327 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2022
    1. The magazine is quite explicit about this. “The man from the future where technology makes all things possible is a throwback to our glorious industrial past,” it states, “before America stagnated and stopped producing anything but rules, restrictions, limits, obstacles and Facebook.” In short, we need Elon Musk to rescue us, regardless of the cost. But is that the truth?
    1. Stories critical of Trump were allowed and even encouraged on the site; stories critical of Musk were not as welcome, despite the fact that both men are billionaire snake-oil salesmen who rely on a cult of personality propped up by disadvantaged people who want to believe someone rich and smart is looking out for them.

      Thiel, Trump, Musk ... people who follow them get the leaders they deserve.

    2. Thiel was an easy villain to pick out, a gateway drug to the realization that maybe all of the big brain boys in Silicon Valley weren’t necessarily looking out for the interests of the millions of young sci-fi nerds and aspiring engineers who idolized them, let alone the underpaid bloggers who fueled their ventures with free advertising.

      Realization through Thiel is better than none. At least Thiel's true colors are starting to be clear to many.

    1. i read ... somewhere? a tweet? the theory that all those social-media-for-bigots sites haven't been successful because the targets for their users' bigotry aren't there, meaning the sites are no fun beyond having slur-offs or whatever. so, you know, good luck to those who stay — can't imagine little lord emerald mine will give one fuck about whatever got those users kicked off in the first place, let alone be bothered to act when they all come swarming back and repeat their behavior only 10x worse

      I hadn't thought about the effects of this before...but it makes sense. As I responded:

      This is a really interesting thought that jibes with my experience with TruthSocial. I joined to see what it was like (and, honestly, to do some trolling) but it's a true echo chamber and wasteland with nothing else coming in. I never thought about how a lack of their targets/enemies could be contributing to that, but it makes a lot of sense!

    1. The devastating argument it makes is not that the body keeps the score, it’s that the mind hides the score from us. The mind — it hides and warps these traumatic events and our narratives about them in an effort to protect us.

      An impressive, awesome formulation...scorekeeper and score hider.

    1. Delta Airlines has updated its announcement about the end of the federal mask mandate after igniting a firestorm of criticism from public health experts who said it used inaccurate and misleading language to describe COVID-19. "We are relieved to see the U.S. mask mandate lift to facilitate global travel as COVID-19 has transitioned to an ordinary seasonal virus," the airline said in the original version of its Monday statement.
    1. “Lying to the NYT is not necessarily a transgression,” one conservative House Republican told The Dispatch Friday morning.

      Of course.

    2. GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy lied Thursday. Then hours later, he was publicly caught in that lie.

      Surprising no one.

    1. The adjunct system is immoral by any philosophical measure. The system is not equitable—no one would choose the adjunct life from behind a veil of ignorance. Institutions treat adjunct faculty as means rather than ends, so adjunct faculty treat students as means rather than ends. No one is accorded their due dignity.

      And the answer is not creating more tenure track positions, it is compensating and supporting teachers and getting rid of tenure altogether.

    2. Most uncomfortably, however, the adjunct system is cruel in the useless, unnecessary, and preoccupying disorder it brings to a person’s mind, family, and community. If you are an administrator, legislator, tenure-track faculty member, or paying education consumer, and you are not actively fighting against the adjunct labor system in higher ed, you are maintaining it. You are a callous or willfully ignorant person taking part in a harmful deception.

      Pulling no punches.

    1. I worry more about the success of rubrics than their failure.  Just as it’s possible to raise standardized test scores as long as you’re willing to gut the curriculum and turn the school into a test-preparation factory, so it’s possible to get a bunch of people to agree on what rating to give an assignment as long as they’re willing to accept and apply someone else’s narrow criteria for what merits that rating.

      Yes... this is the problem. It's easier to make rubrics "work" (by twisting the learning experience to fit) than to develop and engage in authentic assessment.

    2. I’m amazed by the number of educators whose opposition to standardized tests and standardized curricula mysteriously fails to extend to standardized in-class assessments

      How large is that number? How many just go along because their programs or institutions require them?

    3. Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective.

      All the kids are ... just another brick in the grading wall.

  2. Mar 2022
    1. we can make space for, however, are a variety of avenues through which students can work to apply, reflect upon, and remember what they learn from their readings.

      100% agreed. But there is a balance here, as well, between student choice and students really understanding what those choices are. Annotation has to involve other skills and processes to be more than just information, and students often don't know what the options are or haven't experienced them enough to make an informed decision. In that sense, "forcing" students to try particular applications and techniques, might be part of the plan to help them make decisions that more closely match their needs.

    1. Creationists lie. Homeopaths lie. Anti-vaxxers lie. This is part of the Great Circle of Life. It is not necessary to call out every lie by a creationist, because the sort of person who is still listening to creationists is not the sort of person who is likely to be moved by call-outs. There is a role for organized action against creationists, like preventing them from getting their opinions taught in schools, but the marginal blog post “debunking” a creationist on something is a waste of time. Everybody who wants to discuss things rationally has already formed a walled garden and locked the creationists outside of it.

      Organizing rather than calling out (or perhaps in addition to if calling out loud is a the product of one who thinks by writing "out loud"

    2. In each of the following conflicts in Anglo-American history, you see a victory of left over right: the English Civil War, the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Clearly, if you want to be on the winning team, you want to start on the left side of the field. Where is the John Birch Society, now? What about the NAACP? Cthulhu swims left, and left, and left. There are a few brief periods of true reaction in American history – the post-Reconstruction era or Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others. But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward shift. McCarthyism is especially noticeable as such. And you’ll note that McCarthy didn’t exactly win.

      I hadn't thought about it this way before.

    3. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have.

      I need a few "graceful failure modes"

    1. Nine months later, in Abrams v. U.S., Holmes changed his mind about the First Amendment. As described in Thomas Healy’s 2013 book, “The Great Dissent,” Holmes reconsidered his position after reading articles and books sent to him by Zechariah Chafee, Harold Laski and other prominent free-speech advocates. Holmes’s dissent in Abrams gave birth to modern First Amendment jurisprudence, with its veneration for the marketplace of ideas. He began by observing that it makes perfect sense to persecute people for their opinions: “If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition.” The problem, Holmes realized, is that we are almost always absolutely certain of our premises, but sometimes we are wrong.

      It's OK to change your mind (not that you would think so given the tenor of most debates)

    1. It is easy for an intelligent adult to start with the particulars of any speech controversy, and reverse-engineer some set of principles that — just coincidentally! — gives their own side the right to say whatever it wants, while granting opponents only the right to remain silent. Since the other side is equally adept, we end up mired in a circular argument that ends up in the same place it started, except with everyone even angrier.Story continues below advertisementJennifer RubincounterpointThe GOP’s gibberish about ‘cancel culture’ never looked so dumbAnd so I’ve come to think we should talk less about free speech as a right, and more about free speech as a truce. As with any truce, it will not be honored in the breach; if you try to silence your opponents, expect them to silence you just as energetically. No matter how exquisitely logical your argument, you will never induce them to unilaterally disarm.

      free speech as truce rather than right...

    1. From my perspective, "pedagogy" is a name we use for the invitations teachers extend to students. (Different pedagogies are just different patterns of invitation.) From this perspective, the type of pedagogy you're using is independent of how students respond to your invitations.

      This strikes me as limited. I see pedagogy as necessarily and essentially dialogic, encompassing not just the invitation, but the process and the outcomes (at every level). Asking students to do things that require the 5Rs is an open activity (or invitation), but just as much a part of pedagogy is the process and the results.

    1. I agree that the things on your list of As are critically important for the design of effective learning activities. However, I don’t think they’re unique to open.

      Of course David is ahead of me!

    2. Do students have any choice in the topic?

      The connections to open pedagogy specifically feel a bit clearer to me here because there are many ways to be open that can emerge from open pedagogical approaches and students should have agency there, and understand the range and valence of each choice.

    3. AlignedAuthenticAchievableAccessibleAgency

      Of course I love shorthands such as these, but (reading this for the first time) this seems like a good distillation...to a point. I wonder about dynamism...or maybe Active in this framing?

    4. Are the materials needed for this activity accessible to all students regardless of economic status, ability, gender, or cultural background?

      Again, completely agree...but what is special/particular about this in terms of open pedagogy specifically?

    5. Will the activity allow students to experience using what they’re learning in a way they would do beyond the class?

      This seems to me to be one part of authenticity, but not the heart of it. This is more an effect of authenticity?

    6. If not, that’s not good pedagogy so shouldn’t count as open pedagogy

      Which makes me wonder: are any of these specific to open pedagogy? Or how do they differ when considered as part of an open pedagogical approach?

    1. the recent court decision prompted one teaching and learning campus administrator to tweet, “Be more Linkletter, Ed Techies.” The community knew exactly what he meant.

      "Be more Linkletter" alone is a good slogan

    2. All signs point to the fact that it is time for a relationship reboot between higher education institutions, their teaching and learning staff, and the ed tech industry. Now more than ever, higher education needs its ed tech critics to ask hard questions early and often.

      .

    3. Ed tech marketing strategies

      'nuf said.

    4. Faculty and staff power dynamics

      This. Reminds me of this tweet:

      If you are a prof chiding ppl for talking about your field when they have no background in it, but then giving keynotes/speeches on course design even though ID isn’t your field… maybe consider why it is ok for you to speak on things outside your field but not ok for others?

    5. Role confusion within the instructional design field

      This is a multi-layered problem. There is often confusion within teams and units, large and small. Often the reasons for the confusion differ depending on scale.

      Then you have the confusion from the outside, where people don't know what instructional design and related roles are, they vastly underestimate the skill and expertise, not understanding they are talking about an entire discipline, not (just) technical expertise.

      I routinely have faculty ask me things along the lines of, "where can I go to learn instructional design? I have a few weeks this summer..."

    6. Many institutions make the mistake of not bringing their teaching and learning technology experts to the technology decision-making table in any meaningful capacity. Faculty often drive early ed tech discovery and decisions—almost exclusively on some campuses. While faculty are essential to the conversation, most are not trained to vet technology for security, privacy, accessibility, equity, or (sometimes) pedagogical value.

      Laura, of course, sees the same need for more inclusive decision making that I do and soon explicates some of the reasons why.

    7. While ed tech served institutions well during the pandemic, it is time to reevaluate its ongoing use more critically and with a person-first (in contrast with a technology-first) strategy in mind.

      Even given the emergency of the pandemic, these decisions could have been made more effectively. That said, re-evaluation (which is harder due to entrenchment, familiarity, and--well--the nature of academic admin to talk a lot and make few decisions, is critical or the current opportunity will be squandered.

    8. The nature of the response, which is unfolding on Twitter, in blog posts, and through industry articles and editorials, is a real-time example of the increasingly fraught and polemic relationship that exists between the teaching and learning community and ed tech industry—a tension that many higher education institutions do not engage with or consider in their technology decisions.

      Most higher ed institutions don't engage with this tension...in part because most of the decisions w/r/t technology adoption don't include the constantly undervalued expertise of learning designers and other experts in the pedagogical aspect of the technologies.

  3. Jan 2022
    1. The rest seem to go to the local truck driving school (rip-offs designed to collect government money) or the ITI “vocational career training,” again designed to hoover up federal dough.

      .

    2. hese so-called volunteers are part of this nation's de facto draft -- economic conscription -- the carrot being politically preferable to the whip.

      "economic conscription" - how did I escape it?

    3. Middle class urban liberals may never claim us as brothers, much less willing servants, but as they say in prison, we are your meat

      We're not in prison.

      We are in a cell within a much vaster prison industrial complex that acts in service of -- it all comes down to, ultimately -- dollars and advertising for which we all are the meat.

    4. when you provide certain species of white mutt people with the right incentives, such as free pork or approval from god and government, you get things like lynchings, Fallujah, the Birmingham bombers and Abu Ghraib.

      .

    5. My point here is that we rural and small town mutt people by an early age seem to have a special capacity for cruelty, compared say, to damned near every other imaginable group of Americans.

      Indeed. I was a mutt who fortunately escaped alive from the common cruelty I could neither take part in or understand.

    6. The Coeur d'Alene Indians refused to suffer those kinds of conditions; they wouldn't even manage the place. They contracted it out. As my friend Walter Wildshoe said: “Only a white man would work there.”

      .

    7. there are lots of yellow ribbons in the windows, Marine Corps and Army parent's icons on the porches and scrubby lawns, evidence enough that you do not need an education to contribute something of value the far-flung perimeter of our expanding empire of blood and commerce.

      .

    8. Doctor's son = College, career, golf, nice car and a bimbo. Redneck laborer's son = Well, if you stay out of trouble, there's always room for one more broad shouldered chinless pinhead stamping out bright yellow plastic mop buckets on the injection molds at Rubbermaid.

      Author has a surgical-level deftness with the withering descriptions.

    9. At some point down the road all the Montessori schools and ivy league degrees in the world are not going to save your children and grandchildren from what our intellectual peasantry, whether born of neglect or purposefully maintained, is capable of supporting politically.

      "intellectual peasantry"

    10. America can no longer withstand the political naiveté of this ignored white class. Middle class American liberals cannot have it both ways.

      Accepted. And it's only gotten much, much worse since this piece was written in 2006. And events of the past five years make me doubt there is a solution while remaining a single country and/or that preserves democracy.

    11. And because liberals have driven secularism into the ground and broken it off, and need to actually adhere to some religious values -- real ones -- even if we don't feel particularly inclined toward religion. (Psst! Everybody else in America DOES fell inclined toward it.)

      But here he loses me because of that last, unneeded, and demonstrably wrong parenthetical.

    12. Why don't we do these things? Part of the reason is that this stubborn proud people does not whine beg or threaten its way to access to education, employment or anything else. And part of it is because we unquestioningly accept a system that calls greed and self-interest “drive”, thus letting the prosperous professional and business classes pretend there is no disparity around them for which they might just be partially responsible, even as they pay the maid and the gardener who lack health insurance a pittance . . . or see that their mechanic's bill reads, “repare of fuul injection, $105.”

      So far, so good.

    13. liberal refusal to see white people as also being diverse, and seeing that some of them indeed need their own sort of affirmative action is exactly the kind of thing that helped the neocons lead these working white people by the nose

      I've never thought about it this way, but it makes sense, especially given my background as a "mutt" of a slightly different variety.

    14. The neocon leadership is right when they tell working white Americans the system has been stacked against them by an unseen hand, though they never mention that their own kids are among the silver spooners rowing around in the Ivy League gravy boat.

      There's no question of neocons' "flexible" morals and principles.

    15. “No one should be forced to dive into an ocean of debt to learn how the world works, much less escape minimum wage hell. It should be enough just to want to know. Then too, look at our educational institutions. Academia, at least from this outsider's perspective, is an almost impenetrable veneer of elitist flatulence and toxic competition. Jesus, no wonder this country is in such sorry shape.”   -- Arvin Hill, Texas philosopher

      "elitist flatulence" -- it's funny because it's true.

    16. Now that education has been reduced to just another industry, a series of stratified job training mills, ranging from the truck driving schools to the state universities, our nation is no longer capable of creating a truly educated citizenry.

      But were the American education systems ever really different? When they were rare, they weren't educating nearly enough of the people (not to mention some groups actively or effectively excluded). And when they became larger, costs run higher, a wider range of people take part, and how could commodification not follow?

    1. It seemed like a comical absurdity: the most powerful nation in the world being run by a guy screaming at his television from the couch. And yet, it’s not clear that the honorable justices of the Supreme Court are all that different.

      He's being generous with "not clear." It's absolutely clear.

    2. As these decisions show, the Court’s future hinges less on the text of federal law and the Constitution than on the capricious process by which conservatives define what it means to be one of them

      And as the court's future looks more and more dim, the rest of us face an even darker future because of them.

    3. because the text of the OSH Act is so clear, the conservative justices, typically so insistent on strict textual interpretation, had to get philosophical. Because what they know, as good Fox News–watching conservatives, is that they don’t like the mandate. They understand that their fellow conservatives would prefer not to be regulated in this way. And therefore the mandate must be unlawful.

      Displaying high-school level determination to prove their predetermined outcomes.

    4. In 2015, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky tweeted a photo of himself getting a booster shot to rebut liberal media bias; in 2021, the career ophthalmologist announced that he was refusing to get the COVID vaccine. As Lowry observed in 2015, anti-vaxxers tend to be “doggedly impervious to evidence.”

      The Lowry of 2015 was a very different person.

    5. “Some say the decision to vaccinate or not should be the parents’ choice,” the conservative writer Thomas Sowell argued in 2015. “That would be fine if their child would live isolated from other children. But that is impossible.” Many articles from 2015 were bitterly angry at the suggestion that conservatives were anti-vaccine, and blamed media bias for it.

      And conservatives wonder why people like me think they are only interested in power and will bend in any direction to gain more of it?

    6. “In a feat that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, the anti-vaccine movement has managed to breathe life into nearly vanquished childhood diseases,” the conservative pundit Rich Lowry had lamented presciently a year earlier. “Nothing good can come from undoing one of the miracles of medical progress.”

      One of the few times I can wholly agree with Lowry

    7. Gorsuch compared COVID to the flu, and asked why OSHA had not mandated flu vaccines, even though the flu is nowhere near as lethal as COVID.

      WTAF!?

    8. the decision in the employer-mandate case, and the dissent from the four conservative justices in the health-care case, hinges on a new and alarming embrace of the right-wing culture war against vaccination, a deeply regrettable cost of conservative political strategy and political-identity formation.

      Bingo. This decision had nothing to do with the the constitution, legal precedent or the law.

    1. Rigor and compassion can and should go hand-in-hand.

      Rigor isn't in zero-sum competition with compassion!

    2. At CTU, we use an instant messaging system that allows for quick contact between faculty and students. With the introduction of this platform, we found that students were more often sharing personal stories and challenges with their instructors.

      I don't think the instructors I work with would take well to such a system because a) yet another system and b) fear or creating those instant connections given workload, etc.

    3. Colleges have long known that creating effective community ties students to the school and enhances learning. Yet, community in online classes is often treated as an afterthought or dismissed as impractical. In actuality, community is just as critical in online spaces.

      And lack of a feeling of community is a common instructor complaint. So why is it so hard to convince instructors to take intentional steps to build community online?

    4. When one instructor guides students to a discussion board and another a discussion forum, and the next requires a “first post” vs. a “primary post,” new students end up feeling lost and uncertain as to whether they understand how their courses work. If two classes both include a discussion activity and an interactive activity each week, but one faculty heavily weights the discussion while the other heavily weights the interactivity, students may become confused on how to prioritize. We have also found it critical to place important items in the same places in the LMS from course to course.

      Easier said than done when there is no program-level planning, guidance, policies, etc.

    5. The instructor needs to know and demonstrate ongoing knowledge about their students.

      know and DEMONSTRATE

    6. Online classrooms optimized to success, regardless of the learner profile, will share these key traits and characteristics: ConnectionConsistencyContentCommunityCompassion

      The 4-Cs

    1. In an age defined by social media — which places a massive premium on constantly talking to others — we need more technologies that encourage us to talk quietly to ourselves.

      This is a driving force behind the continuing analog PIM movement.

    2. All that kinesthetic slapping and crumpling and sticking also gets your body involved with your cognition, which can help catalyze some really creative thinking.

      I've found this to be true (with other analog tools as well). There's something about using physical cards that both opens new paths of thought and solidifies my memory and engagement. See also: the #ChessPunks and Neil Bruce for another good example.

    3. Wherever you find a Post-it note, you find someone managing information; and wherever you find someone managing information, you find someone trying to think.

      Also the case for the abundance of notebooks of all sizes, index cards, etc.

    1. When the only lever developers can pull is the time players invest in the game, using game design that depended on leveraging money doesn't work as well, requiring a more thorough redesign than simply putting the ability to play more in the places where premium currency was supposed to be.

      This reminds me of online education, where trying to just port over the traditional curriculum and activities usually works poorly, and almost never works well.

    2. However, when money isn't at stake, the food chain breaks and the hooks don't set between the game and the potential whales (or minnows). The only way to progress is to invest time, limiting who progresses through the game quickly and giving those players both the cards and the experience to dominate.

      For me, this is a good thing. I don't like it when people can buy their way to the top of a game.

    1. Giving every student an A neutralizes many complex inequities so that no student is harmed academically for being forced into this pandemic. It assures students that we see them, that we acknowledge they’ve experienced a school year unlike any school year in our lifetimes. And it’s just one semester — the system will not collapse because we gave everyone an A this one time.

      Fair enough, but now that we are looking at many semesters, does this remain the answer? Probably not.

      Ungrading practices are much more apt now.

    1. While the progress being made in AI today is miraculous, it’s not biblically so. It’s not magic. If one of the most expensive and technologically advanced algorithms in human history can’t match a first-year college student, then we should probably let go of the breathless hyperbole about AI “ending education” for a while.

      LOL

    2. OpenAI is getting most of the buzz right now, but there are others. It can produce uncanny writing. By which I mean writing that falls in the uncanny valley. It’s writing that seems sort of human but not quite. The result is weird and sometimes creepy.

      But, to be fair, GPT-3, at least, appears to be producing writing that goes beyond the uncanny valley and into writing indistinguishable from human originated writing.

      But then isn't that, in a sense, what this article conveys...if it can't already, it will not be long before the story in question could've been generated by AI.

    3. To get a delightful sense of just how weird and creepy, read Janelle Shane’s blog AI Weirdness. And then read her book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and How It’s Making the World a Weirder Place.

      I can't second these recommendations highly enough. Janelle Shane's blog is fascinating, as is her book.

    4. This is remarkably like the strategy students take of plagiarizing an essay on a similar topic to the one they’ve been assigned and then rearranging it to try and make it fit. The only difference is that he was plagiarizing himself. The problem here isn’t taking somebody else’s thoughts and claiming them as your own. It’s claiming to have thought about and analyzed a topic when you haven’t.

      I need a more emphatic highlight here.

  4. Dec 2021
    1. An astonishing 25,000 or so species of bee have evolved to pollinate flowering plants. To put that in perspective, there are around 10,000 species of birds, and around 5,400 different mammals. Most people think a bee is plump, boldly striped with dense fur and a leisurely gait. But these are just bumblebees which account for only 1 per cent of bee species worldwide.  Others believe all bees make honey and live together with a queen bee, workers and male drones, but few bees do this.

      Amazing number of species

    1. The other thing all honey-makers have in common is a colony-wide social structure. All honey-makers are eusocial species, which means “truly social.” A eusocial nest contains one queen and many workers with a division of labor—different individuals doing different jobs. The colony also produces drones for reproductive purposes.

      Eusocial - "euˈsocial adjective (Zoology) showing an advanced level of social organization, in which a single female or caste produces the offspring and non-reproductive individuals cooperate in caring for the young m20."

    2. he roughly 20,000 species of bees we know about are divided into just seven families. Of those seven families, only one contains honey-making bees, the Apidae.

      Apidae

    1. He concludes that what works well for bees can also work well for people: any decision-making group should consist of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect, a leader's influence should be minimized, debate should be relied upon, diverse solutions should be sought, and the majority should be counted on for a dependable resolution.

      Bees are better than humans

    1. Lastly, bees use the waggle dance. This is the most unique method of communication known to nature, or at least I think so. Using an intricate set of dance steps bees returning from foraging or hive site exploration describe to other bees in the hive the location and quality of these sites. The hive “votes” on the most viable site by the number of bees joining in the dance and the intensity of the dancing itself. In the case of selecting a new hive site, the bees will only relocate when a unanimous decision has been reached.

      bee language 3 - the waggle dance

    2. Secondly, bees use pheromones. Each hive has its own unique scent, which allows the bees to identify their family members. The queen produces her own pheromone, which inhibits the other females from laying eggs and draws her brood to her. Certain pheromones are also released if the bees sense danger.

      bee language 2 - pheromones

    3. Honey bee communication is about three primary methods they leverage. The first, and easiest to understand, is touch. Bees touch their antennae to identify each other and their feet to measure the size of comb cells.

      bee language 1 - touch

    1. But wait, this isn't totally accurate. There's a pretty secure reconstruction for a PIE word for "bee" in *bʰey-, with reflexes in Italic (e.g., Latin fucus = "drone"), Germanic (e.g., English "bee"), and a few other daughter branches (Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian).

      fucus

    2. As far as I can tell, it's confined to the Eastern branches of the Iranian subfamily. I'm not an expert on any Indo-Iranian language, but the reflex that seems clearest to a non-specialist (namely, me) is the Ossetian word for "[honey] bee", мыдыбындз (mydybyndz). The first half of that word, мыды- (mydy-), comes from PIE *médʰu "honey".

      Oseetian root?

    3. On the other hand there is a very well attested word for honey in every branch from Hittite (?) over Tocharian, Indoiranian and Celtic to Baltoslavic and germanic: Sanskrit madhu- 'honey', Mod. Eng. mead and so on, so why does the word for bee differ so much?Perhaps an interesting question, but hardly surprising. Here's a list:https://www.honeybeesuite.com/the-language-of-bee-and-honey/They mostly come from "hit", "bite" if it's not related to honey. Ie, bugs make honey. Not surprising.https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/b%D1%8C%C4%8DelaEdit: you can wiktionary around but apis pretty likely comes from ampi, from PIE imbe - swarm of bees (bi/biti/whatever), which brings us back to the initial point. Apis isn't unattested, and in fact fits nicely within pie, and otherwise an osco umbrian irregularity would otherwise make a lot of sense.

      The argument over where "apis" comes from...

    1. Humans are not the only animals to display collective intelligence. Bees are also well known for their ability to make accurate collective decisions when they search for foods or new nests. What’s more, bees can avoid maladaptive herding. Bees prevent bad information from becoming viral, although they copy each other through communication and social learning. But how do they do it? In the early 20th century, Austrian behavioral biologist Karl von Frisch found that worker honey bees use a kind of “waggle dance” for communicating with each other. In short, these waggle dances are bee versions of online shopping rating systems. Instead of stars or good reviews, bee ratings are based on the duration of the dance. When a bee finds a good source of food, it dances for a long time. When it finds a poor one, the duration of the dance is short or non-existent. The longer the dance, the more bees follow its suggestion to feed there. When honey bees find the best flowers, they go back to the hive and ‘tell’ the other bees how to get there. Researchers have demonstrated that bee colonies will switch their efforts to a more abundant site, even after foraging is already well underway elsewhere, thus preventing maladaptive herding. Collective flexibility is key.

      Collective flexibility.

  5. Nov 2021
    1. article explores how annotation with digital, social tools can address digital reading challenges while also supporting writing skill development for novices in college literature classrooms. The author analyzes student work and survey responses and shows that social annotation can facilitate closer digital reading and scaffold text-anchored argumentation practices.

      Writing to understand what I read is critical to my practice. Doing so socially is particularly helpful when I don't understand something or am lacking the motivation to keep reading.

    1. Hopkins uses tmesis in stanza 34 of "The Wreck of the Deutschland":The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled        Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,Mid-numberèd He in three of the thunder-throne!As editor Gardner explains it, "The second line contains a tmesis: 'Miracle-of-flame in Mary' is rearranged so that the position of 'in-Mary' suggests the furling of the child in the mother and also suggests that Mary herself is an intrinsic part of the miracle." What a lovely-rich image!

      Beautiful example of tmesis in Hopkins

    1. TMESIS: Intentionally breaking a word into two parts for emphasis. Goldwyn once wrote, "I have but two words to say to your request: Im Possible." In the movie True Lies, one character states, "I have two words to describe that idea. In Sane." Milton writes, "Which way soever man refer to it." The poet W. H. Auden makes emotionally laden use of tmesis in "Two Songs for Hedli Anderson," where he stretches out the word forever by writing: "I thought that love would last For Ever. I was wrong." In English, this rhetorical scheme is fairly rare, since only the compounds of "ever" readily lend themselves to it, but it is much more common in Greek and Latin. An exception to this generalization is the American poet e. e. cummings (the lack of capitalization in his name is a rhetorical affectation). Critics note that cummings makes particularly potent use of tmesis in poems like "she being Brand / -new", in which words like "brand-new" and "O. K" are artificially divided across separate lines of text to create an unusual, broken reading experience. Particularly clever poets may use a sort of infixation to insert other words of phrases between the two parts that have been split apart. For instance, a southerner might say, "I live in West--by God--Virginia, thank you very much!" Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, writes the phrase, "how dearly ever parted" (III.iii), when we would expect to find the phrase written as "however dearly parted" in normal grammatical usage.

      in other words, something other than a word (such as a space, or a line break) can be the intruding element. (the tmesic element?)

    1. Coined 1586, from Late Latin tmēsis, from Ancient Greek τμῆσις (tmêsis, “a cutting”), from τέμνω (témnō, “I cut”).

      ultimately the same root as atom (uncuttable), etc.

    1. The celebratory poem is by the popular Australian writer John Patrick O’Grady. (1907-1981) Apparently he originally titled it “The Integrated Adjective” — but for good reason the poem, (and by now, if not since long before the poem was written, the town itself) is famous as TUMBA BLOODY RUMBA. I will give you the entire text, in which you will notice that “bloody” (originally a religious oath — “by our Lady” — and for some reason much more repugnant to Brits than to Americans) is the expletive of choice,

      A better history of the Tumba Bloody Rumba poem

    1. Apparently, there was a poem written not too long ago by an Australian author and poet named John O’Grady[iii] entitled Tumba Bloody Rumba. I won’t include the poem here in its entirety, partly because its frequent use of the word bloody may offend some. Suffice it to say, the poem makes ample use of colourful tmesis with words such as “Tumba-bloody-rumba” and “kanga-bloody-roos.” The result, thanks in no small part to the almost hypnotic power of the word, is that tumbarumba has now become a synonym for tmesis in the English language.

      tumbarumba = tmesis in Australia

    1. "La-dee-freakin-da" became one of Chris Farley's signature phrases on Saturday Night Live. The Simpsons character Ned Flanders is known for his (mis)use of tmesis, inserting "diddly" into words such as "welcome" to come up with "wel-diddly-elcome."

      Ned Flanders!

    1. Tmesis is mainly used to create humor, and lay emphasis on a particular word or phrase. The Romans and Greeks used tmesis for special effects in literature. In comedy, it works as over-done exaggeration. In poetry, its task is to stress a point, as it forces readers to give more attention to the cut phrase or line. It is regularly used in informal speech, as well. In Australian English, it is called “tumba rumba.” And now for the examples and additional explanation: Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw Eliza Dolitttle: “Fan-bloody-tastic” or “abso-blooming-lutely” Richard II, by William Shakespeare “How-heinous-ever it be,” Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare “This is not Romeo, he’s some other where.” In this excerpt, “somewhere” is split up by inserting the word “other.” The purpose of splitting up the word is to highlight and draw the focus of readers to the fact that Romeo is not there, but somewhere else. Hymn to Christ, by John Donne “In whattorn shipsoever I embark, That ship shall be my emblem Whatseasoever swallow me, that flood Shall be to me an emblem of thy blood.” This is a very good example of phrasal verb tmesis. “Whatsoever” is split into two parts by inserting the words, “torn ship.” The same is done in the third line, where the word “sea” is inserted in the middle of the compound word “whatsoever.” Troilus & Cressida, by William Shakespeare “That man–how dearly ever parted.” Shakespeare uses tmesis in his literary pieces. Here, the insertion of the word “dearly” into “however” emphasizes the fond feeling that the speaker has towards the dead person.

      function and examples

    1. We’ll end this with a modern literary example of tmesis, from Kingsley Amis’s 1960 comic novel Take a Girl Like You: “It’s a sort of long cocktail—he got the formula off a barman in Marrakesh or some-bloody-where.”

      Kingsley Amis - Take a Girl Like You

    2. “In what torn ship soever I embark, That ship shall be my emblem of Thy ark; What sea soever swallow me, that flood Shall be to me an emblem of Thy blood.”
    3. Here are a few examples of these buttinskies in compound words: “abso-damn-lutely” …  “a whole nother” … “un-fucking-believable” … “any-bloody-body” … “god-freaking-awful.” The earliest example of tmesis in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1592 definition of the term that includes this example: “What might be soeuer vnto a man pleasing” (“What might be soever unto a man pleasing”).

      buttinskies

    4. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, defines “tmesis” as a “separation of parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more words (as what place soever for whatsoever place).”

      Webster's definition

    1. Informal tmetic usage is ubiquitous but discouraged in formal writing. Examples include “a whole nother” and “any old how” as intensifications of another and anyhow. Recently, however, this form of tmesis has been supplanted in popularity by a form formally known as expletive infixation, in which a profane or otherwise emphatic word is inserted into an adjective to fortify its impact, as in abso-frickin’-lutely and la-dee-frickin’-da. Another colloquial construction is the emphatic insertion of so in such statements as “I am so not going there.”

      Informal tmesis is everywhere...and so common in slang

    2. A form of tmesis often heard spoken spontaneously but best reconstructed for writing is a possessive phrase such as “the girl in the back row’s,” referring to something belonging to a girl sitting in a back row; the modifying phrase “in the back row” is artificially inserted between girl and the possessive s. “The book is the girl in the back row’s,” for example, should be recast as “The book belongs to the girl in the back row.”

      looong tmesis

    3. Phrasing in which the preposition down is located within the verb phrase “turn down” in “Turn down that music,” as opposed to its placement in “Turn that music down,” is a standard form of tmesis, as are whatsoever and unbeknownst, in which, respectively, so is inserted in whatever and be is placed within an archaic form of unknown.

      One simple, common form of tmesis

    1. Cognitive neuroscience proves that no two learners are alike. Designing for a "mythical" average (as Todd Rose explains in the Myth of Average) is to design for no-one.

      Designing for average is designing for no one! Recommend the video as well.

    1. Solicit feedback. One of the easiest ways to solicit feedback from your students is to use a survey. Keep surveys short and consider asking students to share in a few words how the course is going or what they find most challenging.

      Soliciting feedback serves other purposes as well: it's another "touch" with your students, and it demonstrates to students that you are listening.

    1. Offer alternatives for visual information (checkpoint 1.3)

      Note that for these purposes, text is considered a form of visual information.

  6. Sep 2020
    1. students basically just stopped doing the reading

      In addition, there are also some interesting strategies for getting students to do the reading. See Reading Engagement Strategies, for example.

  7. Mar 2019
    1. I follow thousands of people, so my office mate, who happens to be a skilled programmer, wrote a script for me that turned off retweets from everybody. Retweets make up more than a quarter of all tweets. When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times. Less breathlessness. And more of what the people I follow were actually thinking about, reading, and doing. It’s still not perfect, but it’s much better.

      For me, retweets aren't the problem, following the wrong people is. At least half, maybe more, of what I glean that is useful from Twitter comes from re-tweets...perhaps because instead of following thousands, I follow people I trust and/or want to converse with?

  8. Jan 2019
    1. I find some consolation in Stephen Spender’s poem “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.”

      Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,<br> See how these names are fêted by the waving grass<br> And by the streamers of white cloud<br> And whispers of wind in the listening sky.<br> The names of those who in their lives fought for life,<br> Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.<br> Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun<br> And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

  9. Dec 2018
    1. A sweet excerpt from James Geary's latest book. He is punstoppable. I am punapologetic.

    2. The frisson in the ship captain’s reply to the first-class passenger who asks if he can decide for himself whether to help row the lifeboat—“Of course, sir, either oar”

      groan

  10. May 2017
    1. more verb than noun, it only exists through the convers

      Bpah

    Annotators

    URL

  11. Jul 2016
    1. If you burn down a Library of Alexandria full of paper scrolls, you destroy knowledge. If you set fire to a bunch stone tablets, you further preserve the lettering.

      A nice phrase

    2. It requires us to counter the story that “technology is changing faster than ever before and it’s so overwhelming so let’s just let Google be responsible for the world’s information.”

      Not sure I buy the pace of change argument and, in some ways, the whole "it doesn't matter how deep the water is if you know how to swim" argument applies...but I wholeheartedly agree with questioning the assertion that it follows we should leave it to the media overlords.

    3. The average lifespan of a website, according to the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle is 44 days

      But...what about my digital footprint? My tattoo? The end of my prospects to become a Supreme (the court, not the musical group)?

    1. I would suggest that members at a cerebration session be given sinecure tasks to do—short reports to write, or summaries of their conclusions, or brief answers to suggested problems—and be paid for that, the payment being the fee that would ordinarily be paid for the cerebration session. The cerebration session would then be officially unpaid-for and that, too, would allow considerable relaxation.

      A good gig if you can get it.

    2. My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required.

      How quaint this seems today, in the era of relentless promotion of connected, collaborative and even co-creative activities.

  12. Jun 2016
    1. Henry is gone. No buffer. It’s down to ‘I’ now, the poet himself, alone. It is not one of Berryman’s better songs and there’s relatively little art to it, but its plainness renders grief more poignantly than the mirror and mask might have done.

      I think this "plainness" and baldness...this exposure of the bone is powerful and happens a lot in the later songs.

    2. There is a sharp falling off in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which contains a further 308 songs. The Henry mask begins to erode and with it the capacity for play and burlesque that manages to keep the poems buoyant instead of sinking into the self-indulgence typical of most of the ‘confessional’ poetry from the era. The later Dream Songs are reduced to grim reportage from the front

      The easy characterization which is, perhaps partly true. But this is overly dismissive.

    3. ‘Henry does resemble me,’ Berryman told an interviewer, ‘and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax. Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and stall in my hair – and fuck them, I’m not Henry; Henry doesn’t have any bats.’

      The contradictions in Berryman's characterization (he doth protest too much)

    4. ‘I’m pretty much at sea about that book,’ she wrote to Lowell. ‘Some pages I find wonderful, some baffle me completely. I am sure he is saying something important – perhaps sometimes too personally.’

      Bishop got it...need to find complete context.

    5. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is much admired and little read, its clotted syntax not permitting enough air to let the piece breathe. One feels the strain in its assemblage.

      Mistress Bradstreet syntax

    6. In 1960, while writing his Dream Songs, he railed against Eliot’s ‘intolerable and perverse theory of the impersonality of the artist’. By then, for Berryman/Henry it was very personal indeed.

      Evolution of Eliot's influence

    1. might

      So much trouble wrapped up in this one little word. Alan's use of the "All Rights Reserved" image would be strongly defensible as Fair Use...but is it worth the bother (practically) even if doing so would be a philosophical gain in asserting our unvoidable right to fairly use material no matter how assertive the copyright labeling?

  13. Jun 2015
    1. Today we watched some highlights from “The Mother of All Demos,” Doug Engelbart’s 1968 presentation heralding the dawn of interactive computing.

      I need to remember to bring this into the course next time around...I brought it up in comments but really wish I'd pushed it more up front!

    1. So it’s easy to say you don’t have to do everything in a MOOC to be part of it – some MOOCs offer different options to choose from, to help people find something they like. Some people will just think they’re supposed to do it all (poor them). More interestingly, though, is this: sometimes the “cool” people (and it’s really a perception more than anything) choose to all get together and do a particular “thing” and if you’re not into that particular “thing” you might feel excluded. They may have issued an open invitation, but you may have missed it, or didn’t realize you could join, or didn’t think you were talented enough, or didn’t know how to introduce yourself. Not everyone can do those things, you know… But it’s ok… as long as there are multiple opportunities, open invitations, eventually, someone will find something somewhere with some group. If they hang in there long enough.

      Might this not be a kind of test of "digital citizenship": the ability to negotiate the barriers posed by such unintentional, perhaps even illusionary, cliques and groups in order to substantially participate in these open spaces?

    1. What resonates with your experience? What doesn’t? I chose these models of digital citizenship specifically because they do inform my real life experiences (well, porn not so much in my middle age). As a teacher, I am frustrated by mobile devices and how kids behave in computer labs – I always have a special bunch of kids who have behavior issues. In this way, it is quite important to me.

      I don't have much experience in K-12 classrooms...I hope some others can help!

    1. Some of his examples, like Shakespeare, I found a little difficult to make the transition between classic literature and cyberinfrastructure. Seemed like quite a leap to make when he talks about every student needing to learn to become his or her own system administrator, whereas I’m pretty sure not everyone who learned writing and literature became even close to Shakespeare’s level of genius. With regards to that, Campbell does discuss the PS3 game LittleBigPlanet, where players act as both participants and producers, and that of the creations made in the game, the majority aren’t worth a second look. I get what he’s trying to say, but the logic doesn’t work for me. That’s not the focus in my opinion. Teaching skills should be done to teach skills, using technology to enable skill-creation and learning should be the end-goal: not to find the next Shakespeare of the cyberworld by training the masses to find the one gold nugget.

      Gardner? What say you?