As a literary form, the essay is like a plastic cow–a transparent cow–with organs and bones that do not seem to fit together but in the end lead to a satisfying whole, well, cow. Not really says Cristina Nehring on Whats Wrong With the American Essay: “If we must compare the essay to a beast, let us compare it rather to a wildcat. Let us give it back its tooth and nail, its fangs and claws; let us allow it to take risks, to pretend it has nine lives. Let us enfranchise it to disturb us. It is not Orleans incarcerated cow we need today, but Rilkes panther breaking the bars of his cage.”
Anders Albrechtslund looks at the social aspects of surveillance, and suggests it can be seen as empowering and participatory. An interesting alternative to the usual emphasis on potential dangers live privacy invasion and fraud.
Ron asks if Anthony is building a new language: “It is my own feeling that the ubiquity of computers and digital technologies means that all cultural phenomena are now available for use by Anthony and his generation and they are producing a new framework of communications within which writing is only a piece and not the whole.”
Diana Oblinger on what it means to be educated in the digital age: “Learners need skills that go far beyond reading, memorisation and communication. Educational institutions have an obligation to help students cultivate those skills that learners have the most difficulty attaining on their own…judgement, synthesis, research, practice and negotiation.”
Miguel Guhlin on the process of building personal learning networks: “..as we externalize our thinking, it becomes less of “I am an expert expounding on what I know” and more of “I am a learner, just like you, sharing what I’m learning so that we can learn together through our common errors and maximize our breakthroughs.”
Gerald Haman’s original instructional design question (What should people KNOW, and WHEN do they need to know it?) has evolved into a set of questions for approaching innovative design. “Haman’s Investigator Questions” or HIQ: 1) What should people BE? 2) What should people KNOW? 3) What should people FEEL? 4) What should people HAVE? 5) What should people DO? 6) What should people THINK?
Mobile phones and the internet, two revolutionary technologies in their own right, are merging to create a global nomadic culture based on permanent connectivity not mobility:
Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing, says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
The theory of evolution is supported by so many facts that as far as science goes, it’s as irrefutable as the theory of gravity. So, the widespread ignorance and denial of natural selection is baffling. Adam Rutherford: “So far, after a trifling 149 years, Darwin’s theory of evolution has withstood all attacks. As scientists, we are obliged to continue to test it and to further scrutinise and modify its meaning. I think it is staggering how right Darwin actually is in this book.”
Louis P. Masur reflects on the devious lie of a snapshot
: It is not the photographer who is devious, but the nature of the snapshot itself, which isolates and freezes action, disconnecting it from context and sequence. Photographs seduce us into believing that they are objective records, but, in fact, all images are interpretations, texts that must be read.
In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms. Life of course is problematic to define. But the search for aliens hiding in plain sight is forcing us to broaden our ideas of what is biologically possible.
Survey of of general public from six countries and library directors from the U.S. examining the values and social-networking habits of library users, sponsored by the Online Computer Center. It’s not surprising that the respondents have security and privacy concerns: identity theft, ads/spam and protecting personal information are among the top concerns.
Browsing is the act of engaging in a series of glimpses, each of which exposes you to objects of potential interest; depending on that interest, you may or may not examine more closely one of the objects. What’s interesting is that browsing is not a smooth scan, but rather iterative fits and starts. A worthwhile read that in fact never mentions web browsing specifically.
Trust in Digital Repositories provides material for managing intellectual property rights in e-learning for institutions who want to update their policies in e-learning programs. Everything someone in an institutional context would need to set up digital rights management systms in repositories of learning objects: policies, infrastructure, risk, evaluation and opportunity.
Did language evolve from manual gestures and then shift to vocal mode? Fox makes the case that the hands provide a more natural signaling system than the voice, and Armstrong and Wilcox propose that speech itself is a gestural system, which places language in the domain of cognition and biology.
A brain can recall almost everything, practically nothing, or something in between. If nothing else, this month’s National Geographic reaffirms the utter weirdness of human memory. Truth is indeed a memory.
Today’s tendency to make amends for the crimes of history begs the question which horrific acts deserve apologies and which ones get the other cheek? Our often unbearable history should do more than generate vacuous, egotistical apologies; it also “chastens, tempers, rigorously instructs. The more we know of it, the better.”
Two physicists use science to point out the inconsistencies associated with the idea of ghosts, vampires and zombies depicted in Hollywood movies. Heat always moves from a hotter to colder objects. Bring out your basic science and critical thinking skills the next time Halloween apparitions seem a little too real.
