PHD Comics: It’s in the syllabus
PHD Comics: It’s in the syllabus.
Portraits of my 11yo: Pretty, Goofy, and Pretty Goofy
Lego goes steampunk
Be still, my nerdy heart. Steampunk — which has inspired books, art and fashion — hinges on the idea of a future in which we use steam, rather than oil or electricity, as our primary source of energy. Still confused? Think 19th-century fashion and technology, but applied to a futuristic world. Or check out bing…
Brain, Interrupted
In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is [not multitasking, but] really doing something called “rapid toggling between tasks,” and is engaged in constant context switching. As economics students know, switching involves costs. But how much? When a consumer switches banks, or a company switches suppliers, it’s relatively easy…
Ray Harryhousen, visual effects pioneer, dies
The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen, Visual Effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator. He was a multi-award winner which includes a special Oscar and BAFTA. Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own…
Seton Hill Chemistry Club Hosts 30 Homeschool Students for Chemistry Day
The History of Typography Told in Five Animated Minutes
Open Culture.
On Office Hours and Student Contact at the Small Liberal Arts College
I don’t expect students to be constantly after me—and I wouldn’t want them to be. I also know that what looms large for them are their friends, families, and personal lives. But I’m beginning to learn that if students at large universities are starved for personal attention and connection, students at small colleges have so…
Teaching Composition with Interactive Fiction
I’m on a committee that is exploring a multimodal a revision to my school’s freshman writing program. So far I have never seriously tried introducing new media content into a freshman writing course, but this may do the trick. After two semesters of teaching students to read, play, and write IF games, I can say…
Jaz Parkinson “Colour Signatures”
Amusing visual representations of the color references in a handful of literary works. These are my colour signatures, an ongoing collection which are basically graphs of all the visual content in the books. For example when it might say ‘yellow brick road,’ ‘yellow’ gets a tally, or when for example in The Road it says…
Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learning and memory.
Fairly early in the semester, I can spot the students who will struggle to complete big assignments, because they are often the same ones who can’t resist the urge to check up on their Facebook friends. Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their…
Grading writing: The art and science — and why computers can’t do it
Tech companies and university administrators get excited from time to time about the value of software that purports to evaluate student writing. This article does a great job explaining exactly what it is that writing teachers do when they respond to student writing. (We’re doing a lot more than looking for misplaced commas.) The past…
Restoring the first website
Very important bit of history. For a start we would like to restore the first URL – put back the files that were there at their earliest possible iterations. Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share. We will also sift…
Texting? Pets? Millennials Are Flunking Job Interviews – CNBC
The other day, a Facebook friend posted a snapshot of a young store employee absorbed by a smartphone instead of stocking or cleaning. My 15yo has expressed zero interest in Facebook, though my 11yo is irked that some of her preteen friends already have accounts (despite the official 13+ Facebook policy). But soon I will…
Churnalism Search
At the University of Virginia, one summer when I had a summer job writing press releases for a theater company, and I also volunteered for one of the campus papers, I was amused to see how much of my press releases would appear under a different author’s name in the competing student paper. One time…
Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story
It’s not that hypertext went on to become less interesting than its literary advocates imagined in those early days. Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s…
Oh the Overthinks You Can Overthink: Horton the Elephant, the Wickersham Brothers, and Masculinity in Seussical
Yesterday, I performed in a school matinee for Suessical, dashed back to campus to advise with students working on their 20-page term papers for Literary Criticism, served on oral exam panels for four graduating seniors, then went back to the theater for an evening performance. Somewhere along the way, I found myself chatting in an…
Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore
I will have to watch for these uses of “slash.” I wonder if it has any relation to the practice of using a slash to denote romantic pairings in fanfic (e.g. Harry/Hermione). Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me…
We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now | History & Archaeology
“Hear my voice. Alexander Graham Bell.” That was really quite thrilling. In that ringing declaration, I heard the clear diction of a man whose father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface…
Stage Right’s ‘Seussical’ offers songs, messages
The Tribune-Review does a great job covering the local arts community. Here is their preview of this weekend’s Suessical. (My daughter plays one of the baby kangaroos, and my wife and I play Whos and various other supporting parts. I also play Judge Yertle the the Turtle and the Grinch’s dog, Max.) TribLIVE.