Weekend Reading: Holiday Weekend edition

ProfHacker will take the rest of the week off to grade papers in a panicked frenzy prepare job market materials do some writing catch up on service obligations spend time with our various families.  For those moments when you’d rather read something interesting than hunt for doorbusters, we’re at your service:

• Faculty Focus interviewed 2000 higher ed professionals about their use of Twitter, and have released a 20-page report: “the most common activities included staying current on news/trends and networking with colleagues (even those they’ve never met in person).”
• Clay Shirky recently offered a fascinating post on the idea of algorithmic authority: Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” On delicious, Shirky also points to “two tales of crowdsourcery.”
• A little birdie tells me that there are upcoming ProfHacker posts on smartphones & the apps that populate them; in the meantime, here are 25 free iPhone apps for educators. (That is, that can be construed as education-related.)
• Speaking of crowdsourcery, the coolest thing I’ve seen in the past week or so is Digital Humanities Now, a “real-time, crowdsourced publication.”  It works by identifying links that have been posted multiple times to Twitter by upwards of 350 accounts. Dan Cohen’s blog post introducing Digital Humanities Now is also must-read material: “I often say to non-digital humanists that every Friday at 5 I know all of the most important books, articles, projects, and news of the week—without the benefit of a journal, a newsletter, or indeed any kind of formal publication by a scholarly society. I pick up this knowledge by osmosis from the people I follow online.”  Stéfan Sinclair has already started to think about how this model might be extended beyond the URL, too.

This is the most awesome YouTube clip you’ll see this weekend:

(More on the project | My 6-yr-old’s interview with two LEGO Master Model Builders)

A normal posting schedule will resume on Monday.  Don’t forget, you can suggest links for this post through e-mail, or by tagging them in delicious with “profhacker.”

Image by flickr user kristin_a / CC licensed.  Her cupcake tutorial is here.)