"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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Cristina Nehring on What’s Wrong With the American Essay →

As a lit­er­ary form, the essay is like a plas­tic cow – a trans­par­ent cow – with organs and bones that do not seem to fit together but in the end lead to a sat­is­fy­ing whole, well, cow. Not really says Cristina Nehring on Whats Wrong With the Amer­i­can Essay: “If we must com­pare the essay to a beast, let us com­pare it rather to a wild­cat. Let us give it back its tooth and nail, its fangs and claws; let us allow it to take risks, to pre­tend it has nine lives. Let us enfran­chise it to dis­turb us. It is not Orleans incar­cer­ated cow we need today, but Rilkes pan­ther break­ing the bars of his cage.”

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Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance →

Anders Albrecht­slund looks at the social aspects of sur­veil­lance, and sug­gests it can be seen as empow­er­ing and par­tic­i­pa­tory. An inter­est­ing alter­na­tive to the usual empha­sis on poten­tial dan­gers live pri­vacy inva­sion and fraud.

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The Transformation of Culture →

Ron asks if Anthony is build­ing a new lan­guage: “It is my own feel­ing that the ubiq­uity of com­put­ers and dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies means that all cul­tural phe­nom­ena are now avail­able for use by Anthony and his gen­er­a­tion and they are pro­duc­ing a new frame­work of com­mu­ni­ca­tions within which writ­ing is only a piece and not the whole.”

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Growing Up With Google: What It Means To Education →

Diana Oblinger on what it means to be edu­cated in the dig­i­tal age: “Learn­ers need skills that go far beyond read­ing, mem­o­ri­sa­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions have an oblig­a­tion to help stu­dents cul­ti­vate those skills that learn­ers have the most dif­fi­culty attain­ing on their own…judgement, syn­the­sis, research, prac­tice and negotiation.”

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Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind →

The brain has a lim­ited capac­ity for self-regulation, so exert­ing willpower in one area often leads to back­slid­ing in oth­ers. The good news, how­ever, is that prac­tice increases willpower capacity.

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The CTO Challenge: Building Your Personal Learning Network →

Miguel Guh­lin on the process of build­ing per­sonal learn­ing net­works: “..as we exter­nal­ize our think­ing, it becomes less of “I am an expert expound­ing on what I know” and more of “I am a learner, just like you, shar­ing what I’m learn­ing so that we can learn together through our com­mon errors and max­i­mize our breakthroughs.”

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Nomads At Last →

Mobile phones and the inter­net, two rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nolo­gies in their own right, are merg­ing to cre­ate a global nomadic cul­ture based on per­ma­nent con­nec­tiv­ity not mobil­ity:

Humans have always migrated and trav­elled, with­out nec­es­sar­ily liv­ing nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerg­ing is dif­fer­ent from, and involves much more than, merely mak­ing jour­neys. A mod­ern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or sub­ur­ban Amer­ica as a jet-setting chief exec­u­tive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aero­plane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is com­pletely irrel­e­vant. Even if an urban nomad con­fines him­self to a small perime­ter, he nonethe­less has a new and sur­pris­ingly dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship to time, to place and to other peo­ple. Per­ma­nent con­nec­tiv­ity, not motion, is the crit­i­cal thing, says Manuel Castells, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Annen­berg School for Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, a part of the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Los Angeles.

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Haman’s Investigator Questions →

Ger­ald Haman’s orig­i­nal instruc­tional design ques­tion (What should peo­ple KNOW, and WHEN do they need to know it?) has evolved into a set of ques­tions for approach­ing inno­v­a­tive design. “Haman’s Inves­ti­ga­tor Ques­tions” or HIQ: 1) What should peo­ple BE? 2) What should peo­ple KNOW? 3) What should peo­ple FEEL? 4) What should peo­ple HAVE? 5) What should peo­ple DO? 6) What should peo­ple THINK?

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Blogging Darwin →

The the­ory of evo­lu­tion is sup­ported by so many facts that as far as sci­ence goes, it’s as irrefutable as the the­ory of grav­ity. So, the wide­spread igno­rance and denial of nat­ural selec­tion is baf­fling. Adam Ruther­ford: “So far, after a tri­fling 149 years, Darwin’s the­ory of evo­lu­tion has with­stood all attacks. As sci­en­tists, we are obliged to con­tinue to test it and to fur­ther scru­ti­nise and mod­ify its mean­ing. I think it is stag­ger­ing how right Dar­win actu­ally is in this book.”

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How the Truth Gets Framed for the Camera →

Louis P. Masur reflects on the devi­ous lie of a snap­shot: It is not the pho­tog­ra­pher who is devi­ous, but the nature of the snap­shot itself, which iso­lates and freezes action, dis­con­nect­ing it from con­text and sequence. Pho­tographs seduce us into believ­ing that they are objec­tive records, but, in fact, all images are inter­pre­ta­tions, texts that must be read.

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