Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • The Experience Response

    Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy and host of the Gel conference, takes a look at Microsoft’s Bing and discusses the problem with Microsoft’s current strategy and ways they can improve. Customers online don’t respond to a brand marketed to them, they respond to the experience they have. If they can accomplish their goal quickly…

  • University of the People

    Three weeks ago the United Nations announced the launch of the world’s first tuition-free online university; the University of the People. With a high school diploma and a sufficient level of English as entry requirements, students from over 52 countries have already enrolled. Students will be placed in classes of 20, after which they can…

  • The Higher Education ‘Bubble’

    Is the current ‘value’ of higher education artificially inflated and unsustainable? In other words, could higher education be the next ‘bubble to burst’? The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at some of the early warning signs that seem to be suggesting so, and offers a couple of solutions to this apparently looming crisis. Over the…

  • Benjamin Kunkel on The Information Age

    In an essay looking at the changing roles technology takes in our lives and how this changes us, Benjamin Kunkel articulates what many journalists have tried and failed to do in recent times: produce an expressive piece about the ‘information age’ without resorting to tired analogies and scaremongering. Critiques, as opposed to mere descriptions, of…

  • Child Well Being in Biological and High-Conflict Familes

    With the timing and sequence of ‘young adult transitions’ bearing importance for successes in later life, this news about these transitions and their occurrence in ‘high-conflict’ families shows that staying together for the sake of the kids doesn’t necessarily help: Compared with children in low-conflict families, children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop…

  • Education and Surveillance

    After a school here in the UK installed a CCTV system in a classroom used for the teaching of an A-level politics class the students revolted; walking out only to return once they were reassured that the monitoring system was inactive and to be used solely as a teaching aid. The students’ plight was eventually…

  • The Economist Daily Chart

    The Daily Chart from The Economist is one of those links where it’s been around so long and is so great that you feel everyone must know about it already. Visualising data from a diverse range of topics, The Daily Charts are almost always impeccably executed and surprising. The RSS feed for the feature is…

  • Crowdsourcing and Creative Deflation

    Monday Note uses the case study of LG eliciting designs for future mobile phones to show how crowdsourcing is changing how design is done… and how it’s starting to change advertising, too. Altogether, LG is going to spend $75,000, to be distributed among 43 awards. […] Let’s face it: for a company such as LG, seventy-five grand for…

  • GOOD’s Infographic Collection

    GOOD Magazine (“for people who give a damn”) have put their ‘Transparencies’ infographics on Flickr. I spent some time going through the set attempting to find a few favourites to share with you specifically. I failed—they’re all great. via Kottke

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach Video Lectures

    Last year I pointed to MIT’s programme dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach—the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on cognition that defies categorisation. Just to update you on GEB news; MIT have now produced a series of video lectures dedicated to the book. (6 lectures, each approx. 1 hour in length.) (I have a sort of love-hate…