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:Sparkle unicorn "Winston" lends ethos to a presentation on moral agency on anima…PersonalIndependence of the press: the "essential ingredient of liberty" (Alexis de Tocqueville)CultureFBI: 'Exercise Caution and Attempt to Verify Information Through Appropriate Official Chan…The FBI reminds journalists about a few …CultureLooking…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:Carolyn as Maria in West Side StoryPersonalCrazy, Kinetic, Acoustic Visit to the Carnegie Science CenterA few days ago, I blogged about visiting…EducationFDR in AnnieI’ve accepted the role of FDR in the upc…CulturePut up the Hoop Sooner: 10 lessons of parenting from one wise guy who's done doing the…
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:My 10yo…
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:How hate and misinformation go viral: A case study of a Trump retweetOn Sunday night, President Donald Trump …Academia10 Rules of Internet – Anil DashA very useful, concise summary of web-en…BusinessShe doesn't have keys…
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:Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little KidsFelt writey. Because reasons. The other…CultureBusiness as Usual #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 18) Quark accepts a lucrative …Rewatching ST:DS9 Playing tongo at…
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:The Distracted Classroom: Transparency, Autonomy, and PedagogyI don’t ban technology in my classroom, …AcademiaToday's 10sq cm of #steampunk control panel. #blender3d #blender3dartAestheticsTreasure peaceful moments in a turbulent world.AestheticsBlender 2.8 Released. Please leave us…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:Clever Modernization of Hamlet: Polonius with an iPhoneI teach Shakespeare in a literature clas…CultureFacebook shrinks fake news after warnings backfireIn its efforts to combat the spread of f…BusinessAI-generated essays are nothing to worry about (opinion)After reviewing 22 AI essays I asked my …AcademiaClassroom…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:I sometimes snark at the @Turnitin interface, but…I sometimes snark at the @Turnitin inter…CybercultureVideo-Game Violence Is Now a Partisan IssueScholar and essayist Ian Bogost traces t…CultureLoved seeing A Comedy of Errors @setonhillLoved seeing A Comedy of Errors @setonhi…TweetsDeadline seems to have briefly published, then taken…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:Take my feedback if you want to pass.As my students in a compressed online co…AcademiaI love my students enough to teach them the difference between passive voice and past tens…If a goggles-for-brains Lego…
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…