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:I think they mean typeface conference, but "Font Conference" is still amusing.I think they mean typeface conference, b…AestheticsRichard Halloran / Owns Home Computer.“Engineers now predict the day will come…AmusingNAVY TO DROP ALL-CAPS COMMUNICATIONSCaps off to the Navy’s plan to drop all-…CultureOpinion: Time for…

National Headline Contest 2011

Great headlines from winner David Bowman. National Headline Contest 2011. Similar:I had a grand time recording this little story about a misunderstood genius who just wants… The Cask of Amotillado (read by Denn…CultureHasbro removes embedded typeface from My Little Pony website after copyright infringement … Considering the scope of the alleged in…AestheticsLove This Headline: "He took…

OUP research reveals children’s imaginative language use

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 –…

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:A new study shows that students learn way more effectively from print textbooks than scree…Saving this for next term’s “History and…BooksBoys And Girls Memorize Words DifferentlyGirls were more likely to memorize words…CultureWondermark: In Which There…

Teaching the Holocaust or slavery: Is role playing effective or fraught with problems?

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…

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…

Six Reasons a Non-Computer Nerd Might Want to Learn to Code

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…

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:“Thank you for being kind.” —Friday afternoon…

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…

Ancient life, millions of years old and barely alive, found beneath ocean floor – The Washington Post

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…

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…

Latrobe Bulletin Covers this Weekend’s Stage Right! Shows

Seton Hill new media journalism graduate Chris Ulicne, who now works for the Latrobe Bulletin, wrote a really nice feature on Stage Right (local theatre company and school for the performing arts). The full text of the article is not online, but this image is from the PDF of the front page (available through the…

Bully: She told her son, ‘hit him hard’ –and she learned a lesson

This is a great story about a parent who tries everything when she learns her boy is being bullied. The mom shouts at the principal, gives her son advice on how to fight, and gets the cops involved. The gentle son takes a very different approach. Powerful story. I didn’t trust the principal to help…

Your suggestions make so much sense that it’s making me WANT to make my paper better

A colleague just sent me this kind note, which supplies a very-welcome jolt of enthusiasm as the semester winds down: This is probably going to be the best written paper I’ve published, and I could not have done it without your help! (In part because your suggestions make so much sense that it’s making me…

Next Time, Fail Better

Humanities students are not used to failure. They want to get it right the first time. When they are new to the game, they want to get good grades on what are essentially first drafts. Once they learn how much work it is to write and edit a really good essay, their goals shift—from getting…

The Case for Breaking Up With Your Parents

I already felt fairly independent from my parents before I went off to college, as my older siblings were both good students who did not get into any trouble, so because I kept bringing home good grades my parents let me be very independent. I had (and still have) a good relationship with my parents,…

Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams

I’m not giving any final exams this term. On the one hand, we tell students to value learning for learning’s sake; on the other, we tell students they’d better know this or that, or they’d better take notes, or they’d better read the book, because it will be on the next exam; if they don’t…

HubbleSite – NewsCenter – Hubble to Use Moon as Mirror to See Venus Transit (05/04/2012) – Release Images

I love a good infographic. HubbleSite – NewsCenter – Hubble to Use Moon as Mirror to See Venus Transit (05/04/2012) – Release Images. Similar:I'd like to speak to the manager. Yes, I'll wait right here. The manager is of course somewhere e…AestheticsWhy the Internet Isn’t Fun AnymoreI used to spend time in class teaching s…BusinessIn…