Facebook has monetized access to online content. The mobile apps make it difficult for you to actually leave Facebook to follow a link, which means Facebook is increasingly showing other people’s content, bypassing the creator’s own ads (and their “subscribe” and “comment” and “contact us” and “archive” buttons). As Internet comedy writer Matt Klinman puts…
It was pleasurable to encounter a familiar reference to Plato’s Phaedrus (which I just assigned in my Media & Culture class) in this Atlantic article on memory in the digital information age. With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s…
I don’t generally like teaching with slide decks, but students are used to them. I use a typeface that makes it easy for me to pretend I’m creating Okudagrams for Star Trek: TNG computer displays.
Similar:Coronavirus: advice from the Middle Ages for how to cope with self-isolationLike many people, I curate my social med…CultureSharing a root beer float with your dad doesn't fix everything that's wrong in the world, …AestheticsWhat Part of “No, Totally” Don’t You Understand?English continues to evolve. I noticed t…CultureThe Emissary (ST:TNG Rewatch: Season Two, Episode…
I learned a lot while watching this video. I didn’t realize how much of this movie was driven by off-screen narration. The whole “The Death Star will be in range in five minutes” sequence was added in post. Similar:Pope Francis calls for "news communicated with serenity, precision and completeness"Pope Francis recently addressed Italian …CultureFacebook founder…
When I do a career planning unit, I am often amused by the students who list “design skills” or “very creative” on their resumes, yet use the exact same MS-Word default resume template. A second observation is that students typically used their cover letters to describe their own emotions (e.g. as their burning desire for…
For an article on communicating research findings in poetic verse rather than academic prose, an article in Qualitative Inquiry cites my Top 10 Poetry Tips handout.
What I wrote is not actually a list, just a narrative rant against clickbait listicles. Similar:Doctor Bashir, I Presume #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 16) Smarmy hologram des…Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark watches with …AmusingThe black chair is down to 18¢ per ounce? Shut up and take my money, Amazon!PersonalKristin and Haley's Discussion on Poe's "The…
I recently noticed that a blog post I created in 2003 has been getting a spike in traffic. Today my five-year-old son was watching one of my wife’s old Battlestar Galactica videotapes, and I remembered that when I was about 11 I had a crush on the cute bridge crewmember who told the Viper pilots…
Aristotle classified Plato’s work, representing Socrates’s defense against charges that he corrupted the youth of Athens, as a fiction. But what words! What a defense! (“Greatest mind of history / Solving life’s sweet mystery.” —Schwartz) For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your…
Is your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes? lol = linguists overinterpret lol gtg = gtg tokenizes gatekeeping mcm = man-crush-monday connotes mania wcw = whoever created woman-crush-wednesday brb = befoggedly redefine brb Similar:I love my students enough to teach them the difference between passive voice and past tens…If a goggles-for-brains Lego character c…EducationOpen…
I paid a little attention to a long-neglected RSS aggregator for student blogs. It had stopped working at some point, and was no longer recognizing the RSS feeds generated by WordPress. Fortunately, the Feed Creator for WP RSS Aggregator does the trick — it generates RSS feeds automatically. I’m blogging this in part because every semester…
Similar:My Anti-Linkbait Pledge: Cynical Overhyping vs. Simply Being OnlineWhen I find something interesting that a…CultureT-Shirts for student journalists who recently leveled up to “staff writer”(with bear signe…PersonalWe love us some Sherlock any way we can get it.PersonalMore details in the powder room of my villain's lair. #Blender3DAestheticsStar Trek: "Wink Of An Eye"/"The Empath"Amusing, if…
Books symbolized freedom. Posters of 1942 quoted the president: “Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this…
I’ve taught Plato’s Phaedrus before, but in the past I have mostly focused on brief passages in which the characters discuss writing, which is really just a side issue. The purpose of today is mostly just to accustom my “History and Future of the Book” students to oral classical culture, in the hopes they’ll get…
Teaching students to write does not mean correcting their errors, or even preventing them from making errors. While I’m grateful that autocorrect catches most of my typographical errors, I have so far been unimpressed by software tools that aim to check grammar and style. Most of my students are pretty good readers and writers; if…
I used to enjoy buying my kids a $4 set of Legos for no special reason, figuring that some people spend that much for a fancy cup of coffee. My kids would cannibalize their Indiana Jones and Star Wars sets in order to create characters from the steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell them.…
Similar:My 1951 day DuoLingo streak was fun, but… Ever since DuoLingo announced it…BusinessWaiting for a talk on preserving artifacts from NASA’s Apollo program So much to see at the Heinz History Ce…CultureSenior Tech #1: How To Master TextingIt’s funny because it’s true. http://…AmusingI had already created the little utility craft on the lower left, but…
From Daisy Dunn’s review of Puchner’s The Written World: Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Indian epic Ramayanahad been preserved through an oral tradition that seemed destined to perish through overreliance on papyrus. Akhmatova remembered because she had to but Socrates simply chose to. He…
I recently came across a box of old writing, including a binder where I had saved some undergraduate papers. When returning a Beowulf paper for a Brit Lit survey, my instructor had stapled a page of hand-written notes that began, “You come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here, much closer than…