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…
Matt Takacs (a Seton Hill freshman who has been in two of my classes) offers this excellent overview of the ongoing Valve online scavenger hunt: It started innocently enough. Valve Software releases a small update for the three-year-old game Portal, which was included in the Orange Box. Upon looking at the update news, however, things…
Suggested by a colleague. If only we could get our students this excited about our summer reading titles! Similar:The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever “If you want to know how the game was pl…Cyberculture20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't GetI expect my English majors not to balk w…AcademiaYounger Americans and Public LibrariesMillennials are…
TV journalism feels the pain. The jobs remaining will favor journalists who can shoot and edit their own footage. The mood was grim in Los Angeles, the largest bureau outside of Washington. The 40-plus staffers were told this week that only a few producers would remain and only two correspondents would be assigned to cover…
A fan-produced Kings Quest sequel is shut down. What a way to treat your brand’s most loyal followers. Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not…
“We’ve become a close-knit unit you might say. Some of us, we always come back to talk about the year, what happened,” one visitor told Channel 4 Action News’ Tara Edwards. The malformed possessive in the above quotation is a mistake — we all make mistakes like that. But I blogged this web version of…
Via Similar:Facebook Has Seized the Media, and That’s Bad News for Everyone But FacebookFacebook has no financial incentive to c…BusinessAs Twinkle Twinkle is to Suzuki musicians, so is a wooden shipping crate to CGI modelers. …https://youtu.be/diQF9buONqY I ha…AestheticsHomeownership in America Has Collapsed—Dont Blame MillennialsYes, the article is interesting, but I’m…AmusingGoogle, AI Announcements, and the Future…
“We anticipate that between now and the end of the year ABC News will undergo a fundamental transformation that will ultimately affect every corner of the enterprise,” Westin said. “The time has come to re-think how we do what we are doing,” he said, adding that ABC News will “dramatically expand” its use of “digital…
I’m still mourning the loss of Herman T. Zwiebel. And now this? Similar:Fantasy football and the cold future of robot journalismFor fantasy football players, the servic…BusinessSears Reshaped America, From Kenmore to AllstateWe just bought a new refrigerator from o…BusinessThe Pope's Prayer for Countering "Fake News"Today is the feast of St. Francis de Sal…CultureOn UVa rape…
As part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group inquiry (membership-only link, but a publication is planned) into the original source code for Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure, I asked… When does Crowther use exclamation marks? It’s not a deep philosophical question, and the fate of the world does not hang on the outcome. But it’s…
There are no sidewalks where I live, but if there were, my sidewalk, and my conscience, would be clear. Here’s the first stanza of a five-stanza poem by TImons Esaias. Originally there were eleven CommandmentsMoses, perhaps confused by the unfamiliarsnow, ice, and sidewalk,botched one, and left it out. Similar:Terms of ServiceFascinating example of new media…
Not just a student laptop program. Griffin Technology Advantage Technology Provided to Every Student Beginning in the fall of 2010, all first year undergraduate students at Seton Hill will receive a 13″ MacBook laptop and their choice of iPhone or iPod Touch. You will have complete access to these mobile technologies for classes as well as at all…
Thanks for this find, Mark Sample (via Twitter). The ABCs of Adventuringby Admiral Jota, Dylan O’Donnell, G. Kevin Wilson, and Dan Shiovitz.A is for Adventure, the first of them all;B is for Brass lantern, so you don’t take a fall.C is for Compass, an unseen one you keepD is for Drinking, eating and sleep.E is…
This animated map of the expansion of American territory since the original 13 colonies is a bit cheesy in terms of production values, and not nearly as high-quality as the wonderful animated map of The Civil War in Four Minutes, but still a good resource. Similar:With actor Ken Bolden, who appears in Quantum Theatre's gripping…
Gripping story of an effort to use data to predict teaching excellence. As Teach for America began to identify exceptional teachers using this data, Farr began to watch them. He observed their classes, read their lesson plans, and talked to them about their teaching methods and beliefs. He and his colleagues surveyed Teach for America…
Excellent feature about Roger Ebert’s bout with cancer. (Ebert’s own words on his cancer are also worth a read.) When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be. He is a wonderful writer, and today he is producing…
Google Buzz combined the openness of Twitter with the “whoo-hoo look at me!” aspects of Facebook. The result? A total face plant. —PC World Similar:Elon Musk has officially killed Twitter. The zombie platform lives on as X, a disfigured s… Whereas Twitter was once a fountain of…BusinessThe Nth Degree (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 4, Episode 19)…
This week, I’ll be facilitating a week-long collaborative annotation project, as part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group online conference, on the source code to Crowther’s original Colossal Cave Adventure (a classic text-only computer game from the 1970s). According to Donald Knuth, designer of the “literate programming paradigm,” Colossal Cave Adventure is the “ur-game…
“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to…