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:Diana Kimball on "What Scares Us About Programming?"A few months old, but still interesting:…AcademiaAnother visit to downtown Pittsburgh with my history-loving son.CultureIn October, 2002, I was blogging about stupid space explosions, the superiority complex, w…In October, 2002, I was blogging about …CybercultureWe are the product that Facebook has been testingUp to now, I refrained from…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Darwin Was Wrong: Your Facial Expressions Do Not Reveal Your EmotionsIn real life, people express a given emo…CultureMask-wearing cuts Covid incidence by 53%, says global study Globally, Covid cases exceeded 250 mil…CultureThank you, frog and friends, for reminding us all what the Internet is supposed to be for. …

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:A 40sq cm section of a #steampunk control panel. #blender3d #blender3dartAestheticsFor some reason, I saw a bump in traffic to a page that linked to a "make-your-own-Trump-e… This sort…

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:Hidden Spaces, New Possibilities I’ve often had dreams about returning …CultureBuzzFeed plagiarism, deleted posts: Jonah Peretti explains.In 2012 my former Slate colleague Farhad…BusinessWhat's a namber? (archived)Update, December 2024: Sadly, the “what’…CybercultureInnovative journalism: A game about the rising sea, a…