By the early sixth century, Western Europe had become largely illiterate, its teachers dead, its students on the run, its libraries turned into kindling. Ireland, however, had just settled down, thanks to a tough old bird named Patrick, a Roman citizen raised in the province of Britain who had been grabbed by Irish slavers when…
When writing a paper in MLA style, prefer brief quotations from your sources, in order to emphasize how the complex connections between the sources support your original argument. In the essay “The Full Title of an Essay Fills Lots of Space” by Maxwell Wordsworth Filler, it talks about how easy it is to bury your own thoughts when…
I’m getting ready to teach a one-credit journalism course on editorial writing, which will also be a test case for a potential “topics in advanced composition” course. This essay looks like a good way to start the class. The good nouns are the thousands of short, simple, infinitely old Anglo-Saxon nouns that express the fundamentals…
Wisdom to keep in mind as I plan for this semester’s “History and Future of the Book.” FAIL Blog. Similar:Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C StandardsThe DRM proposals at the W3C exist for a…BusinessUnity Normal Problems (Importing an object from Blender 2.8b)I had a complex model that I created in …AestheticsIn…
Americans’ print consumption has declined since 1960, but words delivered by computer have more than made up the difference. (Image courtesy of the University of California at San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center) Conventional wisdom holds that YouTube, videogames, cable TV and iPods have turned us away from the written word. Glowing streams of visual…
Is this for real? On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. —Amazon.com Hold on, though… who goes online to shop for more books on Dec 25, before the spines have been cracked on the new books that were under the tree? Amazon was heavily promoting its…
I completely missed this, which I stumbled across via the Reeves Library blog. Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition…
I can’t say I understand, but someone invented every symbol and bit of notation that we use from emoticons to the alphabet. It’s cool to see the story of the need to invent new symbols. via Wired. Similar:Are we spreading fake news about fake news?In a new research paper that Poynter say…CultureThe Little Professor: How…
The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying…
To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself…
Although I explained how I track and archive my students’ Twitter activity, I didn’t describe what they actually do on Twitter. That’s because I wasn’t sure myself what they do. I mean, of course I’ve reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn’t considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter.…
I just drafted a new handout on writing editorials. I couldn’t find anything online pitched at the proper level, so I had to write it myself. (I’ll probably be able to use a version of this in my freshman comp class too.) Presume that your opponent has good reasons for disagreeing with you. Talk to…
When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.…
It’s a safe bet none of the world leaders meeting Thursday for the first day of the G-20 summit are aware that it’s also National Punctuation Day. Rubin founded it in 2004 after he got fed up with seeing misplaced apostrophes and other transgressions by people who should know better — newspaper reporters and editors,…
Silly headline, from a University of Washington press release. Second, fourth and sixth grade children with and without handwriting disabilities were able to write more and faster when using a pen than a keyboard to compose essays, according to new research. The study, headed by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology…
With this Wired article, Clive Thompson put me into a happy place, and I wanted to share it. He’s quoting Andrea Lunsford: “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving…
Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause. Representing the world champion, the “going to hell in a hand-basket,” the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish’s “What Should Colleges Teach?” on his…
Colbert’s tag line brought tears to my eyes. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kerry!) The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Nailed ‘Em – Library Crime www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers Similar:"The Nightmare of Prince Prezelsky"Leigh, Peter, Carolyn and I had fun reco…AmusingIn June, 2001 it seems I only blogged three…
David Stanley pointed me to this thoughtful essay. Modern librarians who prioritize information over knowledge perpetuate a distraction from the real purpose of a library. A library facilitates the patient gathering of knowledge – whose acquisition is superior to almost every other endeavor. Religions have adapted to technology for the most part without being destroyed…
I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago. At Hopkins, Knudson uses Twitter as an extension of the classroom, asking students to raise questions, hold discussions online, keep up with breaking news and share links to interesting stories. She believes the limited number of characters allowed is a useful way to remember…