Category: internet

random stuff i’m mulling over/pondering/interested in 2.29.12

Sha Towers on

firewalling your attention (chapter in Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani’s book “Upgrade Your Life”
http://ginatrapani.org/

streamlining and economizing instruction – cut the fat!  http://t.co/uzkkekzT

technology, media, and communications predictions for 2012 http://bit.ly/whfUFb

workplace readiness skills – in contrast to whatever kind of skills we think we’re creating in academia. this stuff seems more universal, more important than knowing the longest river in the united states or how many planets there are (today, anyway!) and what their order is
http://www.cteresource.org/downloads/1/wrs_poster_2012.pdf

managing professional (or any!) information overload: http://lonewolflibrarian.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/managing-professional-information-overload-02-21-12/ @LONEWOLFMLS for passing along and @hbraum for the prez

how people spend their time online
http://lonewolflibrarian.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/how-people-spend-their-time-online-02-29-12/

shallows

Sha Towers on

this quote from Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains , is particularly annoying to me:

“for some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly – like sewing your own shirts or butchering your own meat. ‘i don’t read books,’ says Joe O’Shea, a former president of the student body at Florida State University and a 2008 recipient of a Rhodes scholarship. ‘I go to google and I can absorb relevant information quickly.'”

what is irks and saddens me about this is the complete shortsightedness, thorough lack of understanding about why we read. we don’t read merely for data gathering. we read for learning, for pleasure, for experiences, for encountering thought and art and beauty.