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:Any pasta can become a pasta salad when the office microwave stops working!CultureRehearsal Rabbi-CamThis weekend, I will be playing the rabb…CultureAfter you finish your brass-polishing shift, join me at the Gear and Heart to swap stories…AestheticsA Note to My Remaining Students at…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:“Thank you for being kind.” —Friday afternoon email from a student who’d been a little sal…PersonalAlike (2015)This short film reminds us why art matte…AestheticsThe girl performed musical commercials for a fund-raiser in the Laurel Highlands (and she …The girl performed musical commercials f…CultureCreated a new graphic for an…
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:Graphic Design…
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:And the girl has succeeded in getting me to wear t…And the girl has succeeded in getting me…TweetsTweet: Came around the corner and saw my kids huddled on…Came around the corner and saw my…
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:Another section of a #steampunk control panel. Useful for a cutaway shot after a character…AestheticsMe (glares in iambic pentameter)Me: I need to post the opening lecture f…AcademiaMany things in the…
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:Delightful #steampunk #neovictorian control panel. #blender3d #blender3dart #design #aesth…One of many steampunk control panels I’v…AestheticsAn unreal Mars skylineThat awesome image showing Earth, Venus …AestheticsThank you, anonymous donor of Mardi Gras candy.Okay, on closer…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:The Ensigns of Command (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 2) Data plays MacGyver to sa…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….MediaFirst-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to GoI check into Musk’s X every few days, bu…BusinessAstronaut Luca Parmitano describes near-drowning experience in spaceWith water…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:'Facebook is simply not cool anymore' to teens, study findsTeens also don’t seem to care that Faceb…BusinessSights, Sounds, and Smells of Elizabethan TheaterSomewhere during my education I picked u…AcademiaDuke stops assigning numeric values to essays, test scoresThis story is about the admissions proce…AcademiaWhy I Rarely…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:Just a random side corridor in the #neovictorian #steampunk cruiser I've been building in …AestheticsI'm down to a king and two pawns but my son likes playing until he crushes me.PersonalSlash: Not Just…
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…