http://o.aolcdn.com/videoplayer/AOL_PlayerLoader.swf HT Jesus Needs New PR Read more

Apparently there was a Tron Christmas special once upon a time – or at least a spoof commercial for one. Funny or Die unearthed it, and IO9 shared it. http://player.ordienetworks.com/flash/fodplayer.swf The 1982 Tron Holiday Special from Rip Taylor Read more

Inspired by a recent post of mine, Ian has written a short science fiction story entitled “Pro-Life” and posted it on his blog Irreducible Complexity. I think it is really good, and hope it gets a wide circulation and lots of reads. It addresses an issue that is currently a staple of science fiction, but may one day soon be a matter of current events: What rights will digital persons, artificial intelligences, have in our human societies, if such entities... Read more

I’ve tried to use participation grades and I’m thinking the time has come to ditch them and simply leave it up to the student to learn as they learn best. Students are different, and learn differently. Then again, if participation grades penalize the silent contemplative learner, removing them could be interpreted as penalizing those students who create vibrant class discussions that everyone benefits from, but do less well in other aspects of coursework. Here are two other blogs presenting arguments... Read more

Daniel Kirk shares details about a PhD studentship at the University of Gloucester, focused on the intersection of the Bible and spirituality. Read more

Doug Chaplin explores the possibility that some of the commonalities between Matthew and Luke in their infancy stories (in spite of other glaring differences) might be due to material in Q. Read more

The National Center for Science Education has shared another retrospective of their own as well as one from the Philadelphia Inquirer. They have also shared the top ten evolution stories of 2010. Read more

Volume 13, Issue 3 of the Journal of Electronic Publishing includes articles on open access repositories, academic search engine spam, and web-first publishing models. Read more

Several bloggers have drawn attention to the fact that it was 5 years ago today that Judge Jones handed down his verdict in the Dover trial regarding Intelligent Design. Among those who have posted is Lauri Lebo, who covered the trial and wrote a book about it, The Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America. Others include Panda’s Thumb and Why Evolution is True. What a great Christmas gift Christians like Judge Jones and Ken... Read more

As I mentioned previously on my blog, this semester I tried something different in my class on the Bible. Rather than focus on recall and testing memorization, I focused on the ability to identify reliable sources of information. And so the final exam allowed them to use computers and presented them with questions that we had not addressed directly that semester. They had the usual two-hour exam period to answer one question (as well as a few short-answer questions). The... Read more