Are you aware that our children aren’t being taught to trim their own goose-quill pens? And don’t get me started on the growing number of urban children who lack adequate access to parchment. Here’s a welcome, balanced response to the decreased role that penmanship plays in today’s schools — and in today’s society. My clients…
A wonderful analysis of an important part of world-building in science fiction. As most of you probably know, filmmakers use the term “MacGuffin” to stand for some object that various characters in the tale are competing for. A secret paper, a formula, a stunning gem, a statue of a Maltese falcon… In Fantasy and SF…
This is why I require my “new media journalism” students to do more than simply write stories — they must know how to edit, create multimedia, and work on team projects. See other sobering charts, via Business Insider. Similar:Life in Code and Software (Open Humanities Press)This book explores the relationship betw…AcademiaGoogle, AI Announcements, and the…
When you click “like” for a cause in Facebook, you may be helping scammers make money. People buy and sell fan pages. That “like” that you clicked gives whoever owns the page more access to your Facebook feed; the more feeds the page can access, the more money it’s worth. Structure of a Facebook scam…
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…
Similar:Quidditch Comes to Seton HillwartsVisitors often remark the campus reminds…AcademiaAdding a little Middle-Earth drama to a photo shoot.The girl was concerned she wasn’t nerdy …AestheticsMuseum of Endangered SoundsImagine a world where we never again hea…AestheticsThe ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor? It Never Should Have HappenedI regularly teach Flannery O’Connor, and…AcademiaWhat Do Happy Teens Do? Hint: It…
This is making the rounds among my English professor Facebook friends. I’m an English Professor in a Movie Good morning, and welcome to Advanced English Literature—I’m Professor Anglosoundingname. As you can see, I have a mane of silver hair and wear a corduroy blazer with leather elbow patches stitched with corduroy threads that have their…
My sister would fill up a video tape with episodes of Babylon 5 as they aired, and she’d send me each tape as it filled up. When a new tape arrived, my wife and I would watch the whole thing in one sitting. While I haven’t deliberately made time to watch any TV show since…
Most teachers are those who, not surprisingly, have made it through the educational system smoothly enough to replicate it, even when they think of themselves as radical reformers of that system. Especially English teachers. English teachers are the gatekeepers to the normal brained. (I see this all the time when I am hanging out with…
Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Thank you, frog and friends, for reminding us all what the Internet is supposed to be for. https://twitter.com/PicturesFo…AestheticsShakespeare on EclipsesPrepping for tomorrow’s first meeting of…AcademiaBill Murray Admits A Painting Saved His LifeDuring a February press conference in Lo…AestheticsThe phrase "debate begins" in the headlines of multiple stories on…
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…
NBC aired doctored versions of a 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case, which led to an apology and several people losing their jobs in April. On Monday, MSNBC aired a video that seemed to show a grief-stricken man being heckled by pro-gun lobbyists while talking about his recently murdered son. via The Hollywood Reporter Similar:Knee-jerk sharing of…
[S]ize seems to predict lifespan. The formula seems to be nature’s way to preserve larger creatures who need time to grow and prosper, and it not only operates in all living things, but even in the cells of living things. It tells animals for example, that there’s a universal limit to life, that though they…
Text A: Uh-Oh, Photo Of Crying Woman On Cover Of National Newspaper Uh-oh, according to alarmed sources across the nation, a picture of a crying woman appeared on the front page of a national newspaper this morning. “Ah, shit—this can’t be good,” Arlington, TX resident James Licari said… –The Onion Test B: What It Feels…
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:I came of age playing too many CD-ROM point-and-click adventure games to ignore these stee…I came of age playing too many CD-ROM po…AestheticsGathering background objects to create cluttered shelves.…
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…
A significant number of young people today, when they enter the workforce, will never have been exposed to the valuable skills that come with arts education and specifically the theater experience — thinking on one’s feet; effectively communicating; practicing and rehearsing; writing; and collaborating as a team. This is a missed opportunity. According to the…
The web also creates the illusion that all information is available and accessible to anyone at any time. This common view represses the real disparities of access in our world and also undermines the need for educational experts. After all, if you can get all knowledge from Wikipedia or a Google search, why do you…
If you took everything human beings have ever written — an estimated 50 billion megabytes of text — and stored it in DNA, that DNA would still weigh less than a granola bar.”There’s no problem with holding a lot of information in DNA,” Goldman says. “The problem is paying for doing that.”Agilent waived the cost…
Baffled that the young reader for some reason circled the word “cottage” every time she came across it in the text, the used copy of The Scarlet Letter stated that it truly began to doubt Dobson’s reading-comprehension skills when she wrote a note on page 37 suggesting the entire novel might in fact be an…