are many and detailed, having "the rules" in a written form is good for everybody, so that we can refer back to it to remember exactly what we previously agreed upon. Also, going over the rules carefully is a way to have a conversation about what the rules should be. Parents do have authority over their kids, but sometimes kids have good ideas that should be incorporated into the agreement.
It's particularly important in areas where kids and teens are learning to exercise freedom responsibly: internet use, staying home alone, learning to drive a car. In situations like that, we want them to stretch a little bit, so that they can gain experience and (it's to be hoped) wisdom; but we do not want them to stretch dangerously beyond their capabilities faster than their maturity can keep up. That is complicated and subjective, and in a bigger family it's hard to keep track of where everybody is at a given time.
Furthermore, I think it's important to include items that protect the child's interests as well. At some point, I think a parent needs to demonstrate respect for a child's privacy by agreeing to limit blogging about them or writing about them on FB. So note below that the contract includes language that could let my child ask me to remove or modify blog posts about him. And I think it's so important that a child be honest about what he or she encounters online, that I think it's reasonable to agree up front that if the child tells us promptly about a potentially dangerous encounter, he will not be punished (though privileges might be reduced; changes in privileges should not be construed as punishments).
So I took the contract and adapted it for my own family, in which there is an almost-11-year-old boy who is just now getting expanded access to the Internet. I thought I'd post the text of my adapted contract here. Feel free to use it or adapt it for your own family.
Comments are welcome. We haven't gone over the contract with him yet, so please tell me if you have any feedback or suggestions! I can still make changes.
+ + +
Internet and Computer Contract for Kids Under 18
When I use computers, mobile devices, phones, and the Internet, I promise to follow these rules to keep my family, my friends and myself safe. I will discuss these rules with my parents and initial each section as we discuss them.
--
1. My parents will decide when I am allowed to use the computer, cell phone, Wii or other game system, and the Internet.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
2. I will never tell anyone secure information without getting my parent’s permission first.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
3. I will not participate in mean, physically dangerous, or morally wrong activities online.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
4. I will never post or send pictures of myself, my family or friends without my parents' permission.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
5. I will never, ever meet with anyone I've talked with online without first talking to my parents.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
6. If my parents ask for my password, I will give it to them.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
7. If I want to download anything, I will ask for permission FIRST.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
8. I will not try to win free things or buy things on a phone or on the Internet.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
9. I will not change settings, install software, or open my parents' files without permission.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
10. I understand that my parents allow me to use the Internet, computers, and games on the condition that I do not hide from them what I do.
Initial here: Kid _____ Parent _____
For the child:
_____________________________________
Child's signature Date
For the parents:
____________________________________
Parent's signature Date
_____________________________________
Parent's signature Date
+ + +
04 July 2011 in Education, at home and elsewhere, Gadgets, Games, Media, On raising kids, Pop Culture, Question for readers, Technology, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Ann Althouse has this to say, and frankly I think it's a good point.
Discuss.$5 and $10 donations are easy to make, and they really add up. It's a terrific way to include vastly more donors....Text the word "HAITI" to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross. And get on with your life!
Now, maybe you think charity should involve more reflection and attention to the object of charity. Maybe you think charitable donors should feel that they are giving something up for the sake of the less fortunate and be personally transformed by the act of giving....
Jesus said: "But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." So do not let your left thumb know what your right thumb is doing. Text some charity and don't make any kind of deal out of it. Don't even let yourself think that you have done anything. There is good in that, and it's a good instantly achieved by everyone with a cell phone. You're only giving $5 or $10, so there isn't even anything to congratulate yourself about. When everyone just does this, without thinking, the charities get millions, and we have no reason to get puffed up about about our benevolence.
16 January 2010 in Bad things happen, Beautiful things, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Glossographia brings us a funny story from the depths of Google Scholar, which is Google's full-text-searching answer to searchable catalog subscription indexes like JSTOR, SciFinder, etc.
One of my students in my introductory linguistic anthropology course this term is doing a paper on linguistic aspects of laughter and humor. During my search, I encountered the following citation (direct from Google Scholar to you):
Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.
After I stopped laughing, I set to figuring out what was going on.
The answer turns out to be a metadata problem that's endemic to machine indexing. It serves to illustrate the differences between machine and human indexing, and also to spark an interesting discussion in the comments about the relative merits of Google Scholar and the subscription services. Academics or former academics may enjoy it. It reminds me a bit of the perennial "Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia Britannica" debate, even as it reminds one of the commenters more of John Henry, the steel-drivin' man.
(h/t Eugene Volokh, from whom I take the title of this post)
23 October 2009 in Gadgets, Media, Science (Social), Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
15 February 2009 in Gadgets, Pop Culture, Religion, Technology, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
OK, I'm finally admitting that I have a problem. I'm sure you've noticed how screwy my formatting is, and I apologize for being an eyesore.
31 January 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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