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:Giving Obsolete Books an Afterlife as Theatre PropsOnce, someone really cared about these o…AestheticsKids, Pants, Booze, Music: Trouble In River City And AlwaysHe’s not holding back here; he is tellin…CultureIconic 'West Side Story' still resonates todayCarolyn Jerz of Greensburg will be playi…ArtAmazon…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:Challenger Disaster: 30 YearsI was a high school senior, watching on …CybercultureRenata, Carolyn and Alex in a scene from this weekend's Pippin.CultureThe girl as Mrs Lovett with Ben Federico as Sweeney Todd.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITqwfTCk…CultureOne of my students is demonstrating the perceived value of brand-name vs no-name products…. PersonalLecturing is So Much…
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:How PatrioticAmusingMe…
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:Juror's CreedWhile researching my obligations for #ju…CultureHabits for happiness: tips for looking on the bright side of lifeHabits for happiness: tips for looking o…PersonalShe doesn't have keys or a phone or an ID. Why…
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:Wonderfully Detailed Tribute to 1970s British TV Show Space: 1999″A middle aged geek” puts it well: “Utte…AestheticsMore #steampunk control panel bits for a #neovictorian #blender3D project. I have a master…AestheticsAnother…
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:Between static hand-coded HTML pages and modern content-management systems, there used to …When I started my blog in 1999 (by addin…CybercultureGoogle's Super Bowl Ad: A Romance in SearchI didn’t watch the game, but…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:The iPad Falls Short of Expectations—But What Does That Mean? The iPad market is saturated. Table…BusinessCameras and Masks: Sustaining Emotional Connections with Your Students in an Age of COVID1…There are some sound pedagogical reasons…AcademiaThe Impact of Google on Our MemorySo what is it…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:No, Running Online Classes Isn't CheaperA good response to the myth that the lab…AcademiaMicrosoft Research Launches Code Hunt Game to Teach ProgrammingAnother item for the “when I’m finished …BusinessWhat You Need To Know About WordPress 3.9 Users are now able to create audio and…Current_EventsI should…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:Ground-nesting Yellowjacket WaspsWhile my 16yo son was mowing the lawn wi…Culture#blender3d is teaching me more than I ever thought I’d need to know about roof geometry. E…#blender3d is teaching me more than I…
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…