Blogging, women, and a swipe at ’90s gender psychology

As I’m sure you know, the WordPress license agreement mandates a monthly blog post about blogging. What could I do?
Responding to Emily Gould’s self-exposé in the Times Magazine, Jemima Kiss on last week’s Tech Weekly podcast suggested that gender differences on blogs are most pronounced in the kinds of blogs men and women tend to [...]

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Announcing: Podcasts from my Writing Center!

It has been a few semesters in the making, but UW–Madison’s Writing Center has begun releasing podcasts! You can subscribe to our feed and everything.
I’m a total podcast junkie: between bus-riding and chore-doing I probably listen to an hour of podcasts a day. Obviously I’ve followed this project with great interest and was ecstatic to [...]

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Zany story, killer reading

The New Yorker has an unusually smart fiction podcast: short story writers reading and chatting about stories written by earlier New Yorker short story writers—Louise Erdrich reads (UW–Madison’s own) Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford reads John Cheever (in his sexy, sexy voice), Paul Theroux reads Borges, and so on.
I’m not an aficionado of the form, but [...]

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More corporate shilling: Who needs EndNote?

I procrastinated for hours at the beginning of April looking for useful reference management software—I considered learning LaTeX so I could use BibDesk. UW–Madison has a license for RefWorks and EndNote Web, and I spent half a day trying to wrangle them into serviceability; EndNote came closest, though it had an ugly habit of making [...]

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Can we make education more like a video game?

In the ’90s I spent more hours than I care to count playing Sonic the Hedgehog, collecting as many rings as it was in my power to collect. By what industrial practice Dr. Robotnik’s machinations produced floating jewelry as a byproduct remains unclear, and even less clear was what Sonic did with all those rings: [...]

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