"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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Blog Writing →

Sarah Boxer on blog writ­ing as id writ­ing:

…I think I get the super­hero fix­a­tion. It’s the fly­ing. It’s the sus­pen­sion of punc­tu­a­tion and good man­ners and even iden­tity. Blog­gers at their com­put­ers are Super­men in flight. They break the rules. They go into their vir­tual phone booths, put on their cos­tumes, bring down their per­sonal vil­lains, and save the world. Anony­mous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, ‘Dude, the ball.’

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The Life Cycle of a Blog Post →

Where does a blog post go? Wired mag­a­zines’ flash ani­ma­tion fol­lows a blog post as it makes its way from mere post to reader via the Inter­web: The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, from servers to spi­ders to suits to you [flash ani­ma­tion].

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The Future of Ideas →

We can now down­load Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas [pdf] for free. Lessig, a pro­fes­sor of law at Stan­ford Law School and vocal critic of the exten­sion of the copy­right term in United States, per­suaded Ran­dom House to release the book under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

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Foreign Policy Goes Glam →

Increas­ingly, celebri­ties are tak­ing an active inter­est in polit­i­cal causes. Are they actu­ally mak­ing a dif­fer­ence? No doubt that celebri­ties can raise the pro­file of issues near and dear to their hearts. But high­light­ing a prob­lem is not the same thing as solv­ing it—on that score, the celebrity track record at affect­ing pol­icy out­comes is the same as the rest of us: mixed.

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Let’s Talk About Love →

Is dis­dain for Céline Dion innate or learned? Is our love or hatred of My Heart Will Go On the result of a uni­ver­sal, dis­in­ter­ested instinct for beauty-assessment? Or is it some­thing less exalted? Carl Wil­son tends to side with the French soci­ol­o­gist Pierre Bour­dieu, who argues that taste is never dis­in­ter­ested: It’s a form of social cur­rency, or “cul­tural cap­i­tal,” that we use to stock­pile pres­tige. Hat­ing Céline is there­fore not just an aes­thetic choice, but an eth­i­cal one, a way to ele­vate your­self above her fans—who, accord­ing to mar­ket research, tend to be dis­pro­por­tion­ately poor adult women liv­ing in fly­over states and shop­ping at big-box stores.

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How a UNICEF Photo Makes the West’s Heart Ache →

This photo of 11-year old child bride sit­ting next to her 40-year old fiance cap­tures a small, every­day moment that wouldn’t sur­prise any­one in the Tal­iban. But to West­ern eyes it is quite a dif­fer­ent mat­ter. Dutch writer Leon de Win­ter: Our eyes behold an abom­i­na­tion. Our eyes have learned to see the world from the per­spec­tive of a slowly acquired sense for human­ity. And although more and more voices tell us that we — the for­mer colo­nial­ists and impe­ri­al­ists — have lost the right to judge other cul­tures, we know just as well as this girl that this mar­riage is wrong.

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David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists and Megastars →

David Byrne’s describes 6 music dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­els, each offer­ing var­i­ous lev­els of artis­tic con­trol. The totally DIY model is cer­tainly not for every­one — but that’s the point. Now there’s choice. What I like about this piece is how David Byrnes defines music, and that by doing so expands the idea that it is just a piece of plas­tic meant to be bought, sold, traded and replayed end­lessly in any con­text. We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fab­ric: to con­gre­gate at con­certs and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Inter­net) as a form of social cur­rency; to build tem­ples where only “our kind of peo­ple” can hear music (opera houses and sym­phony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their polit­i­cal beliefs.

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Twilight of the Books →

We are read­ing less as we age, and we are read­ing less than peo­ple who were our age ten or twenty years ago. Caleb Crain reacts to The National Endow­ment of the Arts (N.E.A.) recent report on Amer­i­can read­ing pat­terns that con­nects declines in read­ing with civic, social, and eco­nomic impli­ca­tions and asks what soci­ety might be like if only a few elite peo­ple read lit­er­ary texts as a hobby.

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Medical Myths →

Heard the one about using only 10% of our brains? Not true. Doc­tors pour cold water on this and 6 other med­ical myths in the British Med­ical Jour­nal. These myths were based on ideas the authors had heard endorsed on sev­eral occa­sions, and which many physi­cians thought were true. But after we care­fully lay out med­ical evi­dence, they are very will­ing to accept that these beliefs are actu­ally false.

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The Polarization of Extremes →

Cass Sun­stein argues that the abil­ity to fil­ter infor­ma­tion on the inter­net is going to lead to a world of frac­tured com­mu­ni­ca­tions, group polar­iza­tions, cas­cades of false infor­ma­tion, finally result­ing in a rise in extrem­ism. It’s a relief to hear argu­ments that do not see the inter­net as an ideal force for democ­racy, but his argu­ment relies on “per­fect fil­ter­ing,” with­out any expla­na­tion for how this is even possible.

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