These are interactive news packages I’ve selected to show to journalism students as we discuss some of the capabilities of Adobe Flash. Many are very recent. —Mindy McAdams Similar:Pieces of Earliest Games RecoveredThese small sculpted stones unearthed fr…CultureMore Fake News from the Biased Fake Crappy Bad MediaClearly the pesky reporters whom the pow…BusinessIn May, 2000,…
Link pointing to blog entry about a different self-referential clip, and also a different (more vulgar) self-referential clip. Similar:Visiting my parents. Admiring their original Hallmark Enterprise Christmas ornament. I ask…AmusingBlender 3D Flyover of Fantasy Steampunk Spacecraft When my kids were small, at bedtime …AestheticsKatie Couric Gun Documentary Undermined By Manipulative Editing : NPRInterviewer Katie…
I am so looking forward to Jason Scott’s Get Lamp. (Family obligations are keeping me from attending the premiere at PAX East.) Talking to Scott, his passion for the subject and for detail are both formidable. Most of our interview was tangents, and I didn’t mind any of them. Discussing Colossal Cave Adventure, he ran…
When writing a paper in MLA style, prefer brief quotations from your sources, in order to emphasize how the complex connections between the sources support your original argument. In the essay “The Full Title of an Essay Fills Lots of Space” by Maxwell Wordsworth Filler, it talks about how easy it is to bury your own thoughts when…
Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words. “Why won’t it just tell me…
Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and…
A good analysis from Christian Science Monitor. (Thanks, Eric.) BlogPulse, an analytics company operated by Nielsen, shows hundreds of new blogs launched every week. In fact, as the Pew study indicates, blogging has actually climbed slightly in popularity among American adults over the age of 30, from 7 percent in 2007 to 11 percent last…
I didn’t watch that movie awards thing, but I understand this ad premiered last night. Here we see the iPad as a tool for monetizing the consumption of the internet. I saw brief flashes of a keyboard, e-mail, a desktop publication program, and a photo album, so the ad does acknowledge the role of user-created…
Brilliant. Now what do we do about all the workers who get tipsy from the cleaning fluid? In 2002, a group of Babson College entrepreneurship students ran out of room on their whiteboard. They had spent hours brainstorming new business possibilities, and the sudden space crunch threatened to cramp their creativity. Instead, it sparked a…
Professor, please assign us another paper, so we can use Turnitin.com again! If we could, we would stay here in front of this building, submitting papers to Turnitin.com all day long, stopping only to care for our amazing teeth! Look at our eager faces — can you not tell that this software makes us want…
I’ve never played this game, but in the last week or so, my attempts to play multiplayer games with my kids (Uru and Dungeons and Dragons Online) have been thwarted by the fact that my modem blips out for a few minutes every couple hours, which freezes up games that exchange information over the internet. …
Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.” Hold…
I think it was some time in 2003 that There.com e-mailed me to ask me to be a beta-tester, with the promise that I’d have free membership. I remember being interested, and I think I even started the download, but I don’t recall going any further than that. We believe that all of this together…
How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers? Similar:Texas lawyer trapped by cat filter on Zoom call, informs judge he is not a catA Texas lawyer accidentally left a kitte…AmusingMelissa Terras' Blog: Male, Mad and Muddleheaded: Academics in Children's Picture BooksLabcoats, suits (but not if you are fema…AcademiaLiberals and conservatives…
I’ve been collecting and returning almost all my classwork electronically for the past four or five years. Last semester I started thinking about something that was missing from the classroom — the ritual of handing back papers, of looking the student in the eye, of hearing the student say “Thank you!” (I would always shoot…
Similar:Boy, this sort of thing sure makes some racist people very angry.https://twitter.com/steelers/status/1305…CultureVintage Freebies for DesignersI wish I had time for cool stuff like th…AestheticsTell Me a Smart Story: On Podcasts, Videos, and Websites as Writing AssignmentsIt does take longer to evaluate student …AcademiaComing up for the girl is another classic show: The Fantasticks.So looking…
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From the U.S. Government’s Plain Language website, a satirical guide by Kathy McGinty. Are you tired of short, direct, and simple sentences that seem to take forever to fill up a page? Are you paid by the word? In either case you can benefit by increasing the number of words in your sentences and the…
It’s not really a grading tool, but it might be worth introducing into the writing process. I’m running a paper workshop tomorrow… I might give it a shot. PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help…
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the…