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:Making the Switch to GMail Our wonderful IT folks have set up a…CybercultureTwine: the program that’s democratised the video gaming worldTwine games look and feel profoundly dif…CybercultureExplaining Twerking to Your ParentsI still haven’t seen the video, but this…AmusingThe Best Halloween Costume Is a Robot Halloween Costume – Atlantic MobileAwesome robot costume is awesome. The…AestheticsTrained eagle…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decadesSo what if a WaPo story about huge flaws…Current_EventsIn August, 2002, I was blogging about ebook readers and email in teaching; how urban legen…In August, 2002, I was blogging about …AcademiaWhat Modern Humans Can Learn From The Neanderthals' Extinction“You don’t like…

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:Enjoy the showmanship as a 94yo woman performs in a dance competition.https://youtu.be/8LOdmka4_90AestheticsStack of wooden desk trays with metal supports. #Blender3D. Normal map, glossy map; mahoga…My goal in trying to do…

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…