I have a quizcard board game called Quiztimate that I liked playing every once in a while in groups before we went online. Many of the questions led to further discussions on the respective topic a question referred to, which for me is the main point of all quizzes: hoping the questions are so interesting that we can talk about them, not just go for finding the correct answer.

I have found that online people are more likely to sneak out of a conversation whose aim it is to think together and discuss possible answers to questions, and instead go for ‘instant gratification’, or what psychologists and neuro-scientists call the google affect – my biggest enemy 😉

For playing online, I have scanned some cards, 9 per round; the answers will be in a separate post, perhaps. If I forget to do that, try to find the answers via internet research. But only AFTER having exhausted all conversational solution generating processes!

New music download patterns appear to closely resemble epidemic curves for infectious disease, study finds

The text below is about a study that describes how music seems to spread similar to infectious diseases. Before reading, discuss the questions and look at the selected words

An all time great topic are song texts. However, the choice of song is not unimportant. I like to choose songs everyone knows with lyrics most people don’t. There has to be a little mystery and surprise concerning the text, something special about it.

In this respect, the song below definitely qualifies.

Recently I bought a poster: 250 Top Movies Bucket List. I had it hung on my wall and was accordingly asked by some course participants what it was they were seeing. The single movie titles were too small for them to identify over my camera, but they were interested and some wanted to find out how many they actually knew.

I found a page that shows them all. And below I put some quiz questions together. Each sentence hints to one of the films. But before you guess the films: do you know the origin of the term bucket list?

Below you find an article from the New York Times about one of their newly published games. You find some pre-reading preparatory vocabulary exercise first, followed by an adapted version of the article and a link to the original.