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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…
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:Into the depths of code. Algorithmic archaeologies and cave fantasies in video gamesThe full article (by Angelo Careriis) in…AcademiaTrump’s war on the media is driving students to journalismTwenty-one-year-old political science st…AcademiaAwesome 1935 Soviet Movie Deploys Saxophone-Controlled Robots…
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:Overheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool …AcademiaFirst Stanford code poetry slam reveals the literary side of computer codeLeslie Wu, a doctoral student in compute…AestheticsDC Just Announced Plans For Choose Your Own Adventure Style Digital ComicsIt’s rather hard to believe it took them…GamesStar…
“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:The Great Works of SoftwareI realized that each one of these techno…AestheticsSports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated WritersThe AI authors’ writing often sounds lik…CybercultureThe Drinks are On Us! and Us! and Us Too!I got a text message a couple days ago…..CultureEpiscopal bishop…
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:How’s newsgathering during COVID-19 at the state…
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:The Unbearable Weakness of Trump’s MinionsNote that the URL of…
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:Another section of a #steampunk control panel for a texture atlas. #blender3d #blender3dar…AestheticsMy laptop hard drive is full & my comfort-food shelf is emptyMy laptop drive is full & my comfort…CultureWired…