Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and…
My auditory processing disorder makes it hard for me to process speech when I can’t see the speaker’s lips. My wife is being treated for an ear infection. We are asking each other “What?” after somebody coughs, after we ask each other “What did you say?” and after we answer each other “Never mind.” In…
Essays like this remind me why I picked my English major. There are other ways to get facts. Newspapers are full of them, as are podcasts and documentaries. Travel shows proliferate, take your pick. But even then, there is nothing like the view of the world via a novel. Novels can go beyond merely being…
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable. During a lesson on the Narrative of…
Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy. I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the…
After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading. I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat…
As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about Marshall McLuhan here, a bit of Harold Innis there… Blogging this so I keep this in mind the next time I teach a course like The History and Future of the Book. (There’s so much out there!) [S]ome media are…
The technology will continue to improve so that that simulated gymnastics videos will look less and less bizarre, but people who can use AI to create flawless gymnastics videos aren’t actually learning gymnastics. No human being will become a better gymnast thanks to a better AI simulation of a gymnastics routine. More convincing AI-generated…
Touched up and created an infographic for a web page that I first posted in Nov 2000. Similar:Another square of #steampunk control panel eye candy. #blender3d #blender3dart #design #a…AestheticsWhat Jonson meant by Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek" Jonson famously eulogized Shakespeare …CultureBanned Books Week | Celebrating the Freedom to Read: Sept. 30 – Oct.…
As those familiar with the liberal arts know, in antiquity there were seven such arts. Three formed the trivium of the humanities: rhetoric, grammar, and logic. And four formed the quadrivium of the sciences: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The assertion was this was the knowledge one required to participate as a citizen, as a…
The new AI advanced version of Google Search, aka Google SGE or Search Generative Experience, provides wicked smart AI answers to your queries. And if you ask it how to pass kidney stones quickly, Google will tell you to drink at least two quarts of urine every 24 hours. Source: Google SGE Recommends You Drink…
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Dr. David von Schlichten honors the spectrum of motivations (not always financial) featured during Seton Hill‘s “Celebration of Scholarship.” Similar:I Was Taught From a Young Age to Protect My Dynastic WealthOne of the heirs to the Disney fortune e…BusinessThe Value of Truth: We are living through an epistemological crisis. In the jargon of academia, the study…AcademiaToilet…
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In my lit classes, I’m definitely teaching more short stories and fewer novels that I used to. I’ve expanded the time I spend on note-taking, synthesizing quotes from different sources, and why at the college level it’s not a good paragraph if it simply introduces “One quote that supports my position,” repeats three or four…
Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced. (It’s the third of three examples she uses.) Similar:Masks (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season…
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Overview Animated GIFIndividual SlidesComprehensive Overview Similar:Wired and Business Insider remove articles by AI-generated ‘freelancer’Journalists who can’t verify their sourc…Current_EventsBing’s A.I. Chat Reveals Its Feelings: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’In a two-hour conversation with our colu…Current_EventsLining up for Honors Convocation 2016. #setonhillAcademiaClickbait writers hate this English professor's time-saving trick!Defeat clickbaiters with this one weird …CybercultureThe…
If you are writing an academic paper that quotes from an author that uses the ellipsis in a way that differs from MLA style (such as the script of a modern play that uses “…” to indicate when a speaker is interrupted, or a graphic novel that might use “…” to indicate a meaningful silence…
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