Summer Blogging Slowdown (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m going on a little family vacation, and won’t be back until Tuesday. We’re visiting my brother-in-law in New Jersey, and plan to visit Philadelphia, too. I hope this trip goes better than last year’s. Similar:Today I didn't save the world, but I did help a student while power-walking at…
—Knights of the Round Table — Star Trek TOS (YouTube) Amusing. Not side-splittingly funny, like that Bush/Blair mashup that was circulating last year. But still amusing. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. Similar:How Humans Respond to RobotsThe play that coined the word “robot,” K…AestheticsLonely Among Us (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 6) Crew-posessing spark roams and a…
—Blender for the Faint Hearted — 06: Material Basics, Part 2 (SciFi Meshes) I’ve been working with the open source 3D design tool “Blender.” It’s powerful. Very powerful. It’s got an overwhelming number of buttons, and the existing documentation is incomplete. I have asked Seton Hill to purchase a handful of copies of a professional 3D…
Angry mother to preteen girl: “Don’t ever tell me to shut up again. That’s totally disrespectful. Now go and fill your damn water.” Similar:Preview of "The Fantasticks" (thanks, Tribune-Review, for covering the arts community)For Luisa, Jerz’s character, “the world …CultureWaiting for a talk on preserving artifacts from NASA’s Apollo program So much to see at…
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:Knowing Poe [Annotated Version of 'The Raven']Edgar Allan…
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:Many things in the world are awful, but my latest #Blender3D work on my #steampunk control…One of many steampunk control panels I’v…AestheticsAfter 10 Years of Blogs, the Future's Brighter Than EverIn Wired, Jenna Wortham focuses on what …HistoryKickball Ice Cream Maker Is…
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:Save The WordsIn honor of the cold I am fighting, I ju…AmusingThe Other 21st Century Skills User…