The MOOC Honeymoon is Over: Three Takeaways from the Coursera Calamity

The honeymoon with MOOCs is over. The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera…

How Patriotic

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Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:The worst-case scenario Converging in a tense section of Huntsville: A white police office…This article focuses on a police officer…CultureFive myths about daylight saving timeNo, Daylight Saving Time was not created…Businessfrom “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo EmersonThe poets made all the words, and theref…AestheticsPaleo-Future: robotsThis is from the…

A Wealth of Words

People with similar vocabulary sizes may vary significantly in their talent and in the depth of their understanding. Nonetheless, there’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary. Simply put: knowing more words makes you smarter. And between 1962 and the present, a big segment of the…

Pinkalicious — “Buzz Off”

My daughter plays the Bumblebee in “Buzz Off,” which both ended Act I and opened Act II in last weekend’s Stage Right! production of Pinkalicious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gr6jlrndSU Similar:Picture Books Languish as Parents Push ‘Big-Kid Books’Picture books are so unpopular these day…BooksWhat a great time everyone had at the "Cabbies."CultureA Grave Tale (a short story I narrated…

Make Games in the Classroom with Inform 7

I’ll blog pretty much anything that has to do with Inform 7. Text-based games, or interactive fiction, have continued to evolve since the days of Zork. Many works can be powerful for play in the classroom: Emily Short’s “interactive epistolary” First Draft of the Revolution, Andrew Plotkin’s physics-grounded Dual Transform, Peter Nepstad’s historically grounded 1893: A…

Almost Flat Design

Apple, Google and Microsoft have very different design aesthetics. Almost Flat Design | Matthew Moore Design. Similar:In January, 2002 I was blogging about… A 20-something former CEO takes a fa…BooksMinimalist Graphic Interpretations of Philosophical Concepts — Prints by Genis Carreras …Art Prints by Genis Carreras | Society6….AestheticsWhy No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext StoryIt’s…