By Adeline Koh. Here’s an opportunity: if you teach grades 8–12 or at an institution of higher education, Steelcase – a company that sells products and services for corporate offices, classrooms, and healthcare settings – is offering some substantial grants for you to redesign your classroom into an “active learning center.” The awards range from $35,000 to $50,000, and they include all equipment, installation, instruction, and communications. Applicants get to select from three “styles” of active learning classrooms: a “verb classroom,” a “node classroom” or a “blended classroom.” This year, 15 grants will be awarded. More...

By Adeline Koh. Wikipedia is the seventh most-popular website on the Internet and is the web’s most popular and largest reference resource. Many instructors decry student reliance on this online encyclopedia open to anyone to edit, but I am part of a growing movement of teachers who integrates student editing of Wikipedia pages into our pedagogy. More...

By Ryan Cordell. If you’ve ever read one of our ProfHacker holiday gift guides, you’ll know that lots of us are big fans of board games, and in particular of the new breed of smart board games that have appeared in increasing numbers in the past decade or so. Board games are oddly hip, and for good reason—there’s more variety and complexity in the genre than ever before. More...

By Natalie Houston. Professionals in every field today often find themselves overwhelmed by the flood of incoming information, opportunities, and tasks. Most of us want to do more than just keep up with the inbox — we have larger projects and goals we want to pursue, which sometimes get pushed to the side when we’re under the pressure of urgent deadlines and requests. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Free speech attacked yet again. Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, angered somehow by the privilege of growing up in peaceful Denmark rather than war-ravaged Palestine, sprayed bullets from an M-95 at random into the Krudttønden cultural center simply because a debate about free speech was being held there. He killed a filmmaker. (Later he killed a volunteer security man at a Bat Mitzvah celebration just in case we had missed his motivation. We get it: Islamist radicals hate Jews just as much as they hate free discussion.) More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I belong to a generation that ate in restaurants only on special occasions. You know: Mom’s birthday. Or after visiting Grandma in the hospital. Or maybe in the airport restaurant, the one with the white linen tablecloths, when we went to fetch someone who was actually flying into town to visit us. More...

By Ben Yagoda. The Smithean view is supported by the OED, which counsels (in language that has not been revised since 1895): “In standard English the form farther is usually preferred where the word is intended to be the comparative of far, while further is used where the notion of far is altogether absent; there is a large intermediate class of instances in which the choice between the two forms is arbitrary.” Commenting on this passage, H.W. Fowler, author of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), remarked, “That seems to be too strong a statement, or a statement of what might be a useful differentiation rather than of one actually developed or even developing.” More...

By Allan Metcalf. If you search the web for an example of “native advertising,” surprise! You will not find National Geographic photos of quaint retailers in Belize or Brooklyn painting handmade signs, or of rustics at farmers markets lettering labels for the vegetables they vend. More...

By Anne Curzan. My expertise in the conventions of texting and Twitter and Instagram, compared with the expertise of the undergraduate students I work with, is <.
Actually, it is <<<<<. More...