"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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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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Are Aliens Among Us? →

In pur­suit of evi­dence that life arose on Earth more than once, sci­en­tists are search­ing for microbes that are rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from all known organ­isms. Life of course is prob­lem­atic to define. But the search for aliens hid­ing in plain sight is forc­ing us to broaden our ideas of what is bio­log­i­cally pos­si­ble.

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Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World →

Sur­vey of of gen­eral pub­lic from six coun­tries and library direc­tors from the U.S. exam­in­ing the val­ues and social-networking habits of library users, spon­sored by the Online Com­puter Cen­ter. It’s not sur­pris­ing that the respon­dents have secu­rity and pri­vacy con­cerns: iden­tity theft, ads/spam and pro­tect­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion are among the top con­cerns.

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What is Browsing – really? →

Brows­ing is the act of engag­ing in a series of glimpses, each of which exposes you to objects of poten­tial inter­est; depend­ing on that inter­est, you may or may not exam­ine more closely one of the objects. What’s inter­est­ing is that brows­ing is not a smooth scan, but rather iter­a­tive fits and starts. A worth­while read that in fact never men­tions web brows­ing specifically.

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Trust in Digital Repositories →

Trust in Dig­i­tal Repos­i­to­ries pro­vides mate­r­ial for man­ag­ing intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights in e-learning for insti­tu­tions who want to update their poli­cies in e-learning pro­grams. Every­thing some­one in an insti­tu­tional con­text would need to set up dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment systms in repos­i­to­ries of learn­ing objects: poli­cies, infra­struc­ture, risk, eval­u­a­tion and opportunity.

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Not Just a Pantomime →

Did lan­guage evolve from man­ual ges­tures and then shift to vocal mode? Fox makes the case that the hands pro­vide a more nat­ural sig­nal­ing sys­tem than the voice, and Arm­strong and Wilcox pro­pose that speech itself is a ges­tural sys­tem, which places lan­guage in the domain of cog­ni­tion and biology.

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Remember This →

A brain can recall almost every­thing, prac­ti­cally noth­ing, or some­thing in between. If noth­ing else, this month’s National Geo­graphic reaf­firms the utter weird­ness of human mem­ory. Truth is indeed a memory.

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