ma'ayan goes tumbling

All the juice in only seventeen beats.

Information vs Knowledge

We’re cutting the ribbon to our online shop!

Marshall Vandruff, one of the best teachers I have ever had, on artist’s block. Said during a webinar done on Visualarium to advertise his upcoming online course on animal anatomy (source links to webinar)  (via pale-afternoon)

Bill O’Brien on art and science for The National Endowment of the Arts. 

Einstein and Nietzsche would agree.

(↬ It’s Okay To Be Smart)

I really truly love and believe this. During his keynote at HighEdWeb last October, Adam Savage (half of Mythbusters) shared a similar sentiment. Science is an art, and art is a science. I love that my work allows be to embrace both these statements simultaneously.

Oh, Dev Bootcamp.

I’m on the “soft skills” side of this post, in that I am not a developer but think having some coding skills would be a Good Thing for me to have for/with regards to my future. If I were writing on this hypothetical board, I would have fought like hell to have more human skill set options on the lesson plan to complement development.

It’s not just Tumblr — most social networks don’t understand original content — paidContent (via elvira)

Great day, right? Inside Higher Ed, the Daily Penn… we’re famous, you guys! Some of the tweets and inbox comments were not so loving today, but whatevs. We’re feeling just dandy.

If you didn’t hear about or read what happened, check it out:

Inside Higher Ed critcizes Admission Problems

Blah blah blah from the Daily Penn 

With the number of stealth applicants we have today, we all know and recognize that we have never met the majority of our applicants. There really is no reason to write a college essay that borderlines on (or is completely) inappropriate for a complete stranger to read. If a kid chooses to disclose something really personal (to the point where they’d be embarrassed if it was shared), they shouldn’t be including it in a college essay. The essay doesn’t stay sealed in an airtight envelope all the way to your dear admission counselor’s desk, kids. It’s more than likely touched by at least a dozen or so people in this process. And if the office you applied to scans all their applications electronically, your application just became amusement for generations of student workers and admission counselors to come. Use some common sense.

My admissions essays are as public as the world can get. They're on the Oberlin blogs,  both my Oberlin essay and my general common app essay. I vetted my essays first on my own personal blog back when I was in high school. Not because I was worried I would be embarrassed about them, but because I needed a place to talk them through with people who weren't my parents and they were cool pieces of writing I wanted to share.

And secondly, and the reason I even thought about reblogging this is the first place, is that beyond the praise and the criticism, some smart folks have found the light and...

We received 182 new inbox messages today. 151 of them were questions from high school students about essays asking for advice.

The Social Ties That Unbind

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of commissioned essays for The World’s First Tumblr…Art Symposium on Saturday, March 9, 2013.

When I sent my first email in the 1990s, the internet was just beginning to hit the mainstream. The idea that we would use the internet to talk to friends we knew offline had yet to take off. Most of the nascent social web culture, from usenet to telnet to AOL chat rooms, consisted of socializing largely with strangers. These strangers might eventually become friends, of course, but they’d start out as strangers in the purest sense of that word. At the outset, you didn’t even know their name, age, location, perhaps not even their gender.

For slightly more context, because it is important for my posts here, I, too, attended Oberlin College before beginning to work here following my graduation in 2010. I decided to stay here because of the community I wished to remain connected with and help represent. Not all the days here are good and picture perfect, and know that I am speaking with a bit of perspective, perhaps not lots, of what the Oberlin campus community has experienced over the past few years, and that it is unfortunately not limited to the actions we have seen recently. And when I say I am feeling the actions that move within our campus, I am feeling them as a graduated student who is paying back her loans for attending Oberlin (no small feat, this I know), as an alum who is equally saddened and angry by what is occurring here, and as an administrator who spends much of her day attempting to connect with all audiences associated with Oberlin College (a greater challenge than you can imagine, because Obies are calculated in our choice of discussion and have a healthy skepticism of that which is official). It is a human thing to be able to show weakness, but I admit that I am scared, I am scared for each and every one of you and for myself, because I am never sure what we will next see and hear that comes from unknown aggressors who wish to demonize our identities -- yes, even me and mine, the ones my parents taught my brother and me to be proud of and voice even when I wasn't in a community as accepting as Oberlin. If Oberlin taught me anything, it is that you can not keep Obies quiet if the things we believe in, that we live daily, that we fight for because we know it is the right thing to do, are compromised. 

I will refer to silence again for a moment, not because I feel that silence is strength -- it is not, as a reticence to tackle a problem is condemning that problem to worsen through inaction -- but because what may appear to be silence to you is an undercurrent of discussion that has been ongoing for months. As someone who works in the administrative body at Oberlin College, I can tell you that in no way have we been silent about this, though perhaps there isn't much public display for our discussions. I'm but one person, but I have spent hours of my past week discussing what is happening and what the outcomes can be.