Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site,…
The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili. This is not a function of journalistic anti-intellectualism, though there‘scertainly enough of that to go around.…
Irked by a reporter who told him he seemed to be “off his game” at a Beijing public appearance, President George W. Bush sought to make a hasty exit from a news conference but was thwarted by locked doors. — Locked doors thwart Bush’s bid to duck question (Reuters | MyWay) In Bush’s defense, that was…
A computer-generated reconstruction of the man’s face bears a strong enough resemblance to portraits of Copernicus to convince the scientists. —‘Body of Copernicus’ identified (BBC) See Wikipedia for more about Copernicus , the 16th-century priest whose astronomical hobby provided evidence to support the theory that the sun was at the center of the solar system. This…
Here’s where it gets fun: after students’ small groups put some thoughts up on the board, we read through the Writing Program’s Statement on Plagiarism out loud, and discuss it, making sure everything’s clear about the policy. And then I hold a plagiarism contest. —Mike Vitia —Let’s Plagiarize! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m home in Greensburg, still…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2A Debate Between Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Do we need instructional design in serious games, or is making a good game enough? This debate is part of an ongoing turf battle within the serious games movement. As is generally the case with conference liveblogging, these are…
The uncanny valley itself is where dwell monsters, in the classic sense of the word. Frankenstein’s creation, the undead, the ingeniously twisted demons of animé and their inspirations from legend and myth, and indeed all the walking terrors and horrors of man’s imagining belong here. In essence, they tend to be warped funhouse-mirror images of…
Subject: The expository lecture as the principal means of instruction. Inciter: The expository lecture is simply a talking textbook that has endured too long since the invention of printing. Subject: The student-selected curriculum. Inciter: According to the interest theory of value, the value of academic subjects is not intrinsic. It is bestowed on them by…
“But I do know that it’s true,” said the author of The Book of Virtues, “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible…
—Teaching Carnival II is here! (Scribblingwoman) A great collection of teaching links, highlighting what teachers who happen to blog are saying about their work.
I am also not claiming that IF should self-evidently be assimilated under the umbrella of “games,” but instead is being cruelly excluded. There is plenty of ambivalence about whether or not IF belongs in games on all sides, both from within the IF community and from without. As “fiction” that is experience by playing a…
WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. “The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. “But when so-called ‘contributors’ began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought…
Usually once a decade an invention comes along that makes everyone revise the way they think about an accepted form of technology. In the first decade of the 21st Century the invention is Uni-Screw?. Uniscrew? replaces Slotted, Phillips,? Pozi-Drive,? Torx? and Square Head style screws and offers significant advantages compared to these fastening mediums. As…
During the 1990’s, Lorin Anderson (a former student of Benjamin Bloom) led a team of cognitive psychologists in revisiting the taxonomy with the view to examining the relevance of the taxonomy as we enter the twenty-first century. REMEMBERING Recognise, list, describe, identify retrieve, name ?. Can the student RECALL information? UNDERSTANDING Interpret, exemplify, summarise, infer,…
Proof by clever variable choice “Let A be the number such that this proof works. . ” Proof by tessellation “This proof is the same as the last.” Proof by divine word “And the Lord said, ‘Let it be true,’ and it was true.” Proof by stubbornness “I don’t care what you say-it is true!”…
Reflection on Wojtyla’s The Jeweller’s Shop (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last night, I read Karol Wojtyla The Jeweller’s Shop for the first time. I knew it was mostly a collection of monologues with little action, in part because it was written to be performed in secret, in Nazi-Communist-occupied Poland. It is a poetic drama, in which the…
# Proof by Name Dropping A: What do you think about objection X? B: Well, BigNamei, BigNamej, and BigNamek agree with me. LittleNamei might agree with you, if only they were that silly. # Proof by Absentee Belittlement A: What do you think about objection X? B: Person C, who is not here to defend…
Infidelity is genetic, say scientists. Electricity allergy real, says researcher. I’ve been collecting “scientists have found the formula for” stories since last summer, carefully pinning them into glass specimen cases, in preparation for my debut paper on the subject. So far I have captured the formulae for: the perfect way to eat ice cream (AxTpxTm/FtxAt…
Because Katrina scattered Tulane students across the nation like dandelion spores, Whiteside hopes that interest might grow near colleges from New York to California that have taken in Tulane students. ?We might ask some of our students in other places to visit high schools with us,? he said. He also hopes that from the wreckage,…
—Bus-ted! Update (Junkyard Blog) This satellite photo shows some 255 unused buses in a flooded New Orleans lot. (Found via Instapundit.) The photo — found, I presume, via Google Earth, and mailed to a weblog by a reader — depicts an unused escape route for some 15,000 New Orleans citizens. The blog, which defends George Bush…