As a kid, I remember studying my CRT displays with a microscope. Each pixel that I could control with BASIC on my TRS-80 or Atari 800 or Commodore-64 was made up of tiny arrays of red, blue, and green dots that I could not control directly. There was one display mode of the Atari 800…
Critical Thinking Matters Personal Essays vs. Academic Writing Summary vs. Original Ideas Filler: “There Are Many Reasons to Avoid the Filler Phrase ‘There Are’” Bloom’s Taxonomy: Hierarchy of Critical Thinking Skills Similar:Elderly ballerina hears familiar music from 50 years agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owb1uWDg…AestheticsCreate Joy with Content Management System Hexcodes for Canvas LMSI spent about 30 seconds eyeballing…
Update — Media Bias Chart 10.0 All human endeavors are biased. Vanessa Otero’s chart, which places various news organizations on a 2D chart with a left/centrist/right X axis, and a quality/garbage vertical axis, is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that seeking out and relying on quality reporting from “the other side” is an important…
I’m having my students play Adam Cadre’s text-only, command-line interactive fiction game “9:05.” Over heard, from a student playing the early part of the game with a peer: “Did we just kill someone? We did something bad!” Similar:Professoring. With an(other) apple pie cupcake.I touched up and board-ified a presentat…AcademiaThe Toulmin model for analyzing arguments came…
I touched up and board-ified a presentation on “fake news” for Seton Hill’s “Celebration of Scholarship” event. Similar:The daughter is in “Very Berry Dead,” a new play which opens this Friday and runs for two …The daughter is in “Very Berry Dead,” a …AmusingPreppers for the win. Kinda.The euphoria of getting my grades in Fri…Personal#Blender3D…
An important but small detail in a Blender3D project I just finished is this trench-coated character. I started with a clip-art silhouette, but it looked pretty drab. Thanks to a little pixel-doctoring in The GIMP, I touched up the center image. The schlubby pant cuffs on this guy don’t fit the character, so I smoothed…
There are ways to raise a child’s test scores that have nothing to with helping that child learn. In the past 10 years I have seen far more students — even the most capable, most brilliant students — paralyzed with fear about grades. In high school, you got good grades if you followed instructions and…
I am not particularly into anime, though when I was about 12 I was entranced to run across episodes of Star Blazers that aired on my local TV station one summer at about 7am. Having said that, I found this trailer for a (theoretical) anime reworking of Star Wars very appealing. Similar:Literacy Debate: Online, R…
The New York Public Library has a program that lets youths check out briefcases, handbags, and neckties for job interviews or other formal occasions.
If you are writing a poem because you want to capture a feeling that you experienced, then you don’t need these tips. Just write whatever feels right. Only you experienced the feeling that you want to express, so only you will know whether your poem succeeds. If, however, your goal is to communicate with a reader — drawing…
I spent about 30 seconds eyeballing the hexcode colors for Starfleet uniforms so that, from now on, when I’m marking papers, my Canvas interface will remind me just a little bit of Star Trek. Where do you create joy? Captain’s log… supplemental entry. It’s not a perfect match, but the blue and gold are hard…
Here’s a thought… nothing you can write can possibly encourage me to click through 40 separate chunks of text. Bye. Similar:I Love Books: A Campus Library EvolvesI love books. I love smelling them, t…AcademiaLetter of Recommendation: Fanny PacksWhat other accessory ensures the safety …CultureInmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviewsAn…
When a Facebook friend asked for tips on teaching a large class, I inventoried what I’ve learned about the flipped classroom. For the classes I teach on a regular basis, sometimes online and sometimes in-person, I’ve had many opportunities to develop stand-alone resources that I reuse. For example, I’ve recorded some stand-alone audio lectures on…
Journalism matters. Educated citizens who understand and appreciate the role of the free press in a democracy are a threat to authoritarian figures who benefit by sowing mistrust. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out errors and bias in specific news stories. (News organizations love reporting about when their competitors get a story wrong, and journalists…
For my summer project, teaching myself the Unity Game Engine, I’m updating the texture atlas I created for control consoles for the flagship of the steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell my kids. My designs are now a lot less blocky and more visually interesting. When I showed the girl, she was impressed. Then…
Similar:I can't really articulate why i enjoy crafting #steampunk control panels, but it's been a …AestheticsGoogle Docs MLA Style Works Cited Class ActivityI have rarely been satisfied with spendi…AcademiaCome see Carolyn as “The Girl” in The Fantasticks, Oct 18-27. CultureParable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of societyA very clever interactive…
The original was a stunning image, which has been used to criticize ICE’s policy of separating children from parents attempting to immigrate at the border — a policy which Trump says he dislikes. The animated version of the Time cover makes it clear that this is a composite picture, though of course the emotional power…
Similar:In education, Apple must augment the reality of the cheap notebookIn 2012, Apple tried to position iPads a…CybercultureHow Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free PlayNormally, students and teachers in Finla…CultureHasbro removes embedded typeface from My Little Pony website after copyright infringement … Considering the scope of the alleged in…AestheticsToasty Warm Bed (designed by drunk AI neural…
He could have built, you know, a junkyard mechanic droid, or a general manual labor droid, or a Bitcoin-mining droid, or a freedom-fighter droid? No, he builds a fussy butler. The silliness of this just hit me. Similar:Star Trek: Voyager Premiered 20 Years AgoI remember wanting to like Voyager a lot…CultureTweaking yesterday's #steampunk workstations. Now…
Facebook is discontinuing the “trending” list. After the employees hired by Facebook to curate the trending news items were found to bury news they didn’t like, Facebook fired them all and tried to automate the process. If it matters to you whether their bias was liberal or conservative you can look it up, but my…