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:Some fairy tales may be 6000 years oldFairy tales are transmitted through lang…CultureWhy Can't Millennials Find Jobs?Half of hiring managers say wearing atti…BusinessDiana Kimball on "What Scares Us About Programming?"A few months old, but still interesting:…AcademiaBefore and after making a meme of…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:The girl has gotten progressively more dedicated over the past few days.When you’re a homeschool parent, you go …AestheticsMy English major skills crushed the girl in Bananagrams.Wildcard? You mean quitter tile! GamesA warning to college profs from a high school teacherMy students did well on those questions …AcademiaDate…
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:Make America…
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:Overheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool …AcademiaJury Duty UpdateI’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-…GovernmentAnd the girl has succeeded in getting me to…
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:Gathering background objects to create cluttered shelves. This Baby Gund “Rainbow Hector” …AmusingReally enjoyed watching Your Name with the family. Visuals hooked me, but the story kept m…AestheticsThe Zombie Argument…
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:My 10yo Launches a Soda Bottle Rocket http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNu8…AestheticsFacebook Updates News Feed So Your Favorite Friends Rise to the TopNow, News Feed, at its most basic level,…BusinessMerry Christmas 2018PersonalPopcorn MakerI’ll have to look into…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:Your verbs have been lost and will be invisible until sentence author revision.The marketers and programmers at Google’…CybercultureMy daughter found where all the missing pens and pencils end upAmusingI Hate Your BlogI hate your blog. Your recipe for vegan …AmusingDon't hide your online…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:Why Tetris is the 'perfect' video gameRather than wanting to make a film about…AestheticsHow not to attract women to coding: Make tech pinkJust watched videos of the musicals “Tho…AcademiaTwitterverse, are we grieving over coder droves now leaving? AmusingMeme unfairly blames "protesters" for four crimesA Facebook…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:Loved part 2 of Romeo and Juliet @thepublicpgh #pptplaytime (Next week: Tartuffe)CultureNot doing well. As usual.PersonalMany familiar faces in this cast but this one is my favorite. Sold out opening of Grand Ho…PersonalToday's…
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…