The new semester is starting, and a colleague proudly announced on Facebook that he is banning laptops, tablets, and cell phones in his classes because students are using them to go on Facebook. Other colleagues, who seem always to be trumpeting their support for the digital revolution on their own Facebooks, promptly "commented" their own plans to institute classroom bans on these attention-sapping devices.  Continue reading...

Last week, lexicographer and Word Routes columnist Ben Zimmer presented his nominees for Word of the Year. Now here is the Word of the Year selection of Dennis Baron, English professor at the University of Illinois and author of the blog The Web of Language.  Continue reading...

Apple has just patented page turning. On Nov. 13, 2012, the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple patent no. D670,713s for a "display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface." In plain English, that's a page turner®.  Continue reading...

A publisher of digital textbooks has announced a utility that will tell instructors whether their students are actually doing the assigned reading. Another exciting example of interactive, digital education? Or a new way to snoop on students outside the classroom?  Continue reading...

Shortly after 10 a.m. EDT on June 28, FOXNews and CNN erroneously reported that the US Supreme Court had invalidated the Affordable Care Act. Simultaneously, Scotusblog, which was live-blogging the last Supreme Court session of the 2011 term, correctly announced that the Court had upheld most of the ACA.  Continue reading...

Machines can grade essays as accurately as human readers. According to the New York Times, a competition sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation produced software able to match human essay readers grade for grade, and a study of commercially-available automatic grading programs showed that computers assessed essays as accurately as human readers, but a whole lot faster, and cheaper, to boot. But that's just the start: computers could lead to a reading-free future.  Continue reading...