The Handwriting Is on the Wall

The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better — a lifelong benefit. Children who don’t learn…

Google Snaps Up YouTube for $1.65B

Internet search leader Google is snapping up YouTube for $1.65 billion, brushing aside copyright concerns to seize a starring role in the online video revolution. —Google Snaps Up YouTube for $1.65B (AP|MyWay) Similar:BREAKING: All ITT Campuses Will CloseAll ITT Tech campuses will be shut down,…AcademiaShe was a musical ingenue Sunday, filmed a slasher movie past midnight…

Community Papers Anniversary Lift

That’s cut and paste journalism, taken in large part from Wikipedia – the online encyclopedia to which any member of the public can contribute. Here’s where freelance journalist Tom Winterbourn took the exact same words and sentences from Wikipedia. —Community Papers Anniversary Lift (ABCTV (Australia) MediaWatch) An interesting article about a print journalist accused of plagiarizing…

Tron

[Y]ou’re running around on a big circuit board, powering up at transformers, dodging resistors, your path barred by ROM chips. This probably seems pretty weird to The Youth of Today. In the years since Tron we’ve been trained to think that a journey to “the inside of the computer” might entail running around on a…

Annoying Blue Bounding Box in Adobe Flash

Annoying Blue Bounding Box in Adobe Flash (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m introducing Adobe Flash to my New Media Projects course next week. I’ve fiddled with Flash before, but I haven’t yet worked through the examples in our book. My simian curiosity got the better of me, and I started clicking buttons at random. I suddenly noticed…

Timez Attack

—Timez Attack (BigBrainz) There are flashcard “games” and is multiplication bingo and multiplication Frogger, and they’re all well and good. But this is something else. Watch the video on the home page. Similar:'We're back': Bushy Run's 2023 battle reenactment will be heldI’m glad to know that this recent contro…CultureThe #Blender3D #eevee denoising filter gives off a…

[E-Mail is for Old People]

—[E-Mail is for Old People] (User Friendly) Thanks for the link, Josh. Similar:'Peter Pan Live' Was Never Intended to Be EnjoyedI didn’t watch the show (our cable-less …AestheticsTelevision is Now the Second Screen for Kids with TabletsOf course, not all kids have tablets, an…Culture"Why are you throwing out all the books?!"The short answer is because we’re…

I'm a Man, Yes I am

The question, “what can you say when you step off something?” tells you almost everything you need to know about Armstrong: Everyone else on earth was thinking in terms of stepping on something — the surface of another world — while the pilot was thinking, and still thinks today, in terms of stepping off something…

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to…

IFComp 2006

The games are now available for downloading. —IFComp 2006 Mmmm…. interactive fiction. Similar:That's my daughter in the hoop. Pippin Oct 21-23 and 27-29. AestheticsGoogle: "how can u" vs. "how can an individual" is not really about grammar Yes, I got a chuckle over this, but …CultureYork Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours…

Disney retools its 'School'

Bryan Louiselle wrote two new songs, “Cellular Fusion” and “Counting on You,” … —Disney retools its ‘School’ (Variety) I don’t get cable, so I haven’t seen the TV version of High School Musical. But it turns out that the two new songs that are part of the stage version were written by someone I knew in…

Colleges coveting home-schooled students

After years of skepticism, even mistrust, many college officials now realize it’s in their best interest to seek out home-schoolers, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “There was a tendency to kind of dismiss home schooling as inherently less rigorous,” he said. “The attitude of…