If you could recommend a game as a community-building activity for your school, what would you recommend? I thought about some of the arty Jason Rohrer games, but maybe those would be more appropriate for a “How can games lead to deep thoughts” pre-discussion, something I might use to get buy-in from the non-gaming community…
There were a lot of spammy hits out there, so here you go, semantic web: I just found a free cloze test generator that I rather like. It doesn’t seem to be able to save an interactive test, or score the test automatically, but it’s still a time-saver. I’ll be using as part of a close…
While discussion has always been a big part of my pedagogy, I very much enjoyed this item from an engineering professor about what happened when he pushed the lecture out of class time, and spent what used to be a lecture period as a lab. In my American Lit class, I’m not planning to record…
The mind boggles… Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig’s disease. —NY Times Similar:What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About LivingThis is not only powerful material for t…AwesomeCDC: Vaccinated people can resume activities without a mask or physical distance (with som…CDC: “Fully vaccinated people can resume…AwesomeIn September, 2002, I was blogging about science writing, satire,…
Clever writing in this story about a priest who rides around in a “God Squad” car. Father Strand, who is currently ministering at the Holy Family Catholic Community in Fond Du Lac, Wis., was perhaps slightly surprised when Best Buy sent him a cease-and-desist letter, which told him that the company believes he is infringing…
Similar:The geekling is 14 today.PersonalOk, never mind Dusgcxms2… buddy, you can keep your first place as far as I’m concerned. Ok, never mind Dusgcxms2… buddy, you…EducationInfinite Scrolling: XKCD's Creative Insight on a Common Interface IndignityAmusingEclipse!PersonalThe chief engineer has a forward-facing station, on a platform above the technical staff c…PersonalMuch Ado About Nothing (Beatrice is my…
So, you’re an office worker who sends tons of email? Take one hour, read this article on writing effective emails, and then rewrite your last ten emails according to those guidelines. Forever after you’ll be a better emailer.–Stubbleblog Similar:dungeon.jpg (JPEG Image, 2535×1616 pixels)Great Zork map.AestheticsA computer scientist urges more support for the humanities (opinion)”Lior Shamir,…
For 136 years, then, typing in English has meant making certain neurological associations. Words exist in our minds and on our tongues, but they also live in our hands and fingers. Anyone who types envisions and feels words in space, and for English speakers who use technology, this space is defined by the qwerty keyboard.…
Our technology story rests on three strong pillars. First, like many personal services, including much of health care, the law and banking, higher education remains essentially an artisanal industry. These are industries in which technological progress has not reduced the number of labor hours needed to “produce” the service. By contrast, labor productivity in basic…
The very efficient mobile phone version of Yahoo! Mail, m.yahoo.com/mail, no longer works for my iPad. A purple screen with a spinning animation just hangs. What gives? The full web version is way too busy for a touchscreen. Similar:Standardized-test robo-graders flunk“According to professor of theory of kno…AcademiaUnderstanding Shakespeare: "Pick a play. Click a line…"Pick a…
[A] new study indicates that computers alone can’t keep students from falling into their same weak study habits from their ink-and-paper days…. The research, published in The Journal of Educational Psychology, found that students tend to study on computers as they would with traditional texts: They mindlessly over-copy long passages verbatim, take incomplete or linear…
Doom was a ground-breaking 2003 1993 first-person shooter, with a successful business model that involved releasing the first few levels as shareware and charging for the full game. From GoldenEye to Modern Warfare 2, I’ve played first-person shooters made of polygons. As the years advanced, I’ve watched the worlds and figures these games depict advance…
A skillful exercise, this sonnet blog. Such parser game nostalgia warms my heart. You might be int’rested in Graham Nelson’s Command-line Shakespeare remix, The Tempest. Similar:‘These are all fake news,’ said the honor student. He was wrong.Kim Ash teaches the Newseum’s “Fighting …CultureJournalists report what sources say and do. They can't report what sources think,…
Here’s the proposal for an in-house “Teaching and Learning Seminar” I’ll be presenting October 13: There is no scholarship on the academic use of iPads, because people like us — who have just begun teaching and advising and facilitating with iPads — haven’t published it yet. We can, of course, draw on related academic inquiry…
Sheaffer Pen celebrates the art of writing, highlighting (predictably) the technological advances of the fountain pen. (Thanks to Ryan Trauman, who posted this on techrhet.) Near the climax of Death of a Salesman, Biff confesses that he has totally blown a business opportunity because he stole a big-shot’s fountain pen. When I first read the…
A new federal law requires publishers to provide textbook price information to professors and calls on colleges to identify course textbooks during registration, giving students more time to shop around. Experts call it a step in the right direction, but not a game-changer. At the same time, a robust online marketplace of used books and…
Katie Fritsch, Seton Hill Government Association president, said the school is unique. “Seton Hill is unique because it is rooted in tradition but very progressive in its approach to education,” she said. “I love that Seton Hill was the first school in the nation to create a program that will deliver an iPad to every…
The volunteers at the Busy Run Battlefield (in southwestern Pennsylvania) put on a fantastic event today, commemorating the high point of Pontiac’s War (the last major unified attempt of the native Americans to oppose British colonization in the aftermath of the French and Indian War). The event continues tomorrow, with a very engaging series of…
There was no leaflet in my mailbox this morning, but I did find something much better — a copy of Jason Scott’s text adventure game documentary.My commemorative coin… Similar:Two Cheers for the Middle Ages! by Eric ChristiansenI love good writing. “Even those who dou…CultureiTunes 11: It’s time for Apple’s horrible, bloated program to die.At the…
Anthologize is a WordPress 3.0 plugin that turns the WordPress installation into a platform for publishing electronic texts. From within the plugin in your WordPress dashboard, you can grab posts from your existing blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within the tool. At that point, you can outline, order, and…