Are you so alienated from nature that you can’t tell when a piece of fruit is ripe? Don’t worry, there‘sa new line of packaging that changes color when the fruit has reached palatability. Are you too tired to measure out coffee and then too impatient to wait eight minutes while your automatic drip machine brews…
Whether there is a subscription requirement or a Site Pass, there is still a wall around Salon’s content — and that means the blogosphere ignores it. Without this persistent cross-linking, relatively few read its words, and as history is being made — or Googled — every day, Salon’s footsteps in cyberspace become fainter and fainter.…
—Top 100 Speeches (American Rhetoric) Full-text of all, and audio versions of most. Part of a good collection of rhetoric links on Metafilter. Similar:Canada's Stratford Festival losing 'Shakespeare' from its nameAttending this was one of the handful of…CultureKids Today: A Response to Mark Bauerlein (from "Dean Dad")Mark Bauerlein’s essay “What’s the Point…AcademiaMemories of Toronto Yonge Street…
Murdered blogger’s last entry helps find killer (Suspect admits to the deed) Here’s his last entry. —Murdered Blogger’s Last Entry Helps Find Killer (Metafilter) The comments left on Metafilter add much more to the story than those left on the victim’s site. Similar:Father-daughter bonding between takes.That’s a prop knife in my right hand. AestheticsFacebook Removes Human…
An English teacher’s heart will go pitter-pat whenever he or she sees close engagement with the language of the text. That means reading every word: it’s not enough to have a vague sense of the plot. Maybe that sounds obvious, but few people pay serious attention to the words that make up every work of…
Between 4 and 4:45 p.m., the father gives you a great interview. His descriptions of his son are colorful, specific, and heartfelt. His overarching theme is the pride he feels for his son, and his stories all express this theme. In particular the father relates: A) How his son was searching for a purpose in…
Working on ”Drama as Literature” Syllabus (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m working on my goals statement for a 200-level “Major Writers and Genres” course. I’m still working it out — the final version will be less chatty and more infused with academicspeak. The primary research method I teach in a survey course is close reading – the…
There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television’s adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all. I’m a novelist, so I’m hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is…
Maybe when Joe and Mary Sixpack compare the real world they live in with the consistently troubled, violent, sensationalized world the news media present to them day after day, they notice the obvious discrepancies. A perfect example is crime coverage. If you relied only on newspaper front pages and TV news — as so many…
HUNDREDS of BBC journalists and production staff in Manchester are to go out on strike today in protest at planned job cuts. —Nicola Dowling —BBC staff go on strike (Manchester Online) Similar:Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math ClassMy math education predated the widesprea…BusinessKittenwar”May the cutest kitten win…” –Kittenw…AestheticsA Merry Look at Journalism in "The Year…
To assure its continued success, Gemini has further increased it’s [sic] exposure to retailers and consumers alike with innovative marketing and a successful brand[-]building strategy. The For Dummies brand was recently added to Gemini’s stable of product lines. With it’s [sic] recognizable brand name, For Dummies compliments [sic] the current Gemini brand profile that includes…
Dear Card Reader (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Dear Card Reader, Where are you? I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You pick the most inopportune time to disappear, because I have a 1GB SD card to futz around with for the summer. You weren’t under the cushion of the comfy chair, though I did find 13 pens, one…
The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers…
The challenge is to create students who are lifelong learners rather than successful test takers. One of the phrases that Alan consistently uses in his presentations is “fearless learners,” that we have to give our students the tools and the skills to find relevant information and use it well on their own. That we need…
If blogging is both the construction of a personal knowledge artefact and an ecological practice, which reveals emergent knowledges as a series of dynamically linked spaces, this immediately focuses any pedagogy of blogging on questions of connectivity and the evolution of ideas over time. I am therefore becoming increasingly convinced that blogs used across classes…
The retraction set off a firestorm in the blogosphere and on talk radio. The Bush Administration piled on too. White House press secretary Scott McClellan urged the magazine to help undo the damage to the U.S.’s image by pointing out ways in which “our United States military personnel go out of their way to make…
My Scrabble© Score is: 46.What is your score? Get it here. —Pholph’s Scrabble Generator (Solfire.com) Cool fun, via MGK. Similar:Start writing your novel. Journey with Seton Hill University t…AcademiaNested (procedurally generated game of expanding drop-down lists)A text game that you play by opening fol…AwesomeLighten Up (an illustrator explores the racial politics of skin color in comics)Lighten…
We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course. We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second…
Chess provided one of the safety valves that kept the lid on the cold war. But how did chess come to play this role: both symbol of the war and its antithesis? And how does chess illuminate the process by which the west triumphed over communism? —Daniel Johnson —Cold War Chess (Prospect) Check it out, mate.…
In popular conception, mathematics is the ultimate resolvable discipline, immune to the epistemological murkiness that so bedevils other fields of knowledge in this relativistic age. Yet Philip Davis, emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown University, has pointed out recently that mathematics also is “a multi-semiotic enterprise” prone to ambiguity and definitional drift. Earlier this year,…