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:Charlie and the Chocolate Factory / Willy Wonka Lesson Plans Through our local theater school, ou…CultureFacebook Axes “Trending” SidebarFacebook is discontinuing the “trending”…BusinessDr Jerz I think your microphone glitchedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPqnXF7A…AcademiaStories from the Tall Tales Club – Episode 1 The Time ElephantI’ve had a lot of fun in this new ensemb…AmusingImagine, if you will, a Shakespeare course…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:The Struggle to Save Ballet From ItselfA former dancer reckons with the rigors …Aestheticsxkcd: Pathogen ResistanceThis is just an excerpt. Read the whole …AmusingMy Student Calls Out a Mental Health Stigma in a Biased Headline — But Here's Why We Shou…This morning a journalism student told m…CultureIn-person classes…

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:Opening night! So great to see live local theatre.PersonalReading Literature on Screen: A Price for Convenience?Because all of my Seton Hill students ge…AcademiaAfter I noticed an overnight traffic spike…

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…