Learn Out Live! Weekly Digest

Hi there,

We hope you had a great week.

This is our weekly summary of everything that showed up in and around our networks and is simply too good to be shared only once. So, if you don’t follow us on Twitter yet or don’t have time to read all our posts during the week, here’s everything at one glance.

Social Media

brilliant article in the Atlantic: The Rise of the Zuckerverb: The New Language of Facebook via @elenischool

“By adding verbs to the “brand-new language” of social connectivity, Zuckerberg told the f8 audience that Facebook was going to “make it so people can express an order of magnitude more things than they could before.” In his presentation, he used that word, “express,” over and over again. But on closer inspection, the new verb-driven language of Facebook is a weirdly limited vehicle for human expression.”

Jason West (@jasonoutthere) asks via @EnglishOutThere ”Is #socialmedia eroding #Englishwriting skills” and answers it by saying “…use it to learn how to#speakEnglish, I say!” sharing with us this article: Is social media to blame for poor writing skills?

“Some university students cannot write a proper sentence, a fact that deeply concerns Daniel Keyes, an associate professor of English at UBC-Okanagan.”

Education

a somewhat cynical but not entirely false depiction of the “profession of teaching” via @briankotts via @ShellTerrell 10 Reasons Teachers Make Great Punching Bags (editor’s note: compare this list with this UNESCO recommendation):

“1. Teachers are over-worked. For all the vacation time we are supposed to have, many teachers work additional jobs to make endsmeet. They don’t necessarily have the time to fight the political and economic systems that are at work against the profession.”

the next article is a bit older (April, 2011) but reminds us that Student Loan Debt Is Greater Than Credit Card Debt and slowly approaches 1 (one) trillion dollars:

“Last June, for the first time in history, Americans owed more on their student loans, a record $833 billion, than on their credit cards, $826.5 billion. The amount owed on student loans increases at a rate of about $2,853.88 per second, meaning we’re on track for total student debt to cross the $1 trillion mark sometime this year.”

Will the Real Digital Native Please Stand Up? via @briankotts via @tomwhitby via @Campus_Tech looks back to the year when the term “digital native” was first coined and what happened since then:

“A decade has passed since author, game designer, and educational thought leader Marc Prensky heralded the arrival of a new generation of students whose immersion in information technology distinguished them in fundamental ways from previous generations. Because they had spent their entire lives “surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age,” Prensky wrote in a two-part article published in 2001, these “digital natives” were “no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”"

Chris Dawson (@mrdatahs) asks Can a “gadget guy” also be an “education guy”? [includes video presentation] via @AJCann:

“I’m inclined to think that talking about gadgets (and I mean that in the broadest sense) is an opportunity to talk about what we really need and don’t need to support teaching. Sometimes it’s just plain fun, because gadgets fill our lives and our students and teachers can often derive some value from them if they know they exist and have a chance to think about cool ways to use them in a classroom that’s relevant and timely. All of us, though (even the most gadget-inclined), have to know when to say when, and understand that, as the student at UBC pointed out, evaluate “their applicability to educational practice.””

Language Learning

Via @einsofb: In Timing and language learning effectiveness Steve Kaufman of lingq.com makes a clear but simple point about learning languages: Sometimes what the teacher wants to teach is not what the students needs to learn at the moment:

“Language learning effectiveness depends to a large degree on timing. There are times when we are prepared to learn certain things, and other times when we are not. If confronted with information at a time when we are not ready, or not interested, or do not see the relevance, we will have trouble learning it.”

Via @BarrenCode: Savant learns how to speak Icelandic in a week [VIDEO] featuring Daniel Tammet

Technology

Via @russeltarr: Top 30 Failed Technology Predictions is exactly what it says:

“Throughout history man has been making predictions of the future. With the advent of technology, the predictions moved away from religious topics to scientific and technological. Unfortunately for the speakers, many of these failed predictions have been recorded for all future generations to laugh at. Here is a selection of the 30 best.”

A new study finds that Tablets Make Their Owners Less Social, More Sedentary via @WSJ via @briankotts

“You’d expect that anyone who plunks down a few hundred bucks for an iPad would make a point of using it to read news thereafter instead of messing around with newspapers and magazines, and you’d be right: 42% of tablet and e-reader owners say they are now less likely to read printed newspapers, and 40% say the same about print magazines”