"Paul Dourish of the University of California, Irvine discusses how does the design of physical spaces, virtual experiences, and legal codes form the experience of the public and the private. Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center moderates.

The Hyperpublic symposium brings together computer scientists, ethnographers, architects, historians, artists and legal scholars to discuss how design influences privacy and public space, how it shapes and is shaped by human behavior and experience, and how it can cultivate norms such as tolerance and diversity."

"Trust us, you don't need a lot of tools—you just need the right tools. If you have these 16 in your home shop, you'll be able to fix anything."

"In response to the increasing failure to successfully instruct through traditional conferences and learning environments, this comprehensive resource offers the first examination of, and guide to, the “unconference” movement. Dissecting the impact of internet “mob rule” on continuing education and training, this book shows how a new breed of digital solutions—including camps, “unconferences,” and peer learning strategies—successfully put the power of knowledge in the hands of learners. In addition to providing a step-by-step approach to planning and leading a successful camp or “unconference,” numerous case studies are presented, as well as interviews and examples of emerging education and training models for organizations, businesses, and community groups of all sizes."

[See also: http://www.worldcat.org/title/mob-rule-learning-camps-unconferences-and-trashing-the-talking-head/oclc/726821067 ]

"Celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom turns 82 this year…is still publishing & teaching. In his honor, I’ve compiled a list of 6 things he’s outlived.

1) The Western canon.

[long quote]

2) American education.

“American education—even in elite unis—has become a scandal, in my opinion. It has committed suicide.” —TheBrowser.com interview, 2011

3) Art.

[On slam poetry] “It is the death of art.” —Paris Review interview, 2000

4) The mind.

[On Yale graduates flocking to business careers] “Alas, this is the death of the mind.” —Yale Daily News interview, 2011

5) Rock & roll.

“There hasn’t been any good American rock since, alas, The Band disbanded.” —Paris Review interview, 1991

6) The death of the author.

“It was fashionable, quite recently, to talk about ‘the death of the author,’ but this too has become rubbish. The dead genius is more alive than we are.” —Genius: A Mosaic of 100 Exemplary Creative Minds, 2002"

[via: http://thatcamp.org/02/10/the-unconference-is-alive/ ]

"You'd think that unconference are so passé. You'd be wrong. After attending close to 70 events each & every year, the handful that stick out in my mind are the more intimate unconferences that I have taken an active part in. An unconference creates an egalitarian moment in time where people from all walks of life (& all levels within an organization) can simply share, learn, communicate & grow. To run a conference & call it an unconference is a disservice to the unconference movement. Many people don't understand this because an unconference looks & acts nothing like their traditional definition of a conference (hence the name ;). It saddens me to see how many people start w/ the right spirit of an unconference but quickly get stuck in all of the trappings of what they think will create a great event (& this—unfortunately—looks a lot like a traditional conference).

If you've never taken part in an unconference, I would encourage you to look into it... or better yet…start your own."

"the term “unconference” is sometimes used in cases where it’s hard to see what’s so “un” about the conference. I specifically remember deciding not to tweet the otherwise intriguing-sounding “Indigenous Innovation Unconference” when I saw how much they were emphasizing their six eminent speakers and how little they were emphasizing any kind of participant-driven program. Similarly, plenty of events that call themselves unconferences seem to have whole slews of presentations, which strikes me as odd."

"The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation of a Git-like system from the ground up. Understanding the concepts presented here will be the most valuable thing you can do to prepare yourself to harness the full power of Git. The concepts themselves are quite simple, but allow for an amazing wealth of functionality to spring into existence. Read this parable all the way through and you should have very little trouble mastering the various Git commands and wielding the awesome power that Git makes available to you."

"This is the Git reference site. This is meant to be a quick reference for learning and remembering the most important and commonly used Git commands. The commands are organized into sections of the type of operation you may be trying to do, and will present the common options and commands needed to accomplish these common tasks.

Each section will link to the next section, so it can be used as a tutorial. Every page will also link to more in-depth Git documentation such as the offical manual pages and relevant sections in the Pro Git book, so you can learn more about any of the commands. First, we'll start with thinking about source code management like Git does."

[an interactive film about grizzly bears from the National Film Board of Canada]

"It's hard to say where the wild world ends and the wild one begins."

"The forest has its own language."

"If you look backward from any single point in time, everything seems to lead up to that moment."

"They'll have to learn *not* to do what comes naturally, and I wonder. Maybe the lesson is too hard."

"I have often thought that the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories “misconceptions” from the outset, instead of only after we have discovered their successors. Thus we could say that Einstein’s Misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton’s Misconception, which was an improvement on Kepler’s. The neo-Darwinian Misconception of Evolution is an improvement on Darwin’s Misconception, and his on Lamarck’s… Science claims neither infallibility nor finality."

David Deutsch…in The Beginning of Infinity…demonstrates that although we will, barring extinction, continue to refine & improve our knowledge infinitely, we will also never stop being able to improve it. Thus we will always live w/ fallible scientific understanding (& fallible moral theories, fallible aesthetic ideas, fallible philosophical notions, etc.); it is the nature of the relationship between knowledge, mind, & universe.

But it remains odd to say: everything I know is a misconception."

"Texts is a new kind of editor for creation of text structure and content. Books, articles and blog posts written once in Texts can be processed and published in many formats"

"Sonified translates what your video camera sees into sound in real time. Record onto QuickTime movies. The sonifying video camera for the iPhone and iPad."

[via: http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2012/02/06/inside-the-mind-of-a-synaesthete/ ]

"The modern age of landscape is an age where social interactions, markets, and developments are routinely channeled by institutions invisible to the ordinary individual. State infrastructure and capital have made immense and irreversible the effects of building, in the form of corridors, monuments and waste, channeling everyday paths and interactions in new space. In the era of modern building, the secrets of landscape are constantly hidden in plain sight.

To learn to see the landscape, western writers first had to learn to describe it. Unlike studies of rhetoric, which stretch back through the classical tradition, structural studies of the phenomenology, politics, and psychology of landscape only matured in the nineteenth century, in the era when state intervention began to physically reshape the shape of trade, agriculture, and the city at an unprecedented scale. Psychologists like Georg Simmel and cultural critics like Walter Benjamin imported the science of rhetoric and the…"

"sometimes it’s hard to see past one’s ideological blinders, to say nothing of one’s own ego and ambition."

"otsukaresama deshita, which is the customary way of thanking Japanese colleagues for a collective effort; ironically enough, I hated having these compulsory and merely performative-feeling ritual greetings expected of me when I actually lived and worked in Japan, but have come to miss having a handy figure of speech to acknowledge consciousness of the debt one owes to one’s coworkers and their diligence"

In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite…Stuntz startlingly suggests…Bill of Rights is a terrible document w/ which to start justice system—much inferior to…French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson…may have helped shape while…Madison was writing ours.

…trouble w/…Bill of Rights…is that it emphasizes process & procedure rather than principles…Declaration of Rights of Man says, Be just!…Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason…can’t accuse him w/out allowing him to see evidence…& so on… has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors & no protection at all against outrageous & obvious violations of simple justice."

"I am reading about the work of the late William J. Stuntz, a law professor at Harvard, who wrote about the criminal justice system, in The Caging of America (recommended!) and Stuntz looks for the reasons why we arrived at this impasse, finding it, ultimately, in the Constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights. And I was hard struck by how right he was in what was wrong. The problem, as he sees it, is that the Bill of Rights is about process and procedure, rather than principles. Compare, he says, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen with our Bill of Rights — Bills 4-8 establish our judicial system, and are how we end up with more black men in prison than were slaves in 1850, and more than six million people under “correctional supervision”. Gopnik writes:

[citation]

I’d always been uneasy with Constitution-worship, particularly uneasy about the Bill of Rights, and certainly the justice system, but didn’t have the least idea why. This is why."

"Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it…

There’s some fundamental good in eating honestly, I think. Of knowing where your food comes from—raising it yourself, when you can—and trying to eat foods that could theoretically have existed a century ago. But you can’t take that but so far, or else the whole thing breaks down. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”"

"As an alternative to the idea that we teach “subjects,” I’ve been playing with the idea that what we really teach are “subjectivities”: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be “taught” – only practiced. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one’s self-esteem.” You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self…

So here’s my question to everybody: Within your own particular field, is there a particular “subjectivity,” perspective, or way of seeing and interacting with the world that you are trying to inspire in your students? In your mind, is this perspective more important than the “content” or “subject-matter” of the course?"

[via: http://bettyann.tumblr.com/post/17206962390 ]

""Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces," Schmidt says. "I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind.""

"…perhaps most importantly, [this revolution] is driven by what one might call a “rethinking the basics” movement, in which educators everywhere cannot help but see a disconnect between their traditional modes of teaching and the world in which we all now live.

As Dewey noted, the goal is not to counter traditional education and its strict organization with its perceived opposite (disorganization)—but instead to create what Web designers today might call an “architecture for participation.” The learning environments we need may be more fluid, adaptable, collaborative, and participatory, but they are not unstructured and unorganized. As Maurice Friedman noted while explaining Martin Buber’s educational philosophy, “The opposite of compulsion is not freedom but communion…” (1955). [Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, by Maurice S. Friedman, 1955]"

"A Ship Adrift takes the data from that weather station and applies it to an imaginary airship piloted by a lost, mad AI autopilot…

If the wind whips eastwards across the roof of the Southbank centre at 5mph, then the Ship Adrift floats five miles to the East. See the sharp tack the Ship made on the night of the 27th / 28th January? That’s the weather turning; the next day, we froze in London; a few days later, snow…

As the Ship drifts, it looks around itself. It doesn’t know where it is, but it is listening. It’s listening out for tweets and foursquare check-ins and posts on dating sites and geotagged Wikipedia articles and it is remembering them and it is trying to make something out of them. It is trying to understand.

The ship is lost, and I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know what it’s going to learn, but I want to work with it to tell some stories. I want to build a system for cooperating with software and chance. There is no what or why or where or when…"

"Economic insecurity has rendered our social life brutally simple: 'us-against-them' coupled with 'you-are-on-your-own'. But the French essayist can inspire radical new forms of co-operation"

"In my last post, I wrote about the value of Assessment for Learning as an approach to supporting and engaging students. Whenever we talk about Assessment for Learning, we must also address its key element — timely, effective, and meaningful feedback…

Corrections, like the ones in the image above, never focus on things that a student performed well. They zero in on what went wrong. They are also very definitive and authoritarian. They show weaknesses in student work, they point out mistakes and errors.

Feedback, on the other hand, is about supporting the student in the process of moving toward the goal and closing that gap between where she is now and where she needs to be. As teachers, we must help our students answer three questions:

1. Where am I going?

2. How am I doing?

3. What actions do I need to take next?

In other words, effective feedback focuses on goals, progress, and next steps."

"Last semester some students joined me for an interview with Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com to discuss how our class works. You can see the full webinar here: http://nmc.adobeconnect.com/p21022812/ "

"The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level.
The aim of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) is to study the brain's architectural and functional principles. The project is headed by the Institute's director, Henry Markram. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons.[1][2][not in citation given] It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness.[citation needed]

There are a number of sub-projects, including the Cajal Blue Brain, coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories in the UK, US, and Israel."

"The flipback is a new kind of book, which opens top to bottom and has sideways-printed text, so you get a full length novel in little more than the size of a smartphone. This September, six new bestselling titles are to be given the flipback treatment - What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt, Bad Men by John Connolly, Little Face by Sophie Hannah, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver and Brethren by Robin Young. See the complete list to find out more."

[See also http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarsligger_(boek) (via @litherland) AND http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/20/could-this-kill-kindle )

"Over the course of the next 40 years, Gandhi and his movement were regularly denounced in the media, just as non-violent anarchists are also always denounced in the media (and I might remark here that while not an anarchist himself, Gandhi was strongly influenced by anarchists like Kropotkin and Tolstoy), as a mere front for more violent, terroristic elements, with whom he was said to be secretly collaborating. He was regularly challenged to prove his non-violent credentials by assisting the authorities in suppressing such elements. Here Gandhi remained resolute. It is always morally superior, he insisted, to oppose injustice through non-violent means than through violent means. However, to oppose injustice through violent means is still morally superior to not doing anything to oppose injustice at all.

And Gandhi was talking about people who were blowing up trains, or assassinating government officials. Not damaging windows or spray-painting rude things about the police."

"The MFA program in Art Criticism & Writing is one of the only graduate writing programs in the world that focuses specifically on criticism. This program is not involved in “discourse production” or the prevarications of curatorial rhetoric, but rather in the practice of criticism writ large, aspiring to literature."

"Content tagged with "dance""

"Like much of what is called “overparenting,” praise doesn’t signify permissiveness or excessive encouragement; to the contrary, it is an exercise in (sugar-coated) control. It is an extension of the old-school model of families, schools, and workplaces — yet, remarkably, most of the criticisms of praise you’re likely to read assume that it’s a departure from the old school, and that that’s a bad thing.

Praise is typically faulted for being given out too readily (see point #2, above), with the bar having been set too low. We’re told that kids should do more to deserve each “Good job!” they get — which is a way of saying it should be more conditional. Again, this is exactly the opposite of my objection to the conditionality inherent in rewards. The problem isn’t that kids expect praise for everything they do. The problem is with our need for control, our penchant for placing conditions on our love, and our continued reliance on the long-discredited premises of behaviorism."

"Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs."

""We modeled it after our ideal teaching environment," Pitaru says about the genesis, "which means we only take as many students as can fit around our kitchen table (a maximum of five, because the small number is ideal for group-thinking). The seating arrangement is important, as we all get to talk and look at each other rather than face a big projection on a wall."…

Participants are FIFO or first-come-first-serve. As for instructors "We love having guest instructors mainly because it allows us to become students and learn something new," Pitaru says…

Pitaru was recently contacted by someone who wants to open a Kitchen-Table-Coders in London. "Trademarking doesn't worry me," he says. "I'll be flattered if due to our efforts, more kitchen tables are used for learning code, and happy to help anyone who wishes to do so.""

"My son reminded them that it was not so long ago when teachers and politicians in America were told that Japanese schools were the future. Why can’t we do as they do, we were asked? Before that it was Russian schools. And since then it’s been Singapore and now Finland. We were told Japanese children were obedient and hard working, although listening to the teacher talk last week it was clear that they were having virtually all the same problems we were and moving in the same direction we are. They found our description of Japanese education amusing.

There is a lot of educational turmoil there as here, as two “factions” battle for the future: those wanting a more rigid, centralized, exam-driven top-down approach and those who believe the Japanese have to move in a progressive direction if they are to become innovators as well as followers—economically and politically."

"To say “tread carefully” and “proceed with care” after three decades of steel-toed boots stomping of public schools, not to mention, the transfer of an audit culture soaked in high tech from the corporate sector to national educational policy is, well, almost funny. It is, at the least,  a disappointing end to  such a clear laying out of the assumptions embedded in the reigning “tough love” reform ideology in which Mike Petrilli has been a card-carrying member."

"Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites."

"Librivox recording of Walden by Henry David Thoreau Read by Gord Mackenzie."

"In too many classrooms, work is assigned, handed in, receives a grade … and any opportunity to engage students in thinking about and learning from their work is lost. In a classroom devoted to meaningful, timely, and effective feedback, and to assessment *for* learning, not mere assessment of learning, we engage students in conversations that provide them with the support and guidance they need to be successful. These conversations and the feedback we give also provide us — the teachers — with valuable information on how well we’re reaching and supporting the learners in our classrooms. And yet, in many classrooms around the world, assessment for learning is just not present, which begs an important question: what’s stopping us from providing this kind of ongoing and meaningful support to our students? Why is it so challenging to implement?"

"Within an outcomes based educational system built on the principles of redress, social justice, multilingualism and multiculturalism, issues of equity in teaching, learning and assessment are increasingly on South Africa's educational agenda…

Through a case study discussion of a multimodal project with disaffected Soweto youth, the authors argue that new criteria for assessment need to be developed in order to address the complexity of thinking about communication as a multiple semiotic practice and students as designers of meaning. Such criteria place human agency and resourcefulness at the centre of meaning-making, and focus on the recruitment of resources, generativity across modes, linkages and connections across modes and genres, voicing of self, community and culture, the processes of making and reflectiveness, as well as taking account of the 'community of arbiters'."

[via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/teachandlearn/6842871555/ ]

“What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsible, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside.” ― Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

[Also here with Louis CK photo: http://lukescommonplacebook.tumblr.com/post/17291552677/slaughterhouse90210-what-it-means-to-be-human ]

"If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction—doesn't matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps. Lots and lots of maps. This predilection probably sprang from the books I read as a kid—books like The Phantom Tollbooth, The Hobbit and The Princesss Bride—all of which feature engaging maps that serve as gateways to imaginary lands. Here, say these maps, you're in this other world now."

[via: http://lukescommonplacebook.tumblr.com/post/17291470354/if-i-ruled-the-world-or-at-least-a-publishing ]

[Related: http://www.austinkleon.com/tag/michael-chabon/ and http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jul/16/manhood-for-amateurs-the-wilderness-of-childhood/ and http://www.avclub.com/articles/michael-chabon,14122/ ]

“When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, when I was 10, 11 years old, the books that I loved…came with maps and glossaries and timelines—books like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I imagined that’s what being a writer was: You invented a world, and you did it in a very detailed way, and you told stories that were set in that world.”
—Michael Chabon…

My undergrad thesis argued that world-building wasn’t just for fantasy & sci-fi writers—every tale has a setting, every tale creates a world in the reader’s mind—& it explored ways that drawing that world (visual thinking!) can lead to better fiction.

Some of my favorite “lit’ry” books are accompanied by maps.

[examples]

Some writers use previously-made maps to help create their fiction: Melville used whaling charts, Joyce used Ordnance surveys of Dublin, & Pynchon used aerial maps.

Poking around the ‘net I found maps for Faulkner’s books, Treasure Island, and of course, Tolkien…"

[See also the comments.]

"One of the most annoying & pervasive myths pundits like to spout today is that living in cities is, de facto, greener.

All things is being equal, yes, it would be.

It disturbs me, however, that these same pundits spend jet around the globe much of the year, bragging about how many miles they've logged.

Check out Getting There Green, a fascinating report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that I came across in our research for rebuilding the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It turns out that plane travel is much, much worse for the environment. Try it out for yourself at the Terrapass Carbon Footprint Calculator. Alas, that calculator doesn't include first class travel, which pundits prefer, but if we can assume that one first class trip is equal to two coach trips (it may be worse than this), all it takes is 2 first class trips from NY to Europe to equal a year of carbon output from an SUV. 

Is there a surprise in Getting There Green? Yes, the bus is the greenest mode of travel."

"CITIES Foundation, based in Amsterdam and with partners across Europe, aims to catalyse urban explorers with the will to drive innovation in city life, policy and practice. CITIES and its community connects and shares, in person and online, through research initiatives, events, workshops, exhibitions and publications.

CITIES initiates change through its active research themes, and provides a platform for discussion and debate about global ideas and local impacts. Many aspects of urbanism and urban living have, as yet, no fundamental theories, knowledge base, principled methods nor tools to guide their development. CITIES research themes are developing new areas of urban exploration and activity."

"About two months ago, The Millions joined the Tumblr community. So far, the going has been great. The platform is perfectly suited for dynamic storytelling, and as a direct result, it is home to some of the friendliest book lovers around. However, the site’s SEO (or lack thereof) is regrettably unkind to Tumblr outsiders, and this leads to two things. On the one hand, the insularity stokes the kind of kinship that makes its community so tightknit. On the other, the lack of easy searching reduces each blog’s chance of attracting new (or outside) viewers. I’d like to change that. By creating this list of my favorite “literary Tumblrs,” I hope to turn you on to some of the sites that make The Millions’ dashboard that much brighter."

"There's no place like home. It's where we live, work and dream. It's our sanctuary and our refuge. We can love them or hate them. It can be just for the night or for the rest of our lives. But whoever we may be, we all have a place we call home.

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE is a series of short films that explore the idea of home; what makes them, how they represent us, why we need them.

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE is produced and directed by Ben Wu and David Usui, of Lost & Found Films."

"Deleuzecinema.com facilitates international networking and collaboration amongst people interested in Gilles Deleuze and cinema. The site contains a database of people and resources related to Deleuze and cinema (including TV, new media and visual culture). It enables discussion of topics of interest to its members, and disseminates announcements and news items.

The site is open access and its content available to everyone. Registered users can contribute content, build a profile for themselves, enter discussion, or post news items. We welcome participation from people all over the world in any language."

"I'm making some big shifts in my work in the coming months (read: focusing my energies rather than what's become the scattershot of freelance writing). I'm thrilled to say that this will mean more time for Hack Education, thanks in no small part to a research and writing project I'll be undertaking for Mozilla.

It's part of the organization's larger learning and literacy efforts, and my piece will involve researching practices and pedagogies and interviewing teachers, learners, technologists about tools for teaching programming for the Web. Specifically (or rather, conceptually), I'm asking the question: Do we need a "'Scratch' for HTML5?" All my findings and conversations will be written up here on this blog."

"Are you a print designer, photographer, fine-artist, or general creative person? Do you have a shitty website that you slapped together yourself in Dreamweaver in that ONE web design class that you took in college? Do you not have a site at all because you’ve been waiting two years for your cousin to put it together for you? Well, we’re here to help. We know that you have little to no desire to do web design professionally, but that doesn’t mean that you want an ugly cookie-cutter site or to settle for one that hasn't been updated since Hackers was in theaters. Through short tutorial videos, you’ll learn how to take a basic wordpress blog and manipulate the css, html (and even some php!) to match your aesthetic. You’ll feel empowered rather than crippled by the internet and worst case scenario you’ll at least end up having a better idea of how professional web designers turn your design dreams into a reality on screen."

"Information is ineffectual; news of all sorts is noise. Focus, attention, discretion: these are radical."

"The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. Anthropologist and writer David Graeber asks, "How did this happen?" One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic ones. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all. Presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department."

"What makes this story even more poignant is its setting: at sibling colleges founded by monasteries, where self-sufficiency and sustainability were once a central ethic, as outlined in the Rule of St. Benedict. The Benedictine women and men here, along with many of the older alumni, can still remember when they milked cows, plucked chickens, and picked potatoes grown on the monasteries' surrounding land. Bread, furniture, preserved food, ceramics, and other daily necessities were produced by monks, sisters, and students on the campuses. While some remnants of that life still exist, much of it is gone."

"Toohey differentiates between two types of boredom. The first he calls simple boredom, brought on by dull, inescapable situations or by an overexposure to something. Momentary tedium, we might say. He links this sort of boredom with disgust: “Boredom is a social emotion of mild disgust produced by a temporarily unavoidable and predictable circumstance.” This is the boredom that Steve Jobs was referring to, and this is the boredom that primarily interests Toohey. Simple boredom “has a direct bearing on our ordinary emotional lives, keeping company (as I hope to show), with depression and anger while protecting us from their ravages.” Boredom is a warning system, keeping us from tedious, potentially damaging situations by spurring us to resituate ourselves."

"We make mass transit simple. Embark provides an accurate, reliable, and interactive transit experience that helps you get where you want to go."

"This simple piece provides the capacity for speaker or presenter to to participate in the backchannel of a talk or conference session by integrating live 'tweets' into an Apple Keynote presentation. Simply add text inside the tags [twitter] and [/twitter] in the presenter notes section of a slide and when that slide comes up in the presentation the script will grab that text and send it to Twitter on your behalf."

"I like what Kelli Anderson says about her work. For every project, she figures out everything that she hates about the conventional approaches, and proceeds to rage and spit at them, and then tries to channel all of that energy into a different approach. This is how many of her projects turn out to be fantastical.

I see a similar rhythm in the way I like to work. Build up a set of frustrations, in public or in private, and then use them as fuel to light a path forward."

"One of the great assets of the digital, and what it encourages and enables is multiple voices entering into a dialogue and creating new knowledge out of conversation and discussion."

"I was lucky enough to be taught by some of the greatest international authorities yet it was never assumed that their voice in the conversation was necessarily more important than mine. Far more important than who was talking was the quality of thought expressed and the nature of knowledge that emerged from the dialogue, and I think that's quite right."

"DH is…a collaborative field. We have to learn to work together and understand the different languages that are spoken by different partners in the dialogue: geeks, humanities scholars, information professionals, technical support people & indeed the public. In that sense, therefore, the voice of the DH scholar is of use as an interpreter between different languages & cultures. But interpreters cannot, but the nature of their job, exist in isolation."

What if we could change our view of the world with the flick of a switch? 'Song of the Machine' explores the possibilities of a new, modified – even enhanced – vision, where users can tune into streams of information and electromagnetic vistas currently outside of human vision.

This film is a part of an ongoing collaboration between Superflux and neuroscientist Dr. Patrick Degenaar, whose pioneering work in optogenetic retinal prostheses aims to bring back sight to the blind.

Unlike the implants and electrodes used to achieve bionic vision, this science modifies the human body genetically from within. First, a virus is used to infect the degenerate eye with a light-sensitive protein, altering the biological capabilities of the subject…"

[More: http://superflux.in/blog/song-of-the-machine-in-depth AND http://www.sciencegallery.com/humanplus/song-machine ]

"An extended [Twitter] discussion on the nature of wonder" compiled and brought to you by Allen Tan.

"Recent Chelsea College of Art & Design graduate Dan Cottrell has created a guide for the sole aim of getting lost. Pyschogeography is nothing new, but AWOL provides a beautifully simple design approach to the subject.

AWOL comes as a pack, consisting of a compass that doesn’t work, a simple poster and and a map that feature algorithmic walks, which always lovingly return you to your departure point – ensuring you can explore your surroundings worry-free."

"All of these examples are both measured and moving in equal parts.  One is from the world of entertainment, another from academia and serious research, and the last from commercial foresight and corporate communications.  And yet they they all have meaning and breadth far beyond their topic.  Like Zizek said of Children of Men, their power is in their background detail. They address, even if just in passing, a wide range of other issues that reflect a rich investment in thinking about how the complex, messy future might be."

"The bad news is that state funding for California libraries has been completely eliminated. There’s not really any good news about that except that it was expected. This past July, state library funding was sliced in half, and there was a trigger amendment attached to the budget that would eliminate state funding for public libraries at midyear if the state's revenue projections were not met. Needless to say, they weren’t."

"The Principle of Hope is one of the great works of the human spirit. It is a critical history of the utopian vision and a profound exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world."

"The "L Train Notwork," a digital experiment/stunt/art project from the creative agency WeMakeCoolSh.it, launched on NYC subways Monday, allowing commuters to chat and flirt via their devices. Have they invented a whole new marketing channel?"

"The “Notwork” had two main components: a selection of visual and literary content curated by WeMakeCoolSh.it and their friends--poems and drawings by local writers and artists, for example, as well as a few newsfeeds refreshed daily--plus a decidedly old-school chatroom that was called “Missed Connections.” The whole experience is closed-circuit and site-specific, something more like a local area network than the Internet proper. If the World Wide Web is a Borgesian, universal library, then the L Train Notwork is an intimate art gallery. “We’ve been calling it social art,” McGregor-Mento said."

[See also: http://wemakecoolsh.it/ ]

"Demilit Central Command Follow Defenses" (Lines on the ground)

"Once you start looking, you'll notice Main Streets are everywhere and tell all kinds of stories. There's a Main Street in San Luis, Arizona that dead-ends right into the Mexican border. The Main Street in Melvindale, Michigan runs through a trailer park in the shadows of Ford's River Rouge plant, once the largest factory in the world. Main Street is small town and urban center; it is the thriving business district and the prostitution stroll; it is the places where we live, the places where we work, and sometimes, it is the places we have abandoned.

Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States. We invite you to capture the stories and images of the country today. Go out, look around, talk to people, and contribute to this re-mapping of the United States."

"An anarchistic free school (also anarchist free school and free skool) is a decentralized network in which skills, information, and knowledge are shared without hierarchy or the institutional environment of formal schooling. Free school students may be adults, children, or both. This organisational structure is distinct from ones used by democratic free schools which permit children's individual initiatives and learning endeavors within the context of a school democracy, and from free education where 'traditional' schooling is made available to pupils without charge."

"Jannie Jeppesen, the principal of Vittra Telefonplan writes on the school's website that the design is intended to stimulate "children's curiosity and creativity" and offer them opportunities for both collaborative and independent time. Vittra doesn't award traditional grades, either—students are taught in groups according to level—so maximizing diverse teaching and learning situations is a priority.

The open nature of the campus and the unusual furniture arrangements reflect the school's philosophy that "children play and learn on the basis of their needs, curiosity, and inclination." That's true for kids all over the world, so let's hope educators in other countries begin to pay attention."

[Not sure what the program is, waiting to read more. Previously: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665867/school-without-walls-fosters-a-free-wheeling-theory-of-learning ]

"Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to."

[For me, the most interesting bit comes towards the end (8:57 and on) when Jenkins speaks about teaching, holding workshops, and sharing his technique…]

"The basic casting process is quite simple and I've taught it to like seven-year-olds and up. The learning curve is really low… And I don't even know if it's good, but they see my work and then they see the technique and a lot of people gravitate towards doing something that they've seen on my site, which is usually an outdoor installation.

You always hesitate to try to…teach. People can look at your work and get inspired, but if they look too long they end up creating your own work. And what seems to have work best…longer workshops in Russia…sometimes I've done projects…Getting used to being outdoors and using objects. It's more that they learn a perspective than learn… That seems to be the most valuable thing that they get out of it. Or even just learning a different way to see the city."

"If he went to jail to demonstrate his commitment to freedom of others, he went to the berries to exercise his own recovered freedom, the liberty to do whatever he wished, & the evidence in all his writing is that he very often wished to pick berries. There’s a widespread belief, among both activists & those who cluck disapprovingly over insufficiently austere activists, that idealists should not enjoy any pleasure denied to others, that beauty, sensuality, delight all ought to be stalled behind some dam that only the imagined revolution will break. This schism creates, as the alternative to a life of selfless devotion, a life of flight from engagement, which seems to be one way those years at Walden Pond are sometimes portrayed. But change is not always by revolution, the deprived don’t generally wish that the rest of us would join them in deprivation, & a passion for justice & pleasure in small things are not incompatible. That’s part of what the short jaunt from jail to hill says."

"The song “Shock” from Ana Tijoux‘s new album, La Bala, has become an anthem in Chile.

Protesters there are calling for educational reforms and Tijoux’s song has generated buzz.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks to the Chilean-French singer about the song and the student protests in Chile."

"In any case, what seems more provocative here, on the level of design, would be to appropriate this protective stance and reuse it in the design of future objects, but emphasizing the other end: to allow for the scanning of any object designed or manufactured, but to to insert, in the form of watermarks, small glitches that would only become visible upon reprinting.

We might call these object cancers: bulbous, oddly textured, and other dramatically misshapen errors that only appear in 3D-reprinted objects. Chairs with tumors, mutant silverware, misbegotten watches—as if the offspring of industrial reproducibility is a molten world of Dalí-like surrealism.

Put another way, the inadvertent side-effect of the attempted corporate control over objects would be an artistic potlatch of object errors: object cancers deliberately reprinted, shared, and collected for their monstrous and unexpected originality."

"They raise chickens. They grow vegetables. They knit. Now a new generation of urban parents is even teaching their own kids."

[Lost some respect for Wendy Mogel due to the parts of this article that reference her.]

"And the kids? There’s concern that having parents at one’s side throughout childhood can do more harm than good. Psychologist Wendy Mogel, the author of the bestselling book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, admires the way homeschoolers manage to “give their children a childhood” in an ultracompetitive world. Yet she wonders how kids who spend so much time within a deliberately crafted community will learn to work with people from backgrounds nothing like theirs. She worries, too, about eventual teenage rebellion in families that are so enmeshed."

"To the extent that your heart’s desires are self-focused, you will find yourself in a vicious cycle. You will create stuff to present yourself as cool, hip, and individual. Others will do the same, and since everybody will be trying to make sure they are doing their own thing you will end up with evermore fragmentation, complexity … loss of connection, meaning, empowerment, etc. Feeling such a loss you will redouble your efforts to create your own individual identity => more fragmentation, complexity, etc.

But if you make a slight switch and orient yourself to the world, rather than to the self, a virtuous cycle emerges. The world is suddenly not full of choices with which you identify, but possibilities for play … serious play oriented toward serving the world. Fragmentation looks more like a rich diversity. Complexity becomes a rich symphony in which we all play along."

[Now at: http://mediatedcultures.net/smatterings/maker-bots-and-the-future-of-identity/ ]

"The house was full of books & musical instruments, but not every moment was spent productively. Time was wasted. We wandered around, but also got to specialize at a young age…Some days I'm sure we looked like dirty brats not doing anything, but a lot of times, that's what creativity looks like. We figured out what it was to become a creative adult. Creative people spend a lot of time reading & thinking & going down blind alleys…

I think this educational possibility would be best for all children, but it's not possible. Choosing btwn dropping out of the system completely & a 9-hour compulsory day of classes & homework is such a dichotomy. I long for an intellectual community where it doesn't have to be so one way or the other. There are ethical problems w/ isolating your kids, but I wish public ed wasn't so prisonlike…

Have complete trust in your child. It's actually really hard. A lot of parents micromanage… You don't get to choose what your children are interested in."

"This film reveals that dyslexia is a neurological issue, not a character flaw. It explains that the struggle with the written word is not an indication of one’s ability to think, to create, or to solve problems – all valuable skills in the world outside the classroom. This film also reveals that some of our greatest leaders in Business, Law, Politics and Medicine are dyslexics who succeeded in spite of their learning challenges.

The film also shares some of the more practical - and occasionally humorous - tips on how to deal with dyslexia on a daily basis. Hopefully, this film will help dyslexics and their families realize that the challenges of early education will be behind them one day, and that the future can -and should - be brighter for dyslexics."