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

Similar:A masked, socially distant museum visit. So nice to get away from syllabuses and email for… Ford built about a half dozen of the…AestheticsA former student working in SEO shared this. I miss Google classic.AmusingWalking in Another's Skin: Failure of Empathy in To Kill a MockingbirdThe money quote: “In this essay, I argue…AcademiaAlice in Quantumland:…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are right and God isn't 'a magician wi…The theories of evolution and the Big Ba…CultureCaroll "Big Bird" Spinney was originally to be on NASA's doomed Challenger flight And he was even offered a seat as Bi…EducationStuffed planet Venus, made for…

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:The Anatomy of a Shakespeare Play: King Lear (Free video lecture from Pict, 2pm Friday)PersonalKindle App Vs. iBooks. (Spoiler: They’re Virtually Identical Now!)I noticed with interest that Kindle now…

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:Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the SequesterApparently these are two famous and phys…AestheticsTribunal (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 25) O'Brien Must Suffer: shore leave i… Rewatching ST:DS9 O’Brien annoys …JusticeVienna State Opera, funny ballet.Vienna State Opera, funny…