"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

Portable Learner chihuahua

The continuing education of an educator

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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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When Educational Resources Are Open

Judy Breck antic­i­pates an open edu­ca­tion future will let knowl­edge form, ideas emerge and under­stand­ing to be shared. A good sum­mary of what open edu­ca­tion aspires to be: a golden swamp with all sort of trea­sures found there in.

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Apologies All Around

Today’s ten­dency to make amends for the crimes of his­tory begs the ques­tion which hor­rific acts deserve apolo­gies and which ones get the other cheek? Our often unbear­able his­tory should do more than gen­er­ate vac­u­ous, ego­tis­ti­cal apolo­gies; it also “chas­tens, tem­pers, rig­or­ously instructs. The more we know of it, the better.”

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Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality

Two physi­cists use sci­ence to point out the incon­sis­ten­cies asso­ci­ated with the idea of ghosts, vam­pires and zom­bies depicted in Hol­ly­wood movies. Heat always moves from a hot­ter to colder objects. Bring out your basic sci­ence and crit­i­cal think­ing skills the next time Hal­loween appari­tions seem a lit­tle too real.

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Teaching, Learning and Creating Iconic Moments

Christo­pher Ses­sums iden­ti­fies the teach­able moments in a series of pho­tographs in which aged vol­un­teers reien­act scenes from iconic pho­tographs from the last cen­tury, wear­ing their every­day clothes in their every­day envi­ron­ments. I love this. It’s both silly and sub­ver­sive and reminds us of “the impor­tance of his­tor­i­cal events and the impact they have on our per­spec­tives and collective/individual psyches.”

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