I just touched up a handout on Parallel Structure vs Faulty Parallelism. Similar:Telling Trump’s Story to Children: For Book Publishers, It’s TrickyThis is a challenging writing task. Pres…BooksJournalists prefer in-person interviews. Emailing questions to strangers and expecting the…An interview means a real-time give-and …EducationGoogle Docs "Writing to Learn" ActivityI created a fresh Google Docs page…
These comic panels cover the issue well. (Pennington Publishing) Similar:Showing vs. Telling (Example: "I like to win.")I just wrote these examples on a student…AestheticsWhen He Clicked the Link, You Won't Believe How Disappointed He WasAuthors of overhyped link text are like …CybercultureThe Sacramentality of Teaching and LearningFor the one-credit journalism class that…AcademiaI sometimes snark…
A thoughtful reflection on religion in Star Trek. While Humans aren’t depicted as participating in any form of organized religion (there is a reference to a Christmas party here, a nod to monotheism there), the series also includes a distrust of science and technology, regularly depicting mad scientists, societies over-dependent on technology, etc.) that insists…
If you’re legally present on a public street or sidewalk, you can legally photograph anything in plain view. (This includes children and crime victims… but just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea.) If law enforcement engages you, ask whether you are free to go; if so, then move out of the…
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 liberal arts and the humanities are as important as engineeringWe learned that though a degree made a b…AcademiaContagion (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 11)Picard faces aggressive Romulans and an …DesignSaint Crispin's Day Speech from "Henry V"Dennis Jerz performs the famous speech…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:Hamlet!PersonalCarolyn appears as homeschooled teenager "Carolyn." Free holiday show Tuesday at 7. PersonalThat gut-wrenching photo of immigrant children in a cage? First published in 2014.Don’t blame “the media” for using this p…CultureRefreshing my memory of working with reel-to-reel tape as a radio news intern (c. 1989).HistoryThe daughter is doing…
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:Don’t worry:…
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:In Defense Of Metaphors In Science WritingWe live in an elegant universe. The c…CultureFormer student: "I remember sometimes being annoyed with all of our blogging assignments, …A third alum in the last few weeks has c…AcademiaClassroom…
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:I don't expect any but the largest text will be legible in my #steampunk project, but it w…Aesthetics‘Tentacles squelching wetly’: the human subtitle writers under threat from AIArtificial intelligence is…
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:Facebook’s push of “related articles” to users without checking credibility draws fireThe links under your friend’s post got y…CybercultureHacking the Attention EconomyThe techniques that are unfolding are ha…CultureThe Outrageous Okona (TNG Rewatch, Season…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:So, what do professors do all day, anyway?Some days I am not Dennis. I am Marky Mc…AcademiaTell Me a Smart Story: On Podcasts, Videos, and Websites as Writing AssignmentsIt does take longer to evaluate student …AcademiaUpdating a handout I originally wrote in 1998.…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:Why Drag It Out?The ways that the informal speech of wom…CultureIt's been nice knowing you, iPad3 It’s been nice knowing you, iPad3, but…TweetsDigital Storytelling: Empower the Multimodal Writing Classroom with Scratch How can the busy writing teacher interes…AestheticsThis image of Mark Zuckerberg says so much…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:“Your resume is not about you:” Insights from a journalism hiring manager on how to succee…Your resume is not about you. It’s about…BusinessPerspective | After a stunning news conference, there’s a newly crucial…
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.…