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:More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the… Imagine a society that engineers its…Culture10 Rules of Internet – Anil DashA very useful, concise summary of web-en…BusinessJournalism students guiltily ignoring the "no electronic devices" note in the program duri…That moment when you see a dozen or more…AcademiaThe…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:In June, 2001 it seems I only blogged three times…I’m not sure what else I was doing durin…AmusingRussian trolls 'spreading discord' over vaccine safety onlineThe good news is that there are fewer Am…Cyberculture"Wolf!", cried the shepherd boy. (The whole thread is worth reading.) https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/statu…CultureThe six wives of Henry…

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:Backstage with the White Swan and her prince.PersonalDr. Seuss Racism Controversy: A Dr. Seuss Expert Unpacks the Author's History With Racism,…Nobody is banning, cancelling or censori…BooksFormer student: "I remember sometimes…

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…