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:Student: “Just wanted to let you know that your class has benefited me outside of just lit…In my online class on literary dystopia,…AcademiaWhen you hear your daughter the understudy is going on for a sold-out show. Live theater i… CultureThe Printed Word…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:The Tribune-Review published a nice preview of Dani Girl.My daughter Carolyn, Matthew Hommel, Vin…DramaSpring 2020 Quarantine Grades SubmittedPersonalMy theory: Trump was composing therapeutic poetry, and got stuck on the last line. PersonalGeometry and color maps for wooden desk tray. #Blender3D #practiceThe blue image is a “normal map,” which …AestheticsThis friendly…
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:Pluto FlybyWhen…
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:Jury Duty UpdateI’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-…GovernmentMy Minecraft-obsessed tween made this blocky foam pig at art camp. Next up: Stage Right summer musical th…AestheticsShe doesn't have keys or a phone or an ID.…
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:Enjoy the showmanship as a 94yo woman performs in a dance competition.https://youtu.be/8LOdmka4_90AestheticsKirk's manly, sensitive advice to young CharlieIn popular culture, Captain Kirk from th…CultureHippocratic Oath #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4,…
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:Star Wars: The Last Jedi abuse blamed on Russian trolls and 'political agendas'More than half of the hostile responses …CultureRussian troll factory paid US activists to help fund protests during electionRussian trolls posing…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityAfter marking a set of bibliography exer…AcademiaPioneering Harvard Blog Site Wrapping It UpI still use blogs.setonhill.edu, which I…AcademiaViral App FaceApp Now Owns Access To More Than 150 Million People's Faces And NamesViral app FaceApp has…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:Juror's CreedWhile researching my obligations for #ju…CultureHow The NY Times Is Sparking the VR Journalism RevolutionJust as young people in journalism schoo…CybercultureRevisiting a Website I Created in 1996: Engineering Writing Centre (University of Toronto)During the Christmas break of 1996, when…AestheticsA WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:"Dammit Mom, I'm a daughter, not a theoretician!"”Dammit Mom, I’m a daughter, not a theor…AmusingSelf-Regulation: American Schools Are Failing Nonconformist KidsFor a while, we were part of a homeschoo…CultureThat should be the top…
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…