Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learning and memory.

Fairly early in the semester, I can spot the students who will struggle to complete big assignments, because they are often the same ones who can’t resist the urge to check up on their Facebook friends. Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their…

Grading writing: The art and science — and why computers can’t do it

Tech companies and university administrators get excited from time to time about the value of software that purports to evaluate student writing. This article does a great job explaining exactly what it is that writing teachers do when they respond to student writing. (We’re doing a lot more than looking for misplaced commas.) The past…

Churnalism Search

At the University of Virginia, one summer when I had a summer job writing press releases for a theater company, and I also volunteered for one of the campus papers, I was amused to see how much of my press releases would appear under a different author’s name in the competing student paper. One time…

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story

It’s not that hypertext went on to become less interesting than its literary advocates imagined in those early days. Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s…

Oh the Overthinks You Can Overthink: Horton the Elephant, the Wickersham Brothers, and Masculinity in Seussical

Yesterday, I performed in a school matinee for Suessical, dashed back to campus to advise with students working on their 20-page term papers for Literary Criticism, served on oral exam panels for four graduating seniors, then went back to the theater for an evening performance. Somewhere along the way, I found myself chatting in an…

We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now | History & Archaeology

“Hear my voice. Alexander Graham Bell.” That was really quite thrilling. In that ringing declaration, I heard the clear diction of a man whose father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface…

Rookie News Anchor — Fired Instantly for Dropping ‘F***ing S***’ On the Air

Yes, it is nerve-wracking to speak live on the air, but… wow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF6OySsPpko   Similar:Manti Te'o's Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The Colleg…Great example of investigative journalis…Current_EventsDigital Storytelling (EL231: Topics in Creative Writing) EL231 “Digital Storytelling” (Dec 1…Academia#PPTPlaytime Tartuffe @thepublicpgh (Looking forward to Part 2 of this live videoconferenc…CultureData-Related Deaths, 1960-2019…

Huge Collection of Free CC-Licensed Textbooks (2012)

2012 Book Archive. Business, humanities, writing, science. Similar:The Speech Eisenhower Never Gave On The Normandy InvasionA fascinating text from an alternate his…CultureAugust Wilson House officially opens in Pittsburgh's Hill DistrictThe August Wilson House officially opene…CultureAPNews.com Photo Still Says Sam Smith "declared his pronouns 'they/them'" a Week LaterThe Associated Press was widely criticiz…CultureRobot competition requires science,…

Police, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probe

In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials. Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were…

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

A thoughtful analysis. Problem-solvers in the Information Age must train themselves to ignore floods of true-but-trivial and unreliable-but-accessible information. I see this all the time with students who Facebook their way through my class presentations on the function of scholarly peer review, but then submit pages from content farms in their term paper drafts. According…