Back to the Classroom

As an administrator, I worked with other professors and administrators. As an instructor of graduate creative writers and upper-division English majors, I was teaching students who also loved words and writing, students who aspired to be what I was, a published author employed in a bookish field. Believe me, I am no longer preaching to…

The Immortal Henrietta Lacks

“Oh yeah! Scientists I’ve talked to say you cannot overestimate how important HeLa cells have been.” Yet no one in the Lacks family had been informed by Johns Hopkins of the existence of their mother’s cells, until a researcher called in the early 1970s wanting to test the family. “Henrietta’s husband basically got a phone…

Epic Game Design Tour

Epic Game Design Tour / Final Exam Review from Adam Marshall Smith on Vimeo. Similar:Every few years, I Google the name of the kid who saw "The Empire Strikes Back" the night …HistoryElon Musk has officially killed Twitter. The zombie platform lives on as X, a disfigured s… Whereas Twitter was once a fountain of…BusinessMeme…

Doritos Tablet (iPad Spoof)

Similar:Find yourself someone who makes you plomeek soup like Nurse Chapel makes for Spock.PersonalRaw Deal on Printer Ink”The ink we print with can cost more tha…BusinessAre "Keds" still a recognizable kid shoe brand?Are Keds a brand that my college student…DramaStudents Produce Breathtaking 3D Simulation of 17thC LondonThe haze effect lying over the city is b…DesignPlaying…

Change The Code, Keep the Text

Today, programmers, web-developers and designers possess countless different ways to display digital words online, much like an artist with a blank canvas. As words float across our computer screens, code may be considered the underlying thought and form of expression that supports online words, preventing the words from physically or metaphorically “disappearing into [cyber]space” (Richards,…

Teaching Online Journalism » 21 examples of Flash journalism

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:Be Kind, for Everyone You Meet Is Misattributing This Quote in a MemeBe kind, for everyone you meet is fighti…AmusingMy simulated city has 1000 capsule inhabitants that…

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

Link pointing to blog entry about a different self-referential clip, and also a different (more vulgar) self-referential clip.   Similar:Mariah Carey meets William Carlos Williams AmusingUpdated Syllabus for Journalism 101By the end of the semester you will be a…AmusingChilling analysis of organized, anonymous disinformation campaign against Parkland survivo…Forty-seven minutes after news broke of …CultureAnalysis |…

Words Are Cheap

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…

Citations: Efficient In-text Quotations

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…

Crash Blossoms

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…

You will consume.

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…

Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution

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…