The New York Times Makes The Nerdiest Correction Ever – Featured on BuzzFeed
The New York Times Makes The Nerdiest Correction Ever – Featured on BuzzFeed.
Feeding a Neighbor’s Lambs
A neighbor invited us over to help feed the lambs they are raising in their garage. (The mother sheep died, and her lambs needed more care than the owners could manage.) The lambs are Piccolo and Brown Sugar.
Playing video games linked to breast-feeding, not crime
Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica. Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after…
Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)
McSweeney’s: Horatio thinks he saw a ghost. Hamlet thinks it’s annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies. The king thinks Hamlet’s annoying. Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better. Hamlet’s father is now a zombie. Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. (Twitter would probably catch the back-and-forth spirit of a drama a…
Feedback — The Flying Spaghetti Monster
“I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Henderson affirms. “It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence,…
Testing my new RSS feed
Testing my new RSS feed I am having some trouble coding up my new RSS feed. If you’ve got a content aggregator, and you’d like to let me know how my feed works for you, please let me know. BTW… What’s a content aggregator?
AI coding assistants do not boost productivity or prevent burnout, study finds
My job is often to help students understand things that they aren’t good at doing yet. If a student arrives in my classroom with a solid ability to construct clear sentences and summarize difficult readings, using an AI tool that helps them spot grammar mistakes with less effort and capture the gist of a reading…
Double Entry Journals: Your Scholarly Research Notes for College-level Critical Thinking
What is a double-entry research journal?
Reading with a highlighter in your hand encourages you to agree with or ignore what you read. That’s a very limited way to engage with a text.
By contrast, double-entry notes are a way of making complex connections between different things that you read.
My students often tell me that when they take good double-entry notes, they get a much better paper when the time comes for them to start actually churning out the paragraphs.
I Don’t Know Why Everyone’s in Denial About College Students Who Can’t Do the Reading
In my lit classes, I’m definitely teaching more short stories and fewer novels that I used to. I’ve expanded the time I spend on note-taking, synthesizing quotes from different sources, and why at the college level it’s not a good paragraph if it simply introduces “One quote that supports my position,” repeats three or four…
Make Video Horizontal Again
For confessionals or tapdance routines vertical video is fine. When my students do multimedia projects I remind them that the video screen in our classroom is horizontal, so if they do use a vertical video there’s plenty of room for them to add infographics and annotations. Or they can actually edit a vertical video. If…
Picking a rubric in Canvas should not be so frustrating that it makes me want to blog about it… and yet here we are.
In general, I find Canvas a fairly decent system, but after a particularly frustrating hour wrestling with rubrics, I decided to spend two more hours blogging about my frustrations. I would expect a drop-down list to be populated with all the rubrics I’ve already created for my current class, and it would be a nice…
How to fix the internet: If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms.
A teenager in Indonesia may not see the same images on Instagram that I do, but the experience is roughly the same: we scroll through some photos from friends or family, maybe see some memes or celebrity posts; the feed turns into Reels; we watch a few videos, maybe reply to a friend’s Story or…
Can you melt eggs? Quora’s AI says “yes,” and Google is sharing the result
Google Search is already well-known for having gone dramatically downhill in terms of the quality of the results it provides over the past decade. In fact, Google’s deteriorating quality has resulted in techniques like adding “Reddit” to a query to reduce SEO-seeking spam sites and has also increased the popularity of AI chatbots, which apparently provide answers without…
How to Keep Students Writing in the Age of AI Tools
In a writing-intensive class, students need to write extensively to the point that the teacher cannot possibly grade all of it. — Edutopia via NCTE Good advice from an article by Kara Douma, reprinted by NCTE. I need to hear that. The referees don’t score every practice. The coaches don’t give you feedback after…
An English professor tries to help ChatGPT write and revise a sonnet
Shortly after my online AmLit survey began, I received two obviously AI-generated submissions. The responses did not address the prompt, there was no textual annotation and brainstorming assignment that was supposed to lead up to the written response, and the student did not take me up on my offer to meet to discuss how the…
The AI revolution is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour
Students who cheat with ChatGPT can look forward to these $15/hr jobs training the AI that they relied upon to get them their degrees. The students who actually did the work themselves should be much be better prepared to demonstrate how their work differs from the mediocre stream of bot-produced content. Savreux is part of…
They grew up in a mostly analog/paper world and squirmed with joy the first time they clicked a hyperlink that they created
Today’s students have many strengths. They are great at collaboration, introspection, and remixing. While my students are very familiar with phone apps, even the English majors who want to be professional writers are not very familiar with the conventions of writing for the World Wide Web. Because their sense of “being online” mostly entails interacting…
NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’
NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other…
The AI Mirror Test: Why Even the Smartest People Keep Falling Short
What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining,…
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter. I’ve deleted the app from my phone, and check it a couple times a day from my laptop. I’ve been reading more news and fewer tweets. I followed a Twitter bot that reminds me to go do something else that’s not scrolling slack-jawed through tweets.…