Click here to view the embedded video. I love this quirky little how-to clip, mostly because the audio doesn’t match up to the video, making poor Leila look like she needs her own mandated visit to the house of corrections. But I can relate to Leila and her message, and I’m willing to admit that...

Some years ago, I rescued a pile of sheet music from my Grandmother's piano bench.  The collection included a bunch of primers and elementary courses for beginners — my Grandmother gave lessons from time to time — including a number of volumes by a prolific compiler of piano methods, John Thomp...

Earlier this week, we gave you the first part of a conversation between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell on edupunk. Here’s part 2 in which Jim and Gardner get a bit more animated and debate further the the appropriateness of the punk metaphor, address questions of leadership and the politicizat...

You might recall some discussion here of “edupunk,” a term coined by our old friend Jim Groom to describe approaches to teaching and learning that eschew mainstream, proprietary teaching tools in favor of open source technologies and do-it-yourself approaches. The term was, as some of yo...

The comments on Farley’s post about grade inflation and student effort had convinced me not to read the article that inspired them.  Then Shahar excerpted a different part of the article and I changed my mind: A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a thi...

I’ve been quoting the work of Bill Gates and Gates Foundation for years at my Scottish Association of Geography Teacher student talks on Population and Development and Health. At the 2009 TED talks Gates gives an excellent presentation on Malaria, with some startling facts. For example, did you kn...

This is about right. Annnnnnd that's the end of my commentary on that. STOP. HAMMER TIME. So I'm back, and back at it, and I will resume my non-photographic 365 project with renewed fervor! And by renewed fervor I mean renewed tiredness, because I am an exhausted human. (Esp. exhausted after catchin...

The power of the Texas Board of Education over the content in school textbooks is well-known.  Given the large size of the Texan schoolbook market, publishers go out of their way to modify their books in order to satisfy the criteria of the censors there, which maked the Texan standards effective i...

Same thing I did with The Dark Knight , only this time about the fourth issue of Watchmen.  The same caveats apply. In Making Comics, Scott McCloud argues that there are six means of transitioning from one panel to the next; in the fourth issue of Watchmen, Alan Moore aims to confound all of them.Â...

About 15% of our students at Pasadena City College are of Armenian descent; Pasadena is part of the axis of the great Armenian Diaspora centered in nearby Glendale. Indeed, one of the periodic and cheerful debates we have ’round here is whether to classify Armenians as “white” or s...