[Links]
[links] Link salad for a fiery Friday
A reader reacts to Green [ Powell's | Amazon
Dark Roasted Blend with some extended Star Wars weirdness — Though this remains one of my favorite pieces of Star Wars weirdness.
Ghostbusters circa 1954 — A retro trailer. Plus link to cool retro blog The Retro Blog. Though speaking of my old favorites, ever seen Howard Hawks’ Lord of the Rings? Humphrey Bogart as Frodo, L.A. as Middle Earth. Need I say more?
A Different Kind of Teacher Cheating — More on the evils of PowerPoint, collected at Freakonomics.
Making a black hole with metamaterials — Weird science files.
Inside Nature’s Giants part IV: the incredible anatomy of the giraffe — Including bonus phrase of the day “necks for sex”.
?otD: Why did Mother Superior jump the gun?
7/31/2009
Body movement: 10 minutes of stretching and meditation; 30 minutes on stationary bike
This morning’s weigh-in: 224.4
Currently reading: Between books today
Posted: 4:24 am Fri July 31 2009 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Steve Buchheit
July 31st, 2009 at 6:34 amBecause happiness is a warm gun, mama. And it was too early for her to jump the shark.
Cora
July 31st, 2009 at 4:04 pmI don’t get the current PowerPoint backlash. Sure, I’ve sat through my share of dull PowerPoint presentations with illegible slides, but that’s due to a bad presenter. PowerPoint is just a medium and as such it’s neutral.
I use PowerPoint in my lectures. The slides contain the information in condensed form, the details are in the lecture. My handwriting isn’t the best and working with chalk and blackboard would probably not be legible for the students at the back of the room. What is more, having the information up there on the screen frees the students from frantically scribbling down notes and missing parts of the lecture in the process. A lot of them still take notes, some even take photos of the slides with their cellphones. After the class, I put the presentations up on the university website for download, so the students are able to review the relevant information in condensed form without having to rely on possibly incorrect notes.
PowerPoint also allows me to include all sorts of background information such as images, graphics, short quotes, etc… which would have been difficult to make accessible otherwise. With classes of 120 students, a xerox budget of 500 copies per semester runs out fast. I teach linguistics, so PowerPoint is helpful for things like sentence diagramming, phonetic transcription exercises or conversation analysis.
The professor for whom I was filling in is a traditionalist who mainly relied on chalk and blackboard and the occasional transparency (not very legible judging by the one lecture of his I’ve observed is any indication). From what I’ve heard, the students seem to prefer my approach. I’ve also had less students failing my class than the usual rate.