Below please find my four favorite online videos of all time. You can watch them while waiting for 2010 to finally get here, or after you’ve recovered from the late night of drunken hilarity that you will have no memory of.
If you require 78 more, you can check out Paul Bogush’s post listing 78 amazing videos. Happy New Year, people.
According to Time Magazine, this has been the decade from hell. Awesome. I’m going to cross “survive a crappy decade” off my list right away.
One could argue the point that it’s going to take us all a while to clean up after a decade this bad. College is too expensive and won’t help anyone to get a job in this economy, so why spend next year working too damn hard at school and the job you have to hold down in order to live somewhere other than a van down by the river?
I would suggest, to the college students (or recent college graduates who still haven’t found a job), that taking a gap year might not be a bad idea. Getting out of the country is the most expensive portion; you’d be surprised by how little money a traveler willing to rough it can subsist on, especially if one avoids Europe.
For inspiration, you can read Cody McKibben’s post over at Thrilling Heroics, in which he wraps up the year he just spent living in Thailand.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
No, it doesn’t write your paper for you. Using the Achievers Writing Center apps for the iPhone or the iPod touch, college and high school students can write, edit and get assistance with the paper-writing process. Students are on those phone pod things all the time anyway, and the technology is prepared to handle way more than just playing music and making calls. People write novels on those things.
Niles Technology Group today announced their Achievers Writing Center apps for iPhone and iPod touch. Achievers Writing Center apps are revolutionizing how high school and college students write essays and papers. The apps make it easier to be more successful at writing, and they also significantly reduce the time and money required to produce excellent work. For a fixed, affordable price, each app comes with professional writing center services and more.
Students know that time is a precious commodity that they cannot get back and that money is finite and must be used wisely. The main goals of Achievers Writing Center are to help students be more successful writing essays and papers, while helping them spend less time and money in the effort.
“Essay writing assistance for students is the perfect example of a highly fragmented market in need of a serious technology makeover. The products and services simply have not kept up with the mobile, smart-phone centered lifestyles of students,” states Michael Niles, President and CEO of Niles Technology Group.
Mr. Niles explains, “Achievers Writing Center apps deliver the mobile technology and content to let students do things that, in the past, required spending time sitting at a computer, making appointments at a school’s writing center, and traveling multiple times to the writing center. As for reliable “writer’s block” email support, well, that is virtually non-existent at writing centers. And, most importantly, if students want help in editing and reviewing the final product, they usually spend more money than they should on another entity that did not even help them write the essay in the first place. Just talking about all the steps and time involved illustrates how difficult and inconvenient it is to receive consistent, reliable professional help.” More…
It’s common knowledge that the first year of teaching for a newbie educator is awful. Having the fun and having the ability to calm the fight-or-flight response is out of the question for most. It’s really a question of survival until June, at which point the new teacher takes stock and decides whether to stay or run for the hills.
Joel over at So You Want To Teach has a list of ten interview questions he answered for a former student about his first year of teaching:
1. What discipline methods do you use? How do you get the students involved?
One of the most effective discipline techniques I have found is simply to talk less and play more. This prevents most of the misbehaviors that tend to spring up throughout the class period. Additionally, phone calls and parent contact have been invaluable tools. That also is helpful for encouraging student and parent involvement.
2. Was your first year positive? How?
The biggest positive of my first year was learning that the idealism of the university classroom is rarely the case of the reality of a struggling band program. My junior high band got straight 3s at UIL, and that was an improvement on the previous year. Classroom management was my weakest skills. I went into the year thinking that since I knew a lot about the various instruments, I would automatically be a good director.
I recorded myself teaching and would go home and listen to the recordings and be amazed at how badly the students behaved. There were times throughout my first two years that I seriously considered going back to teaching private lessons. The thing that really kept me going throughout was support and contact with some of my mentors who encouraged me that I was actually a pretty good teacher and who helped me to deal with some of the classroom management struggles I went through.
3. What have you learned that will help you in the future?
How to get students quiet and keep them quiet. I was a “good kid” and so relating to the “bad kids” was a challenge for me initially. I spent the last half of my fourth semester of teaching going through trial and error finding out how to do it.
4. How well did college prepare you for the classroom?
Pedagogically, it prepared me very well. Classroom management preparation was virtually nonexistent. I learned a whole lot more through teaching private lessons, teaching master classes, and observing a wide variety of band programs.
5. Give one piece of advice for a new graduate.
Two things. 1) You don’t know everything. When you find one of the many things you don’t know how to do or how to handle, ask questions. Ask questions from anyone who will give you an answer. Some of the best stuff I picked up came from a science teacher down the hall from me my first two years. 2) Read How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie. More…
It’s shocking. I’m overwhelmed with dumbfounded bafflement. How can this be? They went and published an anthology of science writing, and all but three of the authors are of the male persuasion. Is that even possible? Hold on! I’m thinking.
I think yes, there’s a staggeringly high chance that this could have occurred. There’s many a female science badass out there, but I can guarantee she’s spending a large portion of her time and energy trying to hold her ground in a man’s world.
It’s almost Christmas, and we’re all supposed to love each other even more because the country is littered with sparkly dead trees and overtly cheerful Muzak, so I’ll spare us all the rant. Let’s just say I’m a huge fan of DNA and its structure. It’s beautiful, it’s poetry, it actually chokes me up. I’m not kidding. I also think Watson, Crick and Wilkins were amazing. But that doesn’t change the fact that Rosalind Franklin was treated like sh*t despite her ability to kick DNA-structure ass.
I’m well aware of the fact that the Nobel folks don’t hand over the prize to dead people, and that they only allow sharing between a total of three recipients. Three living ones. So Franklin wouldn’t have been eligible regardless. However, it would be fascinating to know whether she would have been chosen to receive the 1962 Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine instead of one of the men had she been alive at the time.
It’s been almost fifty years. I would have hoped for some improvement on the equality front.
And there they went—all the diplomatic words just left my building. I will stop short of explaining exactly how much people suck. Happy holidays. Go forth and treat people fairly.
For years the only goal of a prospective college student and his/her parents is to get into a college or a university. Based solely on the blood, sweat, and tears that were involved with that quest, the youngsters in that scenario will be surprised at how quickly the adults get over their intense relief, massive pride, and welling tear drops and move right on in to the “What are you planning to major in?” line of incessant questioning.
This makes the almost-adults want to scream “Oh for the love of all things holy! Will you people just shut the hell UP?!!!” Additionally, this is how the parental units make dead certain sure that junior will do everything in his/her power to never ever have to live back at home. Everyone’s a winner!
While there is something to be said for just picking something to ward off parents, teachers, extended family and the guy at the post office, in the end it’s helpful to have put some thought into the final decision. To help the soon-to-be-college-students out with this process, Professors Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman made a list of the 10 Questions to Ask Before Picking a Major.
Short Version:
1. Why do I want this major?
2. Do I know enough about this major?
3. What are the requirements for this major?
4. Is my college strong in this major?
5. What are the career opportunities for this major?
6. Is this the right–and only—major for my career path?
7. Have I talked to someone in this major?
8. Am I good at this major?
9. Do I want to pick a traditional major at all?
10. Is it the right time to declare a major?
Have I mentioned the awesomeness that is Flat World Knowledge? I’m fairly certain that I have. They were doing good things in the textbook world back in September of 2008, and now they’re teaming up with Bookshare to provide alternative textbook options to students requiring non-traditional textbook modalities.
Students who are blind, have low vision, or have a learning disability that requires computer-generated speech and highlighted text soon will have more resources after publisher Flat World Knowledge announced Dec. 14 that it will make its content available to Bookshare, the largest web-based library for people with print disabilities.
Bookshare, which has 75,000 members worldwide, will add 11 new digital textbooks to its online library, which has been bolstered in the past year by contributions from colleges and universities hoping to bring reading material to students who can’t see standard print or can’t turn a page. More…
I knew it! Multitasking is for sucks. Focusing on one project at a time and asking one’s brain to dig deep, ponder and problem-solve like the higher-thinking Homo sapiens that you are is smarter, faster, better. I hate the spinning in circles aspect of juggling one’s entire life all day every day.
I lust after graduate study carrels, those delicious-looking closet-sized rooms in libraries reserved only for thesis- and dissertation-writing grad students. Holing up in a tiny, interruption-free room for hours to focus and solve the crap out of all problems on the list that day sounds divine.
Getting off on being alone to think about one item at a time made me L-A-M-E until this vindication-saturated article showed up. Ironically, I found it while multitasking on the Internet, but whatever.
The Decade Google Made You Stupid was written by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media studies at The New School University and producer and correspondent for the PBS Frontline Digital Nation project. In it, Rushkoff explains, with scientific evidence to back him up, that the whole Google/multitasking phase of mankind is making our grey matter work less efficiently and is wrecking our analytical processing abilities.
Cliff Nass, director of Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab (known as CHIMe Lab), has been studying the best multitaskers on the face of the earth: college students. “How do they do it? Do their brains work differently?” He, too, was shocked by his own research. “It turns out, multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information. They’re terrible at keeping information in their heads nice and neatly organized, and they’re terrible at switching from one task to the other. This shocks us.”
Nass split his subjects into two groups—those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking, and those who don’t. When they took simple tests comparing assortments of shapes, the multitaskers were more easily distracted by random images, and incapable of determining which data was relevant to the task at hand. And just because the multitaskers couldn’t ignore irrelevant data didn’t mean they were better at storing and organizing information. They scored worse on both sorting and memorizing information.
So what does it mean if we multitaskers are actually fooling ourselves into believing we’re competent when we’re not? “If multitasking is hurting their ability to do these fundamental tasks,” Nass explained matter-of-factly, “life becomes difficult. Some of studies show they are worse at analytic reasoning. We are mostly shocked. They think they are great at it.” We’re not just stupid and vulnerable online—we simultaneously think we’re invincible. And that attitude, new brain research shows, has massive carryover into real life.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say the increased dumbing down of the human race can’t be good for anyone.
There will be no condoning of violence from this girl. But I did get a sick little twist of satisfaction when I read the NY Times article about UC students protesting tuition rates. Students from UC Davis and UC Berkeley broke some windows and threw some flaming items at the home of UC Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau.
President of the UC system, Mark G. Yudof, also lives in Berkeley and had a run-in with irate students in August ’09 when the first wave of tuition-rate-increase sh*t was hitting the fan. I’ve already said what I had to say about that. (Not to ruin the ending for you, but none of it was nice.)
President Yudof said in a statement that he found the most recent attack “appalling” and “far beyond the boundaries of public dissent.” Really? I’m pretty sure the students who, until now, believed that they had the right to an affordable education are finding the 32% increase in tuition both appalling and far beyond the boundaries of public dissent.
Aaah, the vomitous stench of thousands of high school students grubbing their way through the college application process. It smells in no way like “vick-tree,” it’s really more of a fully-dilated, hyper-aware, fight or flight, big bad stinkfest.
Everyone calm down and watch this: The heads of eight admissions departments explain what they go through when reviewing the piles of applications they receive from high school students hoping to be granted acceptance into their institution of higher education. The counselors sound human (it’s better when they’re not borg-like aliens) and like they actually give a rat’s ass that crushable young humans are waiting with barfy, bated breath for an answer.
The take-home message is to be you. Don’t create a false version of yourself that you imagine will be the exact student your dream school is looking for. Try to keep in mind the coolest college application essay ever; everything totally worked out for that guy.
You can watch the full broadcast below, or go here for a list of the highlights. Jordan Goldman, the twenty-something founder and CEO of Unigo.com, moderates the discussion.
