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Adam Babcock

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 5 views

www.nytimes.com/...29language-t.html

writing english education reading language culture globe gender

shared by Adam Babcock on 29 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects
  • rash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims
  • new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about
  • You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way
  • but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions.
  • When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant.
  • gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory
  • When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it.
  • Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.
Mary Worrell

The Future Of Reading | Wired Science | Wired.com - 7 views

www.wired.com/...the-future-of-reading-2

reading 21stcenturyskills e_books technology

shared by Mary Worrell on 09 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • I sometimes wonder why I’m only able to edit my own writing after it has been printed out, in 3-D form. My prose will always look so flawless on the screen, but then I read the same words on the physical page and I suddenly see all my clichés and banalities and excesses
    • Mary Worrell
      Mary Worrell on 09 Sep 10
       
      I have the same issue. As a business reporter out of college, my first copy editor pushed me to start printing out my drafts for my first round of edits. My editing was much more in-depth and thoughtful, which made her job a lot easier.
  • Mary Worrell on 09 Sep 10
     
    Just another person's opinion on the future of reading and the future of books, but I found it interesting!
Mark Smith

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 14 views

www.nytimes.com/...21mash.html

reading internet

shared by Mark Smith on 09 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
  • People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work.
  • Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
Christy White

Yarp : Simple Invitations and Surveys - 2 views

yarp.com

surveys survey tools web2.0 yarp assessment forms

shared by Christy White on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Christy White on 05 Oct 09
     
    Great for quick surveys. Can do invitations as well, but would be interesting to survey students.
Kristin Bergsagel

How To Do Things With Words : Learning Diversity - 4 views

www.learningdiversity.org/...how-to-do-things-with-words

shared by Kristin Bergsagel on 14 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • the RRSG theory of reading comprehension is predominantly cognitive rather than cultural. It depicts the text as an encoded representation of a specific situation.
  • Making and having meaning, then, transcend cognition and involve a commitment to values and the pursuit of ideals.
  • These moral qualities are essential to human life, yet they seem to be completely redundant in the case of the aforementioned reader of “the cat is on the mat.”
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Could it be that teachers who are allegedly so obstinately unfaithful to the received theory of reading comprehension do in fact apply it in their classrooms, but fail to achieve adequate outcomes because the theory fails to explain reading as a meaningful human activity?
  • the most authoritative theory of reading comprehension misleads her into performing a futile cognitive exercise.
  • namely, instruct students to read the text creatively by transforming it into a model for exploring ideas such as self-deception, hubris, or the unintended negative consequences of well-intended parenting.
  • it doesn’t address texts adequately as media of communication between purposeful, goal-oriented actors.
  • The meaning of a message, then, is its use by the interacting parties and is therefore always much more than a mental representation. When we treat words or statements as mere representations, we fail to communicate.
  • A theory that fails to enhance communication undermines education, because education is a special form of communication dedicated to the transmission of learning.
  • The words remain his rather than theirs, conveying facts about his dream rather than becoming resources useful to them. These readers have missed yet another opportunity to make sense of the history of their nation and of their own lives in relation to it.
  • hopeful vision coupled to a darker prophecy and a threatening message.
  • This reading, then, intertwines American political history with the history of literature in a way that renders the reader herself an active participant in their making.
  • creativity, diversity, and agency
  • Readers, we propose, ought to associate the meaning of the text with its use. The texts students typically read in school, more specifically, ought to be used for the purpose of exploring ideas. Reading for this purpose is necessarily a creative endeavor because it entails transforming the text into a model of inquiry into certain aspects of the reader’s life experiences.
  • In other words, because they use the text in diverse ways, its meaning varies accordingly.
  • What is at stake is nothing less than how students relate themselves to cultural achievements that have shaped the world in which they live and the society in which they gradually mature.
  • Conversely, education researchers in universities and other research institutes are often insufficiently familiar with how children learn at school, and therefore simply do not have an adequate understanding of the problems their research should solve
Leslie Healey

Video Games Are Ruled Protected Speech, Now What? - 2 views

kotaku.com/...uled-protected-speech-now-what

gaming teaching 21stcenturylearning

shared by Leslie Healey on 27 Jun 11 - No Cached
    • Leslie Healey
      Leslie Healey on 27 Jun 11
       
      this is true! why gaming is legitimately a path fro educators to formulate learning strategies
    • Leslie Healey
      Leslie Healey on 27 Jun 11
       
      also--they ask why there are not more erudite games, just as there is "classic" literature--I think games are still a new art form. And aren't there are many fluff books as there are fluff or violent games
  • More important than that historic ruling is the reminder by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice that video games, like books, plays and movies, communicate ideas.
  • Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat," Scalia wrote. "But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional." It raises the question, what video games live up to that legacy of great literary works? And why aren't there more of them?
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  • Now that this distraction is out of the way, lets see the creation of more games like Bioshock, like Shadow of the Colossus, like Flower, games that make you think, that explore new ideas, that shake up preconceived notions.
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