"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." — T.H. White, The Once and Future King

A website by Shanta Rohse on learning, technology and design

Recently in: Portable Learner

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The continuing education of an educator

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Start Pages as Environments for Self-Organized Learners

Start pages like Netvibes and Page­flakes are not specif­i­cally designed for edu­ca­tional pur­poses, but as Malinka Ivanova points out, they are flex­i­ble enough to poten­tially sup­port self-organized learn­ing and research envi­ron­ments. In this pre­sen­ta­tion, she com­pares var­i­ous start pages in terms of a model of mul­ti­chan­nel learn­ing in which learn­ers may play a a wide range of roles: authors, con­trib­u­tors, dis­trib­u­tors, searchers, mod­er­a­tors, review­ers, edi­tors, researchers, or evaluators.

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Q-Tools: An Approach for Discovery and Knowledge Work

Not­ing that Google rec­og­nizes that the inter­net does not need to orga­nized until you have a ques­tion in search of an answer, Dave Gray points out that ques­tions may be the most basic tools for gain­ing knowl­edge and work­ing with infor­ma­tion. His stan­dard set of ques­tions offers an inter­est­ing way for infor­ma­tions man­age­ment sys­tems like feed read­ers and email clients eto orga­nize and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion. Exam­ples of Q-tools include the Prism (one input, mul­ti­ple out­puts), the Razor (binary sort­ing), the Gen­er­a­tor (cre­ates new infor­ma­tion), the Peeler (dri­ves atten­tion to deeper lev­els), and more.

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Frankenstein in the Universe

Can we shape tech­nol­ogy as much as it shapes us? Or do we need to resign our­selves to the specter of tech­nol­ogy out of con­trol? If we do argues Luke Fer­nan­dez, we truly do become its vic­tims:

But even if our lives are con­strained and pushed in cer­tain direc­tions, we have some agency. To deny that would be to suc­cumb to the most nihilis­tic form of tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. If we believe that we can shape tech­nol­ogy as much as it shapes us we can hold out the hope of at least play­ing some minor role in influ­enc­ing the direc­tion that the uni­ver­sity takes in the infor­ma­tion age.

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Critical Theory: Ideology Critique and the Myths of E-Learning

Norm Friesen uses crit­i­cal the­ory to de-mystify three par­tic­u­lar truths or myths in the e-learning domain…that 1) we live in a knowl­edge econ­omy, 2) learn­ers enjoy any­where any­time access, and 3) edu­ca­tional and social change is an inevitable con­se­quence of tech­no­log­i­cal change.

Under­stand­ing tech­nol­ogy as a scene of strug­gle rather than as a des­tiny or fait accom­pli might also help to guide the explo­ration of metaphors other than “impact” or “dis­sem­i­na­tion” when inquir­ing into the rela­tion­ship between tech­nol­ogy and chang­ing insti­tu­tions and practices.

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Voices Carry

Is it a prob­lem, asks Lawrence Hill, that many of the most famous and endur­ing fic­tional accounts of African Amer­i­cans have been penned by whites? A solu­tion to this trend of ignor­ing African-American writ­ers is to incor­po­rate mem­oirs into the body of Civil War lit­er­a­ture into the curriculum:

What’s strik­ing about such nar­ra­tives is the imme­di­acy of expres­sion. These authors have a fun­da­men­tal point to make, one of such per­sonal urgency that the reader can hardly turn away. Between each line breathes a voice that seems to whis­per: This is my name, this is when I was born, this is who I am and how I have lived, and I am going to assert my own human­ity by set­ting my story down on paper. If we are to per­suade book­stores, review­ers, librar­i­ans, and cur­ricu­lum writ­ers to look for fresh lit­er­a­ture touch­ing on the African-American expe­ri­ence, and pre­vail on teach­ers to exer­cise more imag­i­na­tion than merely shov­ing the old pile of school edi­tions of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird at yet another class of yawn­ing stu­dents, it may be mem­oir that does the trick.

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Darwinmania!

The story of Dar­win and his big idea of evo­lu­tion through nat­ural selec­tion offers numer­ous insights into how ideas become wide­spread. For exam­ple, why is it Dar­win we cel­e­brate above the oth­ers who thought of it first (William Wells and Patrick Matthew), or arguably con­ceived of it bet­ter (Alfred Rus­sel Wal­lace)? The rea­son, says Olivia Jud­son is the “Ori­gin,” which changed our view of other species and our­selves through relent­less evidence.

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In Defense of Hulk

What if Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie isn’t as bad as every­one said it was? Comic-book adap­ta­tions typ­i­cally invent new adven­tures for their pro­tag­o­nists while remain­ing rel­a­tively faith­ful to the back story of their heroes. Lee, how­ever, reimag­ined the story of the Hulk, blend­ing ele­ments from the comic book, the tele­vi­sion show that aired in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and his own imag­i­na­tion. The ver­dict? Comic-book fans, crit­ics, and every­one in between agreed: It stunk.

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The Meaning of the Butterfly

Peter Dizikes points out that while pop cul­ture ref­er­ences to the but­ter­fly effect are not just bad physics, they also reveal how the pub­lic thinks about sci­ence: They expose the grow­ing chasm between what the pub­lic expects from sci­en­tific research — that is, a series of ever more pre­cise answers about the world we live in — and the realms of uncer­tainty into which mod­ern sci­ence is tak­ing us.

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Rage Against the Machines

Main­stream media cov­er­age of games seems to be one of two sorts. Either they are daz­zling accounts of end­less dig­i­tal fea­tures pro­claim­ing their supe­ri­or­ity, or bit­ter dis­counts of their claims as cul­ture, usu­ally advo­cated by rep­re­sen­ta­tives from gen­er­a­tions on either side of the com­puter era. What is lack­ing, says Tom Chat­field, is a seri­ous, mutu­ally well-informed debate about the gam­ing phe­nom­e­non that will be a dom­i­nant cul­tural force in this cen­tury.

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Digital Forensics

Fas­ci­nat­ing descrip­tion by com­puter sci­en­tist Hany Farid who works with var­i­ous law-enforcement agen­cies to uncover doc­tored images. Mod­ern soft­ware has made pho­to­graph manip­u­la­tion eas­ier to carry out, but also eas­ier to detect.

I expect that as the field pro­gresses over the next five to 10 years, the appli­ca­tion of image foren­sics will become as rou­tine as the appli­ca­tion of phys­i­cal foren­sic analy­sis. It is my hope that this new tech­nol­ogy, along with sen­si­ble poli­cies and laws, will help us deal with the chal­lenges of this excit­ing yet some­times baf­fling dig­i­tal age.

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