Does anyone still think journalists aren’t creative writers? Take a look at this brilliantly concise character sketch: The rumpled scholar sat discussing the dispute on a recent afternoon in his high-ceilinged living room, which was crowded with books and his paintings. A parrot named Ike provided the occasional squawk, and sunlight streamed over the 400…
In general, I find Turnitin.com’s GradeMark function a time-saver, though the process of creating rubrics is tedious. Over the years, I’ve collected a big list of stock comments that I can drop into a paper easily. Just now, I was re-alphabetizing those comments in order to make them more useful, when the screen started acting…
Touched up this handout on integrating quotations: If your college instructor wants you to cite every fact or opinion you find in an outside source, how do you make room for your own opinion? Paraphrase. You can introduce studies that agree with you (Smith 123; Jones and Chin 123) and those that disagree with you…
For my journalism class, I have already created some fake press releases and other documents and created a scenario that simulates how a student reporter might cover an incident involving a member of the campus. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know that there’s been a real-world incident. I’ve been freshening up what I…
Associated Press The Associated Press has added a new entry on retweeting to its social media guidelines. Staffers are reminded to keep their opinions to themselves. Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. Disclaimers — like “retweets do…
Designed exclusively for Amazon Prime subscribers who own a Kindle (sorry, iPad users – the Kindle App alone will not suffice), the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allows consumers to borrow one book per month without any due dates. Amazon can only offer this option because the books are digital; the company isn’t loaning consumers much…
Testing out the new WordPress iOS app on my iPod Touch. Improved authoring tools, very much appreciated. Similar:Students say "math class is stupid and boring," and they are right. –Mathematician Paul L…I am working on some conference papers t…CultureVideo Tips for Students: Don't do what I'm doing! You can't see my eyes, the background i…You…
One of the most popular pages on my site — a single page that earns about 20% of my hits — started out as a class assignment for a technical writing student whose project for a real-world client ran into a snag. In Fall 2002, I showed my student Kathy Kennedy a model of a…
Similar:Industriousness. Self-improvement. Thrift. And orange slime. The girl amusing herself on our 70m …AestheticsRoss deserves better "Friends": a defense of nerdsI was not a fan of this show, but I am a…CultureWhat Borges Learned from CervantesBorges reinvented Don Quixote as a playf…BooksVisiting the #scienceofpixar exhibit @kaminsciencecenterPopCultSub Rosa (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 14) Dr.…
I believe I feel like a pribbling idle-headed mumble-news. (Thanks for the link, Jessica!) Tastefully Offensive | Premium Funny: Shakespeare Insult Kit – StumbleUpon. Similar:A Prof Debunks Standardized Testing & Pearson Strikes BackAll this emphasis on standardized testin…AcademiaSesame Street Is Moving to HBO, and the Symbolism Is CrushingI’ve been fascinated by the rhetoric of …BusinessWatching ‘To…
My 13yo son plays through chapter 2 of my 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition entry, Fine Tuned. Similar:I can’t fix this broken world but I guess I did okay using #blender3d to model this wedge-… AestheticsThe barbican at Mickelgate was pulled down in the 1800s but I made a rough approximation f…The barbican at Mickelgate was…
The local paper’s headline spins the news a bit more negatively than it probably deserves. I rather enjoy the opportunity to look at some familiar words in a fresh light. Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer: (Current Text) Priest: Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us. (New text)…
[poll id=”2″] Similar:What happens if you hide everything on Facebook? I tried it for a day.Spoiler: not much really happened. Telli…AmusingParallels (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 11) Worf gets technobabbled into a ti… Rewatching ST:TNG After returning…AmusingAmazing birthday cake, created by Jane Eyre herself, Karen Baum. (Thank you @kaboom1250!)PersonalAnother section of a #steampunk control…
While teaching Richard II in a Shakespeare class, I had to get up to speed on the rules and customs of succession, as Shakespeare knew them, so that my students and I could understand and explore the political issues that Elizabethan audiences would find in the play. News from England today bears word of some…
Students collaborate on a breaking news journalism assignment. I wrote a mock police report, an official statement from a university official, and some personal info from various simulated sources, and gave students 45 minutes to churn out a news story. Here, students collaborate on a Google doc while consulting their textbook on a iPad. My…
In the mid-1950s mathematician John McCarthy issued a call for research on “Automata Studies,” but the phrase was so bland that few people understood what he meant. So he came up with a more provocative description of the idea he was promoting. He called it artificial intelligence. via John McCarthy, the father of artificial intelligence,…
A fantastic series of photos exploring the world as it was. The photo of Louie Armstrong playing his trumpet in front of the Egyptian pyramids is pretty cool, but I’m going to call out this one. NASA’s Project LOLA or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related…
The problem is that Google is killing off the current crop of social functions from Reader – and in doing so, they’re fundamentally altering the way most of us use Reader, and in the process they’re sending a huge archive of curated posts and shares and comments down into the void. And this is a…
Similar:Is your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes? Is your child texting about recursive …AmusingProfessoring. With an(other) apple pie cupcake.I touched up and board-ified a presentat…AcademiaThe last submissions of this o'er ripe term, Ungraded, mock me though this app. And thus,…AcademiaA friend asks: "Would it be bad form to point out the typos in my…
Of Archimedes, he who allegedly popularized the word “Eureka!”: “His cleverness is beautiful. Understanding Archimedes is like understanding the most elegant joke in the world.” The researchers paid their respects to the 10th-century scribe who copied down works by Archimedes of lasting importance. The palimpsest contains the only version of “On Floating Islands” in Greek…