To Learn More, This High-Schooler Left The Classroom
Nick Bain, 17, was in class one day when he calculated that only “2 1/2 to three hours” was actually useful instruction. So he decided to go out on his own to learn. —NPR
Unscheduled Disasters in Journalism: Learn to Deal
In school, we expect our professors to answer our questions, to return our emails, to invite us in for a consultation, to pay attention what we say and read carefully what we write. One of the important lessons of being a student journalist is learning how to deal with the unexpected. Unfair things happen in…
Thoughtful PopCult Analysis of ‘Peanuts’ Deserves Better than a Clickbaity Headline Hating on Snoopy
On a shelf in the slanty room under the stairs, next to her college textbooks, my mother kept a stash of inexpensive Peanuts paperbacks — dozens of them, which reprinted the newspaper strips, perhaps on a yearly basis, maybe more frequently. I spent many a summer afternoon reading through those books, and I remember sorting…
One wild place. (Sunday.)
My laptop hard drive is full & my comfort-food shelf is empty
My laptop drive is full & my comfort-food shelf is empty; however, that package slip was for a new external hard drive and a case of Clif Bars. #winning!
Amazon may well be the most evil company in tech
Last week, I had a hardware emergency. A kid in a small-town hardware store spent about 15 minutes helping me find the right nut. I had the troublesome part with me, and used a vise on their worktable and their wrench to twist it in place. The nut cost 50 cents. I asked the kid if…
After a successful piano recital.
Facebook Should Pay All of Us
The trick is that most people think they are getting a good deal out of Facebook; we think of Facebook to be “free,” and, as marketing professors explain, “consumers overreact to free.” Most people don’t feel like they are actually paying when the payment is personal data and when there is no specific sensation of…
Just wrote the first ending to my in-progress journalism game (created in Twine)
3,486 words, 120 links, 57 lexias, and currently this is the only ending.
How Technology Has Changed The Way We Write
Social media services have put writing tools into the hands of people who probably don’t think of themselves as writers, but there they are, captioning photos and picking hashtags and maybe even pausing just a few seconds to edit before they hit “post.” This radio interview offers a good, informal overview of why people who…
Sesame Street Is Moving to HBO, and the Symbolism Is Crushing
I’ve been fascinated by the rhetoric of headlines surrounding the “Sesame Street moves to HBO” story. * HBO gentrifies ‘Sesame Street’ –VentureBeat * Sesame Street Episodes Will Shrink to Half an Hour –Time * Sesame Street Is Heading to HBO, and Getting Even Bigger –Esquire * This episode of Sesame Street brought to you by…
TARDIS from today’s 3D printing class.
A serious summer activity.
Once classes start again, we will all have less time for the game of life. Let’s do some serious playing while we still can.
Keyboard Shortcuts for Novelists
Use the command-alt functions to add sexual tension, plot twists, or a humorous interlude. —The New Yorker
Updating Journalism Handouts
Jerz > Writing > Journalism I’ve spent the afternoon touching up some older journalism handouts, seeing which are still in good shape, which need some work, and which new ones I’ll need to create from scratch. I realize I’ve never actually written a handout on the inverted pyramid, writing leads, writing headlines, punctuating quotes from sources… of course there…
Why Teachers, Parents, and Society at Large Have Destroyed Kids’ Love of Learning
I have experimented with rewarding students for embracing complexity, taking risks, and for celebrating their failures. Returning to musical theater after a 25-year break has been a valuable lesson in humility for me, and a reminder of just how scary it is — exciting and scary — to do something new. The truth—for this parent…
Introduction to Twine (Tutorials by Vegetarian Zombie)
I will always love Inform 7, but I chose to develop a journalism training game in Twine (because it will be much easier to teach Twine to my students). To prepare for my game, I spent about 6 hours (during my son’s last chess tournament) roughing out about 20 lexias. Since then, I’ve spent about 6…
The Satellite That Took This Incredible Photo Almost Didn’t Leave Earth
The camera’s first good image came back a month ago, which was cutting things a little close for the July 16 moon crossing (NASA released the images on Wednesday), according to Szabo. “We were very much aware that the moon would be passing in view, and we worked very hard for it,” he says. The…
No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games – Offworld
Several times I assigned Brenda Laurel’s Utopian Entrepreneur, which described the rise and heartbreaking fall of her girl-centered, girl-positive gaming company, Purple Moon during the 1990s. My own daughter (who is 13) has enjoyed man more opportunities to be both girly and nerdy — something that seems to have been a lot harder 20 years…
A salute lost to history
History is complex and baffling and fascinating. Reading this (an explanation that the stiff-arm salute that we now identify with the Nazis was a general gesture that was common in America before WWII) made my head spin almost as much as reading about the myth of 8 unbroken hours of sleep. A group of about…