Mike Petrilli, in a recent post on the Flypaper blog, comments on a study in Philadelphia that measured the impact of a “healthy-eating” initiative in schools. Petrilli’s argument is that, since the study found that school intervention in students’ diets measurably decreased the incidence of obesity in those students, schools can have a “big [...]

Uma Thurman, in an interview for NPR’s “Fresh Air,”1 on learning martial arts for Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and 2:
It’s difficult to learn. We forget when we get into our adult lives … we avoid as much stress as we can. We learn how to avoid places where we struggle. And when you [...]

I’ve been reading the “Bridging Differences” blog for a few months now and love it. These are two really smart, well-informed, thoughtful, and passionate educators engaged in one of the best examples of extended civil debate I’ve found online … and the hyperbole is justified.
A few days ago, Deborah Meier posted “Let’s Play with [...]

I just finished watching Bruce Sterling’s speech at the “Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign” conference. Though a science fiction writer by profession, he’s become more and more immersed in the world of design, first as a vehicle into his fiction and eventually as the direct object of his study and thinking.
Primary Point: Reducing Cognitive Load
The main thesis [...]

Distributing copies of a “Harry Potter” book, in any format, without payment, is wrong according to my best understanding and ethical sense so far.  But stopping the publication of a lexicon for the world of Harry Potter — which to me is a clearly transformative kind of thing — seems equally wrong.

Setup: Part One
One of the requirements for my Masters in English1 was the standard scholarly research course. The major assignment of the course was to create a bibliography on a subject or author and then compose a bibliographic essay from the findings. I chose to research H. P. Lovecraft because I’d been interested [...]

I had the privilege of meeting with Errol Morris back in the late ’90s.  He came to Mary Washington College to speak at an engagement that Professor Gardner Campbell had arranged.  I was in Professor Campbell’s film theory class at the time, and we had viewed a number of Morris’s films.1  At the time, Morris [...]

As I settle into this new blog space, I find I need to make some changes to my categories. I’ve been putting it off, though, because I’ve been dreading the laborious task of opening each post to make the changes.
Tonight, I found Rob Miller’s1 plugin “Batch Categories (v1.4)” that allows for the batch editing [...]

I don’t even know where to begin with this recent article from New York Magazine, “Testing Horace Mann,” about the fallout (or lack thereof) from offensive student postings on Facebook. It’s at the center of the current technology-related problems schools face. Part of this has to do with new problems the technology makes [...]