"'social' games... have become all the rage on social networks such as Facebook. These are more about interaction than action: players either join their friends for an online game of poker or Scrabble, or to create and show off virtual pets, farms and mob families. Zynga, the market leader, which had 22m users in January, now has more than 170m..."
Paul Buchheit in Founders at Work (p. 162): "AdSense, the content-targeted ads, was actually something that, if I recall, I did on a Friday... Everyone hated it. Many people were kind of mad at me because they didn’t really go for the whole concept. It was something that had been talked about, and people agreed that it was not workable, it was not a good idea. So, to some extent, they were agitated that I wasted my time."
"It seems strange that the system will allow anonymous voting, but not anonymous comments. Allowing the admin to enable anonymous commenting would be very helpful." Yep. Maybe uservoice should listen to its own users..
Professors certainly matter to students. I had one [award-winning] Art History professor who was very accessible despite teaching popular 1st year classes with hundreds of students. I also had a stats prof from China who could barely speak English...
Great professors still matter sure. The problem is that there are so many more resources for learning thanks to the internet. 50 years ago, a bad economics professor was still somewhat acceptable because the alternative was learning nothing about econ. But now, there are dozens of great economics books available for next to nothing on Amazon and dozens of really good econ blogs to follow. A decently motivated student can learn quite a bit from these resources.
A great professor will still raise above the competition and make an impact on their students but the poorer professors are a joke.
The Internet's changed the world of education. I can tell, in some of my classes, which of my fellow students were "raised" on the Internet and which weren't. There's a surprisingly large group of people that's stunning professors by understanding the subject matter on a very deep level.
There's also a professor who I doubt knows as much about her subjects as some of her students, or at least isn't teaching like she knows what she's talking about. I think it's very possible nowadays for students to know more about part of a subject than the person that's being paid to teach them.
"The two African-American business leaders estimate their holdings -- from hotels to TV stations -- are worth $1 billion. One St. Louis hotel they own once barred black people."
"It is highly unlikely that whatever Jennings is suffering from now had anything to do with the flu vaccine she received in August. Unfortunately, this is not stopping irresponsible news coverage or exploitation by anti-vaccinationists... Jennings has now inserted herself in to the anti-vaccine movement, and is using her own case to 'warn about the dangers of vaccines.'"
