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:Can AI write good novels?I expect that this is probably the year …AcademiaMSU asks faculty & staff to volunteer in short-staffed dining halls; @MSU_Football tweets …MSU, instead of asking your profs to vol…AcademiaOrson Welles Radio Play "War of the Worlds" at 75 The New York Times reported “Many Fl…Culturen+1: The Stupidity of ComputersComputers are pretty…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Intimations of MortalityPlato, Montaigne, Pascal—those were the …CultureAfter a pretty crappy day, I found shreds of joy in this clip of socially distanced salsa.In my discipline, teaching small seminar…AestheticsThat’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.AestheticsPost-publication review as an efficient alternative to pre-publication peer…

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 #steampunk control panels. Recessed workstations with fold-down keyboards. #blender3d…PersonalEngrossing but difficult to watch: "Man in Cave" documentary on caver Floyd Collins I’m conflicted. This is a very well…

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:Did you put enough donuts in the elevator shaft of your #steampunk #neovictorian cruiser t…https://youtu.be/lSgv5L0sXtc &nbs…AestheticsMaybe I'll just delete these QUARTER OF A MILLION spam comments.Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in …CybercultureWanted in College Graduates: Tolerance for Ambiguity”What…