"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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Democratic, but dangerous too: how the web changed our world →

What will our planet look like when we are all truly and well-connected? In her speech on inter­net free­dom at the New­seum in Wash­ing­ton last Thurs­day, Hilary Clin­ton declared that inter­net users must be “assured cer­tain basic freedoms” – freedom of expres­sion and of wor­ship, free­dom from want and from fear and, most intrigu­ingly, “free­dom to con­nect”. In sharp con­trast, we have the author­i­tar­ian approaches of coun­tries like China, Iran and Egypt, an over­whelm­ing com­mer­cial web that exploits the vast trails of per­sonal infor­ma­tion we leave behind, and the nar­row­ing prospects of infor­ma­tion we may wish to see when these inter­ests serve up what they think we want to see. Aleks Kro­to­ski looks at the social and psy­cho­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of con­nect­ing and con­cludes that our rela­tion­ship with the web is a syn­ergy. “… as it draws us into its net­works and its hyper­links, we will shape them in our global image.” It is the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary evo­lu­tion that we have ever par­tic­i­pated in:

…who we are on the web is sim­ply a reflec­tion of who we already are offline. We project hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tems into the vir­tual world. We extend our inter­ests and make them hap­pen using the tools the web pro­vides. We seek out things that make us feel good about our­selves. The web is a mir­ror, and we have to face it in con­fi­dence, warts and all.

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When the media is the disaster: Covering Haiti →

The Los Ange­les Times ran a series of pho­tographs of des­per­ate Haitians cop­ing in the after­math of a dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake with cap­tions that kept deploy­ing words like “loot­ing.” Would you enter a col­lapsed super­mar­ket to take food to starv­ing chil­dren and babies? Then you too are a looter. These pic­tures do con­vey des­per­a­tion, says Rebecca Sol­nit, but they don’t con­vey crime. She argues that the media tend to be obsessed with prop­erty and head­lines about assaults on prop­erty, and mis­rep­re­sent events as loot­ing or panic, need­lessly incit­ing hos­til­ity and hys­te­ria on the part of local author­i­ties and caus­ing more suf­fer­ing. When the rest of us con­tem­plate the Haitians’ plight through media reports, we need to remem­ber that:

…what is absolutely accu­rate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life mat­ters more than prop­erty, that the sur­vivors of a cat­a­stro­phe deserve our com­pas­sion and our under­stand­ing of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it mat­ters des­per­ately that we get them right.

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Knowledge is Out, Focus is In, and People are Everywhere →

David Dal­rym­ple thinks that in the net age, fil­ter­ing, not remem­ber­ing is the most impor­tant skill. In his response to Edge’s annual ques­tion for 2010, How is the Inter­net chang­ing the way you think?, he says that those who are able to resist the dis­trac­tions posed by a del­uge of unre­lated infor­ma­tion and focus on what is impor­tant are bet­ter equipped than those who are knowl­edge­able. “Knowl­edge was once an inter­nal prop­erty of a per­son, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed exter­nally, but with the Inter­net, knowl­edge can be sup­plied exter­nally, but focus must be forced inter­nally.” The idea that an exter­nal infor­ma­tion repos­i­tory can replace human mem­ory is inter­est­ing, but the dichotomy strikes me as a lit­tle extreme. We can’t turn off our mem­o­ries, and there is value in serendip­i­tous find­ings. Focus and dis­trac­tion work in con­cert in any under­tak­ing. We’ll just have to be more mind­ful of which one is lead­ing the quest for knowl­edge. via Idea of the Day

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Using Web-Based Tools to Stay Current
Project Notes

Using Web-Based Tools to Stay Current →

How do you keep up with the literature? This poster shows how a reading list can offer a simple structure that supports our need to stay current with the literature within a community of practice.
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Wearable Textbooks
Field Notes

Wearable Textbooks →

The purist form of mobile learning is the shirt on your back.
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The Brain at the Edge of Chaos →

It seems pre­car­i­ous to have a brain that oper­ates on the edge of chaos, one that vac­il­lates ran­domly between states of qui­es­cence and an avalanche of neural activ­ity. Yet, accord­ing to a review of recent stud­ies in the New Sci­en­tist, hov­er­ing near dis­or­der is actu­ally essen­tial to the brain’s capac­ity to process infor­ma­tion and react to an ever-changing envi­ron­ment, and has even been linked to mem­ory and intel­li­gence. This vital bal­ance makes me won­der what hap­pens if we stray too far towards sta­bil­ity or chaos? Are we also hov­er­ing pre­car­i­ously near men­tal insta­bil­ity? They say it’s a fine line between genius and mad­ness, acknowl­edges neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Liley. Maybe we’re finally begin­ning to under­stand the wis­dom of this statement.

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Customizing Individual Blog Posts, Part 1
Tech Notes

Customizing Individual Blog Posts, Part 1 →

Use CSS styling, custom fields and a user-defined function to design blog posts.
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Book Notes

Controlling the Conversation →

Phil Harkins guide to conversations in the workplace is more about controlling the agenda than seeing where the conversation leads.
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Dispatch: On Value, Cost and Price (no math)
Field Notes

Dispatch: On Value, Cost and Price (no math) →

A story behind Lea Vivot's sculpture Secret Bench of Knowledge, with international characters, and a marketing and sales lesson in cost, price and value, from this morning's bus commute.
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