The History of Typography Told in Five Animated Minutes

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Open Culture.

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 [...]

Teaching Composition with Interactive Fiction

I’m on a committee that is exploring a multimodal a revision to my school’s freshman writing program. So far I have never seriously tried introducing new media content into a freshman writing course, but this may do the trick. After two semesters of teaching students to read, play, and write IF games, I can say [...]

Jaz Parkinson “Colour Signatures”

Amusing visual representations of the color references in a handful of literary works. These are my colour signatures, an ongoing collection which are basically graphs of all the visual content in the books. For example when it might say ‘yellow brick road,’ ‘yellow’ gets a tally, or when for example in The Road it says [...]

Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learning and memory.

Fairly early in the semester, I can spot the students who will struggle to complete big assignments, because they are often the same ones who can’t resist the urge to check up on their Facebook friends. Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their [...]

Grading writing: The art and science — and why computers can’t do it

Tech companies and university administrators get excited from time to time about the value of software that purports to evaluate student writing. This article does a great job explaining exactly what it is that writing teachers do when they respond to student writing. (We’re doing a lot more than looking for misplaced commas.)

The past [...]

Restoring the first website

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Very important bit of history.

For a start we would like to restore the first URL – put back the files that were there at their earliest possible iterations. Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share. We will also sift [...]

Texting? Pets? Millennials Are Flunking Job Interviews – CNBC

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The other day, a Facebook friend posted a snapshot of a young store employee absorbed by a smartphone instead of stocking or cleaning. My 15yo has expressed zero interest in Facebook, though my 11yo is irked that some of her preteen friends already have accounts (despite the official 13+ Facebook policy). But soon I will [...]

Churnalism Search

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At the University of Virginia, one summer when I had a summer job writing press releases for a theater company, and I also volunteered for one of the campus papers, I was amused to see how much of my press releases would appear under a different author’s name in the competing student paper. One time [...]

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 [...]

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