Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: culture

  • Literacy

    Before we react to the lower amount of reading, what exactly is the problem we seek to solve? Is the problem declining student reading scores? We need to improve reading comprehension. Students may need to learn how to read more effectively so increasing the quantity may not help that much. Is the problem half of…

  • Are Books the Only Way to Learn?

    Is the Internet really a bad invention? According to Doris Lessing, yes. We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing,…

  • Blogs in Plain English

    YouTube Video tag: culture, blogs, youtube

  • Deeds of Gaijin Occupiers

    My grandmother has recently started telling everyone she owns a house in Japan (gaijin cannot own land?). In the 1950s, my grandfather was stationed in Japan. He went over by himself, acquired a house, and sent for his wife and six kids to come. The most common story my grandmother tells is this trip over…

  • Intellectuals and Politics

    The Age of Enlightenment ended over a century ago. It was known for producing a number of intellectuals. Are intellectuals a dying breed? According to Wikipedia, “An intellectual is one who tries to use his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate, or ask and answer questions about a wide variety of different ideas.”…

  • links for 2007-10-29

    A Critic at Large: The Well-tempered Web: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker (tags: music culture) Subtraction: If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software (tags: software technology programming)

  • links for 2007-10-23

    Blackboard Developers Network – Blackboard WikiKB (tags: Blackboard_Vista) Why Tech Blogging is Broken (Geek News Central) (tags: blogs technology search seo) The once and future university « Jon Udell (tags: education learning university) Colleges and Universities – Education and Schools – Students – New York Times (tags: education learning university) Colleges and Universities – Education…

  • False Panacea

    I ran across Jon Udell’s post on The once and future university which pointed to Mike Caulfield’s post with the video (Transcript). Technology, I think, is a false Panacea. The role of information technology is to better aggregate information for whatever it is we do. Such aggregation draws disparate sources together, but the sources fail…

  • Melungeon

    Mom dropped me a note last night. She ran across the word melungeon while doing some genealogy research. It describes someone who is of European, African, and Native American descent. It was popular in the Appalachian Mountains and similar in use to Mulatto in being a negative term. I haven’t talked about this much on…