A propos of nothing, except I just read it,
If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.
If voting could change this system it would be against the law.
[Attributed to Idaho Blackie, in the liner notes to Utah Phillips‘ We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years.]
Here’s a good example of how your words may not always convey what you intend them to convey:
The video clip’s actually in French, but that’s not the cause of the “mis-translation”.
Doug “Borderland” has another thoughtful and thought-provoking post, this time on start-of-the-year “class management” problems, also called emergence…
To be brutal, I didn’t understand much of it, but I enjoyed the T-shirt, I mean the comments, especially Stephen Downes’, where he discussed the meaning of freedom.
Hayek also connects centralised planning with the homogenization of thought (leading to suppression of individual thought and dissent), e.g. this quote from E.H. Carr:
It is significant that the nationalisation of thought has proceeded everywhere pari passu with the nationalisation of industry.
Disclaimer: I’m not advocating here the ideas of either Hayek or Rappoport. They are merely two writers whose work has prompted in me a re-think of my understanding of freedom. Click the links and read at your own risk, etc, etc.
From a comment Larry left, I discovered his blog, and from there this page of resources for students. An impressive list, although there are lots more resources than student-produced pages.
One of the links was to Dandelife “a social biography network”.
One of the stories I clicked on at random referred to sleep apnea and a successful treatment this guy found called Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, which I wasn’t particularly interested in until I read this: The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.
The Wikipedia article on this topic and a related one on the Neutral Point of View, are both fascinating, revealing a global awareness and how this affects point of view, bias and accuracy in writing, something I blogged about a few months ago: blogging to broaden your perspective. If you’re writing on the Internet, you can assume you’ll get readers from all over the world, and you can’t assume, as so many writers do, that your readers are like you, or have the same point of view.
On the Wikipedia page on countering systemic bias, I found these points to be particularly interesting:
The systemic bias of the English Wikipedia is permanent. As long as the demographic of English speaking Wikipedians is not exactly identical to the world demographic, the vision of the world presented on the English Wikipedia will always be askew. Thus the only way systemic bias would disappear would be if the population of the world all spoke English at the same level of fluency and had equal access and inclination to use the English Wikipedia. However, the effects of systemic bias may be mitigated through conscious effort. This is the goal of the Countering systemic bias project.
There are many things you may do, listed roughly from least to most intensive:
* See if there are web pages on a particular subject which were written by people from other countries or cultures. It may provide you other places to look or other points of view to consider.
* Be more conscious of your own biases in the course of normal editing. Look at the articles you work on usually and think about whether they are written from an international perspective. If not, you might be able to learn a lot about a subject you thought you knew by adding content with a different perspective.
* Occasionally edit a subject that is systemically biased against the pages of your natural interests. The net effect of consciously changing one out of every twenty of your edits to something outside your “comfort zone” would be substantial.
Here’s a roundup of some of my Google Reader content this morning:
For all of us working in educational institutions, there is hope: a way has been found out of boredom and despair.
Since the prison’s physical fitness programme was redesigned Crisanto and his fellow inmates have become musical stars.
Some of the 1500 inmates at Cebu now perform mass choreographed dance moves to the strains of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Queen’s Radio Gaga and a number from the hit film Sister Act among others.
Byron Garcia, a security consultant at the prison, says the thinking behind the move was
Click to read more.
The bit that really caught my attention tho was this sentence about halfway through: Vince Rosales, a city engineer, was drafted in by the prison as a choreographer a year ago…
A what? Was drafted by whom? As a what?!? I mean, when you need a choreographer, that’s the first place you go, right? The Engineering Department! The article is curiously silent about this most curious of facts.
(Hat-tip to James of Recent Reflections for the link).
OK, nothing to do with autonomous EFL learning, but I just loved the photo that was on the BBC website.
Blimey, looks like someone just bought Bilbo’s old pad, Bag End, Hobbiton.
Just had an odd experience using Gmail. I wrote my email then clicked “send”. A window popped up saying “It appears you wanted to send an attachment with this email. Do you want to go ahead and send it anyway?”
gulp! How dit doo dat?
I did use the word “attachment” in the email, so perhaps Google is just reading my email, not my mind.
But I still feel nervous…
If you’re “of a certain age” as the French say, you’ll probably have fond memories of cassette tapes, like this BBC journalist, who writes about what to do with these, now outdated, sound storage devices.
Can you think of any ideas to add?