Who started the fire? Was it Plutarch so many years ago, or was it W.B. Yeats not too long ago? The quotation in question — “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire” — is extensively used in education, and in arguments about scholarship and proper attribution the world over. Here’s that quote, found right on the main page of Gallaudet University’s Department of Education, attributed to “William Yeats:”
There are bombs of different natures, mostly destructive. There are few bombs that exist that could possibly have any benefit for those affected by it. In a world where people sometimes share a space but don’t speak to one another, a social bomb might be just the thing necessary to get some decent human interaction.
Continue reading → Forcing Offline Conversation with the Social Bomb
Two friends, Ron and Tom, were sitting in a cafe — each drinking a cup of coffee.
Continue reading → Nothing Left to Say: Ten Sentence Story #126
Peer review is one of the essential cornerstones of scholarly publication. Smart people with a vested interest in propagating correct knowledge get together and read and critique and fix what has been written for shared academic reasoning and publication. The danger in peer review is that people tend to bring their own agendas and prejudices to the process and they can change and mold and even censor what has been researched and written to fit their own niche or to even destroy a new way of thinking that damages their self-believed right that what they know is only what other people should know.
Continue reading → Can Social Networking Replace Academic Peer Review?
In my October 19, 2010 article — Malcolm Gladwell Crushes the Social Network Revolution — I argued this:
I’ve always been fascinated by the people on Twitter who have 25,000 followers and they’re following 25,000 people. We all know nobody is reading Tweets from 25,000 people a day and, in reverse, nobody is reading what you broadcast to 25,000 people. So the point becomes: So What? Everybody’s Tweeting, Nobody’s reading. That’s the definition of a modern, circular, death with no end except to begin again. We all assume everyone is reading every tidbit we share, but they aren’t — and yet they assume the same about us, and that we cannot live without their every savory update morsel, but we can; and so the fakery and the terribleness of Social Networking is known and felt but never confessed. We all just keep our heads down and keep clicking and pretending we are living memeingful lives while we search for a human reality that never was and never can be.
Malcolm Gladwell was right then, as he is now. The Revolution in Egypt will be won with bloody, civilian, hands on tanks and not pristine fingers pecking on cellphones.
Continue reading → Malcolm Gladwell is Still Right about Twitter Failing the Social Revolution
A recent study has tied the size of the amygdala to human social networking.
Do you know About.me? I didn’t. I do know. About.me is a new website/social aggregator/homepage you create to connect things “About You.” I guess. I’m always sort of late to these burgeoning online enterprises, so when I read yesterday that About.me was sold to AOL for tons of money after only being live four days, I decided to hurry on over and grab a username and root around a bit to see what about the fuss was about and — http://about.me/boles — is now mine, along with all a bundled bucket of obnoxious TypeKit Fonts that still take forever to propagate and load on a page:
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