“Forty percent of students lack basic reading skills, and their academic performance is dismal compared with that of their foreign counterparts. In response to this crisis, schools are skilling-and-drilling their way ‘back to basics,’ moving toward mechanical instruction methods that rely on line-by-line scripting for teachers and endless multiple-choice testing. Consequently, kids aren’t learning how…
fisk (v): debunk via critical annotation, typically with heaping doses of contempt. Recently Jill Walker lamented that it was hard to teach her students to blog critically. Perhaps we should first teach them to fisk. Over the past month, I’ve seen the verb “fisk” pop up in weblogs discussing media coverage of Iraq. The eponymous…
Google: “switch[ed] to Blogger“: 165. Google: “switch[ed] to Movable Type“: 534Blogger vs. Movable TypeLiteracy Weblog) Similar:A Beginner's Guide to HTML & CSSFiling this wonderful resource for the n…CybercultureThe Myth of the Fake Geek Girl It’s not surprising, then, that being a…CultureCarnegie Science Center's Guitar ExhibitThis summer, I’m a “CSC Insider” — mean…AestheticsText Games in a…
“Forty German authors are hoping to set a record on World Book Day on Wednesday by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours. | Each of the authors has two hours in which to write two pages of the book.” —Authors Plan ‘Fastest’ BookBBC) Similar:"Oliver Twist" is a story of redemption for PICT…
“TypePad is the first new consumer-grade weblogging product in more than a year, but it shows a change in the marketplace: grabbing the new middle ground of users who want all the advanced features of a self-hosted weblog, but none of the tears of having to learn about Linux or Perl or FTP. This should…
“Whoo whoo whoo oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh ooh ooh oooh oooh.” — Primatologist Jane Goodall imitating a chimpanzee in the U.S. State Department, yesterday. —Notable QuotesABC News) Similar:William Shakespeare’s Star WarsBecause apparently I am not already nerd…AestheticsThe Toulmin model for analyzing arguments came up at a faculty pedagogy workshop today. I…
“With regard to the article by David Whitehouse posted Friday, 18 April, 2003, 13:45 GMT 14:45 UK: Does anyone actually read these BBC stories before they are posted? It would be polite to to spell Mr. Rutan’s name properly (‘Burt’ not ‘Bert’). Moreover, this is not the ‘world’s first manned sub-orbital space programme’. I cannot…
CNN/Reuters: News reports have filtered out early this morning that US forces have swooped down on an Iraqi primary school and captured 6th- grade teacher Mohammed al-Hazar. Sources indicate that, when arrested, Al-Hazar was in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a geo-board, base-10 blocks, algebra tiles, a computer, a data projector and a graphing…
“In the last 24 years, Mr. Gottman and his colleagues have recorded thousands of such conversations, using careful techniques to measure and notate the participants’ emotions each step of the way. After Angie and Dave’s talk, Mr. Gottman says, his assistants reviewed a videotape, scoring each sentence and facial expression on such measures as disgust…
“A panel of celebrity judges will help eliminate two contestants each week, leaving one lucky winner the undisputed leader of Iraq at the end of the season. Viewers can participate by casting phone-in votes, although Darnell noted that voting is restricted to calls originating from within the continental U.S.” —New Fox Reality Show to Determine…
“By ordering up athletics-enhanced, music-enhanced, optimism-enhanced children, you are not merely urging them in some direction – all parents do that; you are wiring your own tastes into their genes, literally twisting their minds and bodies into the shape you have chosen. And this staggering arrogance is bound to be futile because the technology will…
“By the time this child graduates from high school, her brain will have absorbed 350,000 television commercials, 100,000 alcohol ads and a daily barrage of sex and violence. If that doesn’t turn you off then nothing will.” —TV Turnoff Week — April 22-28Adbusters) Umm… why does it start on Tuesday? That’s probably an old ad.…
When a blogger dies, what happens to the blog? “I keep it on my ‘friends’ list just so I can see his name every so often, but I can never bring myself to click on his name. The first year or so after he passed on I visited it with decreasing regularity, until eventually I…
“In 1999, Fanning, a 19-year-old Boston-area hacker from a broken home, stumbled on the idea for making digital MP3 files easy to find on the Net. Teaming up with fellow geeks he knew only through online chat rooms, he crafted a simple technology that allowed millions to swap music collections free of charge. The operation…
What if “pi” were a recent discovery? How would journals publicize it, and how would the educational system absorb it? “Once the discovery had been reported in a contemporary journal, mathematicians could be expected to begin using and citing Archimedes? constant… While the term Archimedes? constant would become increasingly familiar even to school children, scientists…
“In my opinion, the application forms for humanities Ph.D. programmes should carry the warning: ‘Enter at your own risk.’ The fine print should read: ‘The risks include poverty, shame, humiliation, and clinical depression.’ You will of course find no such warning on the graduate-school application forms. And incredibly enough, even at this stage in the…
“My how times have changed! These days you hear nerd talk spewing out of everyone’s mouth! … Is it computer technology that’s made nerds of us all? Or perhaps it’s because we really do work for those former “losers” now.” Peter Bagge —The Nerd-ification of AmericaReason) I feel the same way about Star Trek, which…
When I found this in my in box it made my day. It’s a report from a former student who is now a techical writer: “Recently, one of your articles came up in my department at Unisys. Each month, my colleagues across the country and I receive a departmental ‘e-zine’ that includes links to technical…
“It is rare for a pregnant woman to vanish. But Peterson’s case likely received extra media attention from the start because she was from the same town as another well-known missing person and homicide victim — Chandra Levy, the Washington, D.C., intern who had an affair with then-Rep. Gary Condit.” —Eerily Similar Case [Missing Pregnant…
I’m a little behind in blogging Elwyn Jenkins’ response to Dan Gillmor’s Making the News. Here’s what Elwyn says: “Writing, that you see here in this [Elwyn’s] weblog, is not journalism. This is more about pedagogy than it is about journalism. This is about organizing information — some bloggers do that by simply amassing a…