A blogger who had a much worse day than I did writes: Today I finished administering the sixth day of New York State Common Core assessments. I was a facilitator in a process that made my 10 year old students struggle,to the point of frustration, to complete yet another 90 minute test. I sat by…
I’m thinking of asking students in a media class next term to make a video resume. Zulic came across one applicant for a marketing job who had posted a three-minute YouTube video highlighting some of her prior work, along with her future ambitions. She got the job, beating out hundreds of others. Such video resumes…
I enjoyed the essay, but the truths it imparts are hardly confined to the coding profession. Any specialized field that looks contained, ordered, and routinized from the outside is going to look more porous, chaotic, and ephemeral from the inside. What this programmer says about Good Code is also true of Good Teaching, or Good…
“According to professor of theory of knowledge Leon Trotsky, privacy is the most fundamental report of humankind. Radiation on advocates to an orator transmits gamma rays of parsimony to implode.’’ ANY NATIVE speaker over age 5 knows that the preceding sentences are incoherent babble. But a computer essay grader, like the one Massachusetts may use…
Other signs of the digital age: we don’t say penned a novel or inked a book deal. #APStyleChat Twitter. Similar:Troy Sterling and the Active and Passive VerbsJerz > Writing > Grammar…AestheticsMy 1951 day DuoLingo streak was fun, but… Ever since DuoLingo announced it…Business“The Cowherd Who Became a Poet,” by James Baldwin. (Read by Dennis Jerz)Inspiration can come…
Google said Wednesday that it stopped scanning student Gmail accounts for advertising purposes after the practice was scrutinized during a recent court case. | Google Apps for Education, a free service used by more than 30 million students, teachers and administrators, offers Gmail email accounts, as well as calendars, cloud storage and document creation.Google Stops…
We could hardly stop reading just before the big final battle. And really, how could I stop reading until we found out how the battle turned out. And once the battle ended, could we stop before we found out whehter Taran finally proposes to Eilonwy? So it was a quarter past midnight when we finally…
Dear organization from my past that just sent me a scolding email for missing an “important deadline” for making your job easier: How nice that you have “arranged a deadline extension” for me so that I can “finalize this important… project by verifying [my] data.” Perhaps this is all a “critical concern” to you, but in…
I got a text message a couple days ago.. would I be available Saturday night to play a judge in a one-act play based (very loosely) on local history? Sure, why not? Similar:A few Dwarven Moments in Stage Right's Snow WhiteThe dwarf scenes were a real hoot. …DramaMy big acting moment in this scene is…
Forced Google+ integration in Google Reader and YouTube, both of which had strong communities of their own beforehand, are prime examples of how Google+ fostered hostility rather than goodwill. The time is right for Google to rethink its approach. I still like the idea of Circles as a way of controlling who sees what, but…
“After 112 years as The Daily Emerald, they saw the tidal wave of change,” he said. “They re-branded themselves from a daily student newspaper into a multiplatform student media company.” It was not financial worries alone that prompted Ryan Frank, its publisher, to announce the decision in 2012 to print two instead of five days…
The iPad market is saturated. Tablets are gadgets for a largish, elite niche. So, as a technology, the iPad adoption curve might look more like a bicycle’s than a mobile phone’s. Some people have and love them, but not everyone needs one. Tablets are “tweeners,” not as robust as a computer nor as convenient as…
The show was awash in quick, smart wisecracks, not to mention cultural references that ran the gamut from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Miles Davis to Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. Watching MST3K was like hanging out with a trio of underachieving-genius best friends. At a time when depictions of geekery were limited mostly to Urkel and…
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Someone is regretting this PR move. The official @NYPDnews Twitter account made an attempt at social media outreach today only to get promptly torn to shreds by users resisting the PR push. Hijacked hashtags are a common Twitter phenomenon, but tend to be played more for giggles (“trolling,” some call it) than to make a…
Fantastic data visualization. How Americans Die. Similar:Facebook Hired Journalists to Train Its Trending Topics AlgorithmRecently I noticed an unusually incendia…BusinessA #neovictorian master status display board for a #steampunk #blender3d project. Inspired …AestheticsOn the Ethics of Rebranding a Former Trump Administration Official as an Amusing TV Person…It’s also a disservice to readers to rep…CultureNewspaper For Sale:…
My wife and I in Biblical costumes for Children of Eden. (We played Storytellers and had walk-on parts as Seth (third son of Adam and Eve) and his wife.) Oh, and she was a polar bear and I was a giraffe on the ark. Dennis G. Jerz. Similar:Dean Jones Dead: Disney Actor Was 84″The Love…
It’s one thing to be able use a service like Facebook or Instagram, and to use it well; it’s quite another thing to code a web page by hand, tweak a CSS file, or design the navigation for a large website. While I don’t expect my English students to be professional programmers, I do aim…
Grail to the Thief stars a thief from the future named Hank Krang, who “recently had a self-aware time machine called the Time Excursion Digital Interface, or TEDI, fall into his lap after a poker game. He has decided to use this technology to go throughout time, stealing priceless artifacts.” His first destination? Arthurian times,…
I am not a fan of Adobe Flash, which is a closed, proprietary system that requires your users to install a specific, resource-intensive player. Don’t build your business on someone else’s property. Long live HTML5. Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and … Flash. All three of these mediums need a player to work, and all three mediums…