The folks at Grammarlogues have a guest post up in the NY Times’ Learning Blog: 5 Easy Ways to Learn Grammar With The New York Times. I totally do this! I’ve done this for years, actually. My own version involves not so much practicing, as it does utilizing the NY Times when I’m in a must-know-now situation.
While I seem to be able to teach myself any subject an institution of higher learning can throw at me (including calculus, which I’m sure will come in handy when the apocalypse comes), I have never found a grammar how-to manual that explains the concept and then shows you several examples so you can understand how it works in actual situations. I need to see the example if the concept is hazy or has too many variables.
What I really require is a university English department to have a 24-hour help desk so I can hand over my sentence and have a professional help me to understand why the correct form is right, and why my version is the equivalent of a six-year-old making “soup” by dumping every spice in the kitchen cabinet into the bathtub.
When the manuals and the online grammar help sites fail me, I turn to the NY Times. I Google “NY Times” and the pertinent portion of the sentence that’s stumping me. The NY Times is the well-edited-newspaper version of an infinite number of monkeys whanging away at typewriters: eventually one of those monkeys is going to hammer out Shakespeare, word for word. Somewhere in the NY Times’ archives there’s a sentence chunk exactly like mine (only with correct grammar and punctuation).
The world order has finally reconciled itself! Barbie no longer thinks “Math class is tough!” Now she’s lighting up cubicle jockeys with her smokin’ bod and her tight pants! She will be fetching lattes for no one.
I actually like Barbie, to be honest. I know she’s supposed to be evil and make little girls feel badly about themselves, but I had about 20 Barbies when I was an impressionable young thing and I’ve never had body issues. Besides, how can you not respect a girl who can maintain that posture and walk around 24/7 on her tip-toes with a rack like that? Barbie’s a badass, I don’t care what the angry hippies say.
He’s loaded. (All rich people are bastards! They don’t even recycle! You know, probably!)
He’s bossy and may want to take over the world. (Gaaah! That was my plan!)
He’s too smart to be human. (That guy freaks me out and forces me to deal with feelings of inferiority!)
Yes, I totally understand how upset people get with regard to Mr. Gates. He lives a few lakes away, I pay attention to the media reports, and I know some Microsofties. This city is full of them. You can’t take your recycling bins out to the curb without elbowing one. They all complain about how working for him takes away their souls, one sliver at a time, but the benefits are too awesome to give up.
What was that entertaining factoid someone came up with a few years back? Something along the lines of: Gates makes so much money every moment of every day that if he sees a $100 bill lying on the ground it’s not worth his time to stop and pick it up.
I don’t work for him, and I don’t plan to. I’m also not someone he plans to crush someday. I don’t actually have any issue with the fact that he has enough money to go buy his own country. My view is therefore possibly more objective. Plus, I can’t not respect a guy who got where he is using grey matter and a blatant disregard for the opinions of others.
The two points that make it impossible for me to dislike Bill Gates are these: he gives a huge amount of time and money to good causes, including creating entire programs in order to actually find solutions; he has so much money he’ll never be able to spend it all and he still wears cubicle-geek chic and apparently refuses to wear cool glasses. How can you not be happy knowing a person like that is in the world?
The Microsoft Corporation chairman says he’s a fan of the movement to publish course materials free online. He seems especially impressed with online systems that gauge students’ knowledge and give them specific feedback, a specialty of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. But while he acknowledges the work of open-content aggregators like Academic Earth, Mr. Gates wants to see better organization of the vast course materials on the Web.
“The foundation has made a few grants to drive online learning, but we are just at the start of this work,” Gates writes. “So far, technology has hardly changed formal education at all. But a lot of people, including me, think this is the next place where the Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things—especially in combination with face-to-face learning.”
Studying for the California Bar exam? Have an extra $1000 burning a hole in your freshly-law-degreed butt-pocket? Then by all means check out BarMax: California Edition. One of the only iPhone apps to cost that much money, its creator, Mike Ghaffary, a JD/MBA ‘06 Harvard grad, says it has everything one might require to study up for the bar.
Ghaffary has an MBA and as of December 2009, is a member of the California Bar; so he’s got that whole I’m business savvy and I studied for and conquered the bar exam thing going for him.
As with all things iPhone, it’s portable and weighs a lot less than the fifty pounds of books you’d be buying and dragging around town if you were to go the dead-tree route. So handy! Also, if you contact BarMax, they’ll send you a free trial version so you can evaluate the materials before forking over a decade’s worth of ramen money.
BarMax: California Edition, available now in the iPhone’s App Store for $999.99, is a study guide for the California Bar Exam. Harvard lawyers oversaw development of the app, which weighs in at 1 GB and includes outlines, lectures, a study calendar, and real questions and essays from previous exams. The only comparable app available now is from BarBri, but you must be enrolled in the company’s $3000 to $4000 classes to use most of the features.
TechCrunch reports that Mike Ghaffary, a former law student and current director of business development at TrialPay, envisioned BarMax as an alternative to BarBri’s pricey classes and digital offerings. Ghaffary partnered with successful app developers in Los Angeles, and enlisted some fellow Harvard Law alumni to guide development. More…
In case you missed it the first time, CourseSmart’s eTextbooks App for the iPhone is working the tablet-device angle for the gadget-licking college students. Their backs will have fewer problems (less textbook carrying) but they’ll all have freakish thumb issues down the line (there is no need to punish the buttons! And slow down!).
Here’s a quick video showcasing the college student experience with eTextbooks on tablet devices. It’s cool. (If you’re into that sort of thing.)
No, it doesn’t write your paper for you. Using the Achievers Writing Center apps for the iPhone or the iPod touch, college and high school students can write, edit and get assistance with the paper-writing process. Students are on those phone pod things all the time anyway, and the technology is prepared to handle way more than just playing music and making calls. People write novels on those things.
Niles Technology Group today announced their Achievers Writing Center apps for iPhone and iPod touch. Achievers Writing Center apps are revolutionizing how high school and college students write essays and papers. The apps make it easier to be more successful at writing, and they also significantly reduce the time and money required to produce excellent work. For a fixed, affordable price, each app comes with professional writing center services and more.
Students know that time is a precious commodity that they cannot get back and that money is finite and must be used wisely. The main goals of Achievers Writing Center are to help students be more successful writing essays and papers, while helping them spend less time and money in the effort.
“Essay writing assistance for students is the perfect example of a highly fragmented market in need of a serious technology makeover. The products and services simply have not kept up with the mobile, smart-phone centered lifestyles of students,” states Michael Niles, President and CEO of Niles Technology Group.
Mr. Niles explains, “Achievers Writing Center apps deliver the mobile technology and content to let students do things that, in the past, required spending time sitting at a computer, making appointments at a school’s writing center, and traveling multiple times to the writing center. As for reliable “writer’s block” email support, well, that is virtually non-existent at writing centers. And, most importantly, if students want help in editing and reviewing the final product, they usually spend more money than they should on another entity that did not even help them write the essay in the first place. Just talking about all the steps and time involved illustrates how difficult and inconvenient it is to receive consistent, reliable professional help.” More…
Have I mentioned the awesomeness that is Flat World Knowledge? I’m fairly certain that I have. They were doing good things in the textbook world back in September of 2008, and now they’re teaming up with Bookshare to provide alternative textbook options to students requiring non-traditional textbook modalities.
Students who are blind, have low vision, or have a learning disability that requires computer-generated speech and highlighted text soon will have more resources after publisher Flat World Knowledge announced Dec. 14 that it will make its content available to Bookshare, the largest web-based library for people with print disabilities.
Bookshare, which has 75,000 members worldwide, will add 11 new digital textbooks to its online library, which has been bolstered in the past year by contributions from colleges and universities hoping to bring reading material to students who can’t see standard print or can’t turn a page. More…
I knew it! Multitasking is for sucks. Focusing on one project at a time and asking one’s brain to dig deep, ponder and problem-solve like the higher-thinking Homo sapiens that you are is smarter, faster, better. I hate the spinning in circles aspect of juggling one’s entire life all day every day.
I lust after graduate study carrels, those delicious-looking closet-sized rooms in libraries reserved only for thesis- and dissertation-writing grad students. Holing up in a tiny, interruption-free room for hours to focus and solve the crap out of all problems on the list that day sounds divine.
Getting off on being alone to think about one item at a time made me L-A-M-E until this vindication-saturated article showed up. Ironically, I found it while multitasking on the Internet, but whatever.
The Decade Google Made You Stupid was written by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media studies at The New School University and producer and correspondent for the PBS Frontline Digital Nation project. In it, Rushkoff explains, with scientific evidence to back him up, that the whole Google/multitasking phase of mankind is making our grey matter work less efficiently and is wrecking our analytical processing abilities.
Cliff Nass, director of Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab (known as CHIMe Lab), has been studying the best multitaskers on the face of the earth: college students. “How do they do it? Do their brains work differently?” He, too, was shocked by his own research. “It turns out, multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information. They’re terrible at keeping information in their heads nice and neatly organized, and they’re terrible at switching from one task to the other. This shocks us.”
Nass split his subjects into two groups—those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking, and those who don’t. When they took simple tests comparing assortments of shapes, the multitaskers were more easily distracted by random images, and incapable of determining which data was relevant to the task at hand. And just because the multitaskers couldn’t ignore irrelevant data didn’t mean they were better at storing and organizing information. They scored worse on both sorting and memorizing information.
So what does it mean if we multitaskers are actually fooling ourselves into believing we’re competent when we’re not? “If multitasking is hurting their ability to do these fundamental tasks,” Nass explained matter-of-factly, “life becomes difficult. Some of studies show they are worse at analytic reasoning. We are mostly shocked. They think they are great at it.” We’re not just stupid and vulnerable online—we simultaneously think we’re invincible. And that attitude, new brain research shows, has massive carryover into real life.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say the increased dumbing down of the human race can’t be good for anyone.
