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:Trump, Obama seem equally disinterested in portrait unveiling — but journalism takes hits…On social media recently I saw people mo…AestheticsWilliam Shakespeare, Playwright and Poet, Is Dead at 52 On this date — April 23, 1616 — the cr…Culture‘Belonging Is Stronger Than Facts’: The Age of Misinformation As much as we like to think of our…CultureAcademic…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Mars Pole Holds Enough Ice to Flood Planet, Radar Study ShowsMars’s southern polar ice cap contains e…Current_Eventsxkcd: Pathogen ResistanceThis is just an excerpt. Read the whole …AmusingTrump, finally, takes the coronavirus emergency seriously CNN’s Stephen Collinson praises the pr…Current_EventsFormer NFL receiver Antwaan Randle El regrets ever playing football“There’s…

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:Hearing "Godzilla on My Mind" author Wiliam TsutsuiPersonalHasbro removes embedded typeface from My Little Pony website after copyright infringement … Considering the scope of the alleged in…AestheticsMy 4Cs StoryI chaired…

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:Maybe I'll start a cover band, cleaning up hip-hop songs…Maybe I’ll start a cover band, cleaning …CultureWe are the product that Facebook has been testingUp to now, I refrained from posting anyt…Business'Peter Pan Live' Was Never Intended to Be…

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…