Mr O'Meara //
Just like Atlassian has their “Fedex Day” and Google has their “20%” days, education needs to create similar models of days where kids are free to explore areas that interest them and develop new ideas. If we ever want kids to be engaged in what they are doing in everyday class, then we need to teach them that it is relevant to the way they will be asked to innovate and design in their future jobs.
Now this is an interesting idea.
Town Hall bureaucrats told to ‘speak plain English’
In defense of the English language
An interesting opinion piece about words and their meanings.
As I've mentioned before, ideas are not everything. If everything about the writing needs work, then it's almost certainly too much work for any editor, no matter how good the idea.
In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect. The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context ("old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease"). This is as opposed to a malapropism, where the substitution creates a nonsensical phrase. Classical malapropisms generally derive their comic effect from the fault of the user, whilst eggcorns are errors that exhibit creativity or logic.[1] Eggcorns often involve replacing an unfamiliar, archaic, or obscure word with a more common or modern word ("baited breath" for "bated breath").[2]
But the deeper you go, the more you come to understand that language rules - well, they aren’t exactly the rules of physics. At best, they’re guidelines, and at worst, they’re superstitions, like not walking under a ladder or putting a hat on the bed.
THE internet will make people smarter within the next decade and improve reading and writing skills, according to a new survey of experts and users.
The project found that 76 per cent of those surveyed said that by 2020 the use of the internet would have enhanced human intelligence as people are given access to more information and make better choices.
MORE than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring.
Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors.
The library’s ebook publishing project, funded by Microsoft, the computer giant, is the latest move in the mounting online battle over the future of books.
While some other services, such as Google Books, offer out-of-copyright works to be downloaded for free, users of the British Library service will be able to read from pages in the original books in the library’s collection.
Love might be blind, but she's rarely deaf: language and love have always been intimately entangled. Indeed, some believe that love is one of the main reasons we have language at all. Essential though the language of love is, some of it is very odd and very funny. So funny that you could die laughing, or as the French would say, that you could "bang your butt on the ground
