Weekly Reader

Surprise! Your Personal Data is Not So Personal
"You can be forgiven for believing that your personal data is actually yours. After all, it's your email. Your Fitbit. Your GPS device. Or your tractor. The reality of today's data-obsessed world, however, is that the minute your data hits the cloud, it's no longer yours. Not even remotely." -- Matt Asay, ReadWrite, 5/12/14

Lurkers Are the 99.989% of Social Media
"Sam Fiorella, Partner at Sensei Marketing, recently wrote “Community Management: The 90-9-1 Rule is Dead,” about the old concept that 90% of all your followers are just lurking, 9% are engaged, and that only 1% of the community actively produces content. Sam believes this is dead and that it’s closer to 70%/20%/10%, according to some research by Paul Schneider (from back in August of 2011). I don’t know if I agree with this — I think it’s more like 990-9-1 — we’ve attained a culture that is getting further and further from being an actor and more and more comfortable in the audience." -- Chris Abraham, Social Media Today, 5/12/14

2014 Summer Reading Recommendations
"Educationalists will tell you how important it is for children to keep reading throughout the long summer break lest their ever-evolving literacy skills erode. Fine. That does not, however, excuse the frequently dreadful list of recommended or — eep — required reading that schools shoot out as one last salvo of homework just as everybody is looking forward to a nice break." -- The Horn Book, Choosing Books, 5/12/14

Failing Faster: Reflecting on Making a Game a Week
"At the beginning of March, I began an adventure in making a game a week with a cohort of fellow scholars and designers (Mark Danger Chen, Melissa Peterson, Dennis Ramirez, and Greg Koeser) looking to increase their creative practice and experiment. It’s now two months later, and I’ve mostly been faithful to the pledge (sans one week of end-of-term madness, my only full failure)."-- Anastasia Salter, ProfHacker, 5/12/14

Is Rereading the Material a Good Study Strategy?
"Lots of good writing on the science of learning is coming out now and it’s needed. For too long we have known too little about learning—I won’t digress into the reasons why. We need to take advantage of this opportunity to learn more about this science." -- Maryellen Weimer, The Teaching Professor Blog, 5/14/14

JOI to the Library
"'This might be too geeky for a column,” said the subject line of a reader's email, “but just in case …” It sounded like a challenge, and I took the bait. The topic in question? A new statistical instrument to quantify the degree of open access for scholarly journals. In other words, exactly geeky enough." -- Scott McLemee, Intellectual Affairs, 5/14/14