Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Month: April 2017

  • Digital Natives? Not in my class.

    Digital Girl

    This is the first week in class, which means signing up for a lot of websites to get set up. One site had instructions printed with the URL at the end of a sentence, like this: http://myurl.com. My students (young Japanese college students, mostly women), are masters on their phones. I suggested they bring their laptops to make things easier, but only 2 did.

    I discovered that some don’t know what a URL is. Tim Berners-Lee would be proud. The guy who invented the world wide web never envisioned naked URLs, thinking they would always be embedded in hyper-links. The first problem is students entering the

    The first problem today was students entering the web address in the Yahoo search engine. With many URLs entered in this broken web search of Yahoo, they yield no results. Yahoo and Internet Explorer are still popular here in Japan, the last country in the world with majority users.

    If you use a good browser like Chrome, the search and URL window are the same. Not with Yahoo (and safari on the phone). But some of my students don’t know the difference.

    The second problem is that students would copy the instructions exactly, so they were entering a URL with the period at the end. http://myurl.com. Reminds me of the days when we said: Enter the URL “http://myurl.com” (without quotes). I would suspect digital natives would understand how a URL works, and that there are no spaces. Which leads to another problem, entering usernames; some try to use spaces. Alas.

    Fortunately, in our department, students get a Computer Skills class the first semester. Most of the problems happen when I teach students from other departments. After their semester in Boston, many are able to handle technology better.

    Me? I am learning how to use mobile better.

  • Media Monday: A dilemma. No. Two dilemmas.

    Up today: New and interesting Media finds. First dilemma: Which one first, and why are there only 24 hours in a day?

    1. A Netflix documentary about movie directors doing documentaries during the second world war. Sam Adams over at Slate magazine lets us in on a new short series (3 episodes) dealing with 5 famous directors (John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Huston) and how they “embedded” with the military before embedding was a word, during WW2, to make documentaries about the war, some having great political influence. The series comes with links to source materials, some of the original documentaries and more, so you can get lost for days.
    2. S-Town, a new podcast from This American Life’s Ira Glass and Serial’s Srah Koenig and it is better than both. An odd farmer writes an email to a journalist complaining about a coverup of a local murder. The journalist visits. The plot thickens. The local characters are beyond colorful. It is a podcast done right. Even Ira Glass and Sarah Koenig say so. Just finished the first chapter, you can download all seven. I have to wait for the weekend to binge.
    3. Out April 25: Walkaway, a novel by Cory Doctorow. He has been writing young adult fiction and non-fiction for years, but I like his fiction. One of the founders of BoingBoing and who I consider the most interesting poster on the most popular blog in the world, Doctorow is all about digital rights. This book is a departure, but the advance notice has been really good. I even bought a real hardback book, one signed by him.
    4. Out April 25: What Remains of Edith Finch. This is an utterly enticing mix of game and fiction, short stories about relatives of Edith, all of who end up dead, each leading to more discoveries, and to the inevitable end. Edith is the last one left. Read this Motherboard review that has me salivating. Second dilemma, it only works on Windows PCs or PlayStations. I have neither. Which should I get?This is good enough to buy a new platform.