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:Halloween Candy Poisonings, School Shootings and Human Psychology What can parents do to minimize thei…Current_EventsWar via TikTok: Russia's new tool for propaganda machine “This is the way they go to war; it’s …Current_Events14 Machines That Were Brilliant in 1985I used something very similar to this sh…CultureYour second attempt at modeling #medievalyork fortifications in #blender3d will…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Stuffed planet Venus, made for me by my dear mother, around 1974.AestheticsRemembering the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (1986)Space Shuttle Challenger Destroyed (my …CultureCandy Land Was Invented for Polio Wards It is a game absent strategy, requi…AestheticsCOVID denial: ‘You are welcome to leave, but you will be dead before…

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:No interior yet. Getting there. Gotta start somewhere. Low-poly background detail for a me…No interior yet. Getting there. Gotta st…AestheticsCarolyn as Dolly Levi (Arts4Homeschoolers / Stage Right)I loved listening to…

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…