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:Your second attempt at modeling #medievalyork fortifications in #blender3d will be better …Your second attempt at modeling #medieva…AestheticsYour first test layout of medieval city streets will be your worst. #blender3d #medievalyo…Your first test layout of medieval city …DesignThe Essayification of EverythingThe word Michel de Montaigne chose to de…EssaysStudying STEM Isn’t The Career Boost We ThinkTurns…

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works

Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:Astronaut Luca Parmitano describes near-drowning experience in spaceWith water already obscuring his vision,…Current_EventsAn Excerpt from Mechanisms [2]: 'Professor RAMAC'Among the attractions at the 1958 World’…BooksPlaying video games linked to breast-feeding, not crimeGreat piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Tech…AmusingDeadline seems to have briefly published, then taken down, story…

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:Adobe steals your colorWhat a horrible situation. The Adobe mon…AestheticsTeaching Shakespeare in a Maximum Security PrisonGood essay by Mikita Brottman. When I r…CultureIn March, 2001, I was blogging about…

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:My tween found this creative use for an extra iPad stylus AestheticsFriend I hadn't seen for about 20 years delivers a vintage nerdy gift.During the original run of Star Trek: Th…Media"I'm a geek. Deal with it." –my 11yo daughter. #geekgirlproblemsAmusingAddressing…

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…