10 Vintage Apple Ads That Time Forgot [VIDEOS]

Awful, awful Apple TV ads. Similar:My buddy JTK helps me make a key point in my slideshow. #4c18 #b29Putting speaker notes on an iPad is alwa…AcademiaActors Fail to Distract Audience from Prop Newspaper HeadlinesMy daughter and I were talking about pro…AmusingToday’s adulting was brought to you by a failed motor vehicle inspection. #notacarguy #win…The car…

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:Let's talk about…

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:Plans for the Little Known Confederate HelicopterThe possibilities of combining Civil War…DesignThe Importance of PunctuationFrom Yahoo! News:   Update: T…GamesAnnie Sullivan on teaching:  Helen Keller, rendered blind and dea…CultureThe elements, in haikuEach element of the periodic table gets …AmusingHow Mickey Mouse…

U.S.S. Requin Tour

Similar:Teachers finding games give a leg up on learningThanks for the link, Dana. Experts sa…CultureAuschwitz color photo: 'A 14-year-old girl, not just a statistic'I don’t know what this prisoner did, but…AestheticsMy outward-bound editor's graduation cap.PersonalMore bits of my summer project – another delightful span of a #neovictorian #steampunk con…AestheticsYesterday it was 298 so this is…

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:College Professors Hate Sharing These Mind-Blowing Study Tips (#3 Made Me Cry) Read the syllabus. Read the syllabu…AcademiaThe…

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:Twine: the program that’s democratised the video gaming worldTwine games look and feel profoundly dif…CybercultureGames Without Frontiers:…

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…