10 Vintage Apple Ads That Time Forgot [VIDEOS]

Awful, awful Apple TV ads. Similar:Now Is the Perfect Time to Memorize a PoemPowerful writing, by Matthew Schneier. …AestheticsBig Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math ClassMy math education predated the widesprea…BusinessThe Nth Degree (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 4, Episode 19) Barclay Evolves Rewatching ST:TNG Engineering schlub …MediaI'd like to speak to the manager. Yes, I'll wait…

Scratch Stats

Scratch is a kid-friendly programming sandbox, designed by MIT in order to introduce kids to computer science concepts. I’ve been using it with my own children for a couple years, and am currently using it as a gentle introduction to development, for an upper-level class designed for the “New Media Journalism” program. Similar:Windows 3.1 Turns…

The Poynter Institute's Seminars

 I’m teaching a “New Media Projects” course, which aims to explore the connections between communication with words (linear, narrative) and communication with programming (interactive, procedural). Out in the wider world, The Poynter Institute hosted this session this week. I’m glad to see the profession moving beyond digital cameras and blogging. Programming for Journalists / Journalism…

Free cloze test generator

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…

Challenging the lecture-homework paradigm

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…

Study Says Brain Trauma Can Mimic A.L.S.

The mind boggles… Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig’s disease. —NY Times Similar:My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die SoonAmy Silverstein writes a stunningly powe…EmpathyAdaobi Tricia Nwaubani: My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-TraderThis fascinating essay, by the grandchil…CultureKorean News Station Pokes Fun at KTVU with Fake American Pilot Names After Southwest Airli…This is certainly…

U.S.S. Requin Tour

Similar:Just a handful more of these elegant #steampunk control panels and I can move on to the ne…AestheticsHave 40 years of mobile phones given literature bad lines?The X Files did a good job of embracing …CyberculturePreview of "The Fantasticks" (thanks, Tribune-Review, for covering the arts community)For Luisa, Jerz’s character, “the world …CultureAnother delightful section of…

Why Does College Cost So Much?

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…

Yahoo! mail no longer serves mobile version for my iPad

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:Impact of One-size-fits-all Web DesignI don’t particularly miss the splash lan…BusinessScratch StatsScratch is a kid-friendly programming sa…CybercultureNon-Euclidean…

College Undergrads Study Ineffectively on Computers, Study Finds: Students Transfer Bad Study Habits from Paper to Screen

[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…