Nancy Grace and Ashleigh Banfield Hold Split-Screen Interview in Same Parking Lot – Dashiell Bennett and Philip Bump – The Atlantic Wire. Similar:Dog and TP WallAmusingFirst Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News Shad and co say bots play a part…AcademiaKittenwar”May the cutest kitten win…” –Kittenw…AestheticsNTSB Blames Intern for…
PHD Comics: It’s in the syllabus. Similar:Ironic QuotesAmusingFascinating observation on Trump's ability to drive the "Spygate" story Within the span of five days, Trump we…CultureYep, it's time to read student papers on Flannery O'Connor.AcademiaSAT essay section: Problems with grading, instruction, and prompts.In my freshman writing courses I work ha…AcademiaHow Zuckerberg’s Facebook is like Gutenberg’s…
Similar:Who's ready for some free outdoor Hamlet?PersonalGIFs, memes and liveblogs: The controversial new language of book reviewingSalon has an interesting essay on multim…AestheticsDon’t worry: It’s not just art!Before a school play, a principal worrie…AestheticsA former student contacted me to share her thoughts.A few years ago, I told myself I would s…AcademiaLittle ThingsI recently came across…
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:Auditioning in Pittsbugh (flanked by shots from recent performances).CultureYahoo, You Nagged Me Too Many Times; Bye!I have a Yahoo account that I use when a…BusinessIt’s that time again.PersonalThings that have made me start singing "Tradition!" in my head so far todayAfter last night’s first rehearsal for “…AmusingMore delightful #steampunk control panels. These are computationally…
Open Culture. Similar:Presenting at #NEMLA session 8.1 Friday. “Hacking English: Examining a multimedia sandbox …AcademiaWonderfully Detailed Tribute to 1970s British TV Show Space: 1999″A middle aged geek” puts it well: “Utte…AestheticsWriting IndexJerz > About > Dennis G. Jerz [ P…AcademiaAstronauts cloaked Klingon space patch: Star Trek-inspired emblem revealed The current commander of the Internati…AestheticsStudents Produce Breathtaking 3D Simulation of 17thC…
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…
“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…