Let’s try a thought experiment.   Let’s assume we live in a culture where all forms of educational achievement tests have been banned and no one is allowed to assign a letter or numerical grade for anything.   How would we evaluate what students are learning?

Is it the job of intellectuals to speak to the public?  Or is it the responsibility of the public to put forth the effort to understand complex and important ideas by intellectuals?  Did the proponents of cultural literacy dumb us down?

HASTAC team members Mandy Dailey, Nancy Kimberly, Ruby Sinreich, and I will be attending the CHAT Festival--Collaborations:  Humanities, Arts, and Technology Festival to be held at University of North Carolina February 16-20 and would love to meet up with any HASTAC network members who will be there.   Please let us know via either the comments box below or on the Events page meet-up and calendaring tool on this site. Here's the url for the full Festival site: http://www.chatfestival2010.com/ and for the schedule:  http://www.chatfestival2010.com/daily-schedule.html

Sheryl Grant, the Director of Social Networking for the Digital Media and Learning Competition, and I will both be attending the Digital Media and Learning Conference in La Jolla, CA,February 18-20.  If you are going too, let us know as we'd love to have an informal HASTAC meet-up there.   You can use the comments session below or the EVENTS page of this website.

Who knew that letter grades began being assigned at Mt Holyoke and then five years later someone decided it was such a good idea that it was time to start assigning letter grades to grades and cuts of meat.     Now that's a metaphor!

This review of PBS's Digital Nation is a reblog from my own blog, buried yesterday in an announcement that our "Reimagining Learning" competition was opening yesterday.  I got carried away.   For those who have emailed me confused about where I offered my comments on the PBS special, I'm reblogging here.   Feel free to add your own comments and opinions below.

Our big news is that, later today, we will not only begin accepting revisions and resubmissions of original applications submitted to  our "Reimagining Learning" 3rd Annual Digital Media and Learning Competition, we will also be accepting NEW applications.  Here's the url for the site and you can find the application form, the rules, and the timeline once you get there:   http://dmlcompetition.net/

I'm fascinated by experimental psychology experiments that reveal that we know almost nothing about ourselves--or that our "selves" reveal far more about "us" than we ever imagined in our rationalist paradigms.  The West has been clinging, against odds, to the mind v. body dualism for thousands of years, gave it a few booster shots in the Enlightenment, and now requires psychologists with cagey experiments to trick us into seeing that the mind and body are, in fact, not opposites but all part of the same thing.

The point is a great and highly innovative ideas are not really ahead of their time, they are catalysts in their time.

Here is an update from Publisher's Lunch (a publishing industry newsletter) that details some of the dispute between Macmillan and Kindle.   This is an urgent issue for anyone who cares about books.   What happens when those who publish and those who sell books clash?   How will this be resolved?   No answers, but we all should be keeping an alert and questioning stance here because the future of the humanities is bound up with all of these issues of production, distribution, and consumption.   As I've said so many times in this blog, you cannot change one part of the equatio without disrupting the other parts as well.