The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)
I always enjoy my visits to the studio. This recording was a quick one!
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 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…
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:The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the…Stapler jam during a midterm exam.The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)The Darkness and the Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5,…
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 Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityThe Begotten #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 12) Kira and Odo face surrogacyMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the…Stapler jam during a midterm exam.The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold…
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.
Similar:The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibilityMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the…Stapler jam during a midterm exam.The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)Is AI making us less intelligent?
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…
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:The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)The Begotten #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 12) Kira and Odo face surrogacyMore than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the…Stapler jam during…
Couples in successful relationships always use these 6 phrases: ‘You’ll grow stronger both individually and as a unit,’ therapist says
“If you and your partner regularly use these phrases, it’s a sign that you’re already a mentally strong couple,” (psychotherapist Amy Morin) says. “And if you don’t yet, you can start implementing them and find that you’ll grow stronger both individually and as a unit.” —MSN “I’m going to tell you something that may be…
Students are trusting software like this to do their work.
The technology will continue to improve so that that simulated gymnastics videos will look less and less bizarre, but people who can use AI to create flawless gymnastics videos aren’t actually learning gymnastics. No human being will become a better gymnast thanks to a better AI simulation of a gymnastics routine. More convincing AI-generated…
‘People are rooting for the whale’: the strange American tradition of Moby-Dick reading marathons
When I went off to college to be an English major, my father (who passed last December at 90) told me a story about how his respected professor at Northwestern University spent a whole lecture on the seven levels of symbolism in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Being of an analytical mind and precise mind, my father copied…
There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI
Two years after the release of ChatGPT, it may not be surprising that creative work is used without permission to power AI products. Yet the notion remains disturbing to many artists and professionals who feel that their craft and livelihoods are threatened by programs. Transparency is generally low: Tech companies tend not to advertise whose…
Sesame Street had a big plot twist in November 1986
My older siblings say they remember our mother sitting them down to watch a new TV show called Sesame Street. A running gag was that Big Bird’s friend, the huge, gentle wooly-mammoth-like Snuffleupagus somehow always disappeared before anyone else on Sesame Street could see him, leading the adults on the show to believe “Snuffy” was…
I played hooky from work to see Wild Robot with my family
I played hooky to go see Wild Robot this afternoon, so I went back to the office to mark more papers. Plenty more to go, but I put a good dent in things. The story and characters of Wild Robot were not as engaging as those of Wall-E, and the problem of “how do predators…
I’ve been teaching with this handout for over 25 years, updating it regularly. I just removed some references to poorly focused overhead transparencies! #overdue
I first started teaching with this handout in 1999 and posted it on my blog in 2000. Like the Ship of Theseus, I’ve made gradual changes so it’s not really the same document, but just now I spotted hilariously out of date references to bringing along transparencies with you as a backup. Similar:The Dog and…