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…

What my classroom looks like during today’s video journalism workshop

Within 3 minutes of being placed into groups, my students were out in the field, practicing news gathering. They have one hour to produce a 2.5 min segment. This is the first graded video project of term. (The other two in-class projects have been dry runs.) Similar:Infinite Scrolling: XKCD's Creative Insight on a Common Interface…

Vulcans, The Secret Garden, and Venn Diagrams

  Similar:80 Days review80 Days was my go-to game over the summe…CultureBother (a minor Turnitin.com grademark bug)That whole thing should be a link — the…Academia5 Characteristics of Successful Work Groups (at Google)Google’s internal study of work groups f…BusinessEach of these #retro #neovictorian #steampunk control panels takes me about an hour. #gree…AestheticsNo focus, no fights, and…

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:Why the Weather Channel's Hype Has Lost Me for GoodAfter the break, we’ll tell you how impo…BusinessIndustriousness. Self-improvement. Thrift. And orange slime. The girl amusing herself on our 70m …AestheticsIs Google Making Us Stupid?Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic: As…

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…