Tech Meets History & Totalitarianism

Consider this post more of a thought-in-progress than anything. Two things I read this week that triggered the “Bingo, it’s a connection!” neurons in my brain. I can’t quite pinpoint how, but here they are: 1. Outsourcing Education: Does It Matter If Someone in India Corrected Your College Paper? Apparently some US colleges are outsourcing basic grading functions to India—grammar as a quantifiable skill. But

Alison Garwood-Jones wrote a lovely piece a while ago on her blog about the wisps of life we leave behind on the internet. To add to the unmade bed, the book half-read, the phone call never returned and conversation never finished, is now the digital alter-ego, never finished. And, somehow lacking the poignancy of finding a letter that didn’t manage to get mailed or an

Hanging out on Twitter makes for an odd perspective on world events. Like Revolution 2011 World Tour. There’s an expectation to comment on these major upheavals. And at the same time, an expectation that seeing lunch tweets interspersed with desperate pleas from protesters is meant to make us uncomfortable. It does. (But then, we’re also meant to click on top Tweets from someecards.com, like the

If you close your eyes and think about what a child imagines when they hear the word inventor—the house full of strange objects with mysterious purposes, the stacks of notebooks filled with drawing and diagrams, the patent certificates—you might get something close to Brent Farley. But we’re not children and Farley is very real and it’s all a little less magical than it was in