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:Death Comes for the Microbot — Flash Fiction by Aimee PicchiBee walked on six spindly legs to the sp…CultureThe Secret Power Of Black TwitterA recent Pew study (Smartphone…
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:Perspective | After Hannity’s travesty,…
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:PLS York Plays 2025 — Prof. Matthew Sergi's Call for Theatrical…
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 Cabaret Theatre (Latrobe) presents Shakespeare's popular Midsummer Supernatural pranksters! mismatched …CultureI just realized I've been misspelling and mispronouncing "detritus" all my life. I’ve been a college English faculty …AcademiaThe Way of the Warrior #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 1) Worf joins…
Great headlines from winner David Bowman. National Headline Contest 2011. Similar:Sports Meant So Much to Me. Why Wouldn’t My Son Play?I heard the boy tell Raffi that all his …CultureJesus Christ SuperstarI have a daughter who does things. Her n…CultureThe girl has gotten progressively more dedicated over the past few days.When you’re a homeschool parent,…
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:After decades lost, Star Trek’s original Enterprise model may have been foundLong before sci-fi shows created their v…DesignA Dance Mom Gets Schooled by a Ballet Mistress Who Can WriteAvoid trying to publicly shame a ballet…
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:Me loving my birthday truck, c. 1971. …
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…
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…
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…
Scientists now believe that much of the life on Earth is barely able to fog a mirror, as it were. The deep-sea microbes may be an extreme example of a laid-back norm. Most of Earth life, measured by numbers, is not rambunctious and charismatic like life in the sunshine, nor is it akin to the…
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…