"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

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Nobody’s A Critic →

Crit­i­cism, laments Mar­tin Meis, no longer defines what is good and bad in cul­ture, and he blames new media. “Basi­cally, cul­ture has been democ­ra­tized. It has been flat­tened out and mul­ti­plied. There are no longer real dis­tinc­tions between high and low. There’s just more.” What he laments is not so much the demise of crit­i­cism per se, which is actu­ally quite robust, but rather the demise of the influ­ence of pro­fes­sional crit­ics and the sanc­tity of their domain. But if the rela­tion­ship between ama­teur and pro­fes­sional critic has flat­tened, so too has the rela­tion­ship between critic and artist. Par­tic­i­pa­tion is a two-way street. Mar­tin Weis on the per­sonal impact made by lit­er­ary critic James Wood’s essay, “What Chekhov Meant By Life”:

Or, to put it another way, Chekhov is more Chekhov when you add James Wood. I pre­fer Wood/Chekhov to Chekhov/Chekhov and I sus­pect that there is sim­ply no such thing as the old Chekhov after Wood got to him. By the same token, Wood is the critic that he is in no small mea­sure because of how he was affected and trans­formed by read­ing Chekhov.

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The Itch →

Sci­en­tists once saw itch­ing as a form of pain. They now believe it to be a dif­fer­ent order of sen­sa­tion, one which sug­gests that per­cep­tion is more than mere recep­tion. Per­cep­tion is infer­ence. Atul Gawande explains the “brain’s best guess” the­ory of per­cep­tion:

Per­cep­tion is the brain’s best guess about what is hap­pen­ing in the out­side world. The mind inte­grates scat­tered, weak, rudi­men­tary sig­nals from a vari­ety of sen­sory chan­nels, infor­ma­tion from past expe­ri­ences, and hard-wired processes, and pro­duces a sen­sory expe­ri­ence full of brain-provided color, sound, tex­ture, and meaning.

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Is Google Making Us Stupid →

Con­trary to the title of this arti­cle, Nicholas Carr isn’t so much ask­ing if Google is mak­ing us stu­pid, but rather if Google mak­ing us think dif­fer­ently. The answer to this ques­tion is yes, and it echoes ear­lier sen­ti­ments by Neil Post­man who pointed out (about tele­vi­sion) that tech­nol­ogy is not neutral:

Then again, the Net isn’t the alpha­bet, and although it may replace the print­ing press, it pro­duces some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent. The kind of deep read­ing that a sequence of printed pages pro­motes is valu­able not just for the knowl­edge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intel­lec­tual vibra­tions those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sus­tained, undis­tracted read­ing of a book, or by any other act of con­tem­pla­tion, for that mat­ter, we make our own asso­ci­a­tions, draw our own infer­ences and analo­gies, fos­ter our own ideas. Deep read­ing, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indis­tin­guish­able from deep thinking.

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The Myth of Multitasking →

E-mails pour­ing in, cell phones ring­ing, tele­vi­sions blar­ing, pod­casts stream­ing – the great media din that has become an expected part of our lives is one in which we ration our atten­tion among many com­pet­ing tasks. Unfor­tu­nately, Chris­tine Rosen points to a spate of recent stud­ies indi­cat­ing that not only is mul­ti­task­ing a poor strat­egy for learn­ing, the learn­ing you do man­age while mul­ti­task­ing is less flex­i­ble and more spe­cial­ized, so you can­not retrieve the infor­ma­tion as easily.

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Start Pages as Environments for Self-Organized Learners →

Start pages like Netvibes and Page­flakes are not specif­i­cally designed for edu­ca­tional pur­poses, but as Malinka Ivanova points out, they are flex­i­ble enough to poten­tially sup­port self-organized learn­ing and research envi­ron­ments. In this pre­sen­ta­tion, she com­pares var­i­ous start pages in terms of a model of mul­ti­chan­nel learn­ing in which learn­ers may play a a wide range of roles: authors, con­trib­u­tors, dis­trib­u­tors, searchers, mod­er­a­tors, review­ers, edi­tors, researchers, or evaluators.

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Q-Tools: An Approach for Discovery and Knowledge Work →

Not­ing that Google rec­og­nizes that the inter­net does not need to orga­nized until you have a ques­tion in search of an answer, Dave Gray points out that ques­tions may be the most basic tools for gain­ing knowl­edge and work­ing with infor­ma­tion. His stan­dard set of ques­tions offers an inter­est­ing way for infor­ma­tions man­age­ment sys­tems like feed read­ers and email clients eto orga­nize and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion. Exam­ples of Q-tools include the Prism (one input, mul­ti­ple out­puts), the Razor (binary sort­ing), the Gen­er­a­tor (cre­ates new infor­ma­tion), the Peeler (dri­ves atten­tion to deeper lev­els), and more.

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Frankenstein in the Universe →

Can we shape tech­nol­ogy as much as it shapes us? Or do we need to resign our­selves to the specter of tech­nol­ogy out of con­trol? If we do argues Luke Fer­nan­dez, we truly do become its vic­tims:

But even if our lives are con­strained and pushed in cer­tain direc­tions, we have some agency. To deny that would be to suc­cumb to the most nihilis­tic form of tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. If we believe that we can shape tech­nol­ogy as much as it shapes us we can hold out the hope of at least play­ing some minor role in influ­enc­ing the direc­tion that the uni­ver­sity takes in the infor­ma­tion age.

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Critical Theory: Ideology Critique and the Myths of E-Learning →

Norm Friesen uses crit­i­cal the­ory to de-mystify three par­tic­u­lar truths or myths in the e-learning domain…that 1) we live in a knowl­edge econ­omy, 2) learn­ers enjoy any­where any­time access, and 3) edu­ca­tional and social change is an inevitable con­se­quence of tech­no­log­i­cal change.

Under­stand­ing tech­nol­ogy as a scene of strug­gle rather than as a des­tiny or fait accom­pli might also help to guide the explo­ration of metaphors other than “impact” or “dis­sem­i­na­tion” when inquir­ing into the rela­tion­ship between tech­nol­ogy and chang­ing insti­tu­tions and practices.

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Voices Carry →

Is it a prob­lem, asks Lawrence Hill, that many of the most famous and endur­ing fic­tional accounts of African Amer­i­cans have been penned by whites? A solu­tion to this trend of ignor­ing African-American writ­ers is to incor­po­rate mem­oirs into the body of Civil War lit­er­a­ture into the curriculum:

What’s strik­ing about such nar­ra­tives is the imme­di­acy of expres­sion. These authors have a fun­da­men­tal point to make, one of such per­sonal urgency that the reader can hardly turn away. Between each line breathes a voice that seems to whis­per: This is my name, this is when I was born, this is who I am and how I have lived, and I am going to assert my own human­ity by set­ting my story down on paper. If we are to per­suade book­stores, review­ers, librar­i­ans, and cur­ricu­lum writ­ers to look for fresh lit­er­a­ture touch­ing on the African-American expe­ri­ence, and pre­vail on teach­ers to exer­cise more imag­i­na­tion than merely shov­ing the old pile of school edi­tions of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird at yet another class of yawn­ing stu­dents, it may be mem­oir that does the trick.

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Darwinmania! →

The story of Dar­win and his big idea of evo­lu­tion through nat­ural selec­tion offers numer­ous insights into how ideas become wide­spread. For exam­ple, why is it Dar­win we cel­e­brate above the oth­ers who thought of it first (William Wells and Patrick Matthew), or arguably con­ceived of it bet­ter (Alfred Rus­sel Wal­lace)? The rea­son, says Olivia Jud­son is the “Ori­gin,” which changed our view of other species and our­selves through relent­less evidence.

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