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:Vote for your favorite Monopoly token — or else!One of the six current game pieces will …AestheticsHypertext as a Teaching Tool — Brown University Poetry Classroom 1974This short film documents an early attem…AcademiaLetter to the editor: Why our English department deserves more respectI…

National Headline Contest 2011

Great headlines from winner David Bowman. National Headline Contest 2011. Similar:Pompeii artifacts at the Carnegie Science Center The lighting was very low, so the phot…AestheticsWAOB MisSpelled (final episode airs)The final episode of the fantasy/comedy …AmusingMelissa Terras Reports Her Success in Making Digital Humanities More InclusiveA pleasant little success story. “TEI” i…AcademiaJust wrote the first ending…

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:Cause and Effect (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 18) time loop. Ka-boom. The En…Rewatching ST:TNG A smart, charac…AestheticsKing Hedley II ( #AugustWilson #CenturyCycle, 9 of 10)August Wilson’s Century Cycle >  Spoi…BooksI’m still teaching journalism…

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:I may have mentioned that I have…

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…