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:Student: “Just wanted to let you know that your class has benefited me outside of just lit…In my online class on literary dystopia,…AcademiaWho is the more dramatic — my extroverted tween or my philosophical teen?Stoked from a morning show-choir perform…AmusingNo one’s ready for this: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to… Everyone…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Finland's Museum of Contemporary EmotionsA history of the beginning of the pandem…AestheticsHow Exactly Do You Catch Covid-19? There Is a Growing ConsensusFrom the Wall Street Journal: At a Marc…CultureMore Evidence that Choosing a Typeface Is ImportantAestheticsTrump, finally, takes the coronavirus emergency seriously CNN’s Stephen Collinson praises the pr…Current_EventsConsciousness:…

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:We were a Neilsen ratings family during the pandemicIn March 2020, just as the lockdown clos…BusinessI remember these young people. I remember these young people. Personal'Peter Pan Live' Was…

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:Opinion: Don't link video games with mass shootingsContrary to Dr. Bushman’s suggestion, vi…AcademiaPerspective | How NPR’s Steve Inskeep cracked the code for interviewing Trump The role of mainstream journalists i…Current_EventsWatched "Apollo 11" at local library with my son today50…

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…