The Chronicle of Higher Education Announces Plan to Limit, Curate Comments

By 2016, the terrain has shifted. Publications of all stripes are re-examining what it means to engage with their audiences and to encourage productive conversations. Quite a few of those conversations — including ones about our work — have already moved to social media. Many publications have played down comments or eliminated them altogether; others…

What Khan Academy’s Fun, Free Learning Empire Has to Do with Dystopian Social Control

Over the Christmas break, I’ve been churning through Khan Academy math drills, so that I can be a more effective homeschool parent. It’s actually kind of fun watching my score go up, and earning badges. In the way that birds who are trained to peck buttons for food think it’s fun to peck their little beaks bloody. As a grad student ploughing through…

The Post drops the ‘mike’ — and the hyphen in ‘e-mail’

When I announced these style changes, another Twitter user wrote, “wait, it’s 2015 and there are still people who write e-mail?” Not everyone is on Twitter, of course. For every online Post reader snickering at mike, there might be a longtime print subscriber baffled by mic. Because it would be impractical to edit each article separately…

“This paper is going to read like smooth jazz.”

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Irrational Geographic : snopes.com

Boosting the signal. This is a real National Geographic cover, but this issue was likely planned and implemented months before Murdoch purchased the franchise. No, National Geographic hasn’t begun covering nonsense since their merger with Fox. Source: Irrational Geographic : snopes.com Similar:Game Design Program for Education & TrainingI haven’t tried GameSalad yet… and won…AcademiaThe Medium…

Why Is Othello Black?

To us today, the word “black” carries with it a specific cluster of associations informed by history, culture, stereotypes, and literature. Othello may have started in conversation with Shakespeare’s definition of blackness, but today, he speaks with ours. A much more interesting question, really, is: Why is Othello black? Why did Shakespeare write a domestic…

Where is the tipping point?

What if universities stopped buying academic journals, and put the money towards hiring editors who helped their faculty publish their scholarship in their own free, open-source journals? I don’t know how much labour goes into running a prestigious journal, but let’s say all the universities that really need those specialised mathematics journals sat down and…

Surprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On Investment

The conventional wisdom is that humanities majors are wasting all that tuition money and dooming themselves to lives of underemployment. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Humanities degrees are actually worth well more than the cost of college. […] The present value of the extra earnings that graduates in humanities majors can expect over their lifetime…

Editors and editorial board quit top linguistics journal to protest subscription fees

When I publish as a scholar, my goal is not to make money, but to share my intellectual creation. That’s part of my job description, so my university writes my paycheck with the expectation that I will publish. My publications will have more impact if more people read them. Hiding them behind subscription paywalls will…

Verify or duck. Confirm each detail or leave it out of your news story.

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80 Days review

80 Days was my go-to game over the summer, though lately I have switched back to Faster Than Light. I haven’t had the chance to play the updated game, though I have installed it on my iOS devices. This paragraph, from Christian Donian’s review on Eurogamer.net, really impressed me. Great writing, and a great explanation…

All the ‘Happy Birthday’ song copyright claims are invalid, federal judge rules

In a stunning reversal of decades of copyright claims, the judge ruled that Warner/Chappell never had the right to charge for the use of the “Happy Birthday To You” song. Warner had been enforcing a copyright since 1988, when it bought Birch Tree Group, the successor to Clayton F. Summy Co., which claimed the original…

Allergic to Grammar Errors

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Details matter in journalism.

Get the brand of the beer, the make, model and year of the car and the name and breed of the dog. Here’s a great story that suggests journalists also “get the brand of the bra.” Similar:My son showed me Seven Samurai. I had never seen it before. Amazing!I’m going to have to watch this…

Avoid biased reporting. Avoid bias in your reporting. A person might be biased. A person cannot be bias.

Bias is a noun.

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