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:Writing Effective E-MailTop 10 Tips:  Write a meaningful subject…BusinessYork Corpus Christi Pageant, Toronto, June 7I’ll be in Toronto next week to observe …Academia"A Mushroom at Last… A Mushroom Forever"I asked my 10yo why she was moping. “…AmusingRecent SHU journo grad, upon the hiring of an even more recent SHU journo grad: "Many time…A couple weeks…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:I absolutely adored Spock. Loving Dad was much more complicated.A great father-son story, written by Ada…AwesomeWhen is Donald Trump kidding? When is he being sarcastic? When is he being serious? Who ge…Earlier today a reporter, following her …Current_EventsThings That Will Freak out Every OCD PersonA good collection. I’m…

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:She’s on her way to the @thepublicpgh for two shows today as Margot in Dial M for Murder.She’s on her way to the @thepublicpgh fo…AestheticsRedemption, Part I (#StarTrek #TNG…

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:If you win the very first time you play a game, that means you are skilled and brilliant, …AwesomeDon’t patronize older adults by calling them ‘the elderly’In English grammar, we use the definite …CultureDrumming Kid Is Epic. That Is…

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…

Surviving the Next Apocalypse: a Modest Curriculum

Obviously, given this surge in student demand, we need to make survivalist education another distinctive feature of our educational mission, and we must scramble to build institutional capacity in “apocalypse preparedness.” The admissions office already has brochures: “Where would you send your child: someplace that prepares them for a 20th-century job, or a community that…