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:Leonard in Slow Motion (9min video)Leonard exists in slow motion but lives …AestheticsNarnia Lesson Plans: Activities Related to the Musical (based on The Lion, the Witch and t…I just posted the latest musical theater…BooksAlice in Quantumland: A Charming Illustrated Allegory of…
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:The bots are coming. And they have poems. Yet in a circle pallid as it f…CybercultureWhat Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?“The great paradox about these digital c…CultureForce of Nature (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 9) A Space Thing leads to an en… Rewatching ST:TNG In which a comic te…EthicsDefiant (#StarTrek…
Similar:Same photo, two different interpretations.This is why I spend time teaching my jou…PersonalJournalists Verify ClaimsConfirm what your sources tell you. Fact…CultureTevye from Fiddler on the Roof, Now a Rich Man, Receives a Letter from His HOADear Tevye, This letter is to inform …AmusingThe Benefits of No-Tech Note TakingI quibble with The Chronicle headline wr…AcademiaSupport the…
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:This Is What Summer Vacation Is For: Designing a Steampunk Airsloop with Blender 3DSummer vacation means if I am telling my…Aesthetics"A Mushroom at Last… A Mushroom Forever"I asked my 10yo why she was moping. “…AmusingExplaining Twerking to Your ParentsI still haven’t seen the video, but this…AmusingCarolyn's performance as Ariel #bardinbloom @ThePublicPGHSo good to see her…
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:My Daughter's Synesthesia: "S" Is Always Red, and "T" Is Lime GreenAccording to a color-picking test at syn…AestheticsCarolyn Gombell Is Not a Real Person: #JusticeforCarolyn Is a Campaign Against Twitter Ref…Fascinating use of social media. To be c…Current_EventsWhat does a professor do, other than lecture for…
Carving out some time to enjoy this show as I prep to teach the Pittsburgh Cycle @SetonHill Similar:Liberal arts college professor assaults alt-right group memberCarefully choosing language that fits yo…AcademiaRest assured, there will soon be enough Rey toys to monetize the imaginations of the littl…The problems of female characters being …BusinessThe dangers of short form…
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…