Stanford to offer new undergraduate majors integrating humanities, computer science

Training humanists who can code like a techie and engineers who can dream like a poet. Well played, Stanford! “We’re also seeing students who want to balance their academic passions with pragmatic considerations about their career development, and this kind of program addresses that need. The intellectual landscape is changing, and the workplace landscape is…

Khan Academy Gets Rare Partnership To Close Wealth Gap In College Test Prep

“We think we can make the playing field more level by making the best-in-class tool and making it free. We hope that beyond individual students, these tools become adopted by after-school and college readiness programs.” With a huge influx of donations from Silicon Valley’s most notable philanthropists, Khan Academy quickly evolved from a YouTube lecture…

Vulcans, The Secret Garden, and Venn Diagrams

  Similar:Someone seems to have slipped this over my transom. Thank you, #foodsubstitutefairy whoeve…PersonalSunny but cool. Great day for a long walk with my son.PersonalDrinking milk and using the #WaybackMachine to fix broken links in a 10-year-old blog post…PersonalOrson Scott Card Builds an EmpireVideo games are a viable storytelling me…CybercultureThe Loss (#ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Four,…

Facebook Puts a Downer on Upworthy

Facebook Inc. changed its newsfeed algorithm. You’ll never believe what happened to Upworthy’s traffic next. —Bloomberg. Similar:Playwright #AugustWilson Takes Center Stage on U.S. Postal Service Commemorative Forever …https://twitter.com/USPS/status/13548292…CultureWhy are we so bored?On average we spend six to seven hours i…CultureNASA prepares a Mercury probe for orbitNASA’s Messenger probe is about 10 days …Current_EventsPerspective | How…

Beyond Usability and Design: The Narrative Web

We see narrative everywhere. It’s a primitive urge, a way to tie cause to effect, to convert the complexity of our experience to a story that makes sense. We want to see narrative everywhere. Stories are fun, exciting, comforting. This isn’t just a matter of bedtime stories and art. The saga of the Great Browser War, the…

Dennis G. Jerz | Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism, Seton Hill University | jerz.setonhill.edu

My Anti-Linkbait Pledge: Cynical Overhyping vs. Simply Being Online

When I find something interesting that an online friend has shared via a linkbait site, I hereby pledge that I will link to the origin of the story, rather than a third-party site that republishes it without commentary. The people who share and like and respond to Upworthy and similar linkbait websites are just responding…