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:The AI Mirror Test: Why Even the Smartest People Keep Falling ShortWhat is important to remember is that ch…CultureThe girl sank her brother's last ship with the homophonous cry "I-1."AmusingWilliam Zinsser: What Is Good Writing? (Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity.)Most of…

U.S.S. Requin Tour

Similar:Ushering for a school matinee. Love seeing the kids excited about @prime_stage Frankenstei… CultureChipping away at the total as the final submissions pour in.PersonalThe Abomination of Ebooks: They Price People Out of Reading Random House, which jacked up its eboo…BooksCanadians Love Poop, Americans Love Pizza: How Emojis Fare Worldwide The company SwiftKey analyzed more tha…AestheticsAnnoyed…

Two Tips for Deliberate Practice

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:Another section of a #neovictorian control panel for a #steampunk #blender3d project. I h…AestheticsHalloween Candy Poisonings, School…

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:Privacy and reporting on personal livesInteresting guidelines, phrased as sugge…CybercultureWhy is Elon Musk attacking Wikipedia? Because its…

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…

GET LAMP Sonnet Review

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:Google Stops Scanning Student Gmail Accounts for Ads Google said Wednesday that it stoppe…AcademiaMedia Bias Chart version 10 — Left / Center / Right; Fact vs Fabrication; (Ad Fontes Medi…The…

Contextualizing Student Experiences with iPads in Academe: A Collaborative Exploration of What We Expected, and What Surprised Us So Far (proposal)

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…

Twenty-Six Old Characters, The (1947)

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…

Bushy Run Battlefield Re-Enactment

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…

LAMP: TAKEN

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:Non-Euclidean Doom, where the value of pi is not 3.14159Weirdly beautiful. Wonderful bit of game…CybercultureThey Should Have Used Another TypefaceHave you ever noticed that the letters “…AestheticsLaughter…