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:Digital Humanities: A DefinitionDoes the world need another working…
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:Liberal…
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:In November 2000, I was blogging about the US Presidential election, mirrors, Arts & Lette…In November 2000, I was blogging about …BusinessOh No, Performers Coming Into AudiencePITTSBURGH—Audience members at the Bened…AmusingRandom sibling selfie.PersonalJournalism has become ground zero for 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…
A masterful spoof of one of my favorite literary works, skewering a reference book I spent a lot of time with in my formative years.. ‘Tis hard to say, which promises more Loot:Writing, or Telling others how to do’t. — Geoff Nunberg Similar:Portofess”If people can confess on Oprah, Phil an…EthicsThe Missing Will, by Agatha Christie…
A serendipitous click on a link brought me to this striking example of storytelling economy in a news story. “Three flower cars, wow!” said a pilgrim from Wisconsin who was just about to chomp down on a chocolate cannoli from Mike’s Pastry yesterday morning. The cheesehead was momentarily spellbound by the stately procession of black…
A big part of my work as a freshman writing instructor seems to be convincing students that I really do mean it when I explain that Googling to “find quotes” to support an opinion you’ve already committed to paper is not the same thing as doing academic research with peer-reviewed sources. I also find that…
I dislike the term “digital native.” I mean no offense to Marc Prensky, who popularized it (along with its counterpart, “digital immigrant”), but the term is laden with colonial baggage, though as a humanities person I’m perhaps hypersensitive to that sort of thing. More important, the term also misses an important point. Today’s technologically savvy…
I recall deciding not to blog about an unpublished study that reported a correlation between lower grades and higher Facebook usage, though I did make a mental note of how some of the coverage was confusing correlation with causation. A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in…
While hiding from the stack of final papers, I took a break in the cafeteria. Some of my colleagues were talking about the new Star Trek movie, and the conversation shifted to what’s on TV now. My daily household duties include putting the kids to bed. My wife doesn’t really do mornings, and homeschooling doesn’t…