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:Branding Essentials for the English Major: 4 Examples of How to Re-package Your Skills for…It seems every week some “expert” publis…AcademiaDarmok (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 2) Picard of the Federation, His Metapho…Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…CultureMaybe it wasn’t a…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:Attending Religious Perspectives on the War in Gaza. Attending Religious Perspectives on the…PersonalI am very happy for these folks, who spent 20 or so years tweaking an insanely complex, co… AwesomeThe Anatomy of a Shakespeare Play: King Lear (Free video lecture from Pict, 2pm Friday)PersonalI am happy with…
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:Paparazzi-proof clothing…
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:My Minecraft-obsessed tween made this blocky foam pig at art camp. Next up: Stage Right summer musical th…AestheticsParallel structure in writing: Use it!These comic panels cover the issue well….HumanitiesJury Duty UpdateI’m a happy, responsible,…
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:Allegiance (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 18) Picard plays 'Escape the Roo…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….EthicsThis is Ralph. Ralph is a concept, created by you while reading this.AmusingShort-range…
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:A familiar performer choreographed and dances the "Canaan Days" tango in Stage Right's Jos…AestheticsPfully Pfizered and pfeeling pfine so pfar. Current_EventsOkay, please stop droolingIt perfectly pulls together four importa…CybercultureJohn Speed’s 1611 map of…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:Stapler jam during a midterm exam.My years of watching MacGyver definitely…AcademiaThe Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s SilenceWired, obviously having worked on a thin…BusinessNested (procedurally generated game of expanding drop-down lists)A text game that you play by opening fol…AwesomeWhy Even Try if You Have…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:Harvard revokes admission of several students for posting "offensive" memesThe First Amendment of the constitution …AcademiaPlans for the Little Known Confederate HelicopterThe possibilities of combining Civil War…DesignSCUBA Diving at the PoolBecause a beautiful sunny day at the poo…CultureFacebook's Mike Hudack rants about the media: Why…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:More modeling in #blender3d. Very happy with reflections and lighting. (The teacup is a po…DesignOp-ed: QAnon, the Holocaust and the deadly power of conspiracy theories The Holocaust was the most murdero…CultureMaybe I'll start…
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…