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:Internet hyperlinks do not infringe on copyright, EU court advisedWhile European Union rules say every act…Current_EventsVideo Tips for Students: Don't do what I'm doing!  You can't see my eyes, the background i…You might have been asked to submit a sh…AcademiaIn major step, UCSF scientists translate unspoken words of paralyzed man into writingThe “neuroprosthetic” technology involve…AwesomeTwitter…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Here's some good writing from The New Yorker: "Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the L… If you think of science like the multi…CultureRussian trolls 'spreading discord' over vaccine safety onlineThe good news is that there are fewer Am…CybercultureFormer NFL receiver Antwaan Randle El regrets ever playing football“There’s no…

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:Interior Detail of Steampunk Convertible Gazebo Spent much of Tuesday wrestling with co…AestheticsBody Parts #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 25) Quark announces he's dying; Kira …Rewatching ST:DS9 In…

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:9 Photography Tips (Steve McCurry) 9 Photography TipsAestheticsWhen is Donald Trump kidding? When is he being sarcastic? When is he being serious? Who ge…Earlier today a reporter, following her …Current_EventsStudents Don't Read Syllabi, Exhibit 58623https://twitter.com/ConnorMEwing/status/…AcademiaExplore Geotagged Wikipedia Pages as…

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…