Features

Business | Culture | Cyberculture | Design | Essays | Ethics | Technology

We Need to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class

Maybe it’s not the super-robots we need to fear, but the ones just good enough to displace one worker’s salary.

Consider the automated checkout line at your local grocery store. It makes more mistakes than a human clerk, it is harder to use, and it is slower because of the rotating error light that loves [...]

Business | Culture | Essays | Literacy | Media | Rhetoric | Writing

Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

I am not a big fan of traditional slide-show lectures. This is in part because I am not a visual learner, but also because, as a writing teacher, I can see how easily a slide show can fill time without actually informing, persuading, challenging or moving the audience. Students who create slides that summarize what [...]

Academia | Culture | Education | Essays | Humanities | Personal | Psychology

On Office Hours and Student Contact at the Small Liberal Arts College

I don’t expect students to be constantly after me—and I wouldn’t want them to be. I also know that what looms large for them are their friends, families, and personal lives. But I’m beginning to learn that if students at large universities are starved for personal attention and connection, students at small colleges have so [...]

Cyberculture | Design | Essays | History | Literature | Media | Social_Software | Technology | Writing

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story

It’s not that hypertext went on to become less interesting than its literary advocates imagined in those early days. Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s [...]

Culture | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Essays | Ethics | Media | Social_Software | Sociology | Technology

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

20130420-093140.jpg

A thoughtful analysis.

Problem-solvers in the Information Age must train themselves to ignore floods of true-but-trivial and unreliable-but-accessible information. I see this all the time with students who Facebook their way through my class presentations on the function of scholarly peer review, but then submit pages from content farms in their term paper drafts.

According [...]

Academia | Amusing | Culture | Education | Essays | Modding | PopCult | Writing

Frodo Baggins, A.B.D.

Careers Cover Illustration resized

When I had pneumonia a few years into my current job, I spent 10 days bedridden (or, having been banished to the basement, futon-ridden), and watched the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy over and over, since I needed something that would occupy my mind enough to distract me from my suffering, but I couldn’t [...]

Business | Culture | Cyberculture | Design | Essays | Games | Media | Personal

LucasArts’ eulogy reminds us of the inhuman cost of game development

Game development culture often involves 18-hour work days during crunch times that last for months. I remember as a teen or college student enjoying a “lost weekend” of doing nothing but playing the latest game (the X-Wing games, The Dig, and Full Throttle come to mind), but expecting the professionals who produce games to work [...]

Academia | Business | Culture | Design | Education | Essays | Ethics | Humanities | Literacy | Rhetoric | Writing

New Test for Computers – Grading Essays at College Level

Imagine writing an essay for a college, and, instead of sparking personal feedback from an expert who spends five or ten minutes per page writing personalized reactions and tips for improvement, your work was never actually read by a human being who could recognize, appreciate, and encourage your accomplishments. Imagine that your essay was instead [...]

Art | Culture | Drama | Education | Essays | Humanities | Literacy | Personal | Rhetoric | Science

Why scientists should care about art

20130401-152304.jpg

My artsy daughter loves stories about science far more than she loves science; she has won “Best Display” for her age group in a science fair. When my son was 5, when given the choice he would invariably ask me to read him a nonfiction book rather an a fiction book; he has won “Most [...]

Business | Culture | Current_Events | Essays | Ethics | Humanities | Politics

America is raising a generation of interns – The Week

After hearing these numbers, I began to understand why Jessica felt lucky. Maybe she is fortunate to be earning $4.35 an hour at her ivory-tower job while she works nights and weekends as a waitress. Maybe a 10-month paid internship followed by graduate school and then perhaps another internship is the new lucky, particularly at [...]