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:Lego TimelineThe Lego brick system was patented 50 ye…AestheticsVideo-Game Violence Is Now a Partisan IssueScholar and essayist Ian Bogost traces t…CultureThe Case for Slow Journalism: When to Unplug from the Endless News CycleOften when I see people in my social med…CybercultureMailbag: breaking in again » Raph's WebsiteGood advice from Raph Koster to someone …BusinessWhy Tetris…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:People Thought an AI Was Brilliantly Analyzing Their Personalities, But It Was Actually Gi…”To begin our hoax scenario, we intended…Culturefrom “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo EmersonThe poets made all the words, and theref…AestheticsNASA reconnects with Voyager 1 (after months of confusion)  NASA says it is once again abl…AwesomeUndergrad…

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:A colleague bakes Irish soda bread to share on the Humanities floor every St Patrick's DayPersonalI just looked up the context for the bald guy dropping the chili. I…

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:The Miller of the Dee; by James Baldwin; read by Dennis JerzI showed up at the recording studio for …AestheticsA Fistful of Datas (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 8) Worf Trapped in Western S…Rewatching ST:TNG Silly Gagh-Western …AmusingYes,…