The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)
I always enjoy my visits to the studio. This recording was a quick one!
Stapler jam during a midterm exam.
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…
The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)
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 Darkness and the Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 11) A serial killer targets Kira’s former resistance colleagues
Rewatching ST:DS9 In a cave (again with the caves), a pleasant-looking Bajoran monk welcomes guests to a “days of atonement” retreat, and is zapped by a beam of light. In the infirmary, the very pregnant Kira, griping comically that the herbs she’s been prescribed mean sedatives don’t work, learns that Latha, formerly a violent member…
The press lobby is going feral—ignore it
Given that they need to write multiple stories a day, while also appearing on podcasts and 24-hour news channels, lobby journalists cannot plausibly understand policy detail or how financial markets work. It’s also not what they’re good at. Their skillset is to nose around and cause trouble. If you want a scandal covered or to…
January 6th … the board game?
About 20 of us are here in Brooklyn to play a large-scale war game — think Risk — but we’re also each assigned a character, which is a bit like Dungeons & Dragons. We’re told it’s Jan. 6, 2021. We’re given rows and rows of hand-painted mini-figures, a bowl of dice, and a measuring stick showing how far…
Rapture #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 10) Sisko’s “visions” complicate politics, faith and family
Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira is moved by the interest Sisko shows in an artifact recently recovered from the Cardassians. After a classic “zoom in and enhance” scene where Sisko uses a reflection to unlock an archaeological mystery, a technobabble accident flabbergasts Sisko’s neural jimberjams, which Bashir says will likely give him heightened sensory experiences for a…
Don’t Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)
Full version Similar:The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the…Stapler jam during a midterm exam.The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)The Darkness and the Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5,…
I ordered a box of composition books. Low-tech response to AI.
I felt like a capitalist, buying in bulk on the cheap and selling individual books for $2 (about a 20-cent profit, per book, but I’m really rounding up so I don’t have to deal with change). Students will spend time in class annotating printouts and writing in their copybooks. They’ll still do online activities but…
The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager
In the halls of power at Amazon, busy executives have no time for PowerPoints. At the start of a meeting, everyone gets a printed 6-page memo, and spends 20-25 minutes reading it silently and marking it up. After the discussion, the printouts (typically with detailed hand-written comments) are handed back to the person who called…
It will be harder to leave Facebook than it was to leave Twitter
It was not that hard to leave Twitter. I removed the app from my phone and followed a lot of journalists and professionals on Bluesky. I still checked Twitter on my laptop, but not every day. Then one day when X asked me for my password to log back in, I decided not to bother.…
The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up a mountain
Rewatching ST:DS9 Space Dad fusses hoveringly as Jake packs to move in with Nog. Cadet Nog, who has been placed on DS9 for a sophomore internship, is all about duty and cleanliness and exercise, setting up comic tension with Jake, who wants to play computer games and have fun. Odo smugly collects Quark, who’s wanted…
Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a hero of the resistance
Rewatching ST:DS9 Sisko, Dax, Odo and Garak return from a conference on the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, where Garak got flak for his pro-Cardassian bias, and Odo is uncomfortable with his own reputation as a hero. They’re in a runabout, so it’s no surprise that a plot contrivance particle field hits them before the opening…
Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial Time Travel Tribble Tribute
Rewatching ST:DS9 Strait-laced time cops arrive on the station to demand “just the truth, Captain.” Sisko’s voice-over informs us that on a trip to recover a Bajoran Plot Contrivance Orb, the Defiant picks up a passenger who would be strangely familiar to anyone who had seen any of Paramount’s extensive promotion for this episode, scheduled…
Students are trusting software like this to do their work.
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…
Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.
When I ask my students to use the library database to find scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles, some students stick with the search methods they’re already familiar with, and they submit works cited lists that include articles written by undergraduate interns, or articles from low-value pay-to-publish ecosystems like “Frontiers.” While I don’t read every article students…
Each building in my #medievalyork simulation has four levels of detail (so that distant objects render faster). #blender3d #mysteryplay #design #cgi
Similar:The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the…Stapler jam during a midterm exam.The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)The Darkness and the Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 11) A serial killer t…The press lobby is going feral—ignore…
What have my students learned about creative nonfiction writing? During class they are collaborating on a Google Doc that’s coming together very nicely before our eyes.
What have my students learned about creative nonfiction writing? During class they are collaborating on a Google Doc that’s coming together very nicely before our eyes. Similar:The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to…
There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI
Two years after the release of ChatGPT, it may not be surprising that creative work is used without permission to power AI products. Yet the notion remains disturbing to many artists and professionals who feel that their craft and livelihoods are threatened by programs. Transparency is generally low: Tech companies tend not to advertise whose…
Sesame Street had a big plot twist in November 1986
My older siblings say they remember our mother sitting them down to watch a new TV show called Sesame Street. A running gag was that Big Bird’s friend, the huge, gentle wooly-mammoth-like Snuffleupagus somehow always disappeared before anyone else on Sesame Street could see him, leading the adults on the show to believe “Snuffy” was…