There was only one game. Appropriately for us neighborhood-explorers, for us mapmakers, it was launched by typing ADVENTURE. The game began you at a house by the woods, with a mailbox, a trail to a grate, not unlike the wandering explorations we undertook on our own in our simple neighborhood. It explicated all of this…
[portfolio_slideshow] Last night I used Blender 3D to rough up a model of this stairway, the site of hundreds of group photos over the years. Similar:Small Changes in Teaching: The Last 5 Minutes of ClassI just ordered the book Lang mentions in…AcademiaHermann Zapf, the font designer behind Palatino and Zapf Dingbats, has died at 96Hermann Zapf,…
I’d like my students to be co-creators, too. The richest exchanges on day two of the Hewlett Open Educational Resources Grantee Meeting came from those who challenged the fundamental premises of the meeting. In designing the meeting, Berkman staff imagined three groups: Learners, Facilitators (teachers, librarians, coaches, educators, etc.), and Builders. They assumed a kind…
My undergraduates are working their way through N. Katherine Hayle’s My Mother Was a Computer. They told me that they benefitted from the notes I wrote the other day, so I’m continuing the effort. In Chapter 3, Hayles reminds us that the “worldviews of speech, writing, and code” are not merely theories, they are…
Yale journalism students say they could have easily broken the Watergate scandal themselves, simply by Googling for keywords. “This is Yale,” Bernstein said gravely. “That somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events,” Woodward said. “And they went on to say the political environment would be so different that Nixon wouldn’t…
I’m withholding judgment until I find out exactly what the argument was about. Perhaps the punch was appropriate. Ann Arbor police Lt. Renee Bush said the man went to a party at a home in the 100 block of North Ingalls Street at about 2 p.m. on Saturday. Bush said the man was sitting on…
The canonical definition of “creepy treehouse” was written by Jared Stein in 2008. Here’s an excerpt: n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids. Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John…
This is why 12-year-olds aren’t excited about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram | ZAGGblog Similar:Students must learn how to get things wrong. Only one subject does that. [English.]I invest a lot of energy asking my colle…AcademiaCriminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in VideogamesGreat example of the application of well…CultureWhen F. Scott Fitzgerald Judged Gatsby By…
Hayles is an established authority on a humanities-centered approach to human-computer interactions, and My Mother Was a Computer (2005) is her third book on the topic. At times she writes with the expectation that her readers already know some foundational topics that she may have spent more time introducing in her previous books. In the…
That day, on the Southampton docks in England, the Torkos family wallowed in disappointment. Anxious to head home to Monessen, Westmoreland County, the Hungarian family had been banned from boarding the ship because of the cut on 7-year-old Mary’s cheek. Fearing the spread of infection throughout the ship’s steerage, officials banned Mary, and thus the…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9xjoffTzLo Similar:The Princess and the PaintFriday night, my daughter will be playin…AestheticsPrincess of Wales photo furore underlines sensitivity around image doctoring Catherine’s attempts to adjust a famil…CultureFall colors are past their peak but it's still a beautiful late October day.PersonalWendy's Bests Internet Troll, Then Unwittingly Posts Completely Unrelated, Obscure Racist …I fixed the clickbaity title…
“This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black,” Zimmerman is heard saying in NBC’s edited version. The difference is significant, since activists have been claiming that Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin. Critics have argued that NBC set out to purposely advance that narrative by condensing the 911 tape to make it…
Looks like this blogger presented the chart as an implicit argument about the quality of literature being read today, rather than the quantity. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition…
Christ willingly stretches himself down on the cross. Surprised, one of the soldiers observes: “Behold, himself has laid him down,/and bent his back unto this tree.” From one of the first web pages I created, for an academic article about a computer simulation of the epic medieval Christian pageant the York Corpus Christi Cycle. The…
According to my 9yo daughter, “It’s completely and utterly stupidulous.” Pancho McFarland, an associate professor of sociology at Chicago State, fears the policy could restrict all types of communications by professors, including speaking engagements. “It will put a chilling effect on our ability to speak in a number of venues,” he said. “It is part…
Regular readers will perhaps know that I (and others) have been saying for a while that Mesozoic Earth was not the global hothouse that many have long assumed. There’s evidence for cool continental interiors and poles during parts of the Jurassic and Cretaceous (Barron & Washington 1982, , Sloan & Barron 1990, Sellwood et al.…
“Whether in the lecture hall or in a textbook, anyone is obviously free to teach the subjects biology, economics, or psychology, and can do so using, creating, and refining the pedagogical materials they think best, whether consisting of ‘open source educational content’ or otherwise,” it reads. “But by making unauthorized ‘shadow-versions’ of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,…
My 9yo was ordered not to leave the kitchen table until her lessons were done, but she wanted to communicate to the world that she was in a bad mood. From where she was sitting, she had access to paper, scissors, and tape, which she used to construct this head-mounted frump-amplicfaction isolation cube. Ironically, it…
In Stallybrass’s mind, students—and in fact, all scholars—need to do less thinking and more working. “When you’re thinking,” Stallybrass writes, “you’re usually staring at a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen, hoping that something will emerge from your head and magically fill that space. Even if something ‘comes to you,’ there’s no reason…
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