Posts from — January 2007

Projects in Digital Archives – Jeremy Hunsinger’s Homepage:
Projects in Digital Archives

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here is my new projects in digital archives course, it is significantly re-envisioned to meet more of the students technical questions. It moved away from its basis in archival theory and more into practice based technical learning.

think:lab: “The Future of Learning” Manifesto:
“The Future of Learning” Manifesto

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Well the first issue of learning inquiry is entitled Futures of Learning… it should be out in april… so this seems interesting to me…

OpinionJournal – Extra:
The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized–it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law.

snip
Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

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Ok, while I buy that not everyone should pursue higher education… This bit above.. it is just fabrication, a fiction, and an ideological one. There is no proof that this has ever been the case and there have been recent books showing that elite university and colleges.

Intelligence is not a gift, it is a natural capacity. I’m really not even sure it exists beyond a statistical inference. I know that some people seem to lack certain mental capacities that others seem to have, and that some people can master some skills of thought easily, but not everyone can master all skills of thought simply. I start from the idea, in my thinking, that the brain is a remarkable organ that is capable of all kinds of adaptations and transferrences in order to do something, but sometimes… it just can’t do something, but learning that it can’t do something is fascinating. Almost everyone that enters the educational system can learn from experience and can learn to be creative and inventive in interesting ways. They key is to take that and find a way to get them to be able to do that in our world. There is no single solution…. like ‘liberal arts’ that will work for this.

How the Body Shapes the Way We Think:
“How the Body Shapes the Way We Think – A New View of Intelligence”
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ummm did someone miss the whole of phenomenology? it looks that way….

AlterNet: The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair:
Millions of Americans live trapped in soulless exurbs which lack any kind of community, leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable. Without alternatives for their social despair, they flock to demagogues promising revenge and a mythical utopia.

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the problem is…. that this is probably true…

Blinded by Science: The Real Reason We Can’t Find bin Laden – – science news articles online technology magazine articles Blinded by Science: The Real Reason We Can’t Find bin Laden:
uncap my pen this morning in defense of a fellow American, one who finds himself rather up against it at the moment. I speak of our president, George W. Bush. The midterm elections give evidence that he has paid a dear political price for what one might term the nation’s stiffening conviction that the man couldn’t president his way out of the kind of frail, blood-caked paper bag that they are fond of submitting to infrared analysis on A&E’s Cold Case Files. But among the various fiascos laid legitimately at the brocaded cowboy boots of our nuance-eschewing commander in chief, there is one for which he is unfairly blamed: the failure to find Osama bin Laden.

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where is waldo? in the mountains… we think… or perhaps not.

Learning Librarians Network:
Learning Librarians Network
An Educational Social Networking Service for
Library and Information School Students

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part of what i’m using to teach courses this semester. it is an elgg install.

Adultery could mean life | Battle Creek Enquirer – www.battlecreekenquirer.com – Battle Creek, Mich.:
In a ruling sure to make philandering spouses squirm, Michigan’s second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

“We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today,” Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, “but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion.”

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so… while adultery is wrong… is it worth life in prison?

OpinionJournal – Extra:
While concepts such as “emotional intelligence” and “multiple intelligences” have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

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I think we can see this pretty clearly in reading ability. However, I’m not sure that things are as determinist as this author seems to think.

Tinderbox ☙ Yojimbo: Wow!:
It’s nice to surprise a reporter.

Merlin Mann was interviewing Patrick Woolsey, COO of BareBones, on the floor at MacWorld Expo (video here) for MacBreak. They’re talking about Yojimbo, which Patrick calls “a digital junk drawer — a place to store all that stuff that, otherwise, is going to accumulate on your desktop.”

About half way through, Woolsey mentioned that Yojimbo now comes with each copy of Tinderbox.
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I like tinderbox… i’ve crashed yohimbo…. went back to devonthink pro….