Students slam poetry - News

Students slam poetry - News

Fun with Flipbooks

Flipbook Printer - Mouser - Software - DonationCoder.com

This is just plum fun. I think I will download the video of Bush's "failed exit strategy" in China for my first flipbook.

technorati tags: fun

Atlantic's Poetry and Fiction Page

technorati tags: poetry

Everything And Nothing: The Searchable Shakespeare

Everything And Nothing: The Searchable Shakespeare

All is searchable.

University Music Collections

Here is an annotated sampling of music that awaits you when you walk through the doors of my University library.  Charles Smith’s work is obviously a labor of love.  I have always felt so rich whenever I walk out of a library with books, tapes, cd’s , and such.  Libraries are proof positive that we are all in it together.  In our Kentucky communities, libraries are created through local taxing districts and supported by state library services.  It is remarkable what this simple system has produced:  a library in every county, Internet access in every one of those libraries, and information access on a global and local scale that must rival what those in the Great Library of Alexandria must have felt. 

The Power of Words

The Power of Words:  Flores is making a larger point about the real source of strength in business. "In the western mind, there are two notions of compassion," he explains. "One is, I'm going to be a good Samaritan and help this guy. But that is the compassion of the weak. The compassion of the strong is in waking people up to their blindness. For that, you need to be a warrior. I am tough and sweet. I show you your bullshit, but I'm also infinitely patient with you." Flores stands up very straight and addresses the group. "Know this," he announces. "We aren't aware of the amount of self-deception and self-limitation that we collect in our personalities. I'm fighting for freedom, for breadth of being. I want to open up people's moral imaginations -- which will give them a strategic advantage in business, in politics, and in their personal lives."

 

An amazing article that I am not quite sure how to take.  You take a look and come back.  Tell me what you think.  I just can’t be sure if this is ugly truth or truly ugly.

A New Blogging Tool from FactoryCity--Flock

FactoryCity :  “This design was fundamentally weak because it relied on an existing solution grafted onto an entirely different problem. Once I accepted the ambiguity of the situation—exacerbated by the numerous solutions available for blogging—I realized that what we needed was something that didn’t encourage the management of your blog, but rather the act of composing and creating.”

Designing a brand new tool to post to your weblog is an exercise in the imagination.  Just as I am trying to create a community of practice with my weblog, LitTeach that is only a dreamed image, so too are these folks working on a new folksomonic tool.  I surely do wish that I could do a beta test of this new Firefox extension posting tool.  I have requested this, but I am doing a 30 minute major presentation on campus and would love to demonstrate posting with this tool.  So… I cast another wish in a bottle to the Internet gods to grant. 

TomDispatch - Tomgram: Iraq in America

TomDispatch - Tomgram: Iraq in America

“The one constant of this President and his administration is that their most essential impulse is never to head for the frontlines themselves -- not in war, not in disaster, not for our safety or our planet's safety, not even on the campaign trail. They are invariably at the front of nowhere at all, and more than happy to be there. The old "chickenhawk" label has a deeper meaning than we ever realized.”

Tom Englehart nails Bush to the wall, but will anyone in the mainstream take him down?  Still waiting.

Innovate - Places to Go: Apolyton

Innovate - Places to Go: Apolyton

What sites like Apolyton suggest, however, is that instead of embedding a game into learning, it is possible to embed learning into a game.

What Downes is writing about here is pure, plain and simple cooptation.  Coopt the game paradigm to learn.  Internally motivate and adapt existing gaming frameworks.  That’s how you get around the “educational” and exogenous nature of most games created to teach.

Innovate - Epistemic Games

Innovate - Epistemic Games

epistemic frames

Hmmm.

online writing / writing online presentation | CultureCat

online writing / writing online presentation | CultureCat

Wonderful draft on weblog pedagogy.  Nobody has all the pieces, but some folks are joining the many loose ones they are finding on the Internet to begin to make it work.  Great work, Clancy Ratliff.

Very Cool Things: Gakken Emile Berliner Gramophone Turntable [Model] Science Kits

Very Cool Things: Gakken Emile Berliner Gramophone Turntable [Model] Science Kits

What can one say to this? Oddball, but I do remember playing cardboard records as a kid from cereal boxes. Might be a cool way to get interesting sound effects for soundtracks of various kinds.

This is an experiment

This is an experimental post using Word for Blogger.  Howzabout a picture, too?

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New Scientist Breaking News - HIV breakthrough raises hopes for a cure

New Scientist Breaking News - HIV breakthrough raises hopes for a cure

“Our findings suggest that eradication of established HIV infection may be achieved in a staged approach,” says Margolis. “This finding, though not definitive, suggests that new approaches will allow the cure of HIV in the future.”

 

Dare we raise our hopes for a cure?  Damn straight we do! It says something about the state of AIDS affairs, that we begin to pin so much hope on the results of three patients, but…hope is the feathered thing.

Cellphone-based pollution sensor being developed at Berkeley - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Cellphone-based pollution sensor being developed at Berkeley - Engadget - www.engadget.com

A team at UC Berkeley is working on a platform to cram even more functionality into your cellphone, but this time instead of adding games, ringtones or other toys, the new functions will be planet-friendly tools like pollution and radiation detectors (hey, it is Berkeley, right?).

Cellphone+Ubiquity=Universality

Cellphone University anyone?

 

Innovation Weblog - Trends, resources, viewpoints from Chuck Frey at InnovationTools

Innovation Weblog - Trends, resources, viewpoints from Chuck Frey at InnovationTools

The habit of innovation at an individual level (personal brilliance) is the differentiator... The American worker for example is more expensive than others so they must determine how to create that much more value."

I know I have a habit of short posts to links, but it doesn’t bother me because I tend to respond to same.  I know I need some longer posts and some essays online as well.  This will do for now because it is a good topic to discuss with students—reality and the world of creativity.   This notion of “personal brilliance” really is a touchstone, or perhaps it might be better described as the steel that sparks off my flint. (Don’t you have a hard head, too?) OK, I know these are, as my son is so fond of saying, “lame sauce”, but SBI (so be it).

 

Open Learning and Large Learning Objects (Courses)

Open Learning and Large Learning Objects (Courses)

…What's the point in getting certification if no HR guy or girl is looking at your CV anymore. It is more likely that you will have to show a record of clients, projects, artifacts etc. instead of Diplomas, Degrees, and so forth. Reputation is built differently in the part of a networked society that lives and operates outside of the big corporate business world.

A lesson to us all in how to make our “services” portable in both senses—easy to carry and easy to hook into. 

New Scientist Premium- Entering a dark age of innovation - Technology

Entering a dark age of innovation - Technology

It may seem like we are living in a technological nirvana, but the rate of technological innovation has been falling for 100 years, a new study reveals… according to a new analysis we are fast approaching a new dark age.

So… which is it Moore’s Law or the Dark Ages.  Competing paradigms duke it out?  Odds on favorite?  I’m going with the new guy cuz I like the underdog.  The article says we average seven innovations per billion people per year.  Are we bumping up against patent office logic here where we get someone who just assumes that nothing more will be invented?  I think that both of these paradigms are probably grossly wrong in many ways and subtly right in others.  I especially love the assumption that innovation is a quantifiable and that it is a predictable quantifiable.  Chaotically speaking, both of those hypotheses are unacceptable.

Improv Visits the Office

Take a look at this and see if there isn't a valid analytical tool for the classroom. Tell me what you think and I will do the same.

Training + Development > Press > Performance of a Lifetime

Training + Development > Press > Performance of a Lifetime

Effective improvisation embraces several basic concepts:
• Pay attention and be present.
• Make your partner look good.
• Don’t censor yourself.
• Say, “Yes, and...” instead of “Yes, but....”
• Listen generously.
• Take risks and embrace failure.
• Say the obvious thing—in other words, the first thing that comes to mind. There are no wrong answers.

 

OK, readers few but fine, let us substitute “learning” for “improvisation” and then play out the rest of the quote.  Does this fit?  Partner=?  Please comment briefly, addressing briefly and then perhaps suggest an implication or two that would arise from this substitution.  Thanks.  I use some improv principles in my teaching, but I need to reinvent myself as a “learner-who-just-happens-to-be-the-teacher”.