Loneliness

If you are an adult and experience loneliness, society seems to be saying that you’re doing it wrong. Yeah. I have known no greater depth of loneliness than at one point in my marriage when my wife & I just weren’t communicating and much later when I was desperately in love and my lover had retreated to another bedroom in

Consumer-Grade Technology Won’t Cut It In the Classroom

Nothing will shake out the bugs and defects in anything quite like exposure to the energy and intensity of elementary students. I’ve seen nicely manufactured kid-friendly robots happily fail to drive forward after only two-weeks of exposure to elementary students. And we’re not talking about driving them off tables or running them into walls or any other forms of robot/technology

2017-18 STEAMLab WK07: Art – Drawing Self-Portraits

2017-18 STEAMLab WK07: Art – Drawing Self-Portraits This week we finished creating self-portraits using a simplified facial drawing techniques that I found on YouTube. This is the video that I shared with students last week, going through the video step by step as students attempted to draw their version of what I later called “generic white guy.” Turned out that

The Day after The End and The Rest of Your Life

I stayed up way too late into Sunday morning messing around with my blogs, such that I completely forgot about the “Apocalypse” that had been getting so much buzz on the web. Then I noticed that someone on my social network feed had “checked in” on an apocalypse page as “safe” like someone checking in after riding out a hurricane.

My Addiction: A Blogging Problem

My name is Joe and I have a problem working on my blog or creating new blogs or posts when I have more important things to do. Even if I have student projects to grade for the next day or new curriculum to create for next week, I find it hard to not fiddle with my blog, fixing formatting, adding

The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer & The Community of Friends

The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer Turns out that famous recording artists are people with all the flaws, failings and feelings of everyone else you’ve ever known. As much as that should be a “duh,” I was pretty disappointed after Melissa Etheridge’s jilted partner aired dirty laundry about how Etheridge saved her emotions for her songs. That disclosure, true

The Newspaper Business in the Age of Digital Media, Part 1

Who still reads the local newspaper or any newspaper for news these days? I recently saw an ad for a position at the local alternative paper looking for a digital content coordinator, essentially to help the paper “develop and define the publication’s digital presence across a variety of platforms.” In the early 1990s I interned as a Fact-Checker for the

Saving History: Rescued Film Project & 31-WWII Rolls of Film

I was just writing an article about something that happened eight-years ago like it was ancient history and decided to pull up and post images from that event. Then I stumbled into this article by Michael Zhang on the PetaPixel Facebook page about someone who was using his old-school photo developing skills and digital technology to rescue 31-rolls of undeveloped

Witnessing History: The Best Steve Jobs Keynote

Just over eight-years ago I was in the auditorium on January 9, 2007 and witnessed history when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world. It seems weird that this happened only eight-years ago, and at the same time hard to appreciate how the technology world really changed after that keynote. Apple was a sliver of the computer market with