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:New Voices For The Voiceless: Synthetic Speech Gets An UpgradeWonderful, inspiring article that uses t…Culture2001: A Space Odyssey – Discerning Themes through Score and ImageryIncredibly detailed close reading of the…AestheticsIt not only went VROOM, it carried chunky plastic letters that could *spell* VROOM.Tonight, when I got home after all the e…AestheticsVienna State Opera, funny ballet.Vienna…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:AP Style tips on "neurodiversity"EmpathyDeath of NFL inevitable as middle class abandons the gameLike vegan pizzas and secular Christmas …BusinessAt Age 11, I Named the Curiosity RoverWonderful story! I still remember that …EducationHexagons Are the Bestagonshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs…AmusingUniversity disavows chocolate milk, concussions studyThe University of Maryland on Friday dis…AcademiaTrump, finally,…

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:Detailed Articulation of Feet in Unity3DI’m following a lot of tutorials, and co…AestheticsThe daughter sings and performs Shakespeare at the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Festival t…CultureFind yourself someone who makes…

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…