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:Annie — Cabinet TomorrowMy 10yo daughter Carolyn played Annie in…AmusingSurprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On InvestmentThe conventional wisdom is that humaniti…AcademiaMS Paint AdventuresWonderfully silly take on old-school poi…AmusingThe problem with blog comments, in 5 images.After I read Mark Sample’s blog post “Wh…AcademiaDown with Fake Politics! Down with Fake Government! Long Live the Free Press!You…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Undergrad Danielle Sidoti Nails an Oral Interpretation/Analysis of "Barbie Doll" by Marge …In my online “American Literature” class…AestheticsYour Students Learn by Doing, Not by ListeningToday one of my students gave a final pr…AcademiaNortheast braces for temps near boiling point – Yahoo! NewsThe inter tubes are clogged with pundits…Current_EventsNASA's…

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:Sweet Lenten RegretsThis Lenten evening / Your orphaned feas…AestheticsDisaster (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 5) Picard Trapped in Elevator with Wee…Rewatching ST:TNG A character-based b…AmusingTom Jones, librettist for…

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:Some new locations for my #neovictorian #steampunk personal project. Created in #blender3d…AestheticsAI-generated essays are nothing to worry about (opinion)After reviewing 22 AI essays I asked my …AcademiaDennis Jerz, R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots), Karel Capek's "Fantastic Melodrama" – YouT…”In which…

Why You Never Truly Leave High School

It’s also abundantly, poignantly clear that during puberty, kids have absolutely no clue how to assess character or read the behavior of others. In 2005, the sociologist Koji Ueno looked at one of the largest samples of adolescents in the United States, and found that only 37 percent of their friendships were reciprocal—meaning that when…