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:The History of Typography Told in Five Animated MinutesOpen Culture. AestheticsNASA reconnects with Voyager 1 (after months of confusion)  NASA says it is once again abl…AwesomeThey Should Have Used Another TypefaceHave you ever noticed that the letters “…AestheticsNYT: G.W. Bush is "super-overexposed" and "so far to our right" — so they omitted his pre…The quotes…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Crazy, Kinetic, Acoustic Visit to the Carnegie Science CenterA few days ago, I blogged about visiting…EducationPluto FlybyWhen I was about 10, I wrote to NASA and…Current_EventsParrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships, No…A new study from researchers at Northeas…AwesomeMask-wearing cuts Covid…

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. Similar:Eye of Sauron, Hobbit Door, Palantir and One Ring Easter Eggs.AestheticsThe Current War (Quantum Theatre Musical)Waiting for The Current War to start. I …AwesomeThe Forsaken (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 1,…

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…