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The Blessay

My own pedagogical term for this is “richly-linked blog post” — emphasizing the value of hyperlinking to sources, evidence, definitions, counterpoints, etc. (Thanks for the link, John S.)

Sorry, I don’t have a better name for it, but I feel it needs a succinct name so we can identify and discuss it. It’s not a [...]

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Don’t hide your online self when applying for college or career

Great advice.

[I]t is common to hear students applying for college or a job say before doing so, they plan to take down their online profiles or change their name to something unidentifiable. Innovative educators know this is not the best strategy. Instead our job is to support young people in creating a responsible digital [...]

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The Incredible Shrinking Ad [The Future Web Is Mobile]

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Is higher education ready for the switch to mobile technology? It’s kinda cool to be working at a university where the Luddites are the ones who are attached to their laptops, but I’m conscious of our need to do more.

When I put a ton of work into a website for a performing arts school [...]

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Adventure Before Adventure Games: A New Look at Crowther and Woods’s Seminal Program

Lessard pushes back in useful ways against the notion that modern computer games emerged fullly-formed from the coding experiments of Will Crowther — a notion I’ve helped to promote (though of course I’m exaggerating as I present it here).

I’ll want to read through the essay again in more detail, but here is part of [...]

Academia | Education | Ethics | Science

Students boycott final to challenge professor’s grading policy (and get As)

Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person [...]

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A warning to college profs from a high school teacher

My students did well on those questions because we practiced bad writing. My teaching was not evaluated on the basis of how well my students did, but I felt I had a responsibility to prepare them for the examination in a way that could result in their obtaining college credit.

I would like to believe [...]

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Procedural Enthymeme with Inform7

Pretty awesome, focused use of Inform 7. (I’m generally content just to let my students explore, trusting through experience that they will learn from testing each other’s games and asking me specific questions realated to the stories they are creating, such as, “So how do I make it so you can’t enter the TARDIS without [...]

Academia | Culture | Design | Education | Ethics

Student “engagement” declining dramatically – and what schools can do

Makers, take note.

Let’s be clear. This is NOT an attack on teachers. That’s because teachers are being pushed hard to focus on standardized, multiple-choice tests.

But as the national Gallup organization points out, we should care about this because “Hope, engagement and well being of students accounts for one third of the variance of [...]

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The MOOC Honeymoon is Over: Three Takeaways from the Coursera Calamity

The honeymoon with MOOCs is over. The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera [...]

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I’m an English Professor in a Movie

This is making the rounds among my English professor Facebook friends.

I’m an English Professor in a Movie

Good morning, and welcome to Advanced English Literature—I’m Professor Anglosoundingname. As you can see, I have a mane of silver hair and wear a corduroy blazer with leather elbow patches stitched with corduroy [...]