Nope, nope, that about says it all.
Just look at the link: http://www.sunokotan.com/index.html
Perhaps it is the benefit of an animist culture? Or one that never went through an extended phase of industrial form as aesthetic?
It is a much deeper question that an aluminum cooling stand might indicate.
Cleaning out old AdBusters magazines and found (or perhaps refound) this little story, which someone was nice enough to post online for all to read.
Enjoy.
Interesting, but is it really the future we want? On the other hand, now that the idea is there, will we even have a choice in the matter?
Via Next Nature.
An important read on why the United States educational system is a dangerous monoculture that has been abstracted from reality.
Mike Rowe's Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation via the Discovery Channel
See also Mike Rowe Works.
I will resist the urge to say Bloom's can suck my big rubber implem- ... oh, wait.
Some bad rapping on climate change courtesy of some real climate change scientists.
Or so they claim.
Oh yah, NSFW!
via treehugger
Multiplayer High via boing boing.
A very good argument on why we should be looking at MMORPGs for inspiration on improving education.
One compliant I hear, and have made myself, is how hard it is to get students out of their comfort zone. They will work right up to the edge of what they know and then stop. Our challenge then, as instructors is to pull them out of that comfort zone to spur them on to learn new things and to do better.
The problem is that we so often fail to teach by example.
Much teaching looks like this:
We work hard to pull students into our own comfort zone without ever stepping out of it ourselves.
This is in part down to the somewhat balkanized nature of education, where each topic is treated as a thing in isolation assigned to different departments with different instructors and different agendas. It is also in part because we are usually hired to teach what we know, we are expected to focus on our area of expertise.
But that doesn't, or at least shouldn't, prevent us from stepping out of our own comfort zones. The way to get students out of their zones is to meet them halfway, not to pull them toward us.
By doing so, both instructors and students grow and expand their comfort zones to include more skills and talents and knowledge.
To put it another way, education needs to be about a conversation between educators and students, where each course becomes a practice of finding common ground to move beyond our respective comfort zones so that we can learn and grow as a group and as a community. But it is the educators who half to take that first step out of the bubble of the familiar, not the students.
Design Thinking Comes to the U.S. Army
The Language of Design Imperialism
Both from Design Observer, and mostly so I can find them again.
I am not sure what the message is I am supposed to be getting [here].
And really ... can be?
An online game about tackling real problems in the real world collaboratively ... Evoke.
What an awesome concept.
via TreeHugger.
You know, I can still sing a fair number of the old Schoolhouse Rock songs. Maybe that should tell us something.
Is between inclusive or exclusive?
Dunno why that question just struck me, but I think in perceiving it as exclusive we may be making a mistake. I also think that between is exclusive in Western culture, but inclusive in Asian culture. Though I could be wrong.
I suppose I should acknowledge that the between I am referring to here is the between that is the social and the political. The thing is that the Western tradition puts the social as something that happens between people but is exclusive of those people the social is happening between. While Asian cultures are more like to think of the social that is between as inclusive of the people it is between.
These two models are significant in what they say about the social, the political, and how it is that people interact. And perhaps by thinking of between as exclusive of what the between is between, we are creating a socio-political situation that impedes communication and negatively influences personal involvement. In other words, we are defining the very sources of the between as not part of the between and thus something that stands apart from the process that is between.
Between, in the social sense, is really something that must be inclusive of those that it stands between, so that it does not stand apart from that which defines it, but rather those that define it stand together as a functioning unit of between. I don't mean this in the sense of traditional Asian cultures, because there are other flaws with the model there. Though between is inclusive it it functions to define those who define it, rather than just letting them define the between that is between them. As such, it may be an odd quasi-circumstance where between is both inclusive and exclusive, or is claimed as inclusive but functions as exclusive.
And I have no idea of where I am going with that, it is the just the germ of an idea.
Being a book reviewer is beginning to convince me that the publishing industry might be a better place if more academics picked the perish option instead. Can one get tenure for picking the perish option? Maybe schools should give it some thought. Especially those with publishing units.
Think of it as akin to the government paying farmers to leave fields fallow to help prop up the value of agricultural produce. Rewarding faculty for not publishing (just teaching) in order to prop up the value of academic produce, or at least that portion of it that is in print. Particularly because academic produce has a very long shelf life and people are really still working on digesting products that were marketed a century or more ago.
If we don't take such a drastic action, are we at risk of a knowledge bubble collapse? We may already be approaching that point. Certainly, people are throwing new academic produce out there faster than it can be digested by anyone, thus limiting it to smaller and smaller targeted markets. The problem with targeting these small markets is that academic produce, as with all produce, is unhealthy if one consumes too much of one type, instead of consuming a balanced diet of knowledge. This means that the glut of specialized knowledge contributes less and less to the overall health of the knowledge economy and its consumers.
The true international language of the world!
Well ... you'll just have to click it to find out.
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