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

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Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:By the way, humans sent a robot to another planet, and the robot sent us the sound of a du… Mars rover captures first sound of d…AwesomeMy 4Cs StoryI chaired a session on Friday, and gave …AcademiaCan the multiverse explain human history?Where did this idea of parallel universe…CultureIt…

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. Similar:Many things in the world are awful. But creating this #steampunk #blender3d control panel …AestheticsPlaying God (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 17) Dax mentors a too-eager-to-plea… 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…