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52/12: My New Year’s Resolution and the Death of the Endless Lunch
I’d thought I was abandoning blogs and projects in a linear pattern, but history here has taken a Viconian turn: I’ve revived my Endless Lunch blog, with the purpose of using it to connect with other writers in pursuing my personal new year’s resolution — to write 52 songs and 12 short stories this year. Continue reading
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Pysch-Pop Notes: Turquoise and the Tales of Flossie Fillett
Listen: turquoise-tales-of-flossie-fillet [Please note, I am asserting my fair use right to this material, as it is provided here as a necessary sample to supplement the educational and editorial purposes of this post, is posted at a severely degraded 64kb/s, and is posted for a limited period of time. See http://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php for more details.] I’m Continue reading
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Arne Duncan’s Magic Lawyer Powers Will Save U.S. Education
Well, it’s happened. Arne Duncan is going to be the next Secretary of Education. The theory of magic lawyer powers has prevailed. Don’t get me wrong. I think one can have a completely irrelevant degree, and do a fine job. But isn’t it just a little bit interesting that when Obama was looking for a Continue reading
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No Lawyers for Secretary of Education. No-way, No-how.
I find tracking the Secretary of Education appointment news maddeningly difficult. And that’s distressing to me, because some of the names I’ve heard floated would be absolutely disastrous. And others I’ve never heard of heard of, have no time to research, and the media does not help me one bit. So how to judge? How Continue reading
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Is OCW a “shovel-ready infrastructure project”?
More on this later, but I wanted to throw this out to see if anyone had any thoughts on it. You’ve probably heard that to stave off the next Great Depression, the government will intervene in the form of a massive stimulus package, focused on infrastructure. What gets interesting is not that the government may Continue reading
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Narrating Comics
Probably the best job I ever had was teaching writing — and I still keep an eye out for interesting methods of rethinking the teaching of composition. In the waning hours of NaNoWriMo last night I found a decent one. Desperate to make it over the finish line by typing anything (anything!) resembling novel prose, Continue reading
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Fahrenheit 451
I am sad to say that I never read this book before now. The way this book had always been presented to me was on the merits of its premise, which I am sure you all know, either through word of mouth or the film — it’s about a world where firemen burn books to Continue reading
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Real Punks Ship
So that was the title I was tempted to throw on the recent post over at OCWBlog. It seemed impolitic over there, but if you are stopping by here, you know me and the spirit it’s offered in. The heart of the OCWBlog post is this graph: I’ve been frankly a little surprised, since signing Continue reading
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Fact-checking
From Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com: I have written for perhaps a dozen major publications over the span of my career, and the one with the most thorough fact-checking process is by some margin Sports Illustrated. Although this is an indication of the respect with which SI accords its brand, it does not speak so well Continue reading
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UVU and the OCWC
Jared Stein writes on his blog that UVU has decided to go open, using a very simple mechanism: Now UVU is not just a vocational/trade school (though I daresay there is more than one administrator who would like to de-emphasize that fact now that we are a university); most of our programs are in the Continue reading