A new story at the Guardian on how McDonald’s is planning on distributing 15 million children’s books over the next few years through it’s happy meal program. What a great way to make parents forget that the food is terrible — they give us books! Actually, the story made me …
A very important new study on students’ differential reading of screens versus books is out in the Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing. A summary of some of the article’s findings: Connection with characters on screen does not seem as deep because concentration is not achieved in the same way. …
When I returned to school last month, two things had changed noticeably on my campus. First, my department was gone. The department of German literature and culture, in which I had been a professor, was the latest victim in the so-called decline of the humanities. (To be fair, we weren’t …
This fall has been abuzz with debates about online learning. Like many things digital, this one first appeared a long time ago (1995 anyone?). And now it’s coming back with a vengeance. Suddenly online learning is fresh, exciting, and innovative (not to mention “massive”). A host of universities have announced …
I promised that I would write occasionally about my going back to school. The first thing I can say is that there is definitely a problem with university teaching. It can be abominable. No if’s, and’s, or but’s. I have been searching for an ideal (i.e. decent) intro to statistics …
This graphic should give us as teachers serious pause. It shows how the periods of the lowest nervous activity for students occurred…during class. Ouch. The good news is that “lab” seems to have been far more stimulating. Here is the full paper by Ming-Zher Poh et al.
My son’s school is holding its annual Lecturothon today, where every student in the school has to read for five straight hours (I’m guessing there are breaks). They use it to raise money and to make a statement about the value of sustained reading. He brings a sleeping bag, a …
An amazing interview at Spark with Luis von Ahn, inventor of those blurry text boxes that you have to type in to prove you’re a human when you want to fill out a form. Ahn is one of those people whose mind just solves things. So after feeling guilty that …
Death of the book, death of the humanities, and now, death of the classics. I could have sworn they already died, but alright: Mary Beard has a very thoughtful reflection on the relevance of the classics today in the NY Review of Books. But do we need defenses of things …
The President of SSHRC, historian Chad Gaffield, gave a talk last night at McGill about the role of digital humanities in changing the nature of scholarship. It was a talk probably more appropriate to funders and politicians but one of the recurring themes was the idea of “access.” It is …