Standardized testing rewards standardized thinking, while excluding creativity, resilience & other “soft” skills. I have started gong out of my way to remind students in my classes that I am not comparing their papers to a “correct answer” in the back of my book — I want them to learn a habit of mind that…
It’s a good day when one’s nerdiness is an asset to a colleague. Similar:Why Teachers, Parents, and Society at Large Have Destroyed Kids’ Love of LearningI have experimented with rewarding stude…CultureOrson Welles Radio Play "War of the Worlds" at 75 The New York Times reported “Many Fl…CultureLet's talk about AI art (long, scrollworthy post from…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:The chief engineer has a forward-facing station, on a platform above the technical staff c…PersonalTreasure peaceful moments in a turbulent world.AestheticsDrinking milk and using the #WaybackMachine to fix broken links in a 10-year-old blog post…PersonalSon took out trash w/o being asked; daughter wore papercraft tophat to grocery store.…
Keep a local backup of anything important you’ve entrusted to online services. There’s no guarantee that, years from now, those services will honor the terms you agreed to. Backed by new investors, including singer Justin Timberlake, Myspace (after dropping the capital ‘S’) has been rebranded as a music-streaming service, with a new sleek interface, and…
Penn and Teller are involved with this story. Worth a read. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995. The game remained a curious rumor until September, 2005, when Frank Cifaldi, a freelance…
Judge: Apple conspired to fix eBook prices. #ethics #books The Federal lawsuit claimed that Apple, led by then-CEO Steve Jobs and senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue, conspired with HarperCollins, Hatchett, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster to drive e-book prices up from the $9.99 price point Amazon had established. –readwrite.com Similar:As a…
RT @spj_tweets: How TV could suffer the fate of newspapers: @alanmutter shares the second installment of his two-part blog – http://t.co/l… Similar:I'm no longer surprised, but still want to document.This is really noteworthy. Today the Pre…Current_EventsWhat kids do when Dad won't hand over the iPod So I’m not being selfish… this is …EducationClassroom collaboration marketplaceWhile…
RT @DepressedDarth: Dear J.J. Abrams, If the new Star Wars is bad, you will forever be known as Jar Jar Abrams. Sincerely, Star Wars fans Similar:The Sacramentality of Teaching and LearningFor the one-credit journalism class that…AcademiaMaybe I'll just delete these QUARTER OF A MILLION spam comments.Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in …Cyberculture4 writing lessons…
I really like MailChimp’s “Social” plugin, which not only publishes a WordPress blog entry to Twitter and Facebook, but also collects responses from Twitter and Facebook users and collects them as WordPress comments. Today I installed a different plugin, Twitter Tools, which is really just a single tool — it lets you create a WordPress…
Habits for happiness: tips for looking on the bright side of life. At bedtime, in order to avoid a nightly litany of complaints, I ask my glass-is-half-empty-and-I-hate-the-pirate-glass-and-there’s-a-bug-in-it tween to list three good things, two neutral things, and one sad thing about her day. Sometimes if she needs to share more than one sad thing, I…
While researching my obligations for #juryduty Thursday, I came across this “Juror’s Creed.” The gender-specific reference to men, the instruction to reflect upon the virtues of democracy, and the instruction to respect the judge’s education all hint at a historical context for the creed. Institutions never put their creeds into writing unless they feel those…
Spent a productive work day doing nothing but optimizing my blog. Added a very nice plugin for displaying thumbnails of related posts. Similar:If I don’t stock the officers’ pub on my #steampunk #fantasy #CGI flagship, who will? (All…PersonalGoodby big Android… hello little budget iPhone SE 3rd.I just removed from my syllabus template…AcademiaMaking sidewalks to go…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:My Minecraft-obsessed tween made this blocky foam pig at art camp. Next up: Stage Right summer musical th…AestheticsTwitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse | Siva Vaidhy…I joined Twitter for the first time duri…BusinessThere are…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:My daughter found where all the missing pens and pencils end upAmusingSyllabusing Like a BossAcademiaInfographics: the PowerPoint of the 2010sI used to say that PowerPoint slideshows…CybercultureSeton Hill University advertises for “Social & Digital Content Manager”The Social & Digital Content Manager…AcademiaStop trying to figure out if…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:When you accidentally send a "Dear Satan" letter.My family and I are in the voice cast of…PersonalPeople Thought an AI Was Brilliantly Analyzing Their Personalities, But It Was Actually Gi…”To begin our hoax…
While I am uncomfortable with the whole “classroom as marketplace” metaphor, since it’s pretty much gamifying without the fun, I am nonetheless interested in this strategy for encouraging students to collaborate by having them attach a value to the artifacts they present to the class for sharing.. We shop for everything from apps to ideas.…
The researchers found that each singer’s heartbeat was linked to the song’s melody – i.e. the speed and structure of the music. They also found that when the choir sang together, their heart rates tended to increase and decrease at similar times. “As soon as the singing begins, (the hearts) start following each other,” Vickhoff…
We live in an elegant universe. The cosmos is like a string symphony. Genes are selfish. There is an endless battle between thermodynamics and gravity. Do you love these statements, or hate them? The reading world gets pretty divided over whether or not it’s okay to apply metaphors and similes to descriptive science writing. It…
Literature majors and students otherwise drawn to literature courses can be an introverted bunch. Students overall can at times resist course projects that fall outside the expected parameters of a given discipline. Yet my class proved my assumptions wrong. Many of the students were nervous, to be sure, but overall they seemed to enjoy the…
Let’s start at the end point: what you’re doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication web filled with people and machines. You do this by pointing and clicking, tapping a few commands, organizing your thoughts into symbols that can be read and…