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:As Twinkle Twinkle is to Suzuki musicians, so is a wooden shipping crate to CGI modelers. …https://youtu.be/diQF9buONqY I ha…AestheticsThree-dimenstional PrintersA new generation of three-dimensional pr…DesignOver the years I have leveled up my Blender3D skills.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNLArSlF…AestheticsThe Myth of North America, in One PaintingFascinating art history — a thoughtful …AestheticsCarnegie Science Center: Roboworld (and a bit of SportsWorks)Here’s…

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 …DesignDisability advocates: Don't drop COVID-19 safety measuresWith the lethal threat of COVID-19 on th…AcademiaCockatoos start sipping from Sydney’s drinking fountains after mastering series of complex…Nature is amazing. Dr John…

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:Everyone Nov 1AmusingThe Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Rewatching ST:DS9 Space Dad fusses ho…Amusing#PPTPlaytime Tartuffe @thepublicpgh (Looking forward to…

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…