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:Okay, not my most thrilling #blender3D creation, but a fantasy steampunk ship-of-the-line …DesignTime Squared (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 13)Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…PersonalReception after faculty workshop. #partylikeaprofessorPersonalMy J-Term course on August Wilson doesn’t actually start until tomorrow, but the first…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:There’s Something Off About LED BulbsWhen I’m stressed, or I feel life is spi…AestheticsSpring 2025 Final Grades Submitted!AcademiaWar via TikTok: Russia's new tool for propaganda machine “This is the way they go to war; it’s …Current_Events'Little Mermaid' brings new music to the Andersen fairy tale – Pittsburgh Tribune-ReviewThe…
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:Flannery O'Connor…
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:Overheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool …AcademiaTweet: For an anatomy project, my #geekling made a Vulcan…For an anatomy project, my #geekling mad…TweetsHello,…
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:Dance of "the awkward nerd trying to act really cool" Carolyn (doing a really cool dance m…AestheticsI think they mean typeface conference, but "Font Conference" is still amusing.I think they…
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:I didn't mark a single paper or set foot in a classroom. Here's why this prof is tired fro…I submitted my final grades a few weeks …AcademiaYou aren’t doing it wrong… if no…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance WorkersAI is getting better at rote tasks, but …BusinessLatest on Napster(See also: Digital Hollywood- No Resolut…Current_Eventsdungeon.jpg (JPEG Image, 2535×1616 pixels)Great Zork map.AestheticsMy "Writing About Literature" Students Are Sampling Text Adventure GamesI’m having my students play Adam Cadre’s…CulturePersonal Essays:…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:Replaying Childhood: On Gifting my Video Games to the Library of CongressTevor Owens writes: Giving up my games…CultureTwitter, Fix Your Cropping AlgorithmWhen given the chance to crop four diffe…CybercultureFired for Making a Game: The Inside Story of I Get This Call Every DayHe knows that…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:Why Shouting Down Speakers Is Absolutely WrongWilson offers a good explanation of the …AcademiaBeing a deaf lipreader during a pandemic means increased social anxietyEven social events are a minefield. The …AcademiaFind yourself someone…
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…