Charlie Miller has been hacking computers and phones for over a decade. His ends aren’t nefarious, however: he’s a security researcher working to expose vulnerabilities that will ultimately make our systems safer. In order to raise public consciousness of the issues at stake, he’s been hoping to hack something less techy and abstract that would […]
Blog | Information Literacy, Research, Dayton History
Continuous Partial Attention: How Devices Negatively Affect Our Focus
In today’s environment of constant connectivity, we routinely slog through multiple tasks in a single session. Blinking notifications pull us away from whatever we had been doing to something more pressing. We surf the web by opening up multiple browser tabs and scrolling back and forth between various articles, email accounts, social media streams and other […]
Gmail Advanced Search Tips: Cutting Through Your Inbox Clutter
Google products are known for their usability and uncluttered interfaces. This is great for novices, but users who demand more precision can be left frustrated as their basic keyword searches yield masses of irrelevant results. Gmail is one service in particular where it can be difficult to sift through a huge library of emails trying […]
WordCamp Dayton 2015
Last week I presented at WordCamp Dayton, a conference for designers, developers, bloggers, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and educators. It was held at the Dayton Convention Center downtown, conveniently located about a 10-minute walk away from my apartment. The first evening we enjoyed a speaker dinner at the Dayton Chess Club, also downtown, with incredible food from […]
Can Microsoft Office Stay Relevant for a Future in the Cloud?
Microsoft Office has remained the industry standard for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations for many years, an impressive feat. But in terms of meaningful innovation, there hasn’t been a whole lot lately. Sure, there have been plenty of Office updates (too many, some would say), but they are mainly cosmetic changes and bundles of new […]
More Than Just MOOCs: The Major Types of Online Education
Online education is often talked about as a homogeneous force poised to either bring radically improved education to every corner of the globe or ruin learning and knowledge as we know it. But in reality there are many different types of online education across which generalizations can’t be made. A more nuanced understanding of these varieties, […]