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

One of the problems with the development of project and problem-based learning is that students are given too much structure in how to complete these types of activities. It is amusing to me how we talk about how much we care about student success and preparing them for the future, but we also provide them with a step-by-step explanation of what is required to produce a “quality” product. Perhaps students would be better served if simply said to them: “Here’s the problem. Have at it.” Instead, we provide them with a six page assignment sheet complete with rubric and talking points so that they basically have the answer in front of them.

Some really interesting comments about providing so much structure that the quality of thought and understanding actually goes down.

An interesting example. The many comments are really interesting, too.

The Bird, the Wave, and the ShakaReading the informal language of road signals.

The easy way to prevent PowerPoint from ruining a lesson is simple: just don’t use it. Realize quickly that PowerPoint often detracts from the more important message that you are trying to share with students. In his book “Brain Rules”, Dr. John Medina discusses why teachers need to learn why pictures grab attention and stimulate the minds in ways that words do not. He provides a great explanation of this process. The brain doesn’t see “words” it sees pictures of letters that then translate into words as a learned response (this is very much the “Twitter” version).

I don't agree with all of this (I think that PowerPoint can be used effectively), but it's a spirited and interested set of ideas.

Many, many languages have undergone changes in their systems of writing their words—sometimes drastically, sometimes modestly, in order to achieve efficiencies in their usage—but not English

A few interesting article about the many languages that were deliberately reformed to make them more accessible and useful.

Na'vi is the language of the extraterrestrial blue beings that inhabit the planet of Pandora in the movie Avatar. Maria Zijlstra talks to its inventor, Paul Frommer.

A really interesting interview with the man who made the fictional language for the film Avatar.

Here's What Makes a Great Teacher

As it happens, I agree with the summary at the end in particular.

Kinetic typography is the new BuzzWord this week on Macmillan Dictionary.

The term, which in fact is a fancy name for ‘text in motion with audio’, and is also referred to as motion typography, is not new but it has gained noticeable popularity over the last decade or so, particularly in films, namely in title sequences and credits.

Perhaps in defiance of this move, it seems that if you pop into any supermarket or petrol station these days, you’re likely to find larger versions of popular confectionery brands newly adorned with tempting and justifying vocabulary.

Based on the combined results of British English, American English and Australian English surveys of contemporary sources in English: newspapers, magazines, books, TV, radio and real life conversations - the language as it is written and spoken today.