My ten-year-old has wanted to be a scientist since he was four, but he’s bored by math. Paul Lockhart (PDF) helps me understand why. But what do I do now? The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. Everyone understands…
My former student Mike Rubino makes a good point about the encrustation of social networking icons that are clogging up the interfaces of content-rich websites. Now, instead of a website having the normal “E-mail this article”; “Print this article”; and the occasional “Digg this article” link, it’s got a slew of other services. You have…
Yesterday was my daughter’s sixth birthday. My wife told me that there was a horrific meltdown at the store when the ice cream cake they picked up did not match the picture in the catalog. Screams, tears, and a half hour of sobbing. Last night, I told my daughter the story of The Birthday Party…
For a second, I really wanted this to be true. Great satire from The Onion. According to Mead’s website, the ruling lines in the grad-school-ruled notebooks will be placed 3.55 millimeters apart, making them “infinitely more practical” for postgraduate work than the 7.1 millimeter college-ruled notebooks. In addition, the standard 1.5-inch top margin normally provided…
The abstract from a psychology conference presentation that argues World of Warcraft lowers the anger levels of players is getting a lot of attention online. The term “sex” (which appears in the title paired with “violence”) seems to mean “gender” in the abstract, so the title may be a bit misleading. I haven’t heard from…
My Intro to Literary Study students read Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves while I was away at a conference for most of last week. They really seem to enjoy this book. Early on this term, I noticed a critical mass of students who try to make their blog a place to practice writing for…
Someone is going to use this incident as evidence to support the claim that social networking websites are dangerous. Lindsay’s father said the teens attacked her to make a video that might become popular on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. But the mother of one of the girls arrested said Lindsay had provoked the other…
I’m always a bit nervous about reading any news article with “said to consider” or “possibly” or “just might gonna be” in the headline, but the NYT reports: Over the last decade, CNN has held on-again, off-again talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures but during the last several months,…
I’m not a student. I found your web page while looking for a certain use of slashes. I thought maybe you might know something about it. In the legal field, we sometimes use slashes to indicate that there is nothing following the text when there is extra space at the end of a page. An…
Last year, I enjoyed reading In the Clickstream, a speculative blog-based thinkpiece from Mike Edwards, who teaches composition at the U.S. Military Academy. With Mike, I participated in a workshop at the 4Cs, where I got to meet two majors who are also composition instructors. Both my brother and sister work for defense contractors, and…
The Smoking Gun has this snarky story… I’ve changed the inline links so that they point to The Smoking Gun, rather than to the photos the article mentions about): A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy, claiming that the web giant’s popular “Street View” mapping feature has made a photo of their…
A good analysis from Cory Doctorow: Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there’s…
The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It’s the kind of place where…
The opening of this story uses the sudden deaths of two bloggers over a three-month span (and the non-fatal heart attack of a third) in order to suggest that bloggers are blogging themselves into their graves. How many reporters, kindergarten teachers, retirees, people named “Joe” and left-handed people died in the last three months?  OMG…
Here’s how I’ve been spending my time lately. It’s after 8pm Sunday, and I’ve been at work since I handed my kids off to my wife this morning right after church. Tomorrow morning I drop this baby off in the Provost’s office. The question is… should I add this photo to the front cover or…
Information Week: The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong “Au Clair De La Lune” on April 9, 1860. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a “phonautograph” to scratch…
I’ve been making an extra effort this year to create some new worksheets designed to teach basic, stand-alone concepts in my Introduction to Literary Study class. Here’s a new worksheet to help students write a sonnet. Below is the part they’re actually supposed to submit… after that I’ve included the text that explains the assignment.…
Blackboard, a company that sells popular course-management software, recently won a $3.1 settlement against Desire2Learn. According to Slashdot, Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn’t think something…
Here’s a “glass is half full” headline that makes me proud to work at Seton HIll: Seton Hill U Students Step In, Help Officer Being Attacked By Man Here’s a “glass is half empty” headline that makes me go “oops”: Seton Hill student turns Taser on Greensburg police officer Here’s a more neutral headline that…
The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news: Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of…