Author: abendelow
-
Book Review: Unbroken (2010) by Laura Hillenbrand
Laura Hillenbrand is our generation’s non-fictional Hemingway, telling real stories with dispassion, incision, and grace. The New York Times called her style “crystalline.” It is an amazing war story, with all of the evil, all of the virtue, and all of the mundane in a voice that is measured and removed. The subjects and her…
-
LIfe technology: Will Smith on how to achieve goals
The takeaways for me: Success is democratic–anyone can have it “Know who you are and what you believe and be willing to die for it–it’s that simple.” Dedicate yourself to being better every day A wall is built one perfectly-laid brick at a time Make someone else’s life better, or you’re wasting your time I…
-
EDT 6205: an extremely technical Ed Tech class
image courtesy of Stanford’s EdTech photostream I very much appreciated three things about EDT 6205 (Hardware and Software): its simplifying focus on the hardware and software that people really mean when they refer to “technology” in schools; its practical exercises and projects; and its flexible instruction–adaptive professor and online “flipped” modules with knowledge tests. It…
-
The technology of historical theater
Timeline Theatre Company’s staging of The Front Page (which runs through 12 June 2011) is an enjoyable, thoughtful comedy. But it also demonstrates the special value of this Chicago artistic enterprise.The company loves to stage plays that delve deeply into specific times and places in history, or explore famous, infamous, or just interesting historical personages.…
-
The technology of speech, pt. 1
is something poignantly drawn in this fascinating Ted talk with one of my very favorite Tweetple, Roger Ebert @ebertchicago. Taking away a critic’s voice is tantamount to shutting him down, and only twenty years ago, before the advent of text-to-speech software and a robust, ubiquitous Internet, Roger would have been shut down and silenced– “isolated…
-
The technology of music: rock and roll
The power of music to powerfully stir human spirits is very ancient, and so it is no surprise that the révolution du moment in Libya has its own version of the Hebrew shofar, or musical instrument that inspired the Isrealites and brought down Jericho’s walls. Today MSNBC reports that in Libya rock star Abu…
-
Google should really send me a Cr48 if they want me to be fair to them
when I suggest purchasing thousands of netbooks. I don’t want to believe the stories of the Google Internet device‘s disfunctional trackpad and memory limitations, or its jerky scrolling you can read about at sites like this, this, and this. After all, I’m a happy Google app user, and would expect the same functionality in an important piece of…
-
"Cracking the 'Native' Information Experience
David Warlick’s “Cracking the ‘Native’ Information Experience” at the District 219 Technology Conference in Skokie, Illinois today offered educators insight into working with the amazing young people who are coming into our schools. These kids amaze the old teachers because they have abilities and dispositions unknown when the teachers were students. The kids have expertise…
The Wikiness 