The ability to communicate so precisely with one another is what divides us from other species of animals. Without language, it is difficult to comprehend where we would be right now – it has allowed us to question the universe and, ultimately, to develop and evolve. Therefore, what is even more incomprehensible is the prospect
Year: 2012
Education Opens Doors
T.S. Eliot’s words “It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time— for we are bound by that—but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time” serve to remind us that education enables us to overcome even great obstacles. It opens doors, builds
Mistakes are opportunities to learn
A mistake is an action by us, that gets either other people or us into some sort of trouble. Mistakes can be careless or accidental, gigantic like losing one’s life savings in an investment or tiny like spilling juice over a school essay. One thing is for certain though: mistakes are always opportunities for learning,
The Way We Acquire And Share Knowledge Is Changing
The enduring advancement in scientific innovation and the irresistible potentialities of technology are transforming how we acquire and share knowledge, our understanding of what constitutes educational materials, and the key learning skills we will need to be successful learners. Yesterday, there were no books. Today, books fill libraries and house vast knowledge. What tomorrow holds
My Kindle And I
I got a Kindle for my birthday last year. I wasn’t sure that I wanted it, but there it was – sleek and grey in a soft purple cover that closed over it like…well, a book cover. It was wireless enabled and synced with my Amazon account, so when I turned it on it greeted
Babel Fish
The Babel Fish was created in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, long before Google Translate or Yahoo’s version that was named after the Babel Fish, or any of the other free translators you can find online. Google Translate and Babelfish are not always reliable, because there’s slang and there’s names and there’s lots of
Kindles Don’t Smell
Has anybody seen the original Logan’s Run? It was a, ‘not bad for the time’ (1976), science fiction film that brought William Nolan and George Johnson’s tale of an idyllic, hedonistic, yet sinister society into peoples’ living rooms. I watched it with the rest of my family one Christmas Eve, and even now recollect their
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” – Nelson Mandela
The United States is a country of many native people, but most of the population prefers to exclude others to maintain comfortable self-image. We revere our ethnic communities, but our sentiments alter drastically when members of those communities move beyond simply entertaining onlookers. To be sure, this country – in the legal sense – began
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil”. – C.S Lewis
It’s a fact: education is one of the foundations of financial or status success in life. It can be found other ways, but education opens doors – spiritual and social as well as financial. But Lewis here rejects the idea of systematic, conformist education – he wants important and relevant teachings and ideas woven through
The book is dead (again). Long live the book
“Books are the most dynamic things in history. Nations have gone to war over them. Civilizations have been decimated to extirpate a single text. And yet always something escapes and goes forward, something elusive that is indigenous to the book, that vanishes and surfaces again after the storms have passed, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Ike and Me
I have a wall full of books. I love them. I love the masterpieces, I love the pulpy and forgettable crap. I love the smell of aged ink, I love the texture of thin paperback sheets and the thick creamy stock of hardback first editions. But, these loves are secondary to what I love most:
In the future, people will cease to own books
Wake Up Charlie Dragon! I first read this book around 1987 and now at the age of 29, I still have a sticky-taped together copy, which I’ll read with delight many more times when I have a child one day.I can clearly remember my mother reading the story of Charlie, a dragon who was asleep
In the future, people will cease to own books
In the future people will cease to own books. Or they’ll own fewer books than they do now. Or they’ll own just as many as they do now. I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters. That might seem surprising – I am, after all, an English teacher and an aspiring writer – but
If everyone were able to speak English, what would happen to all the other languages?
English. Rapidly becoming the world’s most popular language. Natively spoken in the United Kingdom, North America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as countless other countries and islands. It is also taught as a second language in the majority of mainland Europe, much of Asia, parts of Africa and even in parts of South America
Ah! TS Eliot
Sage words from a man obviously speaking from experience, but what kind of experience was it that prompted such a statement? Clearly Eliot had issues with his own loyalties-enjoying the freedom of action that his homeland, the USA offered him, but clearly a man struggling to fully express his firm anti pluralistic beliefs through his
How can technology help to make education more accessible to all?
Introduction I am going to write about technology making education more accessible to all. First of all, I am going to write about what technology is in today’s world, and then I am going to write a definition of education. I am also going to write about the advantages of technology making education more accessible
A World Without Books Will Never Come To Be
In my house the only things that I treasure are the books on my shelves. As someone once said, ‘They are not just books, but minds of great people’, so I often treat them that way. Even though the shelf keeps groaning under the weight of books from past expeditions, I run to that second
Education in the developing world
The challenges of being an educator in the developing world were many. I could speak of the trials and tribulations of working without text books, electricity or running water, or having the local goats intermittently disrupt my lecture, or the issue of anemia and its effects on my students, but that would be easy and
The Function of Education
It is a common saying that one cannot run away from one’s shadow -it follows you everywhere you go and you can do absolutely nothing about it. This popular saying is typical of our existence as humans and the prevailing situations and events that unfold around us each day. As the day goes by, events