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:Part of Wright brothers' 1st airplane on NASA's Mars chopper “Wilbur and Orville Wright would be pl…AwesomeWriting Computer Games with InklewriterIf brass lanterns or slathering-fanged g…CybercultureTwitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse | Siva Vaidhy…I joined Twitter for the first time duri…BusinessFound: Brass Candle SnifterThis was by…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong)At a glance of the edited footage, it’s …DesignAn unreal Mars skylineThat awesome image showing Earth, Venus …AestheticsThe Chase (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 20) Planet-hopping archaeological DNA…Rewatching ST:TNG A well-done mystery…CultureLecturing is So Much Easier…

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:And so it begins.BooksTesting out my new greenscreenFriendly advice… If you are practicing…AestheticsWhen she's grown and flown, I will miss the thick deposit of glitter in my back seat.When…

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:Axios journalism style delivers traditional news content in scannable formatIn addition to the fact that it’s good n…Current_EventsFamily ( #StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 2) Picard Retreats to Family Vineyar…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….DramaWhile searching my bag…