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:Whispers of the Past-Herb Morrison and the HindenburgIn this short documentary, I voice Herb …CultureIn one small prairie town, two warring visions of AmericaGreat writing and great photography in t…CultureWhere There's a Whip, There's a WayThe girl was singing lyrics she learned…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:Zooming into the abyss: Black squares don’t contribute much to the learning environment.PersonalFall 2025 Grades Submitted!PersonalTaking a break from my syllabustering in order to design some stairs. I’ve learned so much…Taking a break from my syllabustering in…Personal#SHUConvocation is about to begin @setonhilluniversityPersonalGo not to the elves for counsel,…
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:New book:…
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_EventsOverheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool …AcademiaI asked…
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:'Atari Dump' Will Be Excavated, After Nearly 30 YearsThe New Mexico landfill or “Atari Dump” …AmusingThe Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of DenmarkUpdate, July 2015 –…
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:Two Steps Down the Interactive Fiction RoadWonderfully detailed analysis of two gro…AestheticsUdacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes CourseSuddenly, something that had been unthin…AcademiaClassic. So good! #startrek #tosPersonalRandom sibling selfie.PersonalThe Surprisingly…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:Family Feud: Tense Thanksgiving for Facebook and George Takei Businesses — as well as groups like no…BusinessNew CarWednesday morning my resourceful brother…BusinessIn December 1999, I Was Blogging About Joseph Heller, E-Journalism, and Travel WritingIn December 1999, I was blogging about: …BusinessFake News Remains…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:What Does the Demise of Cursive Mean?Are you aware that our children aren’t b…CultureThe Medium is the MoralIt has been more than 40 years since Mar…AcademiaThe Distracted Classroom: Transparency, Autonomy, and PedagogyI don’t ban technology in my classroom, …AcademiaLLM error rates I worked on LLMs,…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:How Technology Has Changed The Way We WriteSocial media services have put writing t…CultureMade it to the closing performance @quantumtheatreDramaPfully Pfizered and pfeeling pfine so pfar. Current_EventsJust a random side corridor in the…
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…