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Why do people listen to the advice of those wannabe ‘writers’. I mean they are not even published? 

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[Text Asst Feat Ed @DJ_theoretical: “I’d love to read about that weird, niche topic you’re obsessed with. Your Pog collection, those ribbon candies that seemingly only grandmas buy, your new obscure hobby. Distract me from the horrible big picture with your hyperfixations.”

Assistant Features Editor @darcyjaygagnon is “very interested in learning more about art, science, music, or all the above. Or truly any topic that isn’t the pandemic.”

Feat Ed @eve_ettinger wants “to see queer & trans authors writing essays where gender/identity isn’t the plot. Poets writing prose. Essays that you can’t quite describe, but which sing. Essays about weird jobs, bendy & confusing grief, & home as a complex space.”

Asst Feat Ed @TaylorByas3: "As a poet, I’m drawn to lyric essays as concerned with the beauty of language as they are with storytelling & voice. I’m also into hybrid/experimental pieces that play w/ formatting. Ultimately, I will die for a good braided essay.”

Features Editor @theljsharks wants “to hear something you’d only tell someone you were never going to see again. Haunt me.”

Closing things out, @The_Rumpus Features Editor p.e. garcia wants to see more essays from “new writers, particularly people of color and queer folx.” #RumpusEssays]

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A new Pew Research Center survey finds that Americans’ understanding of technology-related issues varies greatly depending on the topic, term or concept. While a majority of U.S. adults can correctly answer questions about phishing scams or website cookies, other items are more challenging. For example, just 28% of adults can identify an example of two-factor authentication – one of the most important ways experts say people can protect their personal information on sensitive accounts. Additionally, about one-quarter of Americans (24%) know that private browsing only hides browser history from other users of that computer, while roughly half (49%) say they are unsure what private browsing does.

This survey consisted of 10 questions designed to test Americans’ knowledge of a range of digital topics, such as cybersecurity or the business side of social media companies. The median number of correct answers was four. Only 20% of adults answered seven or more questions correctly, and just 2% got all 10 questions correct.

As was true in a previous Center survey, Americans’ knowledge of digital topics varies substantially by educational attainment as well as by age. Adults with a bachelor’s or advanced degree and those under the age of 50 tend to score higher on these questions. These are some of the key findings from a Pew Research Center survey of 4,272 adults living in the United States conducted June 3-17, 2019.

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Do you ever feel like your website is a mess?

It’s like a cluttered garage that you wish someone else would just clean out–get rid of the trash, sweep it out, and put anything of value back on some nice shiny shelves.

You could turn around, walk away, hire an agency, and tell them — fix it!

But, it’s your job to clean it out.

To help you dive in, we’ve outlined a seven-point action plan — if you follow it, you’ll end up with a good understanding of what’s in your “garage” and some first thoughts on all of the key areas for a new website.

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While many American printers are closing or merging, Stevens Point, Wis.–based Worzalla is in the middle of a $12.5 million capital improvement campaign that will bring additional capacity online by spring of 2020.

Worzalla has enjoyed steady growth over the last few years due to several factors, president and CEO Jim Fetherston told PW. A key growth driver, he said, is Worzalla’s quick turnaround time, which allows publishers to keep first printings to a minimum with the knowledge that Worzalla can quickly reprint any title that catches fire. “We’re very flexible and we always meet our commitments,” Fetherston said. He also noted that even before the current $12.5 million investment, Worzalla has continually invested in its operations, making the company very cost efficient.

Worzalla specializes in producing quality children’s books, movie tie-in titles, and coffee table books, and as domestic printing capacity has steadily shrunk, Worzalla’s customers, which include all of the major trade houses, asked Worzalla if they could add capacity, Fetherston said. “Business has been really good,” he added, noting that while there had long been too much domestic printing capacity, with printers closing or reducing their book production, currently supply and demand are about equal. Fetherston said the turnaround began before there was even talk of tariffs being placed on books imported from China. “We were at full capacity without the implementation of tariffs,” he said.

The company currently has 270 employees and expects to add another 40 when the newest phase of its expansion is completed. With the printing industry experiencing a shortage of skilled labor, Worzalla has used a number of recruiting initiatives. “We couldn’t do the expansion without the right staff,” he said. Worzalla’s modernization plan also includes building a 50,000 sq.ft. addition to its manufacturing headquarters, a new 8-unit Heidelberg press, and a new Kolbus perfect binder.

Worzalla is an employee-owned company and, Fetherston noted, “the goal of our modernization plan is to strengthen the long-term health of Worzalla for all current and future associates.”

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Book Description

Serverless computing is radically changing the way we build and deploy applications. With cloud providers running servers and managing machine resources, companies now can focus solely on the application’s business logic and functionality. This hands-on book shows experienced programmers how to build and deploy scalable machine learning and deep learning models using serverless architectures with Microsoft Azure.

You’ll learn step-by-step how to code machine learning into your projects using Python and pre-trained models that include tools such as image recognition, speech recognition, and classification. You’ll also examine issues around deployment and continuous delivery including scaling, security, and monitoring.

This book is divided into four parts:

Cloud-based development: learn the basics of serverless computing with machine learning, functions as a service (FaaS), and the use of APIs

Adding intelligence: create serverless applications using Azure Functions; learn how to use pre-built machine-learning and deep-learning models

Deployment and continuous delivery: get up to speed with Azure Kubernetes Service, as well as Azure Security Center, and Azure Monitoring

Application examples: deliver data at the edge, build conversational interfaces, and use convolutional neural networks for image classification

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This holiday romance novels quiz is sponsored by The Mistletoe Matchmaker by Felicity Hayes-McCoy and Harper Perennial.

The days are turning colder, preparations are under way for the Winter Fest, and everyone is hoping for a little holiday magic on the Finfarran peninsula. And as Cassie Fitzgerald, fresh from Toronto, is about to discover, there’s more to the holidays on the west coast of Ireland than mistletoe and mince pies. The dazzling third book in Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s Finfarran Peninsula series, The Mistletoe Matchmaker is a heartfelt celebration of community, family, and the meaning of home. “The perfect winter heart-warmer.” — Cathy Kelly, bestselling author of Between Sisters

As the weather turns colder, the holidays are just around the corner. And I’m not just talking about Christmas! Don’t forget about all the other reasons to celebrate—Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, New Year’s Eve, and more. With all that holiday spirit, there’s room for a little romance, too. Take our holiday romance quiz below to find the perfect book to put you in the holiday spirit.

This blog got:

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Meanwhile at European level, Nordic EdTech associations are at the heart of the recent formation of the European Edtech Alliance. Details are still emerging but N8, Oslo EdTech Cluster, Swedish EdTech Industry, ​Edtech Southeast Sweden, EdTech Finland and xEdu are Founding Members of the group and have all played leading roles in the group’s creation. We’ll watch for, and report on, further developments here!

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Do you want to design better, more user-friendly interfaces, apps, and web pages?

Creative Market, a popular online destination for high-quality design assets, in cooperation with Contellio, has created a concise infographic that lists most valuable books on UX and usability.

There are many great books on UX and usability. On Amazon alone, there is a special category which includes over 5,000 items. The infographic from Creative Market and Contellio will save you a lot of time as it puts together ten absolute must-read titles.

If you had to pick up just one book, don’t think too much and choose Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think – “This book has a great way of approaching human-centered design thinking and Steve Krug is one of the foremost experts in the field.”

My pick is Mobile Usability by Raluca Budiu and Jakob Nielsen. The book focuses on how to improve user experience on a small screen, and covers such topics as writing and designing for mobile, usability comparisons, and developing mobile-first strategies.

Click or tap the infographic to see it in full resolution.

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Enter the Diagnostic arena

In the new Diagnostic tab, students can answer questions to discover their current knowledge levels. They will periodically have a choice on which question they’d like to answer, keeping them engaged in their own learning. Plus, with handwriting recognition, they can fill in the answers to math questions by writing on the screen!

Reveal current knowledge levels

As students answer questions in the arena, the Continuous Diagnostic will narrow down their knowledge levels. Colorful stars represent their progress in a fun way–when a strand has been pinpointed, the star will reveal their level!

The Continuous Diagnostic also creates personalized recommendations for the best skills to work on next, which can be explored in the Recommendations tab!

Try it out now!

Teachers: Check out our 3-step  implementation guide for how to use the Continuous Diagnostic with your students.

Want to use the Continuous Diagnostic on a different device? Just visit www.ixl.com/diagnostic in your mobile browser!

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As the date new ebook licensing restrictions are set to take effect looms, the Edmonton Public Library is joining forces with groups across North America to protest the changes.

Effective Nov. 1, all public libraries, regardless of size, will only be able to buy one copy of any new Macmillan ebook release and will have to wait eight weeks before they can buy additional copies.

“There’s been a lot of conversation, a lot of outrage, from public libraries across North America and beyond, but we haven’t heard anything back from the publisher, from Macmillan Publishers, yet,” said Sharon Day, EPL director of branch services and collections.

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Fill out the form [at the link above] to unlock the streaming webinar recording. 

Does this sound familiar? “I can’t find my best content.” “I know I have some great stuff, but I don’t know where it is.” “My content feels out of control.”    

You’re not alone.  So, let’s figure out where to start, together. 

Ian Synge, Principal Consultant, guides you through the basics of metadata strategy. Finally, gain a working knowledge of metadata, enrichment, and discoverability in simple terms that are relevant to your daily workflow. We game out common use cases to demonstrate the considerations that make the most sense for your organization.

It’s time to make metadata strategy manageable. 

Speaker:

Ian Synge, Principal Consultant

Ian Synge is a Principal Consultant at Copyright Clearance Center with particular specialization in knowledge management, taxonomies, and categorization. He has delivered projects for major international organizations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia focusing on helping them dynamically make sense of large datasets. Ian has a longstanding enthusiasm for knowledge organization; his Ph.D. thesis (Aberystwyth, 2002) focused on the taxonomic interpretation of naval diplomacy during the late cold war.

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In 2004, the blockbuster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid, hit screens worldwide. In the film, the world’s ocean currents somehow stop, which results in higher temperatures in the tropics and a cooled Northern Atlantic. Naturally, a cataclysmic storm forms, and the film’s protagonists find themselves in the middle. While based on the real theory of “abrupt climate change,” the science is a dramatization for cinematic purposes — a worst-case-scenario climate fiction. But, the lessons are the same. Cities in the United States are not prepared for the radical effects of climate change and catastrophic weather events that come with it.

In the 15 years since The Day After Tomorrow was released, the U.S. has seen some generation-defining storms. There was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated New Orleans; and two weeks later Hurricane Rita, in the Houston area, which prompted the largest full-scale evacuation in American history. We continue to see wildfires from California to Texas; polar vortexes in the northeast, and floods covering Miami’s city streets.

The specter of cataclysmic environmental events has led to a growing need for fiction to help us conceptualize our changing planet. And the genre of dystopian climate-based fiction has helped both readers and educators put the effects of climate change into context.

A genre that translates climate science into stories that help paint the picture of how climate change will affect our communities at large is a much-needed tool — something that former newspaper reporter Dan Bloom recognized.

In 2011, Bloom was working in public relations and marketing for a sci-fi novel, Polar City Red by Jim Laughter. The book is set in Alaska, in the year 2075, with a strong climate change theme. In press releases promoting the book, Bloom called it a “Cli-fi” thriller. “The term caught on,” Bloom explains to Mic. “There are now hundreds of cli-fi courses at community colleges and major universities in the USA, U.K., and Australia, largely in part to how Margaret Atwood helped propel the genre.”

Atwood has become a major figure across the cli-fi literary universe. She not only helped the term catch on when she tweeted it in 2012, but her 2013 novel MaddAddam has been a popular teaching tool which largely summarizes the need for the genre in the first place. The book tells the story of a group of environmentalists, known as the gardeners, who rebuild the world after a global pandemic. The novel shows how fragile our global systems are. “People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void,” Atwood writes. The book was part of the curriculum for a course on cli-fi at Brandeis University in 2015.

Another notable book in the genre is Omar El-Akkad’s The American War. The book was listed as required reading in a 2018 freshman-level course entitled “Narrating Climate Change” at New York University. The 2017 novel is set in America’s second civil war when southern states defy a law that outlaws the use of fossil fuels. The book is told through the lens of Sarat Chestnutt, who is from Louisiana and is displaced by the rising waters of the Mississippi River. El-Akkad shows the life of an American climate refugee.

It’s no surprise that “cli-fi” courses have popped up at major universities across the United States. The vast majority of young voters see climate change as a major issue — and young people have been at the forefront of major climate movements. According to a recent poll, 83 percent of young Democrats see climate change as a serious concern. And in sharp contrast to where most GOP leaders stand, 77 percent of young Republicans see climate change as a serious threat.

“Cli-fi” literature is starting to catch on in K-12 education, too. Places like Connecticut and Portland, Oregon are passing laws that would require climate change to be taught as part of the curriculum in public schools — which would include the use of “cli-fi’ literature in English classes.

With the effects of climate change looming, it only makes sense that we'll need more ways to help us understand how our world is changing. We need tools that speak to us beyond the science textbook, which for some, just might require a deep dive into the world of fiction.

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“Journalism will continue to be hollowed out by structural shifts that have already led to significant falls in advertising revenue. Publishers are looking to subscriptions to make up the difference,” begins the Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media and Technology Trends 2019 report. “Subscription and membership is the key priority for the news industry going forward.”

“News organisations are increasingly looking to subscription and membership or other forms of reader contribution to pay the bills in a so-called ‘pivot to paid’,” echoes Reuters’ Digital News Report 2019.

While the Trends report said that over 50% of news publishers intended to make subscriptions their main revenue focus for the year ahead, as we approach the end of 2019, it appears things may not have exactly gone according to plan.

According to a survey by Digiday Research earlier this month, publishers are running into a number of obstacles in their subscription efforts, with the biggest challenge—faced by 63% of publishers—being the task of converting audiences to paid subscribers.

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Open Artstor: Folger Shakespeare Library is now available with a selection of more than 8,000 images from the Digital Image Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Provided under Creative Commons licenses, these images illuminate the history and output of Shakespeare and theater in general, from illustrated manuscripts and rare books, costume and stagecraft, to actors’ portraits and miscellanea. This is part of our new, free initiative to aggregate Open Access museum, library, and archive collections across disciplines on the Artstor platform — already a destination for scholars using visual media.

Beginning in 1889, Henry Clay Folger and his wife, Emily Jordan Folger, began to amass rare books and associated media, founding the Folger Shakespeare Library, the world’s leader in Shakespeareana, in 1932. Their success may be gleaned from a handful of outstanding examples across the Open Artstor collection.

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Content strategy is a transformative approach for focusing and elevating your digital communications efforts by aligning all of your content production to your key messages. Sounds simple, but developing and implementing a content strategy can sometimes be tricky to start and hard to explain.

In over a decade of leading workshops to help clients make the most of their content, we’ve developed a content strategy template, breaking down content strategy process into four fundamental questions:

What are we communicating (messages), to whom (audiences), and to what end (goal)?

How will we communicate most effectively? (formats, style, topics)

What processes and resources are needed to ensure success? (governance)

​How do we gauge success and inform ongoing improvement? (measurement)

These questions are at the heart of content strategy. They inform implementation, sustainability, and assessment. If your team can gain alignment around these questions, you will be on your way to introducing content strategy into your digital communications approach.

How to Use the Content Strategy Template

The important thing to keep in mind, is content strategy cannot be a solo show. To drive the most success, it must be a team effort that is operationalized across the organization.

But we have to start somewhere. Pressing the value of these questions both within your team as well as up and down the chain can  — over time — build awareness and investment in your content strategy.

To be effective, you need to start with building alignment. Let’s dive in and see how our content strategy template breaks it down.