Skip to main content

Home/ English Companion Ning Group/ Group items tagged humanities

Rss Feed Group items tagged

susan  carter morgan

Using Social Media to Define the New Humanities Classroom - 0 views

  •  
    Using social media to define the new humanities
Leslie Healey

Digital Humanities Boots Up on Some Campuses - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  •  
    our students should be ready to participate in the digital humanities when we're finished with them
Leslie Healey

The Neuroscience of Your Brain On Fiction - NYTimes.com - 13 views

  • Stories,
  • stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.
  • nterprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.
  • The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life.
  • substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals
  • “theory of mind
  • other people’s intenti
  • comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.
  •  
    analysis of impact of reading, novel especially. validates focus on class SSR, even in 11-12th grade (my groups)
ten grrl

The Morgan Library & Museum - Online Exhibitions - John Milton's Paradise Lost - 0 views

  •  
    The Morgan Library & Museum is pleased to present the only surviving manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book 1. This epic poem is considered Milton's greatest artistic achievement and one of the finest works of the human imagination. Acquired by Pierpont Morgan in 1904, it is the most important British literary manuscript in the collection. The 33-page manuscript has been temporarily disbound, providing an opportunity to see more of its pages than ever before. Also in this presentation are first editions of Paradise Lost printed in England and the United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a rarely seen miniature portrait of the poet.
anonymous

Resource: John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion - 0 views

  •  
    John Seely Brown is a remarkable thinker. His book The Social Life of Information and his article "Growing Up DIgital" are the result of deep and patient thought about society, education, human nature. This is his homepage that brings together in one place his work, his ideas. Highly recommended reading: 'Growing Up Digital."
Kristin Bergsagel

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

  • 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
Mark Smith

How facts backfire - The Boston Globe - 7 views

  • Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
anonymous

David Friedrich's painting, "The Wanderer" - 1 views

  •  
    A classic painting from English Romantic artist that has been used for many book covers. Most recently encountered on cover and as guiding metaphor in Gaddis's "The Landscape of History" (very interesting book). Plan to use this first day of class to generate discussion in AP Lit about painting, literature, art, and their lives.
Dana Huff

Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric - 0 views

  •  
    This online rhetoric, provided by Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University, is a guide to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric. This site is intended to help beginners, as well as experts, make sense of rhetoric, both on the small scale (definitions and examples of specific terms) and on the large scale (the purposes of rhetoric, the patterns into which it has fallen historically as it has been taught and practiced for 2000+ years).
Leslie Healey

Gates and Hewlett Foundations Focus on Online Learning - NYTimes.com - 3 views

  • To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring.
  • The potential benefits of technology are greater as students become older, more independent learners. Making that point, Mr. Gates said in an interview that for children from kindergarten to about fifth grade “the idea that you stick them in front of a computer is ludicrous.”
  •  
    Bill Gates says some surprising things about need for tech in schools!
Mary Worrell

digitalresearchtools / FrontPage - 3 views

  •  
    This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.
  •  
    Great wiki of research tools!
Adam Babcock

One U.S. Corporation's Role in Egypt's Brutal Crackdown | Save the Internet - 7 views

  • Egypt, where the Mubarak regime today reportedly shut down Internet and cell phone communications -- a troubling predictor of the fierce crackdown that has followed.
  • The tools that connect, organize and empower protesters can also be used to hunt them down.
  • Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • arus global customers include the national telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two countries that regularly register alongside Egypt near the bottom of Human Rights Watch's world report.
Mark Smith

George Orwell - James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution - Essay - 0 views

  • Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i.e. the USSR, has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of "managerialism", which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country.
    • Mark Smith
       
      The misssing link between socialism (as it deforms and plays itself out) and managerialism, or "bureaucracy", as I might say, socialism's bastard son.
  • Burnham does not deny that "good" motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else.
  • Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely.
Mark Smith

SpeEdChange: The Big Lies (Part Two) - 9 views

  • Why is a second grader "comparing and contrasting"? Because the Common Core is designed to preserve education as a self-contained hazing ritual for wealth and power maintenance. From the start we are preparing students to write the worthless five paragraph essay, so that those who comply best succeed best.
  • It is, of course, within those "extras" that the human spirit lies. Why learn to read if you cannot read about the things which matter most to you? Why learn to write if you can not write a song? Why learn to count if you do not appreciate the value of what you are counting?
  • The reason we must abandon "core subjects" and embrace Passion-Based Learning is that today we give students absolutely no reason to learn anything. We have turned school into a series of chores with no purpose. Eight-year-olds hate books and reading because they've spent three years drilling in decoding - literacy is pointless effort, not a path to passions. Sixteen-year-olds hate mathematics because they've spent eleven years drilling with numbers, x-s and y-s - maths are totally irrelevant, not a link to a magical world of real and virtual construction.
  •  
    Tell it, brother!
Mark Smith

Truthdig - Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System - 7 views

  • “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”
    • Mark Smith
       
      This is as profoundly true now as it ever was.
1 - 15 of 15
Showing 20 items per page