English Education Professor

Wonderful posts and comments about Alternative Assessment!

One of my favorite writers, Stephen Johnson has a new book, The Invention of Air. I love the energy, clarity, and wit of this model contributor to science.

I really like his “human” take on neuroscience in particular. I’m sure this new book will be great. He’s a hunter of ideas who makes theories come alive.

Johnson uses the life of Priestley to illuminate a theory of history that holds that great people are neither an inevitable product of their times, nor luminous, supernatural geniuses — rather, they are the product of an ecosystem of influences, technologies, climate, and energy (literally — the story of stored energy in coal, saltpetre, and plant-bound carbon are vital to the story). He pulls this off deftly, with a series of insightful, beautifully realized anaecdotes from the life of Priestley and his contemporaries — his allies and his many enemies — that make the idea of history being shaped by webs and networks seem absolutely true. BoingBoing

Beethoven, as it turns out, had a lot of rough drafts.

Nice way to scan the Internets.

Ning seems to have a good start, but SocialGo allows adult content. Not a big sell-point for me.

“They were going to look at war, the red animal–war, the blood-swollen god.” S. Crane – Red Badge of Courage

The Red Room Writers’ community is a weird blend of commercial and noncommercial space…Seems like authors gravitate there. Here is there blurb for reporters.

The Distinction
• While sometimes referred to by its members as “the Red Room,” the Red Room Writers Society
is a business entity wholly separate from the website, redroom.com.
• When writing about the website, it’s appropriate to trace the history of the Red Room Writers
Society as background, but the names of the two entities are not interchangeable.
• The two companies cross-promote and have a licensing agreement.
• While it may be accurate in a generic sense to call redroom.com “a writers society,” we
discourage it, as it will probably cause confusion between the website and the brick-and-mortar
company.

From LifeHacker.

Be uncomfortable. Judith Sills in her book The Comfort Trap, or What If You’re Riding a Dead Horse? talks about how we might be terribly unhappy, but we’re comfortable so we don’t do anything about the unhappiness. Happiness is a risk, but the current situation even if it’s painful is safe.

Good idea…but nothing can compete with RemembertheMilk. Screenshot of my ToDo list below:

Jeff Domke