10 Vintage Apple Ads That Time Forgot [VIDEOS]

Awful, awful Apple TV ads. Similar:Looking forward towards the wardroom (center) and the officers' pub, the Gear and Hea…AestheticsA Grave Tale (a short story I narrated for WAOB Audio Theatre)A Grave Tale (WAOB Audio Theatre) Wri…LiteratureA surprising detail in bank records helped a historian bust a longstanding myth about Iris…A scholar uses bank records to…

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:On Her One…

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:What blogging wasI’ve maintained this blog since the spri…CybercultureOne Author Breaks Down the Reality of Violent Games in the MediaChris Person posts a link to this very c…AcademiaThat story about the pope requiring Catholics to fast from meat as part of…

U.S.S. Requin Tour

Similar:Carnegie Science Center: Roboworld (and a bit of SportsWorks)Here’s a brief video, made up of clips I…CultureCarolyn portrays Maria in West Side Story, Aug 9-12. #ifeelpretty #tonight #somewhereAt the Geyer Peforming Arts Center in Sc…AestheticsWilliam Shakespeare, Playwright and Poet, Is Dead at 52 On this date — April 23, 1616 — the cr…CultureHow Bill Gates…

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:The Future of College Is Facebook Meme GroupsInteresting to see how large groups of c…AcademiaExcessive Copyright Strikes…

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:Not a #carguy but I pried open the hatch of the van to change 4 bulbs. #adulting PersonalAny…

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…