This article does a good job reminding us how the world of media has changed in the past few decades. The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and…
New media researcher and capital-letter-avoider dana boyd recently answered questions about teens and their use of social media. These folks will be in college soon, so it makes sense for us to learn about their media habits. @mirroredpool: What borders to teens place of social networking sites and education? How would they react to using…
Shackle yourself to your work, and set the timer.Thanks for the link, Josh. Similar:The dawn of the post-literate societyThe world of print is orderly, logical a…BooksWhy I disagreed with my students who said, "That was easy!" “That was easy!” Today th…AcademiaA warning to college profs from a high school teacherMy students did well on…
A touching tribute in images and words. Phillip Toledano Similar:Mathematics and What It Means to Be HumanA humanities faculty member and a math f…AcademiaPhysics simulation demo: crate made up of mostly loose boards. #Blender3d #design #practic… https://youtu.be/OqqlWZvWaqM Physic…AestheticsOrson Scott Card Builds an EmpireVideo games are a viable storytelling me…CybercultureWhy Drag It Out?The ways that the…
I recently submitted a conference proposal on cloud computing. Google said in a blog post the outage came down to a simple traffic jam at an Asian data center. The search giant described the situation by using the analogy of a large number of airplanes being rerouted through one airport that was not equipped for…
Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month. One of the more unusual plays in this year’s Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the…
Okay, I’m officially lame. I teared up a few days ago during Star Trek, and tonight I teared up during this song from The Magic Treehouse: The Musical, based on a series of easy-reader books by Mary Pope Osbourne. The touring show was in my town tonight; we had front-row seats. The song is a…
The following search on our campus — for a published mystery author qualified to teach creative writing — has been extended, and will continue until filled. Candidates interested in this position should apply immediately, as we will be considering applicants over the summer. — Mike Arnzen Similar:'Dream' casting a family affairAmong actors in Cabaret Theatre’s…
A budding artist learns his real skill is not artistry, but the ability to critique. I’m blogging this for the next time I introduce iteration as an important cognitive skill — something that requires dedication, time, and a willingness to take risks in order to learn from failures (something that doesn’t often fit will with…
That’s the space shuttle orbiter Atlantis, with the Hubble Space Telescope, in front of the sun. Wow! It’s difficult to imagine a more epic scene, but this photo has modest origins: amateur Astronomer Thierry Legault shot it with nothing but his own telescope, a solar prism and a Canon 5D Mk II. — Gizmodo Similar:In…
High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously. Moreover, it is the right of every American to despise his local newspaper – for being too liberal or too conservative, for covering X and not covering Y, for spelling your name wrong…
How many of you make a point by asking how many people in the room already know it, and then praising everyone who does? This fall, I’ll be teaching my most content-heavy course — “News Writing.” I have to teach a lot of vocabulary, along with research, interviewing, revision, and copyediting skills, in addition to…
[C]ourse-management software has become a new kind of campus building–a virtual one where online classes are held and new kinds of “hybrid” courses take place. The unsettled question is who controls what these classrooms look like and how stable their foundations are. Colleges don’t want to just buy these online classrooms out of a catalog.…
Nowadays, layout editors can just expand the size of a photo or cheat the typesize to make a story fill a gap. But in the days before such digital magic, newspaper editors needed a steady supply of filler stories — short items, just long enough to plug gaps of a few inches at the bottom…
Last night, I went to see the new Star Trek movie with a member of the computer science faculty. A math professor was hoping to come, but had a change of plans. The previews suggested it would be a bit intense for me to take the kids to see it, but now that I’ve seen…
Several of my students created videos for class projects. EL200 Jessie Krehlik: Self Defense Videos (with Aero Windwalker) Jessie Farine: Suis La Lune Review Rebecca Marrie created this YouTube Channel, which I hope we can use to sort all the SHU student projects I hear about in the future. I have one independent study project…
It’s the first time I’ve given a final exam in a while. I usually mark final projects or final papers, which I’ve seen in numerous draft forms for the past month, so all I really need to do is read the student’s final reflection, after all the hard work is over. But in a large-ish…
This paper riffs on one of the most popular handouts on my website — Short Stories: 10 Tips for Novice Creative Writers (originally written by one of my technical writing students in 2002, though I continue to tweak it), and applies it to mathematics. [B]efore anyone can understand a piece of mathematics, they must first…
The cuteness of a tribble, the temper of a mugatu, and the ham of a Shatner. Similar:Why scientists should care about artMy artsy daughter loves stories about sc…ArtTalkback session after the matinee and my brother and faculty colleagues after the evening…Talkback session after the matinee and m…AwesomeAdding a little Middle-Earth drama to a photo shoot.The…
I know that my bridge playset has long since gone to the big warp core in the sky, and I can’t seem to find the shoebox where I kept my original Star Trek action figures from the 70s. Even as a kid, I remember being frustrated that the playset didn’t really look all that much…