I love this story! Mr. Ackerman — Please excuse Tyler… he was with me!” Obama wrote on 11-year-old Tyler Sullivan’s behalf. The Rochester boy skipped school Friday to attend Obama’s visit to a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley with his dad. President Obama writes sick note for 11-year-old Minnesota boy (VIDEO) – NY Daily News. Similar:Humans…
My daughter shared the role of Alice this weekend (she played “Small Alice”). On one night, she also doubled as the mouse, for a different Alice. Similar:Why Did Dial-Up Modems Make So Much Noise?Screeeech . . . hisss . . . squaawk. The…CybercultureMask up.PersonalTime Squared (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 13)Rewatching Star Trek: The Next…
I love the obscure Prufrock reference win this Washington Post story: So as the motorcades come and go, are they talking of Marco Rubio? via Is Bilderberg a conference on world affairs or a powerful global cabal? Similar:Educated, uplifted, boosted, and fed. Block party celebrating August Wilson continues thro…CultureThe Rage of Virginia Woolf”The passion, if…
Similar:31 Undeniable Truths That Journalism Majors Can All Agree OnBecause you know you have the chance to …AcademiaShe was a musical ingenue Sunday, filmed a slasher movie past midnight Monday, and was pre…AcademiaExplaining Twerking to Your ParentsI still haven’t seen the video, but this…AmusingWhich of my colleagues wants attention?AcademiaIn August, 2001 I was blogging about……
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:Infinite Scrolling: XKCD's Creative Insight on a Common Interface IndignityAmusingIn August, 2002, I was blogging about ebook readers and email in teaching; how urban legen…In August, 2002, I…
When I am insanely busy during the academic year, I relish the time before I fall asleep, as time I can think about anything at all. If it’s productive and interesting, I’ll stay awake. If not, well, then I won’t waste much time before I conk out. In an attempt to carve out enouth time…
In 1975 a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the world’s first portable digital camera by cobbling together parts scavenged from a Super-8 and a cassette player. Baffled colleagues asked, “Why would you want to look at photos on a TV?” —The Pocket Camera Moment | Raw File | Wired.com. Similar:The internet’s memory is fading…
Remember this, Dennis. Remember this, Dennis. Remember this, Dennis. That is all. I ask my students to give me, by email, a proposal two weeks before the essay is due. I tell them what I think is good about their idea and what they need to watch out for; more often than not I advise…
A powerful essay, for the next time I teach Videogame Culture and Theory. (Some salty language ahead.) So the Hitman Absolution trailer. Do I have a problem with the existence of female assassins? No. Do I have a problem with female assassins dressing up as nuns? No. Do I have a problem with Agent 47 killing females…
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:All the Classroom’s a StageSome good observations in this essay. As…AcademiaThere…
Almost all the promise once held by virtual worlds has since been realized by Facebook. For every social interaction, brand engagement or persistent multiplayer social experience that Second Life or World of Warcraft or MTV’s Virtual Lower East Side was supposed to provide, there’s something the same or very similar available on Facebook — probably…
“Overall, it was just boring. Really boring! Really boring!” —The Washington Post. Similar:The Declaration of IndependenceI recorded a recitation of the Declarati…CultureThink Like A Journalist | Kelsey Samuels | TEDxPlano CultureNew infographic to help our graduating English majors make sense of their capstone project…AcademiaWhat's wrong with the way I talk?Wife & daughter competing w each…
Great headlines from winner David Bowman. National Headline Contest 2011. Similar:On the Importance of Nonverbal Feedback in the Classroom [an Anecdote]I don’t generally like teaching with sli…AcademiaSportsWorks Adventure at the Carnegie Science CenterI confess that I have never been all tha…CultureToday's Google Doodle is Mostly HarmlessFord Prefect kept a script of Godspell i…AestheticsHidden Spaces, New…
Contrary to concerns that increasing use and popularity of ‘txtspk’ will ruin children’s vocabularies, youngsters demonstrated that they know when it is not appropriate, only including it in their stories when transcribing an imagined text message. The research also found that many of the words contained in children’s stories are repeated from celebrated writers –…
To qualify for a day at the local water park, my daughter woke up early, and is now happily reading. Similar:This is How Literary Fiction Teaches Us to Be HumanPracticing empathy through drama and poe…BooksThe difficulty is the point (teaching critical thinking skills differs from teaching facts…In the past few years I have seen more…
A middle school teacher in South Carolina has been accused of dragging a student under a table during class, telling the boy “this is what the Nazis do to Jews,” police said Monday. The 12-year-old student said he got up to sharpen a pencil at Bluffton Middle School on Wednesday when Patricia Mulholland grabbed him…
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…
Atwood, on his blog Coding Horror, miffed by the “everyone should learn to code” meme, likens coding to plumbing. It’s not for everyone. “Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people,” he writes. “But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge…
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:Pict Free Summer Webinar: Shakespeare’s HeroesCultureI am…
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…