Multilitteratus Incognitus

Airport Lounge (looks inviting, yet it's temporary) I'm back, baby! (just picture me as Frank Constanza from Seinfeld 😂) OK, dissertation done(ish)  [just waiting for final approvals], and oral defense passed.  So, I guess I have some more free time to blog, and MOOC [if a MOOC were to become available 😉].  It's been a rather...interesting 18 months.  I've been wanting to work fully remote for years and I got my wish.  I just wish that we didn't need to have a global pandemic as the reason for it.  This fall, we're slated to return to campus, and I am a bit apprehensive. More on that perhaps in future blog posts. For now, I wanted to write some thoughts that came by reading my friend Lance's most recent [unpublished] IHE piece.  You can read the entire piece, titled "Instructional Designers on Campuses" here . There's no doubt that we've learned a lot during this pandemic. How much learning loss  administrators and faculty experience, onc...

Here's an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal about the relationship of language and culture.  If you haven't studies psychology or applied linguistics, it's an interesting thought provoking article to get you primed for further exploration into the topic of language and culture - and if you are not interested in these topics enough to study them further, then it's a nice conversation (or ice breaker) topic for any meetups or cocktail parties that you go to :-)  The author, a university professor, writes that Chomsky's Universals have not withstood scrutiny.  I am only starting to to immerse myself in psycholinguistics so I don't really know much about the subject (other than the primers on Chomsky's Universal Grammar ), but as far as I know, Chomsky keeps refining his hypothesis, so if one version of the hypothesis has some issues, as more knowledge on the subject is gained and as more studies are conducted, we see newer interpretations of t...

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...

This semester I am taking two culture related courses. One is about the overall view of culture and how it intersects with the axes of language, power-relations, race relations, historical relations and so on. The other course is all about how one goes about the task of integrating the culture of a foreign country (or group of people) when you are teaching the language of that country or group. One of the elements that has come up is that each person, and each culture, are in fact shaped by various socio-economic-political-historical (and more) powers that are in effects in the regions where they grew up, where their parents grew up, their friends, families and coworkers. Within this shaping we have the creation of artifacts that are relevant to that culture. Now snap forward to regular life outside the classroom. I was catching up on my reading of the FAIL blog, and I saw this image (you need to follow the link since it may not be appropriate for work). This is a picture of a road si...