—Bull Run Victim Photo — Editing QuibblesYahoo | AP (will expire)) No, Lenahan lies on a hospital bed. The redundancy of “as shows” and “showing” and “he was gored” and “were gored” also bothers me. And the inconsistency doesn’t do much for me, either. The same caption refers to “traditional bullrun” and “morning bull run,”…
“The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags,” says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year’s International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. “These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost…
What is it for? Why is it there? Did whoever put it up realize that if there were no sign, there would be no need to warn about it? Is this a joke from the developers? Is it a lesson in recursiveness? Is it a philosophical prop? —Bizarre Sign (Lushlush) Does it mean “Don’t forget to…
The books Amazon will offer will include many rare volumes — some that are hundreds of years old and others that are too brittle to be handled by people day after day. With digital scanning and printing technology, such books can be reproduced for anyone who wants to buy them. —Dan Carnevale —Amazon Will Digitize…
The division is cleanest in communities where the predator panic hit before MySpace became popular. In much of the midwest, teens heard about Facebook and MySpace at the same time. They were told that MySpace was bad while Facebook was key for college students seeking to make friends at college. I go into schools where…
I handed my notes over to the class and gave them directions to plan the next three weeks of class. They had to schedule one project and one exam. The project has to run five days straight, and they’ll need the information from chapter seven to do the project. They had to make sure that…
At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative…
He is full of high sentence, like J. Alfred Prufrock. But beneath it all, one finds a sense of cultural history combining one part idyllic idealization with two parts status anxiety. Gorman only appears to be facing hard questions about the new digital order. Actually he is just echoing debates on “mass society” from five…
“The words we suggest,” says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, “are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.” —100 Words Every High School Graduate Should…
—(BRACKETS) – hidden camera prank on unsuspecting public. (YouTube) Amusing. Similar:Close Reading of Sonnet 130: Form, Theme, and Cultural Context (and a Rage Comic)I’m preparing to teach Shakespeare again…AcademiaStar Wars Han Solo in Carbonite Silicon Ice Tray Star Wars Han Solo in Carbonit…AestheticsUsing a Typewriter Simulator to Teach Media HistoryWorking on the syllabus for my “Media an…CultureThinkGeek…
Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands. This, despite the fact…
So I pour myself a glass of red wine, settle in with a fresh pair of flannel pajamas and start channeling my inner geek with glee. Primetime or not, I love the Bee. I love it. I love the celebration of intelligence, the championing of nerd-ship, of the brotherhood of brainiac. This is why the…
—Classic Sesame Street – Ernie (almost) repairs the TV (YouTube) My sister sent me this clip, which was one of our favorites when we were kids. (Still is today, now that you mention it… though the production values were notably simpler back then.) Thanks, Rosemary. Similar:What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud?I’m sad…
Using games to entice, entertain, and engage introductory programmers has been successful; many of the approaches, however, use graphical programming. This either requires a complex game engine or toolkit for students to program or a lot of additional effort for students to get the game looking the way they want. Taking a page from the…
DeSena presented solutions for teachers to prevent the plagiarism plague engulfing a Web-based culture. “All too often teachers emphasize the content (the information) students will cull and hopefully learn. But it is our obligation as teachers to encourage them to respond to the expert or scholar, to answer his or her underlying claim,” she wrote.…
The VSTF process converts display of text such as this first sentence from the U.S. Declaration of Independence into this: —Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading (Reading Online) Fascinating. The indented version really does seem a lot easier to read, perhaps chiefly because the first word in each line is often a…
Some linguists are worried that the proliferation of text messaging among students may hurt the development of formal English. Johnson does not agree. “I don’t buy it,” Johnson said. “I think students can distinguish between different contexts. What they would say with their friends is different from what they would say to an instructor.” Text…
The first person to come to his stand is a man from the Mekong Delta. He’s got a letter with him, addressed to a businessman from Europe. He’s his chauffeur, and he’s been driving him to business meals and meetings for a year. He asks in writing if the man can get him health insurance…
—Field of Rainbows [Copyeditor’s Make Mistake’s Sometime’s] (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) The caption should read “photographer’s shadow.” The mistake doesn’t come close to overshadowing the power of this great photo. Similar:Understanding Poetry INCIDENTAL COMICS: Understanding Poetr…CultureNews Feed FYI: Click-baitingIt’s hard for me to think of Facebook as…BusinessA journalist shot by police while covering the 2020 protests is…
Here’s the dirty secret that you’ll never see printed in a publisher’s glossy promo material: Every textbook on the market is a crashing bore to read. All the publishers will assure you that they’ve added special features designed to attract today’s young people and that the prose is lively and engaging. Yeah, right. The colorful…