"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

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. more →
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Wearable Textbooks
Field Notes

Wearable Textbooks

The purist form of mobile learning is the shirt on your back. more →
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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. more →
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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. more →
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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. more →
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Visual Literacy
Half Notes

Visual Literacy

A reading list about visual literacy. more →
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Digital Literacies: Reading Signs Along The Way
Project Notes

Digital Literacies: Reading Signs Along The Way

Last year I taught various digital literacies as a separate course. This year I am integrating them into the existing curriculum. I'll cover the transition in a series of posts. In this first post, I look at some of the signs that led me in this direction. more →
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How Our Internal Clock Ticks

Time helps us to infer rela­tion­ships of cause and effect, to make sense of the world and to learn. But our abil­ity to per­ceive time and use time is rather faulty. We reg­u­larly mis­es­ti­mate sec­onds, min­utes and hours by 15% to 25% in either direc­tion. We see and move within an opti­mal now period, about 2 1/2 sec­onds long (give or take 1 to 2 sec­onds). Neu­ro­sur­geon Jamshid Gha­jar also makes this inter­est­ing claim: You can explain a lot of patholo­gies, includ­ing schiz­o­phre­nia, autism and ADHD, as prob­lems of time per­cep­tion..

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On Teasing and Playful Provocation

Sur­vival of the fittest is often mis­in­ter­preted to mean sur­vival of the most cut­throat. But fit­ness means so much more than that. In this inter­view, Dacher Kelt­ner points out that kind­ness, play, gen­eros­ity, rev­er­ence and self-sacrifice are also vital to the tasks of evo­lu­tion. And so is teas­ing, which sur­prised me because we tend to be against teas­ing of any sort in our schools and work­places. Kelt­ner calls teas­ing the art of play­ful provo­ca­tion and sug­gests that we use our play­ful voices and bod­ies to pro­voke oth­ers to avoid inap­pro­pri­ate behaviours:

Teas­ing (in the right way, which is what most peo­ple do) … is a way to play and express affec­tion. It is a way of nego­ti­at­ing con­flicts at work and in the fam­ily. Teas­ing exchanges teach chil­dren how to use their voices in innu­mer­able ways — such an impor­tant medium of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In teas­ing, chil­dren learn bound­aries between harm and play. And chil­dren learn empa­thy in teas­ing, and how to appre­ci­ate oth­ers’ feel­ings (for exam­ple, in going too far). And in teas­ing we have fun. All of this ben­e­fit is accom­plished in this remark­able modal­ity of play.

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