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:Fact check: DeVos never said 'only' 0.02% of children will die if schools reopen in the fa…Several times in the past few days I’ve …Current_EventsBoston bombings: Social media spirals out of controlA thoughtful analysis. Problem-solver…CultureAllergic to Grammar ErrorsSource: Cyanide & Happiness (Explosm…AmusingQuantum's King Lear at Carrie Blast FurnaceThe girl and I were thrilled to catch…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:An overnight traffic spike on an older online handout prompted me to touch it up. #techwri… Those are the stats for my entir…AcademiaRt Covid-19 — How Quickly Coronavirus is Spreading in the American StatesThis site tracks Rt, the value that meas…CultureCandy Land Was Invented for Polio Wards It…

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:Ascending the path to High Hrothgar? No, just the snow-covered steps from the parking lot… Ascending the path to High Hrothgar?…PersonalTroy Sterling and the Active and Passive VerbsJerz > Writing…

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:Choose Your Own Buzz LightyearI was on the road (and away from a compu…AestheticsThey grew up in a mostly analog/paper world and squirmed with joy the first time they clic…Today’s students have many strengths. Th…AcademiaToday’s #blender3d modeling, inspired by…

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…