Making and learning are moving towards a merger. I don’t know who the person behind the Getting Smart website is, but the post is a useful synthesis of a number of recent efforts, or at least impulses, in this direction. While I wholeheartedly agree that education should be more facilitative, rather than instructional, than it currently is, I do wonder if all these advocates have considered the costs involved: facilitation requires a much higher number of teachers to work with smaller groups of students, so that the needs of each student, and their diverse groups, can be addressed individually and collectively. Personally, I’m all for it, and it’s the kind of teaching I enjoy the most, but I do wonder about the viability given the current economic landscape to cut education budgets, to impose more and more standardization, and, thus, to remove the teacher from any kind of interactive and/or proactive role in education.
Glassboard 2.0 is out. I didn’t know about Glassboard before this announcement. I have been using, and liking, Minigroup, quite a bit. On the surface, Glassboard feels more graphic-friendly than Minigroup, but I won’t say anything more until I have test driven it for a while.
Glassboard is produced by Sepia Labs, a collaborative, or cooperative, between Brett Terpsta and a number of other folks. Terpstra was the original developer for MarsEdit, an application on which I rely — I am writing this post in ME, for example. ME is now developed by Daniel Jalkut over at Red Sweater Software. I have to say I like them both — Daniel, along with Dan Schrimpf the developer of MacJournal, has the most amazing knack for patience and generosity with his users, and that’s one (very good) reason why I buy every upgrade they produce — and I will look seriously at every new application they develop. I want to put money in their pockets and keep them around.
My advice to friends, family, and students is to do the same. I don’t know why so many people want so much for free. I certainly can’t offer my own services for free — for the record, the bank isn’t interested in giving us our home for free, and so far both grocery stores and gas stations have not offered us their goods for free — and so I don’t see why I would expect others who are offering me real goods and services of real value to me to offer them to me for free. Far from it.
By the way, as long as I am mentioning products I use, as I work on my revision of an essay for the Journal of Folklore Research and continue work on my book, I live inside Scrivener. It’s the application for writers.
What Scientists Read
There’s been an interesting series of essays, and now projects, that focus on what scientists read and how it affects their work. While I know it has been an ongoing conversation in various venues for years, to my knowledge, the dialogue took on a new tone, and a new sense of urgency, with Neal Stephenson’s essay for the World Policy Institute in 2011, “Innovation Starvation”. The story was also published in Wired.
And now there appears to be an effort underway by New Scientist to study the phenomena of what scientists read.
The Machines That Made the Jet Age.. I had decided that after the boat book I was going to get out of the making scene — all the attention in the academy stays focused on language — but I keep coming across articles like this and, honestly, I really enjoy reading them.
We will miss the annular solar eclipse coming up on May 20 — we are too far east and the sun will already have set — but NASA’s map tells you if you are in the right place at the right time.
I’m trying out Hopper. Interesting idea, but I am not yet sure if it solves any problem I regularly face. (It’s the regular problem that’s critical to me: occasional problems I am happy to use workarounds.)
Matthew Epler’s Grand Old Party data visualization project has to be seen to be fully appreciated. I like his series of abstractions: poll numbers that form a graph become outlines for a three-dimensional model that is then fabricated into, er, a useful object. (Hmm.)
Macbeth V.5
The complete quotation:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The opportunities afforded by the American Research Institute in Turkey look very interesting. Perhaps my next project will look there, to the relationship between agriculture and culture in a non-U.S. setting.
Cam Danielson is alive and well and still doing cool stuff. The list of things he taught me is incredibly long.
Great. Now ArsTechnica looks l…
Great. Now ArsTechnica looks like The Verge. If I wanted encapsulated bits of news on a frothy front page, I’d read The Verge.
I know “capuchon” will become …
I know “capuchon” will become “capuchin” but changing Heidegger’s “enflaming” to “enflaming”? Glad I caught that.
Just when you think you’ve lea…
Just when you think you’ve learned to anticipate autocorrect, it gets you.