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elsjekool

Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg - 35 views

  • There are keynote speakers—often the people who created the technology at hand or crafted a given language. There are the regular speakers, often paid not at all or in airfare, who present some idea or technique or approach. Then there are the panels, where a group of people are lined up in a row and forced into some semblance of interaction while the audience checks its e-mail.
  • Fewer than a fifth of undergraduate degrees in computer science awarded in 2012 went to women, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology
  • The average programmer is moderately diligent, capable of basic mathematics, has a working knowledge of one or more programming languages, and can communicate what he or she is doing to management and his or her peers
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  • The true measure of a language isn’t how it uses semicolons; it’s the standard library of each language. A language is software for making software. The standard library is a set of premade software that you can reuse and reapply.
  • A coder needs to be able to quickly examine and identify which giant, complex library is the one that’s the most recently and actively updated and the best match for his or her current needs. A coder needs to be a good listener.
  • Code isn’t just obscure commands in a file. It requires you to have a map in your head, to know where the good libraries, the best documentation, and the most helpful message boards are located. If you don’t know where those things are, you will spend all of your time searching, instead of building cool new things.
  • Some tools are better for certain jobs.
  • C is a simple language, simple like a shotgun that can blow off your foot. It allows you to manage every last part of a computer—the memory, files, a hard drive—which is great if you’re meticulous and dangerous if you’re sloppy
  • Object-oriented programming is, at its essence, a filing system for code.
  • Where C tried to make it easier to do computer things, Smalltalk tried to make it easier to do human things.
  • Style and usage matter; sometimes programmers recommend Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style—that’s right, the one about the English language. Its focus on efficient usage resonates with programmers. The idiom of a language is part of its communal identity.
  • Coding is a culture of blurters.
  • Programmers carve out a sliver of cognitive territory for themselves and go to conferences, and yet they know their position is vulnerable.
  • Programmers are often angry because they’re often scared.
  • Programming is a task that rewards intense focus and can be done with a small group or even in isolation.
  • For a truly gifted programmer, writing code is a side effect of thought
  • As a class, programmers are easily bored, love novelty, and are obsessed with various forms of productivity enhancement.
  • “Most programming languages are partly a way of expressing things in terms of other things and partly a basic set of given things.”
  • Of course, while we were trying to build a bookstore, we actually built the death of bookstores—that seems to happen a lot in the business. You set out to do something cool and end up destroying lots of things that came before.
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    A lengthy but worthy read for all non-programmers on code.
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    Explains code
Don Doehla

Found in Translation - 28 views

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    Language life at UC Berkeley and beyond. Relfections on meaning, language use, cultural means of expression, status of languages, and more.
Martin Burrett

When do speech difficulties in children matter for literacy? - 7 views

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    A new study found that speech difficulties are linked with difficulties in learning to read when children first start school, but these effects are no longer apparent at 8 years of age. Researchers confirmed that early language impairment that co-occurs with speech difficulties predicts poor literacy skills at both 5½ and 8 years of age. Having a family history of dyslexia had a small but significant effect on literacy at both ages, above and beyond the effects of speech and language...
Peter Beens

Education Week Teacher: Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents - 1 views

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    Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents By Gail Tillery Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org. You will face many challenging tasks as a new teacher. Dealing with parents is probably among the most intimidating, especially if you are young and in your first career. While communicating with parents can be tricky, a little preparation will help you to treat parents as partners and to be calmer when problems arise. Here's the first rule to live by: Your students' parents are not your enemies. Ultimately, they want the same thing you want, which is the best for their children. By maintaining respectful and productive communication, you can work together to help students succeed. Second, whenever problems arise, remember that parents are probably just as nervous about contacting you as you are about returning the contact-and maybe more so. I'll confess: Even after 26 years of teaching, I still get a little frisson of fear in my belly when I see an e-mail or hear a voicemail from a parent. But I have seen time and again that parents are often more nervous than the teacher is-especially if their child doesn't want them to contact the teacher. Indeed, some parents may even fear that if they raise concerns, their child will face some kind of retaliation. Remember that parents' tones or words may reflect such fears. In your response, try to establish that everyone involved wants to help the child. Here are some practical tips for communicating effectively with parents: Contact every parent at the beginning of the year. Do some "recon." Telephone calls are best for this initial contact, since they are more personal than e-mail. Ask the parent to tell you about his or her child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. Make sure to ask, "What is the best thing I can do to help your child succeed?" Remember to take notes! Once you've gathered the information you need, set a boundary with parents by saying, "Well, Ms. Smith, I have 25 more parent
trisha_poole

50 Best Education Technology Blogs You Aren't Reading Yet - 173 views

  • Early EFL: Leahn is located in Spain, where she works as a freelance language assistant teacher and as a teacher trainer in workshops for primary and secondary school teachers.
  • Box of Chocolates: Join this EFL teacher from Recife, Brazil, who is very passionate about teaching
  • Neslihan Durmusoglu: This blog reflects on the world of EFL and about being a 21st-century learner and teacher.
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  • Reflections of a Teacher and Learner: David teaches kids at a private college in Turkey and he also is a distance student on the University of Manchester’s MA in EdTech & TESOL programme
  • An A-Z of ELT: This blog is managed by the man who wrote An A-Z of ELT in 2006, Scott Thornbury.
  • Authentic Teaching: This blogger has taught EFL in Brazil, and taught ELT for several years as well. He now is earning an MA in Education in London
  • Jeremy Harmer’s Blog: Jeremy is a writer and teacher/teacher-trainer for English to speakers of other languages, and he blogs about presentation.
  • Marisa Constantinides — TEFL Matters: This blogger runs CELT Athens, a teacher development center based in Greece.
  • Shaun Wilden’s Blog: Shaun has been involved in English language teaching for almost twenty years. He also maintains several online teaching sites including ihonlinetraining.net.
  • So this is English… This blog is filled with ideas, thoughts, discoveries, feedback and more about the teaching and learning of English.
  • Teaching Village: Barbara is an English teacher currently living in Kitakyushu, Japan, and using Web 2.0 tools and virtual worlds.
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    Technology and teaching - two words that seem to fit together perfectly today for most teachers and learners. So much so that a slew of new blogs have come on board to talk about education technology - or, edTech. This list of the 50 best education technology blogs are not inclusive, as there are so many new blogs available; however, if you look at links provided by many of these blogs to other edTech blogs, you may learn about even more blog that you aren't reading yet.
Siri Anderson

Artificial intelligence | Playlist | TED.com - 13 views

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    I used to promote teaching K-8 computational thinking and coding because of the social justice issues around access to the language of power, economic opportunities, and a belief that learning CT enhances overall academic competencies for those likely to be challenged to succeed in schools.. Now I'm an advocate for a different set of reasons that seem more preeminent. We need everyone to learn computational thinking because ethics and protecting the right to spirituality/secular humanist values seem to be what computers won't be able to do better than humans. Therefore we better have humans who are ethically grounded, informed by the humanities, and competent to understand the implications of the computer software we create. This is a great watch list or podcast list to spur considerations of this urgent matter of the unregulated world of AI.
Kate Pok

Intersections: History and New Media: Wiki in the History Classroom - 5 views

  • Students did not agree on the merits of the wiki. Some were deeply offended when other students eliminated or modified their contributions. Others found the chance to pick apart other’s words and conclusions exhilarating. Regardless, most students seemed to grasp the important lesson I hoped to share: that history is the conversation we have about the past. History is about the authorial choices scholars make. History is about the evidence included and the evidence excluded. By asking students to participate in a joint-writing exercise, they were compelled to pay attention to the language others used, the phrasings and structure employed, the anecdotes emphasized, the facts obscured. I told them the story of an undergraduate English professor I had who spent an entire class session discussing why Shakespeare began Macbeth with the word “when”. Words matter. Words shape arguments. They determine meaning, and they form our view of the world around us, including our view of the history of the world around us. Students also came to appreciate that history was not a bag of facts we historians force them to memorize. Instead, as Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob suggest, history is the product of that collective effort of truth seeking.
  • I still caution students about using Wikipedia. But I think the wiki can help our students see themselves as part of that democratic conversation so important to our profession. Throwing their ideas into the ring for others to challenge forces students to defend their ideas, modify their conclusions, and reconsider their assumptions. The wiki, while not perfect, may help us change the way our students think about history. It may help them be more attentive to language and argument. Importantly, it may help them value civil discourse as a civic virtue. These are good lessons for history students and for their professors. —Kevin B. Sheets is associate professor of history at the State University of New York, College at Cortland and project director of the “American Dream Project,” a Teaching American History grant-based project in upstate New York. He regularly teaches courses in historical methods and American intellectual and cultural history.
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    Great description of the merits of using a wiki in a classroom.
Xiaojing Kou

How Listening and Sharing Help Shape Collaborative Learning Experiences | MindShift | K... - 30 views

  • 1. How Listening and Sharing Works
  • In school, getting people to share can be difficult. Learners may be diffident, or they may not have good strategies for sharing. Children often do not know how to offer constructive criticism or build on an idea. It can be helpful to give templates for sharing, such as two likes and a wish, where the “wish” is a constructive criticism or a building idea.
  • But more often than not, it is because one or more of five ingredients is missing: joint attention, listening, sharing, coordinating, and perspective taking.
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  • Using a common visual anchor (e.g., a common diagram) can help people maintain joint visual attention.
  • Sharing operates on two levels: sharing common goals and sharing ideas.
  • Many college students dislike group projects. Some of this is naïve egoism and an unwillingness to compromise
  • Collaboration requires a great deal of turn-taking coordination.
  • It can be useful to establish collaborative structures and rules.
  • primary reason for collaborating is that people bring different ideas to the table. The first four ingredients—joint attention, listening, sharing, and coordinating—support the exchange of information. The fifth ingredient is understanding why people are offering the information they do. This often goes beyond what speakers can possibly show and say (see Chapter S). People need to understand the point of view behind what others are saying, so they can interpret it more fully. This requires perspective taking. This is where important learning takes place, because learners can gain a new way to think about matters. It can also help differentiate and clarify one’s own ideas. A conflict of opinions can enhance learning (Johnson & Johnson, 2009).
  • An interesting study on perspective taking (Kulkarni, Cambre, Kotturi, Bernstein, & Klemmer, 2015) occurred in a massive open online course (MOOC) with global participation. In their online discussions, learners were encouraged to review lecture content by relating it to their local context. The researchers placed people into low- or high-diversity groups based on the spread of geographic regions among participants. Students in the most geographically diverse discussion groups saw the highest learning gains, presumably because they had the opportunity to consider more different perspectives than geographically uniform groups did
Laura Doto

Final Report: Friendship | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH - 1 views

  • Social relations—not simply physical space—structure the social worlds of youth.
    • Laura Doto
       
      A critical conclusion to be realized that can inform our assumptions as educators.
  • When teens are involved in friendship-driven practices, online and offline are not separate worlds—they are simply different settings in which to gather with friends and peers
  • these dynamics reinforce existing friendship patterns as well as constitute new kinds of social arrangements.
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  • Homophily describes the likelihood that people connect to others who share their interests and identity.
  • One survey of Israeli teens suggests that those who develop friendships online tend toward less homogenous connections than teens who do not build such connections
  • Teens frequently use social media as additional channels of communication to get to know classmates and turn acquaintances into friendships.
  • Some teens—especially marginalized and ostracized ones—often relish the opportunity to find connections beyond their schools. Teens who are driven by specific interests that may not be supported by their schools, such as those described in the Creative Production and Gaming chapters, often build relationships with others online through shared practice.
  • there are plenty of teens who relish the opportunity to make new connections through social media, this practice is heavily stigmatized
  • the public myths about online “predators” do not reflect the actual realities of sexual solicitation and risky online behavior (Wolak et al. 2008). Not only do unfounded fears limit teenagers unnecessarily, they also obscure preventable problematic behavior
  • As she described her typical session on Photobucket, it became clear that a shared understanding of friendship and romance was being constructed by her and other Photobucket users:
  • The fact that they draw from all of these sources suggests that youth’s friendship maintenance is in tune with a discourse of love and friendship that is being widely displayed and (re)circulated.
  • “It’s like have you noticed that you may have someone in your Top 8 but you’re not in theirs and you kinda think to yourself that you’re not as important to that person as they are to you . . . and oh, to be in the coveted number-one spot!”
  • Taking someone off your Top 8 is your new passive-aggressive power play when someone pisses you off.
  • Top Friends are persistent, publicly displayed, and easily alterable. This makes it difficult for teens to avoid the issue or make excuses such as “I forgot.” When pressured to include someone, teens often oblige or attempt to ward off this interaction by listing those who list them
  • Other teens avoid this struggle by listing only bands or family members. While teens may get jealous if other peers are listed, family members are exempt from the comparative urge.
  • to avoid social drama with her friends:
  • The Top Friends feature is a good example of how structural aspects of software can force articulations that do not map well to how offline social behavior works.
  • teens have developed a variety of social norms to govern what is and is not appropriate
  • The problem with explicit ranking, however, is that it creates or accentuates hierarchies where they did not exist offline, or were deliberately and strategically ambiguous, thus forcing a new set of social-status negotiations. The give-and-take over these forms of social ranking is an example of how social norms are being negotiated in tandem with the adoption of new technologies, and how peers give ongoing feedback to one another as part of these struggles to develop new cultural standards.
  • While teen dramas are only one component of friendship, they are often made extremely visible by social media. The persistent and networked qualities of social media alter the ways that these dramas play out in teen life. For this reason, it is important to pay special attention to the role that social media play in the negotiation of teen status.
  • primarily a continuation of broader dramas.
  • social media amplify dramas because they extend social worlds beyond the school.
  • Gossip and rumors have played a role in teen struggles for status and attention since well before social media entered the scene
  • social media certainly alter the efficiency and potential scale of interactions. Because of this, there is greater potential for gossip to spread much further and at a faster pace, making social media a culprit in teen drama. While teen gossip predates the Internet, some teens blame the technologies for their roles in making gossip easier and more viral
  • That’s what happened with me and my friends. We got into a lot of drama with it and I was like, anyone can write anything. It can be fact, fiction. Most people, what they read they believe. Even if it’s not true (C.J. Pascoe, Living Digital).
  • finds the News Feed useful “because it helps you to see who’s keeping track of who and who’s talking to who.” She enjoys knowing when two people break up so that she knows why someone is upset or when she should reach out to offer support. Knowing this information also prevents awkward conversations that might reference the new ex. While she loves the ability to keep up with the lives of her peers, she also realizes that this means that “everybody knows your business.”
  • Some teens find the News Feed annoying or irrelevant. Gadil, an Indian 16-year-old from Los Angeles, thinks that it is impersonal while others think it is downright creepy. For Tara, a Vietnamese 16-year-old from Michigan, the News Feed takes what was public and makes it more public: “Facebook’s already public. I think it makes it way too like stalker-ish.” Her 18-year-old sister, Lila, concurs and points out that it gets “rumors going faster.” Kat, a white 14-year-old from Salem, Massachusetts, uses Facebook’s privacy settings to hide stories from the News Feed for the sake of appearances.
  • While gossip is fairly universal among teens, the rumors that are spread can be quite hurtful. Some of this escalates to the level of bullying. We are unable to assess whether or not bullying is on the rise because of social media. Other scholars have found that most teens do not experience Internet-driven harassment (Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor 2007). Those who do may not fit the traditional profile of those who experience school-based bullying (Ybarra, Diener-West, and Leaf 2007), but harassment, both mediated and unmediated, is linked to a myriad of psychosocial issues that includes substance use and school problems (Hinduja and Patchin 2008; Ybarra et al. 2007).
  • Measuring “cyberbullying” or Internet harassment is difficult, in part because both scholars and teens struggle to define it. The teens we interviewed spoke regularly of “drama” or “gossip” or “rumors,” but few used the language of “bullying” or “harassment” unless we introduced these terms. When Sasha, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, was asked specifically about whether or not rumors were bullying, she said: I don’t know, people at school, they don’t realize when they are bullying a lot of the time nowadays because it’s not so much physical anymore. It’s more like you think you’re joking around with someone in school but it’s really hurting them. Like you think it’s a funny inside joke between you two, but it’s really hurtful to them, and you can’t realize it anymore. Sasha, like many of the teens we interviewed, saw rumors as hurtful, but she was not sure if they were bullying. Some teens saw bullying as being about physical harm; others saw it as premeditated, intentionally malicious, and sustained in nature. While all acknowledged that it could take place online, the teens we interviewed thought that most bullying took place offline, even if they talked about how drama was happening online.
  • it did not matter whether it was online or offline; the result was still the same. In handling this, she did not get offline, but she did switch schools and friend groups.
  • Technology provides more channels through which youth can potentially bully one another. That said, most teens we interviewed who discussed being bullied did not focus on the use of technology and did not believe that technology is a significant factor in bullying.
  • They did, though, see rumors, drama, and gossip as pervasive. The distinction may be more connected with language and conception than with practice. Bianca, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, sees drama as being fueled by her peers’ desire to get attention and have something to talk about. She thinks the reason that people create drama is boredom. While drama can be hurtful, many teens see it simply as a part of everyday social life.
  • Although some drama may start out of boredom or entertainment, it is situated in a context where negotiating social relations and school hierarchies is part of everyday life. Teens are dealing daily with sociability and related tensions.
  • Tara thinks that it emerges because some teens do not know how to best negotiate their feelings and the feelings of others.
  • Teens can use the ability to publicly validate one another on social network sites to reaffirm a friendship.
  • So, while drama is common, teens actually spend much more time and effort trying to preserve harmony, reassure friends, and reaffirm relationships. This spirit of reciprocity is common across a wide range of peer-based learning environments we have observed.
  • From this perspective, commenting is not as much about being nice as it is about relying on reciprocity for self-gain
  • That makes them feel like they’re popular, that they’re getting comments all the time by different people, even people that they don’t know. So it makes them feel popular in a way (Rural and Urban Youth).
  • Gossip, drama, bullying, and posing are unavoidable side effects of teens’ everyday negotiations over friendship and peer status. What takes place in this realm resembles much of what took place even before the Internet, but certain features of social media alter the dynamics around these processes. The public, persistent, searchable, and spreadable nature of mediated information affects the way rumors flow and how dramas play out. The explicitness surrounding the display of relationships and online communication can heighten the social stakes and intensity of status negotiation. The scale of this varies, but those who experience mediated harassment are certainly scarred by the process. Further, the ethic of reciprocity embedded in networked publics supports the development of friendships and shared norms, but it also plays into pressures toward conformity and participation in local, school-based peer networks. While there is a dark side to what takes place, teens still relish the friendship opportunities that social media provide.
  • While social warfare and drama do exist, the value of social media rests in their ability to strengthen connections. Teens leverage social media for a variety of practices that are familiar elements of teen life: gossiping, flirting, joking around, and hanging out. Although the underlying practices are quite familiar, the networked, public nature of online communication does inflect these practices in new ways.
  • Adults’ efforts to regulate youth access to MySpace are the latest example of how adults are working to hold on to authority over teen socialization in the face of a gradual erosion of parental influence during the teen years.
  • learning how to manage the unique affordances of networked sociality can help teens navigate future collegiate and professional spheres where mediated interactions are assumed.
  • articulating those friendships online means that they become subject to public scrutiny in new ways;
  • This makes lessons about social life (both the failures and successes) more consequential and persistent
  • make these dynamics visible in a more persistent and accessible public arena.
  • co-constructing new sets of social norms together with their peers and the efforts of technology developers. The dynamics of social reciprocity and negotiations over popularity and status are all being supported by participation in publics of the networked variety as formative influences in teen life. While we see no indication that social media are changing the fundamental nature of these friendship practices, we do see differences in the intensity of engagement among peers, and conversely, in the relative alienation of parents and teachers from these social worlds.
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    MacArthur Foundation Study - Friendship chapter
Randolph Hollingsworth

Do Majors Matter? - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    Sociology and foreign languages at the top of undergraduate majors if you are interested in seeing gains in critical thinking skills in higher ed - could be some pedagogical models for folks in the natural sciences to emulate since they were at the bottom!
meghankelly492

Music That Represents Culture: Selecting Music with Integrity: EBSCOhost - 4 views

  • The term authenticity has been applied to music in various ways. It might be used to describe a piece of music (recorded, notated, performed); the process by which the music is taught and learned ( through recordings, live models, notation); or the manner in which it is performed (venue, dress, behaviors).
  • In other words, authenticity lies within the perceptions of the individual.
  • Anthony Palmer, who teaches music education at Boston University, has said that music with "absolute authenticity" is performed (a) by and for members of the culture; (b) in a typical setting, as determined by the members of the culture; (c) with instruments specified by the creator(s) of the music; and (d) in its original language.[ 8] Inarguably, and as Palmer recognizes, attaining this level of authenticity is impossible in a school music program (unless we consider "school music" residing within a unique culture of its own). In school, music is separated from its primary source many times over. Music is passed from its primary source (composer, grandmother) to an intermediary (arranger, performer, notation, recording) and channeled through a publisher or presenter to the teacher and finally to students. To confound matters, there are variants of melodies, lyrics, dances, games, and performance styles.
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  • Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl explains that "societies differ, however, in their attitude toward musical stability; to some it is important that a song remain stable and unchanged, while in others individual singers are encouraged to have their personal versions."
  • but he believes educators must determine at what point that musical experience is no longer acceptable as representative of that culture.
  • Having clear visions of educational goals and the broad curriculum is vital to making these determinations.
  • Bennett Reimer states, "Those inner workings are themselves the project of cultural systems, so they must be revealed in their contexts, historical, cultural, and political, in order to be grasped appropriately; that is, 'knowing about' becomes an essential ingredient of artistry and of listening."[ 15] For example, children might not fully understand the meaning of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" unless they understand what baseball is or realize that the song is traditionally sung at baseball games.
  • text in an unfamiliar language should include a translation so students understand the meaning of the words.
  • However, a culturally valid work is not necessarily bias free; and conversely, bias-free music is not necessarily culturally valid.
  • Selecting the best music to represent a culture in an unbiased manner is a process of discovery. You will first need to educate yourself before you can educate others.
Robert Appino

gladwell dot com - something borrowed - 86 views

  • Under copyright law, what matters is not that you copied someone else's work. What matters is what you copied, and how much you copied. Intellectual-property doctrine isn't a straightforward application of the ethical principle "Thou shalt not steal." At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal. The protections of copyright, for instance, are time-limited; once something passes into the public domain, anyone can copy it without restriction.
    • Robert Appino
       
      This is the key to copyright according to Gladwell.
  • initial monopoly on your creation because we want to provide economic incentives for people to invent things like cancer drugs. But everyone gets to steal your breast-cancer cure—after a decent interval—because it is also in society's interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention; only then can others learn from it, and build on it, and come up with better and cheaper alternatives. This balance between the protecting and the limiting of intellectual property
  • Constitution: "Congress shall have the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited"—note that specification, limited—"Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
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  • In ordinary language, to call a copyright a "property" right is a bit misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property. . . . I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don't have it. But what am I taking when I take the good idea you had to put a picnic table in the backyard—by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing that I am taking then? The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas, though that is an important difference. The point instead is that in the ordinary case—indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions—ideas released to the world are free. I don't take anything from you when I copy the way you dress—though I might seem weird if I do it every day. . . . Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and this is especially true when I copy the way someone dresses), "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
  • arguments that Lessig has with the hard-core proponents of intellectual property are almost all arguments about where and when the line should be drawn between the right to copy and the right to protection from copying, not whether a line should be drawn.
  • when it comes to literature, we have somehow decided that copying is never acceptable.
  • A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, and that distinction, I realized, was what was missing from the discussion of Bryony Lavery's borrowings.
  • problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity.
  • But the truth is that Lavery has every right to create an affair for Agnetha, because Agnetha is not Dorothy Lewis. She is a fictional character, drawn from Lewis's life but endowed with a completely imaginary set of circumstances and actions.
  • dred and seventy-five rather ordinary words could bring the walls tumbling down.
Roland Gesthuizen

On Facebook, Bullies 'Like' if You Hate - NYTimes.com - 27 views

  • It is too late to establish distance. To end cyberbullying, we must use the closeness we’ve allowed to breed to our advantage. We must teach them that if one is a cowardly, bullying, rage-baiter online – no matter how many laughs had or page views generated or ad space sold – then one is a bully off-screen, too.
  • Both the older set of digital natives and the generation above us assume that the Internet is a bubble – a space with limits
  • Rage-baiting is commonplace and infuriatingly successful, so the most prevalent language of the Internet is at its best cynicism and its worst outright meanness
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  • there is no wariness, no understanding, no concept of an Internet identity. There is no such thing for them, for example, as “Internet famous.” There is only fame, and the allure of instant gratification.
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    For the digitally native generation, self-worth is accrued in likes.
Bob Rowan

Weblogg-ed - 2 views

  • no better place for my children to watch that speech (or any other, for that matter) than in a place where ideas are encouraged, where critical thinking about those ideas is a natural part of the conversation, and where appropriate response and debate can flourish. Where the adults in the room lead my kids to dig deeper, to validate facts, and consider the many levels of context in which every speech and every debate takes place. Where the discussion around it is such that it lays to rest the concern that many seem to have about this particular speech in general, that in some way the President will be able to “indoctrinate” our kids into some socialist mindset. If schools are the fully functioning learning communities that we hope they are, they should be the place where our kids learn to make sense of ideas, not to fear them. That, however, is not the message we are sending.
    • C Clausen
       
      Isn't it ironic that the very things that we fought for and received via the US Constitution, Civil Rights, etc. are the very things that students are today losing? As an American History teacher I talk about the past, present, and future and show my students how things have/have not changed throughout time. I begin the year by reading the "True Story of the 3 Little Pigs," and talk about J.S. Mill and his challenge to others to question. Is society truly against the educating of its students to have an open-mind, ask questions, and look at many perspectives?
  • In the midst of all of the “uproar” over the President’s planned speech to school kids on Tuesday, I keep thinking about what all of this says about schools, about what they are for, and about the perception that a lot of people in this country have of them.
    • Michelle Ohanian
       
      My English Language Learners were very positive about the speech and couldn't understand all the uproar. Aren't we teaching in government funded schools? Well my young adults liked the message of responsibilty. I have also taught the true story of the 3 little pigs but my ELLs weren/t really familiar with the original version. It helped with point of view from the orignal version.
  • thin walls
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  • thin walls
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    Education Speech
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    Education Speech
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    Will Richardson is Mr. Utopian Education to a lot of people. Even if you don't agree with everything he says, most folks agree that he offers thought-provoking topics.
Clint Heitz

The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens - Scientific ... - 25 views

  • The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.
  • Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
  • Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
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  • At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.
  • Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.
  • An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.
  • In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
  • Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do.
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