"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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Blogging – It’s Good for You

The neu­ro­log­i­cal under­pin­nings sur­round­ing the ther­a­peu­tic ben­e­fits of expres­sive writ­ing are not clear. What is clear is that peo­ple cop­ing with can­cer diag­noses and other seri­ous con­di­tions are increas­ingly seek­ing – and find­ing – solace in the blo­gos­phere.

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Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

Some brains do dete­ri­o­rate with age. But for most aging adults, much of what occurs is a grad­u­ally widen­ing focus of atten­tion and sift­ing through a clut­ter of infor­ma­tion that makes it more dif­fi­cult to latch onto just one fact like a name or a phone num­ber. This is a good thing.; it may increase the amount of infor­ma­tion avail­able to the con­scious mind.

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Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme

Pat Ship­man explores the ironic legacy of Richard Dawkin’s The Self­ish Gene (1976): “The ben­e­fit to sci­ence of ‘The Self­ish Gene’ in trig­ger­ing a new under­stand­ing of the mag­nif­i­cent com­plex­ity of evo­lu­tion­ary processes must be weighed against the harm the book has done in pro­vok­ing a back­lash against science.

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The Cognitive Age

David Brooks explains that eco­nomic change is not the prod­uct of glob­al­iza­tion, but rather a skills rev­o­lu­tion in the Cog­ni­tive Age:

The glob­al­iza­tion par­a­digm empha­sizes the fact that infor­ma­tion can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most impor­tant part of information’s jour­ney is the last few inches of the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the var­i­ous regions of the brain. Does the indi­vid­ual have the capac­ity to under­stand the infor­ma­tion? Does he or she have the train­ing to exploit it? Are there cul­tural assump­tions that dis­tort the way it is perceived?

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Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower

Care­fully struc­tured train­ing in work­ing mem­ory based on a vari­a­tion of the Con­cen­tra­tion card game leads to improve­ments in fluid intel­li­gence–the kind of men­tal abil­ity that lets us solve new prob­lems with­out hav­ing any pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence, and that had been widely believed to be an imutable trait.

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Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

What is the con­nec­tion among habits, cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion? When we con­sciously develop new habits, we cre­ate par­al­lel synap­tic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, inno­v­a­tive tracks.

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Blogs, Public Intellectuals and the Academy

While the dom­i­nant trope about pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als is that they ain’t what they used to be, Daniel Drezner is rel­a­tively bull­ish:

Over time the acad­e­m­iza­tion of intel­lec­tual out­put cre­ated bar­ri­ers to the flour­ish­ing of pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als. The pro­lif­er­a­tion of blogs reverses that trend in sev­eral ways. Weblogs have facil­i­tated the rise of a new class of non-academic intellectuals.…For aca­d­e­mics aspir­ing to be pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, weblogs allow net­works to develop that cross the dis­ci­pli­nary and hier­ar­chi­cal stric­tures of the acad­emy – and expand beyond the academy.

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The New Paternalism

Richard Thaler and Cass Sun­stein artic­u­late an approach to design­ing social and eco­nomic poli­cies that incor­po­rates an under­stand­ing of people’s cog­ni­tive lim­i­ta­tions: pol­icy mak­ers should nudge peo­ple into mak­ing good deci­sions.

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The Stupidity of Dignity

Steven Pinker dis­misses dig­nity as a basis for bioethics dis­cus­sions in bio­med­ical research, which US con­ser­v­a­tives and reli­gious lead­ers are invok­ing to dis­miss poten­tially life-saving med­ical advances. Unfor­tu­nately “over­ween­ing hubris” char­ac­ter­izes most for­mal dis­cus­sions of real revolutions:

In every age, prophets fore­see dystopias that never mate­ri­al­ize, while fail­ing to antic­i­pate the real rev­o­lu­tions. Had there been a President’s Coun­cil on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Inter­net, since it would inex­orably lead to 1984, or to com­put­ers “tak­ing over” like HAL in 2001. Con­ser­v­a­tive bioethi­cists pre­sume to sooth­say the out­come of the quin­tes­sen­tially unpre­dictable endeavor called sci­en­tific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free soci­ety, only emerge as hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple weigh the costs and ben­e­fits of new devel­op­ments for them­selves, adjust­ing their mores and deal­ing with spe­cific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fer­til­iza­tion and the Internet.

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Dare To Be Yourself

Real­iz­ing an authen­tic life can be painful, exhaust­ing, seem­ingly impos­si­ble, and one of our deep­est psy­cho­log­i­cal needs. Psy­chother­a­pist and for­mer monk Thomas Moore on the role that fail­ures in play under­stand­ing self: “Peo­ple carry around a heavy bur­den of not feel­ing authen­tic because they have failed mar­riages and their work life hasn’t gone the way it should, and they’ve dis­ap­pointed every­body, includ­ing them­selves. When peo­ple think of these as just fail­ures, as opposed to learn­ing expe­ri­ences, they don’t have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they’ve made. That dis­own­ing cre­ates a divi­sion that becomes the sense of inauthenticity.”

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