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:Entire staff of Russian TV channel resigned during a live stream with last words: “no war”…The Entire staff of the Russian TV chann…AestheticsWhat's a…

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:My son showed me Seven Samurai. I had never seen it before. Amazing!I’m going to have to watch this one agai…AestheticsTelling Trump’s Story to…

[E-Mail is for Old People]

—[E-Mail is for Old People] (User Friendly) Thanks for the link, Josh. Similar:In September 1999 I was blogging about Tom Stoppard, techno-utopianism, voice-recognition …In September 1999, I was blogging about …CybercultureObamacare's broken website cost more than LinkedIn, Spotify combinedMuch of the criticism of Healthcare.gov …CultureIn 2019, I have a college student who annotates readings like this!I…

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:Very Berry Dead Makes a Big Impression at Big Storm Performance CompanyCarolyn Jerz lights up the stage from he…AwesomeWhen T.S. Eliot Invented the Hipster  Prufrock cannot bring himself to…CultureClosing the Door on the Video Store Era (with tweets) · chutry · StorifyNow that…

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…