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:Interface changes make it a little harder to work with Google's image searchWhen I’m looking for a picture I’m going…BusinessProfessor teaches class of 300 students from his phone while trapped in elevator with 2 sm…https://twitter.com/jayvanbavel/status/1…AcademiaVeteran’s microphone cut off when he discusses Black people’s role in establishing Memoria…Who is this nobody Memorial Day keynote …CultureAdam Bard…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:The six wives of Henry VIII, in pie chart formIf you’ve ever wanted to see the reigns …AmusingSmalltalk through masks is hard; I really was glad to see so many familiar upper halves of…If you said hello to me recently and I d…CultureVideo: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror…

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:More #Blender3D practice. Additional details for a steampunk control panel. Just because.AestheticsFight choreography via teleconference. As You Like It @steelcityshakespearePersonalAnd you thought your last teleconference was rough!PersonalDear 11yo DaughterYou…

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:Captain Gearhart found some stairwell problems on his latest #Unity3D tour of his #Blender… AestheticsBuzzFeed plagiarism, deleted posts: Jonah Peretti explains.In 2012 my former Slate colleague Farhad…BusinessAfter some long-delayed recabling, these are the bits I culled from my work…

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…