Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading the blog posts that were posted yesterday on Change MOOC on the topic of Learning in times of Abundance and it suddenly hit me*, this learning in times of abundance reminds me a lot of the research I did on digital natives (article forthcoming). Yes technology (seems to be) ubiquitous, and so is information, but as   Eric Duval admitted in his intro post: Really big caveat: of course, all of this abundance talk is only relevant to us who are the privileged few, who do not need to worry about where we will sleep this evening, or how we will feed our children… I thought of a few more caveats, one of which I mentioned before, that of literacy. Abundance is almost useless without the literacy to use it...sort of like the old saying: so much sea and yet I am thirsty (OK, I paraphrased a bit right there). The other thing that I was reminded of is actual usage of this abundance.  In a lot of the good digital native research† that I came across looked at f...

A while back I had posted a picture of a road sign (probably also from the failblog ) which showed male genitals and a big giant NO to spanking the monkey. At the time I wondered what exactly could have driven the polish government (or private company for that matter since I don't know if this is a national road sign) to create such a prohibition. Was spanking the monkey while driving such a huge problem that it endangered people on the road? Who does that? Anyway, this week on the failblog, a similar photo of a road sign, this time from Italy. This sign warns motorists that there are prostitutes ahead. Now the road seems straight, which means that you won't be coming around a bend and BAM, vehicular accident because of stopped vehicles of people gawking at prostitutes, or because humans at the side of the road showing off their wares. This brings me back to semiotics. I've never studied the topic, however I would LOVE to take a course in semiotics (perhaps once I gradua...