The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)
I always enjoy my visits to the studio. This recording was a quick one!
MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibility
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…
The Begotten #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 12) Kira and Odo face surrogacy
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…
More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent them
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…
Stapler jam during a midterm exam.
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…
The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)
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…
The Darkness and the Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 11) A serial killer targets Kira’s former resistance colleagues
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…
Is AI making us less intelligent?
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…
The press lobby is going feral—ignore it
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…
January 6th … the board game?
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…
Rapture #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 10) Sisko’s “visions” complicate politics, faith and family
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…
Selling Point (Audio Drama)
I had fun recording this in the studio — with live foley artists! Similar:Booby Trap (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Three Episode 6) When LaForge gets absurd with a hologr…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year b…DesignI had some unexpected downtime today, so I filled out another span of my #blender3d #steam…AestheticsEvita in Zelionople CultureGrandpa Joe's Candy Store.Sugar rush…
Letter to the editor: Setting record straight on Seton Hill newspaper
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…
Don’t Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)
Full version Similar:English teaching: Johnson: Talking past each otherWhen I got to college, I had already lea…AcademiaAmerica's ShakespeareShakespeare continues to be the most per…CultureThink Like A Journalist | Kelsey Samuels | TEDxPlano Culture12yo Actress Carolyn Jerz on Pict Classic Theatre's Great Expectations: "Your heart will b…My daughter, who plays Young Estella in …CultureSolitaire ChessSpent…
Hey there, chaotic world in academia and beyond, could you settle down just a bit so I can mark these papers on August Wilson? Thanks!
Similar:The boy wins once again. #chessGamesQuantity leads to quality – Austin KleonAnecdote: [A] ceramics teacher announced…AestheticsTrump administration gave Courage Award to a woman who criticized Trump, then rescinded th… The State Department revoked a pre…CultureMore #steampunk control panels. Recessed workstations with fold-down keyboards. #blender3d…PersonalDress rehearsal of The NutcrackerPersonal80 Days: "1872, with a steampunk twist. Phileas…
I ordered a box of composition books. Low-tech response to AI.
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…
I have for some reason reached another #duolingo milestone.
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The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager
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…
For some reason, I saw a bump in traffic to a page that linked to a “make-your-own-Trump-executive order” page
This sort of thing was funnier back in 2017. Similar:Whispers of the Past-Herb Morrison and the HindenburgIn this short documentary, I voice Herb …CultureDownloading Great ExpectationsA few weeks ago, I bought an audio recor…BooksTo the Death #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 23) The Defiant's pursuit of disloy…Rewatching ST:DS9 In the Defiant mess h…EmpathyI ordered…
How I Learned What I Learned (featuring Wali Jamal)
Carving out some time to enjoy this show as I prep to teach the Pittsburgh Cycle @SetonHill Similar:Parchmap – Interactive Fiction with automapping, autocomplete, navigation, note taking, an…Parchmap is a wonderful expansion to the…AwesomeTwo Trains Running ( #AugustWilson #CenturyCycle, 7 of 10)August Wilson’s Century Cycle > Spoi…BooksLoved part 2 of Romeo and Juliet @thepublicpgh #pptplaytime…