Taken to heart

The wild week is flying to its end, I can't wait for the space that the weekend provides--for thought, as well as recreation, that I didn't fit in this week.  And I can't help but take heart Nelson's "You can learn anything (even computers!)" and Emily's points about how "vague impressions" are a fine place to start, and we don't have to be ashamed of it as we try to gather insights and learn what we want to know.  It is not a weakness to show that you don't know something.  It is not a weakness to what to know more.  If we have the nerve (Nelson, not me) we can learn/do/create/know anything.  I want this for my children, and I want it for me!

Tools v learning: what is essential?

Hello all!  I miss you what with these snow/ice/60 degree days that we've been having.  I'm trying to put my finger on things for New Media when all I can think of is "re-newing" learning.  If this goes too far down the education path, feel free to join or chide me. 

Problem: when did "let's google it" become the answer, instead of the tool?
It seems to me that all the assembly, augmentation and linking of material, facts, items, information, stuff, is only as good as the one who actually "googles" and finds out something s/he needs to know.  If you google anything and are satisfied that the first entry (read: wikipedia) and in fact, just skim that for whatever "fact" you needed in order to answer the question...is this less or more dangerous than not knowing the answer in the first place?  It is a false sense of knowledge, it is limited in perspective (and I am actually a fan of wikipedia, not a critic), and it certainly doesn't make you think--because you have the answer, right?  So suppose you don't have any natural curiosity left? You don't look at other links, you don't even use the links that wikipedia authors have provided--you certainly don't notice the alert that occurs on almost every wikipedia page (for example) reminding us of what is missing (absence...hmmm....that is another post entirely).

When did you become curious?  intellectually curious?  we associate this with childhood, and we even said in class (weeks ago) that K-12 as currently designed doesn't seem to subscribe to the importance of intellectual curiosity.  Is it a function of our disciplines?  If so, why am I curious about math and science (and not just their history which I would call part of my discipline)?  And how do we "breed" that sort of curiosity in our students?

Did I say that the Christian Ethics journal wasn't available online, my mistake, the latest issue appeared sometime over this lovely weekend.  Link away!

less or more troubling

First, I just picked up my mail and Baylor's Center for Christian Ethics' Christian Reflection journal was there--topic for this issue--Virtual Lives. I haven't read it yet, but will bring it to pass around next week, it's not online (I checked).

Second: what do you think of this quote that I read today? "The distance to my fellow man is [for me] a very long one." Besides the ache in my heart when I read it, I wonder if it might be true for most/all/some of us. Speculation and I think some research supports the idea that our socially-networked, frenetic society might be compensating for our difficulty "meeting" each other face-to-face, while making it harder to (learn to) do so. Then in class, Jonathan mentioned the loss of the community and how the internet could be seen (in his example, in China) as  morally disruptive to community and development of human feelings/intellect--and the question of what and where should/shouldn't be part available as Sha wrote about cybersecurity today. Whether we are talking about the connections of knowledge or the aggregation of it, is seems that we must always return to the question of human relationships. What Kafka wrote in his fourth Octavo notebook at the beginning of the 20th Century (my quote above, of course) is estrangement, plain and simple, estrangement even from his fellow sufferers.  Will that be less or more pronounced in our age and the next?

Multitask or single task

The problem: email, blackboard, updating, checking in, and how it morphs into too much time without much productivity/output. Strictly limit time spent on email/online?  Or respond a different way to tasks that appear through those media? If it isn't in my list, I don't do it?  but I'm already here?  Why not just get it done?  But is it really necessary?  Here is a quote that haunts me a bit, and my quicky translation: One often suffers from the fact that one has a great deal of work, but no identified mission (to which the work belongs)

"Häufig leidet man daran, dass man zwar viel Arbeit, aber keine Aufgabe hat."

Dr. phil. Hellmut Walters