Multilitteratus Incognitus

Here's a little comic relief Dilbert

Well OK, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit, but it's quite interesting. I thought that for the last post of May it would make sense to close the month with something linguistics related given that this semester was all linguistics all the time :-) I was reading this article on Slate called There's No Klingon Word for Hello . I honestly didn't expect it to be so interesting! For instance I did not know that Klingon was a completely developed language, grammar an all! The following really surpised me: But Klingon uses prefixes rather than suffixes, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most romance languages, it has 29. There are so many because they indicate not only the person and number of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (whom it is being done to). Klingon has 36 verb suffixes and 26 noun suffixes that express everything from negation to causality to possession to how willing a speaker is to vouch for the accuracy of what he says. By piling ...

I read this over at Wired a few weeks ago - that culture may be encoded in DNA . Knowledge is passed down directly from generation to generation in the animal kingdom as parents teach their children the things they will need to survive. But a new study has found that, even when the chain is broken, nature sometimes finds a way. I suppose what your definition of culture is. I guess that in this instant culture is likened to Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device , and it's not culture as we tend to think of culture as an interconnection between place, people, practices, communities, concepts and things. I would say that the ability to produce what we would define as culture may be a genetic trait, but culture in and of itself is not in DNA. If it were we could take an adopted child from the US, move them to some remote Himalayan mountain, and that child will have the culture of his American parents. This is obviously a looney idea, however the idea that the child will pick up the...

I know, I know, this is a few weeks late - but better late than never :-) In any case, I was reading this Op-Ed piece on the New York Times. The thesis of this op-ed piece is that: Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost I was going to write a long post about the article and the comments I read, however there are about 500 comments (as I write this blog post) and I don't want to write ad nauseum about the subject (my evernote note about this topic is quite long LOL). So in lieu of an extra long post I will respond to some of Taylor's (op-ed writer) main points. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum ...

Since my other blog is out of commission for maintenance and Web 2.0 is the "it" thing for education now-a-days, here's a little Friday humor for all of you - Twitter in real life. I wonder what this guy would sound like if he were a professor... See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor .

I don't rant often...or rather I hope I don't rant often, however I think this will be a a ranting post. I was reading Jane's e-learning blog , specifically a post on how the future of e-learning is social . ALL learning is social, at least all the learning had in a school, with an instructor and other students in the room. Recently I keep hearing about Web 2.0 and social learning and it amazes me to no end that social learning is the new cool thing and that is the future of learning. Social Learning is new now just like bell-bottoms and ripped jeans are new now - i.e. they are not new people! Just because YOU did not know about it doesn't mean it did not exist prior to you thinking about it. New technology is just allowing us to expand out social reach outside of the space/time constraint of meeting in class. Now I have to say this, this is not a critique of Jane. I found her presentation quite interesting and useful. The critique is directed toward those individuals ...

For a few weeks now I've been using a piece of Web 2.0 software called Prezi. I read this blog post named Throw Away your PowerPoints, Simply Use Prezi , and I knew that I had to try it. To be honest, I really didn't read the blog entry carefully because now that I have used Prezi for a few weeks I know what this means. Ignatia (blog author) says: Prezi enables anyone to quickly build a multimedia rich presentation/visual/mindmap... that offers all the flash dynamics you can wish for. and she quickly follows it up with: This is not a software for the meek and weary, it is for those of us who like to jump, run, dive and stand out in a crowd. These two sentences are actually contradictory to one another! Prezi is NOT fast, and it does not enable Everyone to create multimedia rich presentations. Well, OK. Perhaps I am a bit harsh on Prezi. It does allow everyone to create something in that the software is free (unlike Microsoft's PowerPoint or Apple's Keynote ). Howe...

Anytime a bozo takes the stage and proclaims something radical it seems to stir up the educational community. In similar vain an article circulated the interwebs a few weeks ago about David Wiley who is getting a ton of publicity over his comments that College will be obsolete by 2020 . I suppose in David's case bad press is good press.... In any case his idea that colleges will be obsolete by 2020 revolve around the idea that technology such as podcasts, videos on services like you tube, e-Learning and m-Learning, communities of practice and freely available content will replace how people gain knowledge. Don't get me wrong. I love technology and all that it can do to help in education, but let's be serious, we won't be replacing colleges with downloadable podcasts any time soon. The reason you go to college is not just to get an information dump. If that were the case colleges would have close down ages ago because people would be going to free public libraries for ...

Or...rather...50 years of bad grammar advice! I was reading this article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed a few weeks back and I didn't get an opportunity to fully savor it, so I re-read it. As a typical American undergraduate student Strunk and White was a required book, a style manual that we had to abide by. I remember really disliking my English 101 and 102 classes, but I don't remember why. Perhaps Strunk and White was one of the reasons - I have completely blocked the experience from memory it seems :-) In any case, the article was QUITE interesting and I recommend that you read it, even if you are not that much into writing or grammar or linguistics.

This is it! Today is the day! Spring classes are over. The papers have been written. They've been proof-read and edited many, many, many times, and the projects have been completed. The papers will be handed in today! I suppose that there is that issue of that one final exam that I have to do for next week, but eh...I'll celebrate today :-)

I was reading this opinion piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education on Careers. The author reports back on a forum discussion where people talk about your first job influencing your career. Essentially should you go get a teaching job right after you get your PhD, or should you publish your heart out and try to get to that R1 institution where fame and fortune lies (or so they say). I quite honestly don't get where this vitriol is coming from. Why is it that teaching faculty get little respect. If you want a 5/5 course load, why shouldn't you be judged on your teaching ability? Why are we hearing all this whining about getting a 3/3 course load and time for research and if you go teach at a community college you're not as good as someone in an R1 (research) institution. People go to college to learn. They attend college for educational purposes (well that and Frat parties if you are going to one of the party school teeheehee), so why isn't there an expectation that...

I was reading a post the other day called Who owns information . It's been quite a few years since my Knowledge Management class, but I think I've read the article that Jane is referring to. I think the question here is not Who owns the information , but rather Why do you share information. In my knowledge management class we went through different ideas a tactics to use to get employees who have a wealth of knowledge in certain areas to write KB (knowledge base) articles so that employees who are not in the know can access this KB and tap into the knowledge that these people have. If you are part of an institution trying to get your members to engage in a community of practice your job is cut out for you. One of the ways to encourage employees contribute is to create a happy and positive environment in which the employees feel like sharing. If the environment is negative employees will most likely not share what they know because it gives them power. The trick here is to def...

I was reading this blog post on Donald Clark's blog on the subject of twitter followers. Luckily the incidents that he describes are not happening to me with as much frequency - because my tweets are private. I follow about 50 people, and 40 people follow me. The people I follow I want to follow , and the people that follow me are people that I think are interesting and I would like to interact with. Of course, I come across some twitter accounts who follow a boat load of people and when I look at their tweets, they are all blog post announcements. Quite honestly if your tweets don't interest me, I am not going to allow you to follow me. There seems to be a rat race on twitter to get the most followers. To me, content is what matters. If I would like to follow you (even if I can't because I am inundated with tons of new info) - you can follow me. I don't care how many people read my tweets (after all they are private), but I do care to read what interesting people are...

The title of this blog post should be read with the same annunciation as the ' iron and sulfur ' skit in Strindberg and helium. I need to find a way to incorporate Utterli into the blog. Anyway, I digress. I saw this follow up PhD comic strip and it reminded me very much about how I go about writing papers. First I go to TextEdit and I outline my sections. Then I got into word and I create styles for the headings, subheadings, and body for the text. I add in some Lorem Ipsum text to act as placeholder for what I will write. Then copy...and paste. Copy! and Paste...so that the dummy text + dummy headings are as many as the sections as I have to write. Then I add a bibliography section plus a cover page + table of contents for good measure. Once I am done I have a complete skeleton for my paper. Too bad that Lorem Ipsum text won't suffice for the paper heh :-) This method helps me focus when writing long papers. What kind of a writer are you?

I was reading this article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed recently. The article is about teaching customer service as a science . Please forgive my naiveté but calling something a science does not make it so! While there are some scientific elements - what is referred to as social science - such as sociology and psychology, trying to make a whole degree program out of customer service is just plain silly. Customer service is common sense. In addition, why is this field completely separate from management studies in general? Shouldn't managers know what good customer service is and practice it? The article was a it short (news reporting), but the comments were quite interesting (as they usually are). I got a chuckle out of this comment: Interesting when manners, etiquette, common sense, and decency are items that may be turned into a “degree program.” ConSc 201 – Anatomy of a Smile. ConSc 204 – History of “Thank You.” ConSci 215 – Pricing Strategies for Lost Customers ConSc 225 –...