Our students are transcendentalists, but they don’t know it. Speaking metaphorically, Thoreau writes “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.” Rather than treating children as wild creatures that needed to be tamed and civilized, Thoreau seesorder and meaning in nature, which is threatened, worn down, and buried by civilization.…
Old joke… when’s the best time to air a radio drama? 1937. Radio is still around, but the salary of TV personality Katie Couric ” is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined.” (so says Michael Massing). If you knew nothing about the internet beyond what you…
When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.…
Ms Watts, from Islington, north London, said: “I asked why I couldn’t borrow a pair of scissors and she said, ‘they are sharp, you might stab me’. “I then asked to borrow a guillotine to cut up my leaflets but she refused again – because she said I could hit her over the head with…
Videogames may be economically formidable, but they remain a byword for crass, shallow thrills. A game, it’s understood, can look spectacular, but it will have little to offer its audience in the way of values, insights or craftsmanship. It’s a curious and increasingly untenable situation, given that, to the increasingly large percentage of the population…
Okay, I admit it, being known as the academic expert on a singe indie computer game from the 1970s is something like saying “I’m the handsomest one-eyed pirate on this particular ship, today,” which might well be true, but doesn’t exactly mean very much. Still, I’m thrilled that I could be part of Jason Scott’s…
In all media that boasts your byline remain impartial, and don’t do anything stupid. But is it in the best interests of the paper? Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander points out the the Post (along with just about every other mainstream publication) has at times come under fire for being partisan. These guidelines aim to…
I’m looking for a current book that presents gaming theory at a level appropriate for a 200-level undergraduate course. I have only scanned through the section of Tanja Sihvonen’s work, Players Unleashed! Modding <i>The Sims</i> and the Culture of Gaming (PDF), that deals with Colossal Cave Adventure. I’m not too happy with what I found…
Interview with Stan Lee (comic guru, creator of Spider-Man) If you were starting out now, do you think you would have started out in games rather than comics?If I were young now and I wanted to do stories, I would very much want to get into the videogame business because it’s the most exciting. Videogames…
Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator, I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and grandson of Thror who was King under the Mountain. I am writing you to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices for rescuing our treasure from the dragon Smaug. — Stephen Granade riffs on the Nigerian e-mail scam…
It’s a safe bet none of the world leaders meeting Thursday for the first day of the G-20 summit are aware that it’s also National Punctuation Day. Rubin founded it in 2004 after he got fed up with seeing misplaced apostrophes and other transgressions by people who should know better — newspaper reporters and editors,…
Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it…
I am not too happy about the way wild conclusions drawn from this self-published research periodically pop up in the media. Kudos to Liberman, from Language Log, who tries (yet again) to explain. The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like: In the…
If language is as instinctive to humans as dam-building is to beavers, if every 3-year-old is a grammatical genius, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and wired into our brains, why, you might wonder, is the English language in such a mess? Why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool every time he opens his mouth or puts pen…
I believe that the underlying facts about the Wikipedia phenomenon — that the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight — are so shocking to most old media people that it is literally impossible for them to report on Wikipedia without following a storyline that goes something…
Okay, this is my one frivolity before diving into my hell Monday (featuring an unbroken stretch of three back-to-back classes and a committee meeting): According to a Natural Resources Defense Council survey, 78 percent of sinister one-eyed industrialists based in the Arctic have been forced to relocate their powerful underworld shadow governments, with many now…
Yes, I interact with students via e-mail and the Web. And computers can be great for teaching when it’s difficult or impossible for students to get to a brick-and-mortar classroom. But for me, teaching involves f2f (there, you see, I’ve gone and used a computer term in a sentence). I want to listen to students…
Silly headline, from a University of Washington press release. Second, fourth and sixth grade children with and without handwriting disabilities were able to write more and faster when using a pen than a keyboard to compose essays, according to new research. The study, headed by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology…
It’s a transparent ploy to get Google rank via incoming links, but it’s also a great piece of investigative reporting. By Chandler Phillips. “We would hire you here at Edmunds.com. Then you would go out and get a job as a car salesman and work for three months.” “Selling cars?” I asked unnecessarily. “Right.” “Where…