Improving students’ handwriting skill did improve their writing ability, but improving their typing skills improved their writing even more. From 1999, so not exactly news, but interesting info in light of the pro-handwriting links that have been making the rounds on the Intertubes. There was a significant relationship between orthographic-motor integration — handwriting and the…
HTML5 Boilerplate helps you build fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites. Kick-start your project with the combined knowledge and effort of 100s of developers, all in one little package. —HTML5 Boilerplate: The web’s most popular front-end template. Similar:After your shift at the protocol station, join me in the officers' lounge, just up the…
Similar:The Declaration Of Independence, 240 Years Later (NPR)When in the Course of human events, it b…CultureNerd siblings are awesome siblingsMy 15yo wanted to show me Terminator 4, …HomeI Canna Give Ye Any More Screens, Cap'n! The iPad Mini and the ChromeBook are…HomeSuch deep roots you have: How Little Red Riding Hood's tale evolvedDid all…
I was happy a few years ago when Seton Hill got a new phone and email system that allowed me to get my voicemails directly via email, but I do so little work over the telephone that the feature is really not that useful. Having grown up in a texting-friendly culture, with unmediated cellphone access…
A reminder that polls that ask people to predict (or remember) their behavior are not as reliable as measurements that track what people actually do. (This is why usability testing — asking people to use something and measuring how well they perform — differs from simply gathering opinions.) The more attention-starved we feel, the more…
SMS Generator. Similar:A Successful Failure: The TI-99/4A Turns 40My family had one of these when I was 12…AwesomeAs yearbooks die, colleges lose a link to the pastThis year, for the first time in decades…AcademiaKristin and Haley's Discussion on Poe's "The Raven"I gave my literature students 30 minutes…AcademiaPhysics simulation demo: crate made up of mostly loose…
We tend to assume that pressure makes us more efficient. I work fastest when I’m on deadline. I stretch my grocery budget the most when my funds are running low. But in reality, it’s not that you’re working better when you’re stressed. It’s that the opposite situation, overabundance, often makes us less efficient. It’s a…
I wish I understood Russian, so that I could make sense of this 1935 Russian film featuring a mechanical man remote-controlled via saxophone. Apparently the capitalists take control of the invention and turn it on the workers, at least temporarily. The climax features the workers gaining control of the machines and using them to fight…
20 years ago, I chose for my dissertation texts written from 1920 through 1950, expecting them to come out of copyright one after the other during my career as a professor, but the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added 20 years. Disney has made dozens of movies based on characters that are in the…
The water in the mantle rock, which could equal the amount of water in the world’s oceans, may be an integral part of sustaining water on the surface, Smyth said. It also implies that the Earth’s oceans likely formed from water stored deep beneath the Earth, rather than from a comet or asteroid, as other…
I have no particular problem with the plural of “Starbucks” being “Starbucks,” as “Starbuckses” would sound a little too precious, but how does the Washington Post get from the singular “McDonald’s” to the plural “McDonalds”? There are roughly 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, and about 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants. But combined, the two chains…
I usually start my American Lit I course with an analysis of “The Defence of Fort McHenry.” “Two hundred years ago, Francis Scott Key, inspired by the sight of the flag’s ‘broad stripes and bright stars,’ wrote a song that gave new significance to a national symbol and started a tradition through which Americans have…
Emily Short (Galatea, First Draft of the Revolution), formerly employed by Linden Labs to work on the interactive fiction storytelling platform Versu, announces that her Versu game, Blood and Laurels, is now available for iPad. (The Versu team also includes Richard Evans and Graham Nelson.) It’s the eight hundred and twenty first year of the…
Great piece of history, from 1909. Dorothy Levitt Similar:Mom’s Fears About Daughter Leaving For College Channeled Into Fight About Storage BinsImpatiently scanning store shelves while…AmusingGoogle's Super Bowl Ad: A Romance in SearchI didn’t watch the game, but I did catch…AestheticsSomewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original ''Adventure'' in Cod…Because so little…
Don’t overreact to the headline, which is the internal headline the New Republic put in its <title> tags. The headline on the page itself is not much better: “In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments.” Both versions overhype and (in my opinion) misrepresent the author’s thesis, which is actualy “Only…
Maybe the students in this photo are diligently peer-reviewing each other’s work. I know full well students are not always attentive during my classes, but a study that explores whether laptops help students perform better on pop quizzes makes the interesting assumption that we measure learning by comparing scores on pop quizzes. (Or that students…
I wish I had known about this in advance! VuPop. Similar:About the Sinkhole in the Adjunct Faculty Lounge, and Other Mid-Semester AnnouncementsI recently spoke with the Sarah Sutton, …AcademiaWe found a mushroom fairy ring in our yardIt won’t make the afternoon of mowing mo…AestheticsKing Hedley II ( #AugustWilson #CenturyCycle, 9 of 10)August Wilson’s Century Cycle…
While I appreciate the efficiency of uniform standards, I am concerned because it becomes even more efficient to teach to the test, which means more students will arrive in my college classes expecting to be told exactly what to do. I want them to take risks which means I have to convince them that I…
Great example of the application of well-established humanities critical processes to the analysis of a technological artifact. Of all the possible options in the real world — increasing funding for education, reducing overcrowded housing, building mixed use developments, creating employment opportunities, and so on — it’s the presence of the police that lowers crime in…
I have nothing against holding office hours. If no students show up, I just use the time to answer emails or check my gradebook and reach out to students who are falling behind. My office is also in a somewhat out-of-the-way place — at least, so students tell me. A colleague ends the first day…