The reception line begins. Grad2018

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That felt sooo good!

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STEM Education Won’t Solve the World’s Problems

I love STEM. My SAT score for math was exactly the same as verbal. When I was in grad school, struggling with Sausserian semiotics and Beowulf in the original Old English, I taught myself C++, Turbo Pascal, and Java for fun. For some project I was coding I learned how to do 3D matrix transformations…

Journalists Verify Claims

Confirm what your sources tell you. Fact-checking makes the difference between ethical journalism (which sometimes upsets the powerful) and propaganda (which always aids oppressors).

CNN’s Chris Cillizza on Trump’s definition of “Fake News”

Here’s some excellent analysis of Trump’s latest attack on journalism (I blogged a bit about this in “More Evidence That, to Trump, ‘Fake News’ Means Critical News“). Trump either doesn’t understand or ignores the difference between a story he doesn’t like and one that is not true. He conflates the two for his own political…

America’s Real Digital Divide

If you think middle-class children are being harmed by too much screen time, just consider how much greater the damage is to minority and disadvantaged kids, who spend much more time in front of screens. | According to a 2011 study by researchers at Northwestern University, minority children watch 50 percent more TV than their…

More Evidence That, to Trump, “Fake News” Means Critical News

Nothing really new here, just calling attention to how President Trump uses parentheses to demonstrate that by “fake news,” he means “news that is critical of me.” Similar:Why Drag It Out?The ways that the informal speech of wom…CultureClickbait writers hate this English professor's time-saving trick!Defeat clickbaiters with this one weird …CybercultureBob Dylan's Nobel Prize Acceptance…

Your Students Learn by Doing, Not by Listening

Today one of my students gave a final presentation in the form of a branching hypertext (akin to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels). On the opening screen, the voice of the professor welcomes the students to the course, announces a the major term project, and then immediately dismisses the class. During the Q&A afterwards,…

Outtakes from “Once on This Island” promo

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We love us some Sherlock any way we can get it.

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Once on This Island (Stage Right! Greensburg; May 11 & 12 Promo Video)

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Once On This Island (next weekend)

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If You Think You Hate Puns, You’re Wrong

I wrote my college application essay on how I negotiated social situations by storing up an array of dumb puns on a random general topic. At a social gathering, I would sit around awkwardly until a certain topic came up — shoes (“lace be serious”), or cameras (“lens be serious”) or astronomy (“let’s be Sirius)…

Carolyn plays Ti Moune in the Stage Right homeschool company "Once on This Island" next Friday.

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My student journalists sport their fashionable “What Would Jerz Do?” wristbands.

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My journalism students just gave me this wristband: “What would Jerz do? / Verify or duck.”

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The Justice Department Deleted Language About Press Freedom And Racial Gerrymandering From Its Internal Manual

A subsection titled “Need for Free Press and Public Trial” was removed entirely. That section, which was included in versions of the manual at least as far back as 1988, according to DOJ archives, read as follows: “Likewise, careful weight must be given in each case to the constitutional requirements of a free press and public…

Facebook shrinks fake news after warnings backfire

In its efforts to combat the spread of false news online (whether by malicious people who knew it was propaganda, or through the wishful thinking of overly-credible sheep who saw a post as confirmation of a value they already held), Facebook experimented with flagging stories as “disputed by third-party fact-checkers.” It turns out that a…

How much of what local TV stations post to Facebook is actually local? For many, right around half

I am not a fan of TV news, and in fact only watch a full broadcast once every two years, in order to prep for a particular unit in my intro to journalism class. In truth, I am going to have to redesign that unit, because most of my students aren’t in the habit of…

How We Can Help Students Survive in an Age of Anxiety

Today’s students have also lived most of their lives in the shadow of a systemic financial collapse. Some of us can still remember the extent to which the worldview of our parents or grandparents was shaped by having grown up during the Great Depression. While the Great Recession was objectively not as severe, it has…