Oh the Overthinks You Can Overthink: Horton the Elephant, the Wickersham Brothers, and Masculinity in Seussical

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Yesterday, I performed in a school matinee for Suessical, dashed back to campus to advise with students working on their 20-page term papers for Literary Criticism, served on oral exam panels for four graduating seniors, then went back to the theater for an evening performance.

Somewhere along the way, I found myself chatting in [...]

Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore

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I will have to watch for these uses of “slash.” I wonder if it has any relation to the practice of using a slash to denote romantic pairings in fanfic (e.g. Harry/Hermione).

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me [...]

We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now | History & Archaeology

“Hear my voice. Alexander Graham Bell.” That was really quite thrilling.

In that ringing declaration, I heard the clear diction of a man whose father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface [...]

Stage Right’s ‘Seussical’ offers songs, messages

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The Tribune-Review does a great job covering the local arts community. Here is their preview of this weekend’s Suessical. (My daughter plays one of the baby kangaroos, and my wife and I play Whos and various other supporting parts. I also play Judge Yertle the the Turtle and the Grinch’s dog, Max.)

TribLIVE.

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Rookie News Anchor — Fired Instantly for Dropping ‘F***ing S***’ On the Air

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Yes, it is nerve-wracking to speak live on the air, but… wow.

 

Grading the MOOC University

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The MOOC classrooms are growing at Big Bang rates: more than five million students worldwide have registered for classes in topics ranging from physics to history to aboriginal worldviews.

It creates a strange paradox: these professors are simultaneously the most and least accessible teachers in history. –Grading the MOOC University – NYTimes.com.

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Huge Collection of Free CC-Licensed Textbooks (2012)

2012 Book Archive.

Business, humanities, writing, science.

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Police, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probe

In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials. Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were [...]

The GE Mascot That Proves They’ve Never Seen ‘The Matrix’

On a scale of 1 to 10, this definitely rates a WTF.

Seriously, has no one in GE ever seen The Matrix? Literally any other robot in the history of film would have been a better choice — even RoboCop would’ve made people feel more at ease, because at least he’s a police officer. Agent [...]

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

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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 [...]

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