Linking & Thinking: A Week of Brain Fodder (3/25/2012)

A weekly collection of annotated links to blog posts, articles and websites about information, school and teaching.

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• The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction - NYTimes.com

  Hard science to back up what we've know all along -- the brain can learn emotions, sensitivity and experience from reading, not just living. In tests watching which areas of the brain become active when reading about different things, scientists found that there's no neurological difference between and action and reading about an actionl -- the same parts of the brain go to work. AND, when reading metaphor or evocative description -- a description of a skunky smell activates the smelling regions of the brain as well as the image regions. Reading DOES

  
  

• ACRLog » The Trouble With Books

  A better title might be "In Defense of Books" --
  "Books can bridge that gap between very general and very scholarly that is difficult to find in a journal article. They often cover a broad subject in smaller chunks (i.e., chapters), and can provide a good model for narrowing a topic into one that’s manageable for a short research assignments. Books can also help students exercise the muscles that they need for better internet and database searching as they mine chapter titles and the index for keywords."

  
  

• Open Resources - Transforming the Way Knowledge Is Spread - NYTimes.com

  There is so much freely available that was impossible to access only a few years ago, and a motivated student CAN put together a high quality education w/o formal college (or really even high school). The sticking point is, and always has been, motivation -- and that's something no college or university can provide, open online or otherwise.

• Racial Lens Used to Cull Curriculum in Arizona - NYTimes.com

  Wow. Arizona has banned Mexican-American studies, including YA novel Mexican White Boy by Matt de la Peña, in high schools. Imagine banning Asian American studies in California, or African American studies here in Atlanta. How can they do this and get away with it?

  
  

• E-readers grow; libraries can't get many titles

  Yup -- more of the same thing. It's not time to jump into ebook yet, largely because I don't think we can really supply what I believe (though I could be wrong) our Paideia readers want.

  
  

Posted from Diigo.