Laurence Scheindlin's Blog – March 2012 Archive (3)

 I love the concept of wikis, the subject of this week's (admission: I'm a week late, so it was last week's) assignment.  After reading The Wisdom of Crowds a few years ago as well as some data on the error rate in the Encyclopedia Britannica vs. Wikipedia (surprisingly favorable to Wikipedia, as I recall), I began to comprehend the power of wikis. 

Of course, Wikipedia has quality control, something that cannot be assumed for your everyday wiki.  Still, the fact that people might add…

Stupid.  And frustrating.  If Second Life didn't drag so slowly, with hesitations and agonizing moments of waiting for every action to happen, it wouldn't be so frustrating.  Which it was.  Extremely. 

But even if it weren't frustrating, it still would be stupid.

Which reminds of the old Laurel and Hardy routine:

"You're crazy.

You're drunk.

You're crazy.

You're drunk.

Tomorrow I'll be sober, you'll…

(Sigh)  I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon because I really like technology.  But all of the tools I tried for the this week's tech-course assignment seem so labor-intensive.  Which is fine, if there's a distinct payoff that makes them worthwhile.  I hate to say it but the amount of time that an individual instructor would need to invest in creating a video, or cartoons, or other media for instructional use seems disproportionate to the potential impact.  More than that, it diverts…