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:LEGO turned itself around by analyzing overbearing parents[C]hildren play…

Vulcans, The Secret Garden, and Venn Diagrams

  Similar:A #neovictorian #steampunk ship-of-the-line needs a dramatic flag and a conveniently locat…AestheticsThe Better Angels of Our WritingCopy editors are to the world of publish…AcademiaStunning, bleak unemployment chart from the front page of the New York TimesCurrent_EventsRevisiting a Website I Created in 1996: Engineering Writing Centre (University of Toronto)During the Christmas break of 1996, when…AestheticsAn…

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:When T.S. Eliot Invented the Hipster  Prufrock cannot bring himself to…CultureNASA Calls It A Mission As Curiosity Rover Fills Up Whole 2-Gigabyte Memory CardMore great satire from The Onion. PASAD…AmusingDetails on the disappearance of the Utah monolith Mr. Bernards,…

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…