BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.

There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.

Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out.

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Lynch would like us all to calm down, please, and recognize that "proper" English is a recent and changeable institution. "The Lexicographer's Dilemma" recapitulates the long argument between two schools of thought: the prescriptive — which holds that the job of language experts is to lay down the law by telling us how to speak and write — and the descriptive, which holds that compilers of dictionaries and other guides are in the business of describing, not dictating, how the language is used. The latter group includes most professional linguists and lexicographers, but the former — self-appointed pundits like the late William Safire and Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling rant about punctuation errors, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" — know that the real money lies in validating the ire of purists.

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While mangroves, themselves, are the dominant, or keystone species, of the tropical estuarine ecotone, their rhizomic root system is also analogous to the entire ecotonal ecosystem itself. It negotiates the air/water interface as a third thing.

From Carl Jung, to Deleuze and Guattari, to authors of hypertext, rhizomic systems have fascinated so many because they replace hierarchical constructs with an alternate model of heteregeneity and multiplicity. The rhizomic system is a model of integrated multiplicity and managed disturbance, both made highly productive for the regeneration and evolution of the total system. As a distributed system of populations, but one that functions as a single organism, the rhizomic structure is a precise and prolific analogy for the innovation ecotone space that this paper has put forward.

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A normal class defines both the required learning outcomes and the required inputs (the homework, projects, group assignments etc.) that students must experience in order to (hopefully) arrive at the required outcomes. In other words, the professor decides, not only what the students should learn but also how they should learn.

This factory model for education is growing increasingly untenable as the world grows more complex. Today's students graduate into a world of far greater uncertainty and far greater diversity as the formerly monolithic landscape dominated by a few large companies grows increasing fragmented and diversified.

The core idea is that micro-lab classes adapts to its learners instead of requiring its learners to adapt to the class. This is the central idea of many web 2.0 applications. … In a similar way, the micro-lab course provides an architecture for students to build learning communities and use learning objects of their choosing.

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"Somewhere in the early 1840s there was a dispute between the parents and the master and pupils began to be withdrawn from the school.

"Ultimately all the pupils were withdrawn and the master was left in a school with no children."

The Church of Scotland sought to sack the head teacher, but he refused to go, arguing that he had a contract and it did not specify that the school had to have pupils.

The row reached the courts and the Court of Session upheld the teacher's contract.

Mr Bruce said: "For 19 years he remained in the school before a change in the law eventually saw him sacked."

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For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering – sometimes more so. Without it, we are all bound to lead the miserable life of A. R. Luria's patient Solomon Shereshevsky, who was crippled by his boundless, indelible memory, or his fictional counterpart, Jorge Luis Borges's Funes. No forgetting implies no generalisation, no real present time, no amelioration of trauma, and no weaving of meaningful life narratives …

Total recall may be beneficial for businesses and courts, clinics and insurance agencies, even possibly in settling occasional disputes with significant others, but rarely would it be deeply rewarding for the humble self.

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This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

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many biophysical economic thinkers are trained in ecology and evolutionary biology, fields that do well at breaking down the natural world into a few fundamental laws and rules, just like physicists do. Though not all proponents of the new energy-centric academic study have been formally trained in economics, scholars coming in from other fields, especially ecology, say their skills allow them to see the global economy in a way that mainstream economists ignore.

Central to their argument is an understanding that the survival of all living creatures is limited by the concept of energy return on investment (EROI)

For instance, if a squirrel burns energy eating nuts, those nuts had better give the squirrel more energy back then it expended, or the squirrel will inevitably die. It is a rule that lies at the core of studying animal and plant behavior, and human society should be looked at no differently, as even technologically complex societies are still governed by EROI.

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the fact that new social technology is allowing us to grow the ranks of our weak ties and passively tracked relationships should not be glossed over as an aside, or also-ran, or less than exciting and amazing development… It should be embossed, stuffed, mounted, lacquered, bronzed, and put up on a pedestal for all to admire in perpetuity. Word.

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Sixty-nine percent of the participants who were violent by the age of 34 had eaten sweets and chocolates almost every day during childhood, compared with 42 percent who showed no aggressive behavior, the study found. The association was consistent even after ecological, childhood and other control variables were included, according to the researchers.

“Our favored explanation is that giving children sweets and chocolate regularly may stop them learning how to wait to obtain something they want,” Moore said in a statement. “Not being able to defer gratification may push them toward more impulsive behavior, which is strongly associated with delinquency.”

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Officials at Toronto's Ryerson University … have sent a notice of expulsion to first-year computer engineering student Chris Avenir after a professor came across a Facebook group called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions where students were encouraged to exchange tips and answers for an online testing system.

The group had 147 members from Ryerson's first-year chemistry and computer engineering programs before it was shut down recently.

Avenir, 18, is now facing 146 charges of academic misconduct under the university's policy. Avenir was listed as an administrator of the group.

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October 27th 2009 | Comments(1) | Asides on 21stcenturyskills cheating education education2.0 facebook social

Yochai Benkler 94 delivers a dynamic lecture on the future of social production to mark the occasion of his appointment as the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies.

From the Harvard Law School Spotlight:
"Collaborative systems, built upon freedom and altruism, benefit from increased individual agency of motivated participants. As such, the newer systems are far more efficient and more capable of adapting to sudden changes. However, the task from the theoretical standpoint, said Benkler, 'is to develop a general framework for analyzing human systems of all forms, enabling us to design systems that are both more effective and more resonant with being human.'"

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“Quick visualization and analysis of time-dependent data has never been simpler.”

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The anxious rhetoric around new technology is really quite shocking in its vehemence, from claims that the player piano will destroy musical taste and the "national throat" to concerns that the VCR is like the "Boston strangler" to claims that only Hollywood's premier content could make the DTV transition a success. Most of it turned out to be absurd hyperbole, but it's interesting to see just how consistent the words and the fears remain across more than a century of innovation and a host of very different devices.

So here they are, in their own words—the copyright holders who demanded restrictions on player pianos, photocopiers, VCRs, home taping, DAT, MP3 players, Napster, the DVR, digital radio, and digital TV.

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Fedena is an open source school/campus management system developed by people like you! It is a one stop solution for all school management related issues and helps you manage student databases and all other activities online

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