Er.. no. This is not Anne of Green Gables. Canada’s beloved literary heroine is a freckled redhead who thinks she’s plain. This stock photo hottie in no way fits the bill. And Wuthering Heights is not a prequel to Twilight, as this cover design seems to suggest. Anne Of Green Gables Blond On Book Cover…
Are you aware that our children aren’t being taught to trim their own goose-quill pens? And don’t get me started on the growing number of urban children who lack adequate access to parchment. Here’s a welcome, balanced response to the decreased role that penmanship plays in today’s schools — and in today’s society. My clients…
A wonderful analysis of an important part of world-building in science fiction. As most of you probably know, filmmakers use the term “MacGuffin” to stand for some object that various characters in the tale are competing for. A secret paper, a formula, a stunning gem, a statue of a Maltese falcon… In Fantasy and SF…
This is why I require my “new media journalism” students to do more than simply write stories — they must know how to edit, create multimedia, and work on team projects. See other sobering charts, via Business Insider. Similar:In September, 2003, I was blogging about the emerging fad of internet plagiarism, ethnical…In September, 2003, I…
When you click “like” for a cause in Facebook, you may be helping scammers make money. People buy and sell fan pages. That “like” that you clicked gives whoever owns the page more access to your Facebook feed; the more feeds the page can access, the more money it’s worth. Structure of a Facebook scam…
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…
Similar:Updating a handout I originally wrote in 1998. #tech #writingA mechanism description analyzes (that i…AcademiaRivals (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 11) A charming entrepreneur opens a casi… Rewatching ST:DS9 A man in a fanc…AmusingTwitter, Fix Your Cropping AlgorithmWhen given the chance to crop four diffe…CybercultureCollege Professors Hate Sharing These Mind-Blowing Study Tips (#3 Made Me Cry)…
This is making the rounds among my English professor Facebook friends. I’m an English Professor in a Movie Good morning, and welcome to Advanced English Literature—I’m Professor Anglosoundingname. As you can see, I have a mane of silver hair and wear a corduroy blazer with leather elbow patches stitched with corduroy threads that have their…
My sister would fill up a video tape with episodes of Babylon 5 as they aired, and she’d send me each tape as it filled up. When a new tape arrived, my wife and I would watch the whole thing in one sitting. While I haven’t deliberately made time to watch any TV show since…
Most teachers are those who, not surprisingly, have made it through the educational system smoothly enough to replicate it, even when they think of themselves as radical reformers of that system. Especially English teachers. English teachers are the gatekeepers to the normal brained. (I see this all the time when I am hanging out with…
Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Scaring People Can Make Them Healthier, But It Isn't Always The Way To GoAs my freshman writing students assemble…CultureIn Defense Of Metaphors In Science WritingWe live in an elegant universe. The c…CultureCaptain, the Fake News Detectors are Offline! Slate has a good article about Willi…CybercultureEco-critical Code Studies: Reconfigurations…
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…
NBC aired doctored versions of a 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case, which led to an apology and several people losing their jobs in April. On Monday, MSNBC aired a video that seemed to show a grief-stricken man being heckled by pro-gun lobbyists while talking about his recently murdered son. via The Hollywood Reporter Similar:Opening Night: New…
[S]ize seems to predict lifespan. The formula seems to be nature’s way to preserve larger creatures who need time to grow and prosper, and it not only operates in all living things, but even in the cells of living things. It tells animals for example, that there’s a universal limit to life, that though they…
Text A: Uh-Oh, Photo Of Crying Woman On Cover Of National Newspaper Uh-oh, according to alarmed sources across the nation, a picture of a crying woman appeared on the front page of a national newspaper this morning. “Ah, shit—this can’t be good,” Arlington, TX resident James Licari said… –The Onion Test B: What It Feels…
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:Frodo Baggins, A.B.D.When I had pneumonia a few years into my…AcademiaVibing to a park saxophonist as I code for an upcoming conference presentation, and wait t…Vibing to a park…
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…
A significant number of young people today, when they enter the workforce, will never have been exposed to the valuable skills that come with arts education and specifically the theater experience — thinking on one’s feet; effectively communicating; practicing and rehearsing; writing; and collaborating as a team. This is a missed opportunity. According to the…
The web also creates the illusion that all information is available and accessible to anyone at any time. This common view represses the real disparities of access in our world and also undermines the need for educational experts. After all, if you can get all knowledge from Wikipedia or a Google search, why do you…
If you took everything human beings have ever written — an estimated 50 billion megabytes of text — and stored it in DNA, that DNA would still weigh less than a granola bar.”There’s no problem with holding a lot of information in DNA,” Goldman says. “The problem is paying for doing that.”Agilent waived the cost…