Although professors may hope to remove obstacles to success, innate personality and other environmental factors may influence learning more than what we are able to offer with the short number of hours we are in contact with students. Yet, there are some tactics that seem to encourage real engagement in undergraduate core classes: —Shari Wilson…
The 28-year-old, identified only as D.M., took a photo of his speedometer showing 170 km (100 mph) on a back road in northern Croatia and then put it on the Web site of his local municipality. Police found him three days later. —Hey! Who turned me in? (Reuters) Similar:Essay on meaning of a life grounded in…
Qui ne se souvient pas du SPACE INVADERS, lun des premiers jeux vidéo — Aux commandes d’un vaisseau, il s’agissait de défendre la Terre contre des escadrilles d’envahisseurs venus de l’espace… Et bien, la plus grande partie de SPACE INVADERS de la planète a eu lieu le 24 juin 2006 au festival Belluard. —Space Invaders (notsonoisy.com)…
—Maize: the final frontier (ABCnet.au) A Star Trek cornfield maze. I’ll spare you the fanboy analysis, which would hinge on the fact that it looks like that’s the original series Enterprise, firing what looks like a phaser from the secondary hull (should be coming from the base of the saucer) at a Borg cube, but the…
The Facebook is truly a killer app for incoming freshmen – as they prepare to start a new life in a new place, surrounded by a new social network, the Facebook presents a highly interactive way to explore this new space. For those of us who sent snail-mail letters to our freshman year roommates, Facebook…
And yes, Liz’s face registers the shift between thinking Jon is sweet and deeply weird, but the sudden retraction of her hand from Garfield’s back seals the deal: she wants so little to do with Jon that even touching his cat feels wrong. —”Uh…” (Garfield: Permanent Monday) The world needs more daily critical analyses of Garfield…
They sliced a piece of tough beef in two, bagged half of it in plastic, and dropped it into the bottom of a 50-gallon paperboard drum of water. Then they suspended conventional explosives in the water and retired to a nearby bunker. From there, they watched in safety as a television displayed the ensuing detonation.…
—Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Beginning Tips (Wikibooks: Blender 3D) This is just what I was looking for. I’m still trying to decide whether I should go for broke and introduce my “New Media Projects” students to 3D design for Half-Life 2, where the results will be stunning but the process more fragmented, or be less of…
Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim. This can all sound a little like, well, ’60s-style utopianism. After all, Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would revolt against the bourgeoisie, creating a state where the workers own the means of industrial production.…
—Muppet Wiki (Muppet.Wikia.com) Too much information on the muppets. Way, way too much. Similar:I Made Cheerful Maze Game in ScratchWell, it’s cheerful unless you touch som…AestheticsThe Child (TNG Rewatch: Season 2, Episode 1)Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…CultureI went with frisse. German uses esse “to eat” for people…AmusingLanguage Log » 25 Questions for Teaching with…
As citizens of a highly technological culture, our students see (and often use) technologies as a daily experience. Because of their proliferation, these technologies become are often taken for granted and unexplored. This lesson plan asks students to pay attention to these technologies explicitly. In this activity, students brainstorm lists of their interactions with technology,…
So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?” I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest. They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays. Sitting…
In an online advertising market increasingly dependent on the Net’s ability to precision- target ads, MySpace offers no sure way to hit the bull’s-eye. Google decides which ads to show based on search terms and page content. By contrast, a typical MySpace pageview doesn’t offer much of a clue about anything. What conclusions can you…
Dunn, now 40, grew up in suburban New Jersey where most of her friends dreamed of marrying their high-school sweethearts and settling down. She, however, was obsessed with music, and one day in 1989 walked into the offices of Rolling Stone. Despite a bad perm and a lack of street cred, her detailed knowledge of…
The best students will learn, retain and understand the material they are taught in class no matter how it is presented. However, there are many students in the class who do not have the attention span to concentrate for the whole lesson, who get distracted or do not do the required reading because they are…
Mouse potatoes joined couch potatoes, google officially became a verb and drama queens finally found the limelight on Thursday when they crossed over from popular culture to mainstream English language. —Jill Serjeant —Mouse Potatoes and googling go mainstream (Reuters) Similar:He Googles for some random memes to connect with weak prose, but what he does next is…
Jerz > Writing > Grammar and Syntax > Active and Passive Verbs Introduction Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than passive verbs. This document will teach you why and how to prefer active verbs. The subject of an active voice sentence performs the action of the verb: “I throw the ball.” The subject of a passive voice…
Looking at the last two semesters taught by the author before the text adventure game and the most recent two semesters, every measure of student satisfaction is better. The only measure that might be troubling is perceived student workload. This project is very large. Even with high-level architectural design and many useful snippets of code…
The interactive fiction concept might be spreading. Next year, HarperCollins plans to release Pretty Little Mistakes, a 600-page Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type novel for adults by Heather McElhatton. Depending on the decisions made by the reader, the main character’s options include becoming an actress, an art thief, a cult member, or a murderer. —Aman Batheja —Choose-your-own-adventure novels making…
I was a huge fan of Lucasarts’ adventure games (Loom, The Monkey Islands and so on), and the fact that they were primarily word driven. There were graphics – and what graphics! – but for the most part they presented the player with an interesting dichotomy – nothing ever really happened, but you were responsible…