After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading. I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Odo walks stiffly into the infirmary, where Bashir scolds him for not taking better care of his recently-acquired humanoid body. Quark presents a bottle with what he says is a dead changeling. Odo, entranced, says it’s alive. Bashir manages to mostly unflabbergast the creature’s cellular jimberjams, and there is certainly no plot significance…
Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and even people who intentionally break the law, are less likely to kill people with their cars. On 22 May 1997, the Swedish government presented Bill 1996/97:137 to parliament. It cemented zero deaths as a long-term goal for road fatalities. It reiterated that…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…
As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about Marshall McLuhan here, a bit of Harold Innis there… Blogging this so I keep this in mind the next time I teach a course like The History and Future of the Book. (There’s so much out there!) [S]ome media are…
Rewatching ST:DS9 In a cave (again with the caves), a pleasant-looking Bajoran monk welcomes guests to a “days of atonement” retreat, and is zapped by a beam of light. In the infirmary, the very pregnant Kira, griping comically that the herbs she’s been prescribed mean sedatives don’t work, learns that Latha, formerly a violent member…
This morning, after students submitted a homework assignment (a 200-word evidence-based argument paragraph), I asked them to annotate a printout of the instructions (including a rubric), had them peer-review their own submission, and then had them write additional annotations on the assignment sheet, in which they stated what changes they now realized they needed to…
Given that they need to write multiple stories a day, while also appearing on podcasts and 24-hour news channels, lobby journalists cannot plausibly understand policy detail or how financial markets work. It’s also not what they’re good at. Their skillset is to nose around and cause trouble. If you want a scandal covered or to…
About 20 of us are here in Brooklyn to play a large-scale war game — think Risk — but we’re also each assigned a character, which is a bit like Dungeons & Dragons. We’re told it’s Jan. 6, 2021. We’re given rows and rows of hand-painted mini-figures, a bowl of dice, and a measuring stick showing how far…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira is moved by the interest Sisko shows in an artifact recently recovered from the Cardassians. After a classic “zoom in and enhance” scene where Sisko uses a reflection to unlock an archaeological mystery, a technobabble accident flabbergasts Sisko’s neural jimberjams, which Bashir says will likely give him heightened sensory experiences for a…
I had fun recording this in the studio — with live foley artists! Similar:Korean News Station Pokes Fun at KTVU with Fake American Pilot Names After Southwest Airli…This is certainly a joke, but it’s funni…AmusingRehearsing 'Fiddler on the Roof' is like trying to herd cats onto a grid and make them wal…I’m really enjoying…
Here’s my letter responding to an recent article about the future of the student newspaper I advised for over two decades. A pause. The Seton Hill University student paper is on what my English department colleagues described in a recent email as “indefinite hiatus.” At the time, we didn’t know for how long. I was…
Full version Similar:Help! I may be running out of excuses for not wearing…Help! I may be running out of excuses fo…CultureNASA astronaut: Russians were ‘blindsided’ by reaction to yellow suitsI posted a while back about the yellow a…AestheticsBoston marathon bombing: All the mistakes journalists make during a crisis like the Boston… First, do not…
Similar:Reporters say White House sometimes demands changes to press-pool reports The decades-old White House press pool…CultureTrials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial Time Travel…Rewatching ST:DS9 Strait-laced time c…AmusingReady to teach another set of students what research is (and what it isn’t).AcademiaHow Common Core Testing Damaged High School English ClassesHelping my students…
I felt like a capitalist, buying in bulk on the cheap and selling individual books for $2 (about a 20-cent profit, per book, but I’m really rounding up so I don’t have to deal with change). Students will spend time in class annotating printouts and writing in their copybooks. They’ll still do online activities but…
Similar:Male Supporting Characters in Recent Disney Princess Films Dominate the DialogueThe silly click-baity headline in the Wa…BusinessD&D-Themed movie Zero Charisma pits Nerds vs. HipstersMy wife usually gives me nerd-themed DVD…CultureScaring People Can Make Them Healthier, But It Isn't Always The Way To GoAs my freshman writing students assemble…CultureThe Inner Light (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5,…
In the halls of power at Amazon, busy executives have no time for PowerPoints. At the start of a meeting, everyone gets a printed 6-page memo, and spends 20-25 minutes reading it silently and marking it up. After the discussion, the printouts (typically with detailed hand-written comments) are handed back to the person who called…
This sort of thing was funnier back in 2017. Similar:In July, 2002, I was blogging about military close reading, weblogs in journalism, UX evan…In July, 2002, I was blogging about …CybercultureNo, Running Online Classes Isn't CheaperA good response to the myth that the lab…AcademiaNew rules governing drone journalism are on the way — and there’s…
Carving out some time to enjoy this show as I prep to teach the Pittsburgh Cycle @SetonHill Similar:Apology of Socrates, By PlatoAristotle classified Plato’s work, repre…AestheticsThe Value of Truth: We are living through an epistemological crisis. In the jargon of academia, the study…AcademiaStephen Coles’ The Anatomy of Type, reviewed.Talk nerdy to me. You’re my type. What…
I’m also thinking of the cost to the students who have to repeat a course or fail out of a demanding program because they couldn’t AI their way to a passing grade. “People use it much more than we expected,” the cofounder wrote, later adding in response to another user that he “personally chose the price and…