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:Twitter / Search – "couldn't remove your contacts" – All Tweets Twitter / Search – “couldn’t remove …AmusingHenry V Fans: Today is St Crispin's DayKing Henry rallies his troops just befor…CultureHow Facebook – the Wal-Mart of the internet – dismantled online subculturesFacebook wants you to spend more time on…BusinessGoogle engineers mined the text adventure game…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Do Black Holes Create New Universes? Physicist Lee Smolin InterviewCan’t wait until we get this end-of-year…CultureThe lesson of Rolling Stone and UVA: protecting victims means checking their stories It is a depressing certainty that th…Current_EventsIn Which I Ask a Hard-working Journalism Student to Consider UndeadlinesA student recorded this…

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 Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow: Icelandic bromance, with weapons, secret panels, and…I try to read to my kids for an hour eve…BooksMy tween found this creative…

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:MS Paint AdventuresWonderfully silly take on old-school poi…AmusingTreasure peaceful moments in a turbulent world.AestheticsNetworks cut away from Trump’s White House addressNEW YORK (AP) — ABC, CBS and NBC all cut…Current_EventsThe Game (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 6) Cadet…

Why You Never Truly Leave High School

It’s also abundantly, poignantly clear that during puberty, kids have absolutely no clue how to assess character or read the behavior of others. In 2005, the sociologist Koji Ueno looked at one of the largest samples of adolescents in the United States, and found that only 37 percent of their friendships were reciprocal—meaning that when…

Surviving the Next Apocalypse: a Modest Curriculum

Obviously, given this surge in student demand, we need to make survivalist education another distinctive feature of our educational mission, and we must scramble to build institutional capacity in “apocalypse preparedness.” The admissions office already has brochures: “Where would you send your child: someplace that prepares them for a 20th-century job, or a community that…