Several of my journalism students have gotten interested in infographics. I’m not finished with the spring term yet, but I can’t help thinking about the fall. When we look at our reading habits and our daily interaction with all this digital data that surrounds us day and night, it becomes clear that Kress point does…
Nancy Grace and Ashleigh Banfield Hold Split-Screen Interview in Same Parking Lot – Dashiell Bennett and Philip Bump – The Atlantic Wire. Similar:On UVa rape story: Rolling Stone editors "regret the decision to not contact the alleged a…Rolling Stone, how about you apologize b…AcademiaMy Student Calls Out a Mental Health Stigma in a Biased…
PHD Comics: It’s in the syllabus. Similar:Don't Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)https://youtu.be/CXm3WxU–fM?si=E1BHac8J…CultureAwesome Modular TablesMaura 331, where I’ll spend 6 hours a we…AcademiaNew York fails Common Core testsJust 23 percent of charter students scor…BusinessIf You Think You Hate Puns, You're WrongI wrote my college application essay on …AmusingNotes on Teaching August Wilson's Pittsburgh…
Similar:Having a rough day. But in a span of about 24 hours, three former students reached out to …One former student said I’m the only adu…AcademiaOne of the benefits of teaching at a small college, with small classes…In a final reflection video for a freshm…AcademiaStudent: “Just wanted to let you know that your class has…
Be still, my nerdy heart. Steampunk — which has inspired books, art and fashion — hinges on the idea of a future in which we use steam, rather than oil or electricity, as our primary source of energy. Still confused? Think 19th-century fashion and technology, but applied to a futuristic world. Or check out bing…
In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is [not multitasking, but] really doing something called “rapid toggling between tasks,” and is engaged in constant context switching. As economics students know, switching involves costs. But how much? When a consumer switches banks, or a company switches suppliers, it’s relatively easy…
The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen, Visual Effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator. He was a multi-award winner which includes a special Oscar and BAFTA. Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own…
Similar:Hide and Q (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 9) Riker, buffed up by Q, grants desires of the…Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…AmusingBurgh to Burg, episode 2.AcademiaTop U800. #chesstournamentPersonalI think I smelled a hint of my mint toothpaste just now. Wishful thinking, or another sign…For the past 2 weeks I have slept a lot,…AcademiaSettling…
Open Culture. Similar:My Teenage Son Does Not Know How To Mail A Letter – I Blame Technology – ReadWriteA father learns the Postal Service websi…CultureA serious summer activity.Once classes start again, we will all ha…CultureWinners Chosen in Annual Shakespeare Monologue and Scene ContestMichael Henninger took this wonderful ph…BooksAdding details to a clip-art silhouette, for a…
I don’t expect students to be constantly after me—and I wouldn’t want them to be. I also know that what looms large for them are their friends, families, and personal lives. But I’m beginning to learn that if students at large universities are starved for personal attention and connection, students at small colleges have so…
I’m on a committee that is exploring a multimodal a revision to my school’s freshman writing program. So far I have never seriously tried introducing new media content into a freshman writing course, but this may do the trick. After two semesters of teaching students to read, play, and write IF games, I can say…
Amusing visual representations of the color references in a handful of literary works. These are my colour signatures, an ongoing collection which are basically graphs of all the visual content in the books. For example when it might say ‘yellow brick road,’ ‘yellow’ gets a tally, or when for example in The Road it says…
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…
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…
Very important bit of history. For a start we would like to restore the first URL – put back the files that were there at their earliest possible iterations. Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share. We will also sift…
The other day, a Facebook friend posted a snapshot of a young store employee absorbed by a smartphone instead of stocking or cleaning. My 15yo has expressed zero interest in Facebook, though my 11yo is irked that some of her preteen friends already have accounts (despite the official 13+ Facebook policy). But soon I will…
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…
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…
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…
I will have to watch for these uses of “slash.” I wonder if it has any relation to the practice of using a slash to denote romantic pairings in fanfic (e.g. Harry/Hermione). Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me…