John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged education · everything

Sequence.js - The jQuery Slider Plugin with Infinite Style

This article argues that CSS animation frameworks enhance education by making complex concepts in STEM and other subjects more visually engaging and easier to understand, while acknowledging that technological tools work best when paired with traditional academic support services. The piece repeatedly promotes the use of assignment help and homework assistance alongside animations, suggesting that this combination provides a comprehensive solution to student learning challenges. It presents animation's benefits for engagement and retention across subjects like physics, biology, and computer science, while positioning external academic support as a practical necessity for modern students managing demanding workloads.

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One Town’s War on Gay Teens

# Michele Bachmann's Holy War Between 2009 and 2011, nine students in Minnesota's Anoka-Hennepin school district died by suicide, with four either gay or perceived as such and reportedly bullied, creating what experts called a "suicide cluster." The district had adopted a "neutrality policy" on sexual orientation that effectively silenced discussion of homosexuality in schools, leaving LGBT students without support while teachers feared retaliation for defending them, and the policy was championed by religious conservatives including local anti-gay activist Barb Anderson and influenced by the climate of anti-gay messaging promoted by congressional representative Michele Bachmann. Despite mounting evidence linking the hostile environment to student deaths, district leaders and conservative activists denied responsibility, claiming the suicides resulted from mental illness rather than bullying, while refusing to rescind the policy until facing federal civil rights lawsuits and investigations.

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US college grads' salaries in steep decline - Boing Boing

Economist Michael Mandel documents that real wages for young college graduates (ages 25-34) have declined significantly since the early 2000s—down 19% for men since 2000 and 16% for women since 2003—despite rising tuition costs and increasingly aggressive student loan collection. He raises three critical questions about the causes: whether global competition from international college graduates, declining quality of American graduates, or technological displacement might explain this wage collapse. The disconnect between skyrocketing college costs and deteriorating economic outcomes for degree holders suggests a fundamental problem with the current higher education investment model.

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Six Famous Thought Experiments, Animated in 60 Seconds Each | Brain Pickings

This piece presents six classic thought experiments from philosophy and physics—Zeno's paradox of motion, the grandfather paradox of time travel, Searle's Chinese Room on artificial intelligence, Hilbert's infinite hotel, the twin paradox of relativity, and Schrödinger's cat of quantum mechanics—through animated short videos created by the Open University that make abstract concepts visually accessible and engaging.

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Yale Rolls Out 10 New Courses – All Free | Open Culture

Yale University has made 10 new courses freely available online through multiple platforms including iTunes, YouTube, and its own website, bringing its total open course offerings to 35. The new courses span disciplines including economics, literature, history, environmental science, physics, and political philosophy, taught by Yale faculty members. Each course is accessible in multiple formats (video lectures, audio, and web-based) to accommodate different learning preferences.

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The Management Myth - Magazine - The Atlantic

The author, a philosophy PhD who became a management consultant and founding partner of a consulting firm, argues that management theory is fundamentally unscientific and philosophically hollow—rooted in Frederick Taylor's dubious "scientific management" of the 1890s, which masked subjective judgments as objective data, and perpetuated through later theorists like Elton Mayo who merely recycled humanistic platitudes as revolutionary breakthroughs. Business schools provide little genuine education beyond credential-signaling and networking, and management theory itself is essentially a moralizing discipline disguised as technical expertise, one that corporate executives manipulate to justify control over workers while remaining insulated from accountability for their failures.

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Beautiful web-based timeline software

This is a marketing page for Tiki-Toki, a browser-based timeline creation tool that distinguishes itself through 3D visualization, multimedia integration (YouTube and Vimeo), color-coding by category, and collaborative editing features. The page outlines various use cases from personal diaries to corporate histories and legal presentations, and offers tiered pricing from a free single-timeline account to premium options supporting up to 25 timelines with embedding capabilities.

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Nobody Understands Probability « Academically Interesting

This post introduces Bayesian statistics and argues that most people misunderstand how to apply probability theory in practice, particularly when observing data rather than running controlled experiments. It explains Bayes' theorem through examples like medical testing and coin fairness, emphasizes the critical distinction between being told information versus restricting to universes where information is true, and demonstrates how to build probabilistic models for concrete problems like clustering before comparing this framework to classical statistical hypothesis testing.

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TED Blog | 7 steps to giving your own TEDTalk, courtesy Fast Company

Anya Kamenetz argues that TED has become a prestigious educational brand comparable to universities, emerging as the first such brand in over a century, while exploring what the format's viral success reveals about modern audiences' hunger for ideas and their capacity for sustained attention. She offers practical insights into TED's strategic use of the 18-minute talk length and provides guidance for those wanting to deliver their own compelling TED-style presentations.

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Screenr - Create screencasts and screen recordings the easy way

This is a marketing page for Articulate 360, an AI-powered learning and development platform that helps organizations create, distribute, and measure workplace training at scale. The platform combines instructional design principles with AI tools to transform existing materials like decks and documents into interactive training experiences, supporting features like multi-language translation, custom AI avatars, and analytics to track training effectiveness. It's positioned as an all-in-one solution that consolidates fragmented training tools and integrates with existing business systems across HR, sales, support, and other departments.

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HTML5Rocks - Home

This is a hub page from Google's Chrome team that organizes learning resources for web developers across multiple topic areas including performance, accessibility, payment processing, and progressive web apps, with links to courses, blog posts, and guides designed to help developers build fast, secure, and inclusive websites.

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Home | www.bigbluebutton.org

This is promotional material for BigBlueButton, a virtual classroom platform designed specifically for educational use rather than general video conferencing. The platform emphasizes pedagogical features like breakout rooms, polling, whiteboards, and live engagement analytics, and claims adoption by major learning management systems serving over 75% of the LMS market worldwide, with a case study showing students in online GCSE Maths and English classes achieved full grade points higher than in-person equivalents.

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Open Culture: 20 Podcasts That Will Teach You Spanish, French, Italian and German

This article curates podcast resources for learning four major European languages—French, German, Italian, and Spanish—organized by language with brief descriptions of each program's focus and difficulty level. The recommendations range from beginner series and grammar lessons to slow-news broadcasts and cultural content, offering options suited to different learning stages and goals.

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Contents | How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

This National Research Council report synthesizes cognitive science research on how people learn, covering how experts develop knowledge differently from novices, how learning transfers across contexts, and how children's minds develop. It examines the implications of this research for classroom teaching, teacher professional development, and educational technology, grounding practical recommendations for schools in evidence about memory, problem-solving, and knowledge organization in the brain.

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How to Do What You Love

Graham argues that finding work you love is essential for both happiness and excellence, yet most people are systematically misled about this possibility through childhood education that frames work as tedium, social pressures to pursue prestigious careers, and financial anxieties that push them toward money over passion. He distinguishes between two viable paths—the "organic route" of pursuing what you love directly, and the riskier "two-job route" of working for money while building toward your passion on the side—and emphasizes that the ability to produce concrete work and resist prestige are key tests for discovering what you truly want to do. The essay concludes that while finding such work is genuinely difficult and often takes decades, recognizing it as possible and maintaining awareness of what genuinely appeals to you, rather than what you think you should want, significantly improves your odds.

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