The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
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Portal page for the UK’s Public Art Online site: useful resource for public art news, case studies, research, planning, etc.
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Does Your Language Shape How You Think? – NYTimes.com
Fascinating article by Guy Deutscher about language, specifically one’s mother tongue, and how it shapes how we think.
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Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
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Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education | Video on TED.com
Love this 2010 TED talk by Sugata Mitra on education: “Education is a self organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon…”
From the description on the TED page:
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Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
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Essay – The End of Tenure? – NYTimes.com
I’ve been saying something similar to this for years, even going so far as to say that it’s morally irresponsible to continue cranking out PhDs, especially humanities PhDs, for whom there are no jobs, and to fail to prepare them for careers outside academia (when I was getting my PhD, my advisors’ attitude was that working outside of academia was basically akin to failure and/or selling one’s body by the roadside, i.e., totally unacceptable. It would have been more helpful to show us how to figure out non-academic careers instead. As a result, I really rather dislike my former advisors. As tenure holders, they made it on my back (and many other backs just like mine).
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The labor system, for one thing, is clearly unjust. Tenured and tenure-track professors earn most of the money and benefits, but they’re a minority at the top of a pyramid. Nearly two-thirds of all college teachers are non-tenure-track adjuncts like Matt Williams, who told Hacker and Dreifus he had taught a dozen courses at two colleges in the Akron area the previous year, earning the equivalent of about $8.50 an hour by his reckoning. It is foolish that graduate programs are pumping new Ph.D.’s into a world without decent jobs for them. If some programs were phased out, teaching loads might be raised for some on the tenure track, to the benefit of undergraduate education.
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Danah Boyd: How Censoring Craigslist Helps Pimps, Child Traffickers and Other Abusive Scumbags
Danah Boyd makes a great argument for not forcing Craigslist to shut down its “adult services”:
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The Internet has changed the dynamics of prostitution and trafficking, making it easier for prostitutes and traffickers to connect with clients without too many layers of intermediaries. As a result, the Internet has become an intermediary, often without the knowledge of those internet service providers (ISPs) who are the conduits. This is what makes people believe that they should go after ISPs like Craigslist. Faulty logic suggests that if Craigslist is effectively a digital pimp who’s profiting off of online traffic, why shouldn’t it be prosecuted as such?The problem with this logic is that it fails to account for three important differences: 1) most ISPs have a fundamental business — if not moral — interest in helping protect people; 2) the visibility of illicit activities online makes it much easier to get at, and help, those who are being victimized; and 3) a one-stop-shop is more helpful for law enforcement than for criminals. In short, Craigslist is not a pimp, but a public perch from which law enforcement can watch without being seen.
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Mind – Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits – NYTimes.com
Interesting nuggets on studying and study habits and techniques. For example:
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…individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms – one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard – did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.
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TVO.ORG | Video | The Agenda – Our Digital Future: Digital Hubs
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If you have access to fast broadband, your friends all work online and it is easy to find venture capital, then you are in a digital hub. And you’re not in Canada. Our country trails the world when it comes to building these centres of digital innovation. In this episode of “Our Digital Future – Digital Hubs”, leading voices from Canada’s digital community discuss the characteristics of a good digital hub and the investment needed to create intelligent communities for tomorrow’s digital economy. The episode features: Mark Kuznicki, a leader in the field of citizen and community engagement; Sarah Prevette, founder of Sprouter.com, an online community for entrepreneurs; Jesse Brown, journalist and an influential voice in the world of social media; and, Bill Hutchison, the Executive Director of Intelligent Communities for Waterfront Toronto and a renowned business and social entrepreneur.
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TVO.ORG | Video | The Agenda – Our Digital Future: The Need for High-Speed
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Slow down please, this is Canada! Canada’s digital networks are some of the slowest in the world, running between one hundred to a thousand times slower than other countries in the developed world. In this episode of “Our Digital Future – The Need for High-Speed”, Bill Hutchison, Executive Director of Intelligent Communities for Waterfront Toronto describes the sorry state of our digital infrastructure, stressing the need for major investments in advanced broadband networks. Bill Hutchison is a renowned business and social entrepreneur. He has been a founder of four successful business start-ups and CEO of three corporate turnarounds. As a social entrepreneur he has been the founding chair or director of ten industry and social consortia and charitable foundations.
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CATA i Canada Declaration May…
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Today’s RealityBut now the alarm bells are ringing as Canada has been falling down the international leadership staircase in terms of the innovation and application of technology in ways that could continue to improve the quality of life for all citizens. A recent study indicates that Canada:
* Has some of the poorest high-speed internet service in the developed world;
* Ranked 22nd out of 30 countries against measures such as broadband adoption, network capacity and pricing; and
* Ranked 16th on broadband adoption.Please take a few minutes to view the TVO video on the impact of Canada being way behind the rest of the world in terms of our digital economy and broadband infrastructure. Canada’s speed is 1/100 to 1/1000 slower than 20 major competitors.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. 
Hi Yule… you’ve provided some interesting links here. On the one about “…traditional study habits”, I agree. Multiple contexts/backgrounds can enhance the learning process, creativity, innovation… And extending the # of contexts idea, maybe people who live from their remote device (e.g. iPad/phone) are developing the best study habits of all of us!?
Comment by Ben Ziegler — September 13, 2010 #
Yes, the story about study skills surprised me, too, Ben. I guess it makes sense – having noticed that my productivity improves through access to mobile devices (which let me work with them wherever I happen to have plunked myself down), it makes sense that learning/ studying (as a related activity) is also improved. (Check out all the apps available under Education in the iTunes store…!)
Comment by Yule — September 13, 2010 #