Archive for the ‘Attention’ Category

Curious as to what’s being researched on Britannica’s Web site? History and economics dominate the list of the most-read articles in the Top 10 Britannica Queries in 2010.

1. French Revolution: Explore the movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and introduced the world to the guillotine.
2. Romanticism: This attitude or intellectual orientation that rejected the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.
3. Civil Rights Movement: In this essay by Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, delve into the mass U.S. protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination that came to national prominence in the mid-1950s.
4. Walt Disney: The world’s animator-in-chief changed the way that we look at the world and the way we vacation. The company he founded is now one of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerates.
5. Industrial Revolution: In this brief treatment of process that moved Europe from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture, you’ll learn that there was not one but two industrial revolutions. (Britannica’s detailed treatment can be found in our European history article.)
6. Great Depression: With insights from Richard Pells, history professor at the University of Texas, and Christina Romer, an economist at University of California, Berkeley and former head of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, learn about the decade of depression between 1929 and 1939 from both an economic and cultural perspective.
7. World War II: With dozens and dozens of videos and photographs, you can grapple with this worldwide conflict that ended in the deaths of some 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 people.
8. Socialism: Terence Ball and Richard Dagger, professors of political science at Arizona State University, discuss the economic and social doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. If you hear some called a socialist, especially as a pejorative, this is essential reading to know whether the label is accurate or not.
9. Danube River: It is one of the most picturesque rivers in the world, and Europe’s second longest (after the Volga), rising in Germany’s Black Forest and flowing about 1,770 miles to the Black Sea.
10. United States: With an essay on cultural life by Adam Gopnik, editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, and two dozen other contributors and the history of the United States through the passage of health care earlier this year, the midterm, and the effect of the WikiLeaks disclosures, explore in-depth this country of more than 300,000,000 people.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

The folks at Netzpiloten have put together a mega-list of Social Media Monitoring Tools. These are great suggestions for websites to check out to see what people are saying about you or your library. There are over 100 monitoring sites gathered in this list, here are just a few:

• Social Mention
• TweetBeep
• IceRocket
• Twazzup
• Collecta
• Who’s Talkin’

The team at Educause has put together another of their “7 Things” guides, this time covering 7 Things You Should Know About Analytics. The article takes a look at academic analytics programs and what types of data they can assess in an educational environment. This quick guide answers the following questions:

1. What is it?
2. How does it work?
3. Who’s doing it?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and
   learning?

Rajesh Setty, entrepreneur, author and speaker from the Life Beyond Code blog writes about 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online. The article discusses the influence your content may be having (or not having) on your audience, and the different ways they may be responding to it including:

1. Spam
2. Skip
3. Scan
4. Stop
5. Save
6. Shift
7. Send
8. Spread
9. Subscribe

New York Magazine discusses the problem of attention in Sam Anderson’s In Defense of Distraction. The article discusses information overload, the limitations of attention, modern multi-tasking, and the advantages of a “new techno-cognitive nomadism”.

“As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. We recently elected the first-ever BlackBerry president, able to flit between sixteen national crises while focusing at a world-class level. Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.”