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:Take that, grass! Eat rotary analog steel.HomeFacebook, really? More…

Vulcans, The Secret Garden, and Venn Diagrams

  Similar:Burgh to Burg, episode 2.AcademiaLGN Launches Quandary to Develop Ethical Thinking through PlayThe Learning Games Network, a non-profit…CultureWhy Japanese Kids Can Walk to School Alone It’s a common sight on Japanese mass t…Culture"Orphans" was amazing. Powerul, funny, cruel, humane, empathetic. I was speechle…PersonalLet’s Make the Academic Job Market More HumaneIt’s been decades since I’ve…

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:In May, 2002, I was blogging about… typefaces in period movies; poets Paul Dirac and Ste…In May, 2002, I was blogging about …ArtIn December 2000, I was blogging about typeface snobbery, freedom in video game spaces, th…In December 2000,…

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…