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:Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg strides past fettered drones at Mobile World Conference. I’d like to think that all these peopl…BusinessTrouble importing UMA clothes from Blender 3.6In Blender3D, I created a jumpsuit, rigg…CybercultureRare find discovered amid town's Old West kitschInstead of dispensing a card like Zoltar…AestheticsThe Challenger disaster, Jan. 28, 1986On this day in 1986, the…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:The reluctant wisdom of a science major in my freshman writing class.”There’s nothing left to say,” said a sc…AcademiaJohn Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker: His ideas altered the education of children…“You can concentrate the history of all …AcademiaSmalltalk through masks is hard; I really was glad to see…

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:An afternoon with Ben Franklin. CultureEverybody Dies (Shakespearean Tragedy Infographic) The image (by Magee and Griffin) is an…AestheticsJesus Christ SuperstarI have a daughter who does things. Her n…CultureStar Wars' Original,…

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…