Category Archives: Technology
Personalized Learning? Unlikely…
The latest buzz-phrase in education is “personalized learning”. Like so many other education bandwagons, it has enjoyed a surge in popularity in university education programs, the provincial Ministry of Education, and recent education conferences. In December of 2010, the BC Ministry of Education and the Premier’s Technology Council [PTC] published its Vision for 21st Century […]
Elizabeth Warren: The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
The following lecture features Elizabeth Warren speaking about the current crisis in (and looming collapse of) the American middle class. This presentation is almost 58 minutes, but I highly recommend it for anyone interested in long term social and economic trends and the future of the middle class. Warren is a Harvard law professor who […]
Measuring the Internet
I remember back to the good old days of Alta Vista when they could actually count the number of pages on the ‘Net. Like McDonald’s hamburgers, the number of websites and pages now appears too large to measure. Nevertheless, here’s a really fascinating site that attempts to quantify the Internet in terms of type and […]
Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation
Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation* argues that modern western society (and particularly American society) is moving from a relatively literate print-based culture to a post-literate technology culture. Bauerlein’s specific focus is on the new realm of social technologies (“e-mails, text messages, blog-postings and comments, phone calls, tweets, feeds, photos and songs” (p. x)) that he […]
Is modern music going down the drain?
I recently came across an interesting article on the musical legacy of our current decade (2000-2009). The article, written by Kris Millet for Culture Magazine, takes a dim view of this century’s musical output. His central thesis is that the technological fragmentation of the last 10 years has destroyed our ability to follow a band […]