Heavy quoteageness today.
What do you mean, “Quoteageness is not a word”? I’m having none of that.
EduLinks time!
From The Chronicle – Literature for Real:
“I read a decent amount of non-nonfiction. I could certainly compile a list of my top 100 novels, but I could reel off my top 100 nonfiction books in a quarter of the time. Fine writing, no matter the genre, remains fine writing. However, given the choice between reading a middling novel and a middling work of nonfiction, the latter wins every time, offering at least some compensatory lode of information. I am the kind of reader—and we are legion—who is a sucker for the aura of the real.”
Dan Pink – 7 rules for writing
Deliciously accurate in my opinion. Write, write, write, move, read aloud, write, write. It’s a bit more detailed and helpful, but you’ll see what I mean.
From Topsyturvydom – End of civilisation as we know it:
“At our open days, there are frequently more parents than students, and it’s the parents who tend to dominate the question and answer sessions. The most frequently asked question when I am performing is ‘what can my son/daughter do with an English degree?’ I usually answer by agreeing that studying the Victorian novel or seventeenth century poetry is not, in itself, going to open any doors for them, but that the attributes they will acquire through diligent study and participation on their degree programme will be useful in a wide variety of careers. I often throw in an anecdote about a big cheese from a giant multinational computer company who visited the campus a few years ago. ‘I don’t care what degree subjects they have,’ he said, ‘we can teach them all they need to know about computers in our training sessions. What I need are confident, articulate people, who can communicate well, who can work in teams and on their own initiative, who can write clearly and produce the goods under pressure, who can be organised and intelligent in their approach to work.’ Which is, I point out to the parents, exactly the range of attributes we seek to instil in our students.”
Full of helpful advice to sex fans who want to help the environment. Advice like this:
“Bondage fans should invest in Velcro hand-cuffs which, being made of cloth, are biodegradable and require no metal mining or oil based plastics. Steer clear of hemp rope though as it’s horribly scratchy.”
From University of Leeds – Computer says no:
“Although computers assume that people tend to act logically, limits in human memory and the amount of information people can process often leads us to take mental ‘short cuts’ to answer complex problems and as a result, error and bias creeps in. These errors are compounded by a human tendency to look for information that confirms what we already think and ignore everything else.
“A key purpose of computers is to provide decision makers with extra information and this may simply be used to reassure themselves they are making the correct choice, when in fact they may be making the wrong one.”
Fun Life Development – How to Approach Personal Development
Is personal development a different beast for everyone? Hint: Yes, it is.
If the hint doesn’t help, read how 7 online gurus answer the same two questions.
From The Ed Techie – What might cuts really mean for higher ed:
“…when people talk about 18% cuts, these are not merely belt-tightening exercises. In order to realise those types of cuts you actually have to lose more staff, and make deeper cuts because there are residual overheads in the system. And cuts of this magnitude are unprecedented and when you put them into the kind of context we see above (can you really imagine closing all Russell Group universities?) then the scale of the problem becomes apparent.”
Charade – When academic life is not as it seems
A guest post I did for Megan at Charade. With so many struggles in uni life, study can suffer. Some of the comments you or your friends make may not always be entirely accurate. So what is the truth?
TheUniversityBlog 