Seton Hill Chemistry Club Hosts 30 Homeschool Students for Chemistry Day

Similar:Another section of #steampunk control panel. #neovictorian #design #aesthetics #blender3d …AestheticsMy student journos are meming it like bosses.PersonalEncounter at Farpoint (Season 1, Episode 1: ST:TNG Rewatch) Picard gathers his crew, hates…Rewatching ST:TNG after almost 20 years….CultureHitting the weekend with just 6 ungraded papers. #partylikeaprof Hitting the weekend with just 6 ungrad…PersonalCarolyn made it to…

The History of Typography Told in Five Animated Minutes

Open Culture. Similar:NAVY TO DROP ALL-CAPS COMMUNICATIONSCaps off to the Navy’s plan to drop all-…CultureAmazon may well be the most evil company in techLast week, I had a hardware emergency. A…BusinessAcademics want to preserve video games. The game industry is fighting them in court.For decades, champions of the video game…BusinessExcessive Copyright Strikes Again in 2016Current…

On Office Hours and Student Contact at the Small Liberal Arts College

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…

Teaching Composition with Interactive Fiction

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…

Jaz Parkinson “Colour Signatures”

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…

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…

Restoring the first website

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…

Texting? Pets? Millennials Are Flunking Job Interviews – CNBC

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…

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…

Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore

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…

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…

Stage Right’s ‘Seussical’ offers songs, messages

The Tribune-Review does a great job covering the local arts community. Here is their preview of this weekend’s Suessical. (My daughter plays one of the baby kangaroos, and my wife and I play Whos and various other supporting parts. I also play Judge Yertle the the Turtle and the Grinch’s dog, Max.) TribLIVE. Similar:I filed…

Rookie News Anchor — Fired Instantly for Dropping ‘Fing 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:The Hut Where the Internet Began – Atlantic MobileLet’s start at the end point: what you’r…CybercultureFor New Acquisitions, UMD Libraries Choose Ebooks by DefaultIncreasingly book vendors provide option…AcademiaBoston Herald Guild Members Boycotting Twitter After Reporter SuspendedMembers of the Herald’s editorial guild …Current_EventsGen…

Grading the MOOC University

The MOOC classrooms are growing at Big Bang rates: more than five million students worldwide have registered for classes in topics ranging from physics to history to aboriginal worldviews. It creates a strange paradox: these professors are simultaneously the most and least accessible teachers in history. —Grading the MOOC University – NYTimes.com. Similar:New book: basic…

Huge Collection of Free CC-Licensed Textbooks (2012)

2012 Book Archive. Business, humanities, writing, science. Similar:Watching ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ with 18,000 teenagers was one of the most profound theate…The arts are vital to our lives as human…BooksAmLit Rescue — Scratch GameA student in my “American Literature: 19…AcademiaMy colleague @crissycp offers warm soda bread and tea every year, as part of her authentic…AcademiaBeatrix…

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…

The GE Mascot That Proves They’ve Never Seen ‘The Matrix’

On a scale of 1 to 10, this definitely rates a WTF. Seriously, has no one in GE ever seen The Matrix? Literally any other robot in the history of film would have been a better choice — even RoboCop would’ve made people feel more at ease, because at least he’s a police officer. Agent…