Use RSS feeds to create a personal reading list. This is a collection of extraordinary feeds that should get any discerning transfusion information maven started. [This post is updated periodically.]
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Getting there is half the fun.
portable learner
The continuing education of an educator in the net age
- Just Packed
Book Notes
Controlling the Conversation
Phil Harkins guide to conversations in the workplace is more about controlling the agenda than seeing where the conversation leads.
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Field Notes
Dispatch: On Value, Cost and Price (no math)
A story behind Lea Vivot’s sculpture Secret Bench of Knowledge, with international characters, and a marketing and sales lesson in cost, price and value, from this morning’s bus commute.
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Half Notes
Visual Literacy
My shift from text centrism to visual collage begins here, inappropriately enough with a reading list about visual literacy comprised mainly of text-based resources.
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Project Notes
Digital Literacies: Reading Signs Along The Way
Last year I taught various digital literacies as a separate course. This year I am integrating them into the existing curriculum. I’ll cover the transition in a series of posts. In this first post, I look at some of the signs that led me in this direction.
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How Our Internal Clock Ticks
Time helps us to infer relationships of cause and effect, to make sense of the world and to learn. But our ability to perceive time and use time is rather faulty. We regularly misestimate seconds, minutes and hours by 15% to 25% in either direction. We see and move within an optimal now period, about 2 1/2 seconds long (give or take 1 to 2 seconds). Neurosurgeon Jamshid Ghajar also makes this interesting claim: You can explain a lot of pathologies, including schizophrenia, autism and ADHD, as problems of time perception.
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On Teasing and Playful Provocation
Survival of the fittest is often misinterpreted to mean survival of the most cutthroat. But fitness means so much more than that. In this interview, Dacher Keltner points out that kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice are also vital to the tasks of evolution. And so is teasing, which surprised me because we tend to be against teasing of any sort in our schools and workplaces. Keltner calls teasing the art of playful provocation
and suggests that we use our playful voices and bodies to provoke others to avoid inappropriate behaviours:
Teasing (in the right way, which is what most people do) . . . is a way to play and express affection. It is a way of negotiating conflicts at work and in the family. Teasing exchanges teach children how to use their voices in innumerable ways—such an important medium of communication. In teasing, children learn boundaries between harm and play. And children learn empathy in teasing, and how to appreciate others’ feelings (for example, in going too far). And in teasing we have fun. All of this benefit is accomplished in this remarkable modality of play.
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Field Notes
140 Characters Or Less
On Twitter, character limits, meaning-making, and doing what we have always done.
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In the Ants’ Footsteps
For those who rarely give ants a second thought, Tim Flannery offers immediate relevance for anyone interested in the trends now shaping our own societies. In his book review of Superorganism, he points to the striking parallels between the progress of human evolution and the progress of ants some ten million years earlier:
Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of foreign ants . . . leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovered agriculture . . . . One can hardly help but admire the intelligence of the ant colony, yet theirs is an intelligence of a very particular kind.Nothing in the brain of a worker ant represents a blueprint of the social order,Holldobler and Wilson tell us, and there is no overseer orbrain castethat carries such a master plan in its head. Instead, the ants have discovered how to create strength from weakness, by pooling their individually limited capacities into a collective decision-making system that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own democratic processes.
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Customizing Individual Blog Posts, Part 1
Use CSS styling, custom fields and a user-defined function to design blog posts.