I paid a little attention to a long-neglected RSS aggregator for student blogs. It had stopped working at some point, and was no longer recognizing the RSS feeds generated by WordPress. Fortunately, the Feed Creator for WP RSS Aggregator does the trick — it generates RSS feeds automatically. I’m blogging this in part because every semester…
Teaching students to write does not mean correcting their errors, or even preventing them from making errors. While I’m grateful that autocorrect catches most of my typographical errors, I have so far been unimpressed by software tools that aim to check grammar and style. Most of my students are pretty good readers and writers; if…
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A student in my “American Literature: 1915-Present” class used the medium of a 2D graphic adventure game to deliver her multimodal final project. (Students also wrote a traditional term paper.) You are the cameraman of a new TV show based on Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” But things quickly go downhill when a…
A mechanism description analyzes (that is, subdivides into components for further scrutiny) an object in space. When you try to organize your major subsections, if no other obvious pattern seems appropriate, you can always fall back on the more-important-to-less-important strategy. Don’t sell the object. A technical writer is not required to persuade the reader that the object is wonderful,…
The car shop wanted to charge over $300. I found the part online for under $40. With the help of a YouTube video, the job took about 45 minutes. (Much of that time I spent wandering around my house looking for tools. Grateful that my father-in-law gave me a ratchet set as a wedding present.)…
I have no reason to trust Facebook to filter my news for me. However, so many people get their news by social media, maybe this will be an easy way for people to check whether a viral meme is a hoax. Maybe an option marked “Look up vetted news reports related to this post.” Yes,…
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A Google self-study found that its own most successful employees had soft skills, such as mentoring ability, empathy, and critical thinking and problem-solving. “Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer,” according to the Washington Post. [A]mong the eight most important qualities of Google’s top…
Instead of flagging links to questionable news items, Facebook will instead hide them. Which is nice, but it still means we have to trust the algorithm Facebook uses. (Don’t trust Facebook to filter your news for you.) False news undermines the unique value that Facebook offers: the ability for you to connect with family and…
In the bird-flight simulator at the Pittsburgh Aviary, the girl twists and turns, careening around buildings, dive-bombing alleyways, and comes to a perfect landing in the middle of the street just as her timer runs out. The boy immediately heads up to clear the buildings, then flies toward the horizon to see how far he…
Did you share fake news from Russia during the US Presidential election? Grudgingly following up on a Congressional order, Facebook will permit you to jump through hoops to find out. Because Facebook apparently does not have the technology to insert items of its choosing directly in user feeds, the social media company has helpfully provided…
The other day I found myself very annoyed at how much headspace was occupied by a free game I had downloaded on my phone. So I deleted it. I still go into fight-or-flight mode when I’m drafting a text and a phone call comes in. I like to page through the my notebooks full of…
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(Lights up on a college journalism classroom. The professor enters, surveys the room.) Professor: Math! Students: (Shocked reaction.) Professor: Math!! Students: (Scattered cries of “No!”) Professor: MATH!!! Students: NO!!! Â (Blackout.) Â (40 minutes later.) Â Professor: So, at the very least when you encounter numbers in your reporting, contact sources who can help you…
You won’t usually catch me saying anything nice about Microsoft. (Ok, Flight Simulator was good.) A few days ago when life was a little more stressful than usual, I found myself nearly overwhelmed by what should have been a routine editing task. Then I stumbled across MS-Words’s View->Focus mode, which hides most of the intrusive…
RCA’s console never rivaled the impact of Atari’s VCS, Magnavox’s Odyssey, or Mattel’s Intellivision, and few people remember it today. But the true story behind it is fascinating. Its underlying technology began in 1969 as a personal computer developed at home by one man with a vision, Joseph Weisbecker. His daughter, Joyce, ended up being…
Saving this for next term’s “History and Future of the Book” course. Students said they preferred and performed better when reading on screens. But their actual performance tended to suffer. For example, from our review of research done since 1992, we found that students were able to better comprehend information in print for texts that were…
Dinosaurs evolved into birds. Not all of them, of course. Birds are so much a part of our environment that we barely notice them. I’ve said the same about weblogs. Monetized and platformized and app-ified, the basic functions of blogging live on — a reverse-sorted stream of posts, a mechanism to engage with visitors to…
 The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag. The findings suggest that the mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning,…