The woman and the car: a chatty little handbook for all women who motor or want to motor (1909)

Great piece of history, from 1909. Dorothy Levitt Similar:Dress rehearsal for The Nutcracker.AestheticsJournalism Tips: Newsworthy vs SnoozeworthyA newsworthy story is recent (rather tha…CultureTechnical and Literary Writing: What’s the difference? « DekonztruktschonIn an advanced new media class, I’m intr…AcademiaThe 1931 Histomap: The entire history of the world distilled into a single map/chart.This “Histomap,” created…

Advent of Digital Humanities Will Make English Departments Pointless — New Republic

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…

The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom

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…

An Academic Conference Where YOU are the Hero: Interactive Fiction in Print and Online

I wish I had known about this in advance! VuPop. Similar:There are many Star Wars references in Dani Girl, so I made this tribute to Tom Jung's 197…CultureThe Essayification of EverythingThe word Michel de Montaigne chose to de…EssaysTwitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse | Siva Vaidhy…I…

How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

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…

Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames

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…

Office Hours Are Obsolete

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…

Astronauts cloaked Klingon space patch: Star Trek-inspired emblem revealed

The current commander of the International Space Station initially designed a mission badge that paid homage to Klingons. Too bad that design didn’t fly. Swanson, who currently is commander of the International Space Station, collaborated with his daughter to create an insignia for the outpost’s Expedition 40 crew. What he and his fellow astronauts and…

Listening to the Text: The Medieval Speech Bubble

From a culture where silent reading was unusual and a bit antisocial, it’s not surprising how much the “banderole” (the scrolls medieval artists used to represent speech in illustrations and other media) can teach us about the relationship between written and spoken language.

Digital Storytelling: Empower the Multimodal Writing Classroom with Scratch

How can the busy writing teacher interested in new media storytelling deepen the pedagogical value of multimodality in the classroom — especially for students with limited programming experience? Students who learn to design, code, revise, and publish multimodal texts are empowered by their encounters with technology, and can be more critical of the interfaces they…

Even in the U.S., Chinese Students May Have Tiananmen ‘Amnesia’

But now that he was at college in America, someone had mentioned Tiananmen, a friend. And he went online, to YouTube and Google, and pulled up videos and photographs from 25 years earlier, images not easily accessible behind China’s Great Firewall, as its Internet-censoring regime is called. He kept looking at one, he said, “the…

What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades

When I used a Windows XP Tablet computer a few years ago, I got more interested in handwriting, so that Windows could better recognize my scrawled text. I’m a traditionalist in many ways, but truthfully I’m not all that worked up about the loss of handwriting. (Having said that, I felt like a very bad…

What Causes the Smell of New & Old Books?

Generally, it is the chemical breakdown of compounds within paper that leads to the production of ‘old book smell’. Paper contains, amongst other chemicals, cellulose, and smaller amounts of lignin. Both of these originate from the trees the paper is made from; finer papers will contain less lignin than, for example, newsprint. In trees, lignin…

DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER)

Live in the DC area? June 19 I’ll be speaking about the play Rossum’s Universal Robots for a panel on “robots and theater,” sponsored by Cultural Programs of National Academy of Sciences. (The event will also be webcast.) D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) is a monthly discussion forum on art science projects providing a snapshot…

It’s alive! What NPR learned from turning its @nprnews Twitter account from a bot into a human

My student journalists tell me they learn a lot from assignments that involve livetweeting events. It’s encouraging when students ramp up the social media work on their own, outside of classroom assignments, as part of their work for The Setonian Online. This article offers a helpful reminder that even the pros have to experiment in…

We are in a golden age for journalism

Most handwringing about the state of journalism is done by journalists. They are worried about losing their jobs, so it’s not surprising that they tend to be fretful. But turn the issue upside down for a second, and think about the state of journalism from journalism’s audience. The real purpose of journalism, after all, is…

Disruptive Decorations: Kids learned better in a sparesly-decorated CMU lab

Kids learned better in a sparse lab setting than they did in a decorated room. Of course, if they were familiar with the room, and the decorations came from their own artwork and class projects, perhaps the items would be reminders rather than distractions, but the study didn’t test that possibility. For the study, 24…

Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say

Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s. […] If there were more college graduates than the economy needed, the pay gap would shrink.…

You Are Not a Digital Native: Privacy in the Age of the Internet

Cory Doctorow tries to wake young people up to the realities of an online world controlled by companies that are hungry for your personal data. Facebook is a company whose business model is based on the idea that if they spy on you enough and trick you into revealing enough about your life, they can…

Vintage TV News Coverage of Pac-Man

Vintage TV news coverage of Pac-Man. Similar:IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE — Berkeley Rep audio productionSinclair Lewis’s 1935 anti-fascist novel…CultureFact check: Trump lies about CNN at Mississippi rallyI tell my journalism students they won’t…Current_EventsIn defense of the Selfie StickI’m sure there are hipsters, even now, l…AmusingShould your grieving mum see your digital secrets?A US state has…