Stephanie Sandifer’s point, that purposeful networking is a 21st century skill and should become part of mainstream education, is a proof-of-concept post: it would not have happened without Twitter.
With a Few More Brains
Nicholoas Kristof talks about the dumbing down of discourse in America, and suggests that “the complex and incomplete solution is a greater emphasis on education at every level.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature
Stories can offer so much pleasure that studying them hardly seems like work. In fact, says Brian Boyd, “Attention – engagement in the activity – matters before meaning.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The battle for Wikipedia’s soul
It is the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of user-generated content. The inevitable result of growing pains, all kinds of rules have been devised to measure a subject’s worthiness for inclusion in Wikipedia (or “notabilityâ€, in the jargon of Wikipedians). But now the “threshold for writing articles for Wikipedia is now so high that very few people actually do it.”
♦ ♦ ♦
A Convergence Of Civilizations
Adam Kirsch on the convergence of east and west: “…if the West has achieved things we hold sacred – as we should – it has always been the result of internal struggle. What are now the cherished principles of Western civilization, from democracy to racial equality, have all started out as critiques and became generally accepted only after long and sometimes violent conflict.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Cooked Books
Why are we still surprised when “non-fiction” is less than truthful? “The sad truth is that “non-fiction” has been unreliable from the beginning, no matter how finely grained a section of human knowledge we wish to consider.” The sadder truth is that journalist fact-checking and academic peer review are still the best alternatives.
♦ ♦ ♦
1,000 True Fans
Kevin Kelly does the math for artists in a networked age, and makes it all seem possible: A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author — in other words, anyone producing works of art — needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
♦ ♦ ♦
Are Our Brains Wired for Math?
An interesting summary of Stanislas Dehaene’s research in our numbers sense that has implications for how we teach math: The fundamental problem with learning mathematics is that while the number sense may be genetic, exact calculation requires cultural tools—symbols and algorithms—that have been around for only a few thousand years and must therefore be absorbed by areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes.
♦ ♦ ♦
A pessimist’s view of why scientists do not participate in social networking sites. According to an anonymous postdoc: “I can barely keep up iwth the literature in my field and with what my labmates are doing. Who has time to spend reading some grad student’s blog?”