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 :-)