David Letterman, the biggest late night TV comedian, is retiring in one year. The night he announced his retirement, he had a new band on his show (March 27). This band was not well known. It is now. After the group was put on YouTube, it “went viral” meaning it acted like a virus and grew very very quickly, with almost a million people watching. The new band is called Future Island. Look for more of them in the future. They sang the song Seasons (Waiting on You). Lyrics.
Here is a quote by Einstein, whose birthday is today.
This school with its liberal spirit and teachers with a simple earnestness that did not rely on any external authority, made an unforgettable impression on me. In comparing it with six years schooling at an authoritarian German Gymnasium, I was made acutely aware how far superior an education that stresses independent action and personal responsibility is to one that relies on drill, external authority and ambition.
Not really, but i am going to take the day to do grades from home. No classes anyway.
Testing out my new Galaxy Note 3. I now am fully mobile.
I started listening to this podcast a couple of weeks ago. I can’t get enough.
But now this new guy (for me), Dan Carlin, talks about lots of different kinds of history. His podcasts are long, 3-4 hours, but engrossing. I’ve listened to #48, about heretics and a trial in Munster, Germany just after Gutenberg and Martin Luther. And #41, about how the Dark Ages weren’t really so Dark, and how the Goths were a lot more civilized than most people think. Covers from the fall of Rome in 472 up through Charlemagne in the 800’s.
Our first task for the the first week of the new MOOC by Dave Cormier is not so much reconcile cheating with learning but rethink learning so there is no place for cheating. A MOOC, especially a Connectivist MOOC, with rhizomatic roots is a good place to do that. Rhizomatic Learning is an attempt to assemble a community of people, some with knowledge of the focal topic, others with knowledge of other topics, to work together to fill each others’ chinks. More on the root system that allows single plants to weave themselves together into a single organism, and how Dave had taken that idea and applied it to online learning. I have to take care of a couple of my other blogs, one over at DMLL, about Digital Mobile Language Learning, and another for student work over at languagejapan.com.
But I will be right back with another post. About Burma.