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:Remember That Class Assignment I Hated? The One That Landed Me My Dream Job?ME (a couple years ago): Okay, students….AcademiaThis history of video game graphics is a walk down memory laneBlogging this so I can assign it to my “…AcademiaDr Jerz I think your microphone glitchedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPqnXF7A…AcademiaBig Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math ClassMy math education…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:New York Times runs just 1000 names of the nearly 100,000 Americans who have already died …AcademiaTwo decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost million… Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s…BusinessHow reading fiction can help improve our mental healthIn general, I avoid…

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:When You've Already Got a Major, But You Love Books (Seton Hill English) When committee work is fun… making…AcademiaPfully Pfizered and pfeeling pfine so pfar. Current_EventsCarolyn as Dolly Levi…

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:Captain, the Fake News Detectors are Offline! Slate has a good article about Willi…CybercultureClickbait writers hate this English professor's time-saving trick!Defeat clickbaiters with this one weird …CybercultureThey Smiled Too!Victorians had to stay still for 3 secon…AestheticsTales from the Antiquities…

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…