One in a Billion: email tips – Google Search

In the grand scheme of things, this means very little… but still, it’s kind of cool to be one in a billion. —email tips – Google Search. Similar:Emily Dickinson Manuscript for "The Chariot"A new Emily Dickinson archive is online….CultureInverted Pyramid: A news story starts with what's most important, not with whoever spoke f…Jerz > Writing >&nb…JournalismChapbooks — the…

The Pulse: Seton Hill’s iPad Experiment

This month’s edition of The Pulse podcast features a conversation with Mary Ann Gawelek, provost of Seton Hill University, discussing how her institution’s iPad experiment — begun in 2010 — has fared. RPP_102_iPads-in-Education.mp3 via The Pulse: Seton Hill’s iPad Experiment | Inside Higher Ed. Similar:Challenger Disaster: 30 YearsI was a high school senior, watching on…

Youngest-ever National Spelling Bee competitor says fatigue, stress led to misspelling onstage

“Overall, it was just boring. Really boring! Really boring!” —The Washington Post. Similar:Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism? “Professing Criticism” proceeds on the…AcademiaWhy Teachers, Parents, and Society at Large Have Destroyed Kids’ Love of LearningI have experimented with rewarding stude…CultureTexty Cloak of Darkness in ProseBelow is a snippet from “Texty Cloak of …Games15 Times "Filler Text"…

National Headline Contest 2011

Great headlines from winner David Bowman. National Headline Contest 2011. Similar:Why the British Tell Better Children’s StoriesIf Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn wer…BooksHong Kong: journalist permanently blinded in one eye amid increased police violence A rubber bullet shot by the Hong Kon…Current_EventsRandom #steampunk workstation with a porthole, because why not. Most of the surfaces are…

Reading in the Morning

To qualify for a day at the local water park, my daughter woke up early, and is now happily reading. Similar:The Truth About Test ScoresIt’s not hard to design a test that has …BusinessScrape, Scrape, Spam Blog, Have You Scraped My Site?http://youtu.be/GFk8hEQ-jNI Below is …BooksThe reluctant wisdom of a science major in my freshman writing…

Updated Journalism Handouts

I updated the journalism portal of my online writing site, and touched up some existing handouts: News Story vs. English Essay Your English instructor carefully reads your essay to evaluate the depth of your knowledge, the breadth of your vocabulary, and the loftiness of your ideas. Joe Sixpack glances quickly at your news story to…

Stage Right! Homeschool Musicals

My daughter was recently in the Stage Right! Greensburg homeschool preteen production of Once Upon a Mixed-up Fairy Tale, playing Little Red Riding Hood. Here the girls are singing “Astonishing.” My son played Marshal Cord Elam in the teen production, Oklahoma. He’s wearing the vest and white hat. Similar:Ushering for a school matinee. Love seeing…

The Evolution of Adventure: Make Game – Asio City

In the early 1970s William Crowther worked for the high-tech R&D company BBN Technologies as part of a team developing the ARPAnet; a computer network predecessor to the Internet. Crowther has never shown any desire to court celebrity for his achievements. Aside from a couple of interviews from books, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Genesis II: Creation and…

How and Why to Make Your Digital Publications Matter

My intuition is that, even for the wary, recalcitrant, or skeptical, the ways individuals connect now online and learn from one another’s connections no longer represent the pathological or aberrant (i.e. the shallow, distracted, lonely, asocial, unprofessional digital generation:  you know the litany!), but “the future.”  Since many are worried about “the future,” those who…

Choosing Our Own Adventures, Then and Now

If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us…

Is it time for a text game revival?

It’s also a cultural climate where audiences are increasingly used to thinking of books as media companions — popular film series like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, or TV series like Game of Thrones, all feel richer to fans if they read the books as well as enjoy the films. Designers of text-based…