1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.
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5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views
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2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.
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3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.
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4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people.
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5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run.
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I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies.
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Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time.
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Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?
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Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.
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One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.
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Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" - 52 views
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"bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions
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According to Putnam, time spent with relatively passive and disengaging media has come at the expense of time spent on vital community-building activities.
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A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent
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It would be more plausible and empirically rigorous, then, to consider how specific forms of Internet activity impact civic and social engagement as a result of their particular underlying social architectures
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combining conclusions from two different lines of MMO research conducted from two different perspectives—one from a media effects approach, the other from a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning.
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By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old.
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They are known for their peculiar combination of designed "escapist fantasy" and emergent "social realism"
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from two research projects: one an examination of the media effects of MMOs, the other an ethnographic study of cognition and culture in such contexts.
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the assumption that the most fruitful advances are sometimes made when congruent findings are discovered through disparate means
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as a way to tease out what happens in the virtual setting of the game and how the people involved consider their own activities, the activities of others, and the contexts in which those activities takes place
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a reasonable level of generalizability (random assignment to condition in the first study) and contextualization (ethnographic description of existing in-game social networks and practices in the second)
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brick-and-mortar "third places" in America where individuals can gather to socialize informally beyond the workplace and home
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virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts.
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the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise.
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Unless one transforms the virtual world of the game into a workplace (e.g., by taking on gainful employment as a virtual currency "farmer" for example, Dibbell, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006a) or enters into such agreement, no one person is obligated to log in
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Yee's (2006) interviews also reveal that individuals who game with romantic partners or family find that such joint engagement in the "other world" of MMOs allows them to redefine the nature and boundaries of their offline relationships, often in more equitable terms than what may be possible in day-to-day offline life
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the relationships that play-partners have with one another offline are often "leveled" within the online world
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appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness
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"In all such systems, linguistic interactions have been primary: users exchange messages that cement the social bonds between them, messages that reflect shared history and understandings (or misunderstandings) about the always evolving local norms for these interactions" (p. 22).
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such that "one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there"
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accessible directly from one's home, making them even more accommodating to individual schedules and preferences
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"What attracts a regular visitor to a third place is supplied not by management but by the fellow customer,"
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"It is the regulars who give the place its character and who assure that on any given visit some of the gang will be there"
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As one informant satirically commented in an interview, "You go for the experience [points], you stay for the enlightening conversation.
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Oldenburg argues that third places are characteristically homely, their d�cor defying tidiness and pretension whenever possible. MMOs do not fit this criterion in any literal sense
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In neither of our investigations did the degree of formality exhibited by players within the game bear any relation to the degree of visual ornamentation of the players' immediate vicinity.
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Thus, while the visual form of MMO environments does not fit Oldenburg's (1999) criterion of "low profile," the social function of those environments does.
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Oldenburg (1999) argues that seriousness is anathema to a vibrant third place; instead, frivolity, verbal word play, and wit are essential.
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The playful nature of MMOs is perhaps most apparent in what happens when individuals do bring gravity to the game.
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Participation becomes a regular part of daily life for players and, among regular gamemates such as guild members, exceptional absences (i.e., prolonged or unforeseen ones) are queried within the game or outside i
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create an atmosphere of mutual caring that, while avoiding entangling obligations per se, creates a sense of rootedness to the extent that regularities exist, irregularities are duly noted, and, when concerning the welfare of any one regular, checked into
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Anderson (1991), who suggests that geographic proximity itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence and preservation of "community."
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Social capital (Coleman, 1988) works analogously to financial capital; it can be acquired and spent, but for social and personal gains rather than financial
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This form of social capital is marked by tentative relationships, yet what they lack in depth, they make up for in breadth.
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On the one hand, bridging social capital provides little in the way of emotional support; on the other hand, such relationships can broaden social horizons or worldviews, providing access to information and new resources.
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shows that bridging and bonding social capital are tied to different social contexts, given the network of relationships they enable.
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Virtual worlds appear to function best as bridging mechanisms rather than as bonding ones, although they do not entirely preclude social ties of the latter type.
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One could argue that, if the benchmark for bonding social capital is the ability to acquire emotional, practical, or substantive support, then MMOs are not well set up for the task:
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While deep affective relationships among players are possible, they are less likely to generate the same range of bonding benefits as real-world relationships because of players' geographic dispersion and the nature of third places themselves.
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Despite differences in theoretical grounding and methodologies, our conclusions were remarkably similar across complementary macro- and micro-levels.
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It is worth noting, however, that as gamers become more involved in long-term social networks such as guilds and their activities become more "hardcore" (e.g., marked by participation in large-scale collaborative problem-solving endeavors such as "raids" into difficult territories or castle sieges), the function of MMOs as "third places" begins to wane.
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It may be, then, that the structure and function of MMOs as third places is one part of the "life cycle" for some gamers in a given title.
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In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a "community" nonetheless.
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However, our research findings indicate that this conclusion is uninformed. To argue that MMO game play is isolated and passive media consumption in place of informal social engagement is to ignore the nature of what participants actually do behind the computer screen
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Perhaps it is not that contemporary media use has led to a decline in civic and social engagement, but rather that a decline in civic and social engagement has led to retribalization through contemporary media (McLuhan, 1964).
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Such a view, however, ignores important nuances of what "community" means by pronouncing a given social group/place as either wholly "good" or "bad" without first specifying which functions the online community ought to fulfill.
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Moreover, despite the semantics of the term, "weak" ties have been shown to be vital in communities, relationships, and opportunities.
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In light of Putnam's evidence of the decline of crucial civic and social institutions, it may well be that the classification "lacking bridging social capital" best characterizes the everyday American citizen. T
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Without bridging relationships, individuals remain sheltered from alternative viewpoints and cultures and largely ignorant of opportunities and information beyond their own closely bound social network.
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it seems ironic that, now of all times, we would ignore one possible solution to our increasingly vexed relationship with diversity.
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Colleges Using Athletics to Boost Profile - Athletic Business - 1 views
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For many students, the college experience includes game days watching athletes wearing the school colors take the field or court. But in today's environment of rising costs, soaring student debt and declining enrollment, college and university leaders are sometimes finding they have to explain the need for what has become an "arms race" among athletic departments. The argument might be made that much of the money that is required to keep college athletic teams going comes from ticket sales and outside sources such as alumni contributions. The other side of that coin is that some of the cost is borne by students, even those with no interest in sports. In the case of private institutions, it is up to school officials to decide whether the expense is worthwhile. The public has an obvious and greater role in the determination of the role and funding of sports in state institutions.
Education Technology News: Lecture-style Teaching in Decline, Technology on Rise Says C... - 1 views
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For Those Who Want to Lead, Read - John Coleman - Harvard Business Review - 58 views
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"Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of adult Americans," and for the first time in American history, "less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature." Literacy has been improving in countries like India and China, but that literacy may not translate into more or deeper reading."
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The (Coming) Social Media Revolution in the Academy - Daniels and Feagin - Fast Capital... - 6 views
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Scholars now completing PhD’s have likely never known a world without the Internet and social media.
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Ultimately, this technological transformation is going to have major implications on expert knowledge. The Internet increases voices and knowledge available to all. Elitism in the expert knowledge world is declining; the Internet democratizes knowledge building and use. Much more knowledge has become available, and the distinction between experts and ordinary folks, what Gramsci might have called “organic intellectuals,” is declining.
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Academic bloggers frequently use blogs to keep up with the relevant literature in their field, thereby providing a kind of public note-taking and research-sharing exercise. Academic bloggers also use blogging as a rough draft for ideas they later develop fully for peer-reviewed papers or books.
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bloggers have embraced Internet technologies in ways that broaden the scope of their research work beyond college walls and in ways reaching beyond old disciplinary silos. This is partly about reaching audiences in disparate geographic locations
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Academics, like others who use Twitter, have found short updates a useful way to find and maintain connections to others who share their research and other interests
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For academics that may toil in relative isolation from others who share their immediate interests, the social connection of blogging and microblogging can also provide an opportunity to curate the ideal academic department. While in another era, scholars may have identified strongly with their PhD-granting university, the college or university, or the academic department in which they are currently employed, the rise of social media allows for a new arrangement of colleagues.
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Our colleagues in the humanities have embraced digital technologies much more readily than those of us in sociology or the social sciences more generally. A casual survey of the blogosphere reveals that those in the humanities (and law schools) are much more likely to maintain academic blogs than social scientists. In terms of scholarship, humanities scholars have been, for more than ten years, innovating ways to combine traditional scholarship with digital technologies.
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scholars in English have established a searchable online database of the papers of Emily Dickinson and historians have developed a site that offers a 3D digital model showing the urban development of ancient Rome in A.D. 320.
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New Study Shows Irrelevance of Gains on State Tests. UPDATE! « Diane Ravitch'... - 40 views
dianeravitch.net/...evance-of-gains-on-state-tests
testing performance leaguetable school assessment blog
shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 18 Jul 12
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When students are prepped and prepped and prepped to pass the state tests, they aren’t necessarily better educated, just prepared to take a specific test. Too much prepping distorts the value of the test.
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"An important new study by Professors Adam Maltese of Indiana University and Craig Hochbein of the University of Louisville sheds new light on the validity of state scores. This study found that rising scores on the state tests did not correlate with improved performance on the ACT. In fact, students at "declining" schools did just as well and sometimes better than students where the scores were going up."
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All Work and No Play: Why Your Kids Are More Anxious, Depressed - Esther Entin - The At... - 60 views
Report: Student Social Network Use Declines as Social Apps Move to Take Their Place -- ... - 43 views
thejournal.com/...-move-to-take-their-place.aspx
report student social social network network apps place journal
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U.S. high school dropout rate reaches record low, driven by improvements among Hispanic... - 12 views
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Just 7% of the nation’s 18-to-24 year olds had dropped out of high school, continuing a steady decline in the nation’s dropout rate since 2000, when 12% of youth were dropouts.
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The decline in the size of the Hispanic dropout population has been particularly noteworthy because it’s happened at the same time that the Hispanic youth population is growing.
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The dropout rate for black youth also was at a record low in 2013 (8%) and has fallen by nearly half since 2000 (15%).
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Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis? / UCLA N... - 0 views
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Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.
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I wonder when researchers will realize that lecture is not the best way to teach and interact with students? Of course students using the net during a lecture did not hear and process all that was being said, but.... did any bother to measure what they were learning and how the customization of the learning may have addressed the differentiation needs of the learners?
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Or, I wonder how many of us would EXPECT our students to listen to use lecture while we "encouraged" them to use the internet at the same time? Would you listen? Shifted teachers who know how to use tech effectively also know when to NOT use tech.
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"Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.
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More Remote Learners in Your Future | From the Bell Tower - 7/16/2009 - Library Journal - 0 views
www.libraryjournal.com/...CA6671395.html
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What does this have to do with higher education? High gas prices got adult learners questioning the value of driving an hour each way to a college campus. Suddenly, online learning became vastly more attractive to a whole segment of higher education's market. Articles about fuel prices driving students to online courses became as prevalent as those about the impact of the recession on higher education are right now. While the price of fuel has retreated to a more manageable range, the number of Americans flocking to online higher education has shown no such decline.
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CUNY Adjusts Amid Tide of Remedial Students - NYTimes.com - 24 views
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“Throughout high school, I was a good math student, and to find out that it was my lowest grade of all three was really surprising,”
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Lateline - 29/10/2012: PMs plan for every child to learn an Asian language - 14 views
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Gillard Government's Asian Century white paper sets an aspiration for Australia to rank as the world's 10th biggest economy by 2025, capitalising on the rapid economic growth in the region.
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If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.
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The Prime Minister says she'll force the curriculum changes by tying them to Commonwealth funding to state and private schools.
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Broadly, teachers and education experts have welcomed the plan, but question where the money is going to come from.
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Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.
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say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.
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hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.
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will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.
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we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.
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Draft In - 17 views
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"This is a simple, elegant writing site for a collaborative writing. Users don't writing in real-time like so other sites, but exchange versions which clearly show the changes made. The other users can accept or decline the changes. It is useful for groups to draft their writing and for teachers correcting pupils work. Each version is archived in case the team changes their mind about the accepted changes."
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Early cooking skills strongly predict future nutritional well-being - 18 views
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"Evidence suggests that developing cooking and food preparation skills is important for health and nutrition, yet the practice of home cooking is declining and now rarely taught in school. A new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that developing cooking skills as a young adult may have long-term benefits for health and nutrition."
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The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views
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there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
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it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
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Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
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This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
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When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
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The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
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When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
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those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
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Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
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What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
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kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
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highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
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When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
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solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
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When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
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The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
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those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
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The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
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“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
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In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
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there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
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Change4Life teaching resources help pupils cut back on sugar - 7 views
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"New Change4Life teaching resources will support teachers to use English and Maths lessons to help children cut back on sugar. This comes as Public Health England (PHE) reveals the average 10 year old has already consumed at least 18 years' worth of sugar.[1] While children's sugar intakes have declined slightly in recent years, they are still consuming around eight extra sugar cubes each day[2], equivalent to around 2,800 excess sugar cubes per year."