Explore strange new worlds. Boldly go where no educator has gone before.
Jim Vanides of Hewlett-Packard, in his Teaching, Learning, & Technology in Higher Education blog, takes note of an enticing new opportunity for research on learning.
The MacArthur Foundation, in its Digital Media and Learning Competition, is offering as many as eight “Innovation Awards” of $100,000 to $250,000 each. According to Digital Media’s Web site, they are “intended to appeal to pioneers, builders of new digital learning environments. These might include, for example, a major adaptation of gaming, world building, or social networking environments (such as MySpace or Facebook) designed for educational contexts; or entirely new programs.”
The projects should “explore new digital models of learning that build upon and enhance the informal, networked, and collaborative learning styles of youth today, extending them more broadly,” the site explains.
The learning environments involved in these projects can be physical environments, learning tools like textbooks, networks of peers and adults, and new curricula.
The deadline for applications is October 15. —Josh Fischman
10 Responses to $250,000 Digital-Learning Grants Available
dw - April 10, 2012 at 5:57 am
Edinburgh is a fairly elite university; you may want to check that Mr Oldfied hasn’t stolen your toilet paper.
Nathaniel M. Campbell - April 10, 2012 at 11:12 am
I must have spent too much time in academia already. My first instinct was not to ridicule Mr. Oldfield as a hypocrite but to come up with a list of all the good things universities–both as educational and as research institutions–have done for the modern world. Not sexy or attention-grabbing enough, I suppose, to talk about medical breakthroughs and humanism…
katisumas - April 10, 2012 at 1:49 pm
“Grammar errors have two wonderful properties: First, everyone is cowed into accepting them as unquestionable signs of lack of breeding”
”Everyone” —surely you jest!
”Breeding” ?????? (I know you mean “class” as in upper social class, that is, in the UK where this non-event took place, as people whose blood runs blue instead of red)
I digress but are you aware that all Indo-European languages use double negatives? English speakers owe their phobia of double negatives to blue blooded Victorians who, in their ignorance of basic linguistics, decided that language had to be like algebra, and did away with them. Also, they changed “aint” into “aren’t” (because blue blood destroys aesthetic sensitivity?). Oh, and they put skirts on piano leggs… but I am digressing even more here!
The objection to being fixated on what one believes grammar ought to be is that it wipes out attention to the content as well as does away with any possibility of retaining it. I know some people who are always correcting other people speech. The result is that they are not able to digest what the content is. I have tested such persons (just two, so not a statistically significant sample!) and asked them to repeat the gist of what I said. I drew a blank each time. So I suspect that at least in some cases this focus on grammatical forms and pronunciation is a symptom of attention deficit disorder –present company excepted of course!
By the way are you aware of the content of Ann Coulter’s writings?
harleymc - April 11, 2012 at 9:27 am
“He’s a privately educated hypocrite! An excellent start to the fragging.”
According to Australian independent media (Crikey), Trenton Oldfield was educated to age 16 at North Shore Grammar, but left in protest at the elitism in the school and society. If the report is true then there can be no suggestion that he is a hypocrite in relation to private education and elitism in society.
It was sad to see that poorly supported allegation repeated here.
jamesebryan - April 11, 2012 at 11:38 am
As someone who teaches the history of interior design and furniture I can tell you the Victorians did not put skirts on piano legs, that is a bit of historic-house-museum-volunteer-tour-guide folklore.
pullum - April 11, 2012 at 11:54 am
Am I aware of the content of Ann Coulter’s writings? Oh, yes. I’m afraid so. She would type me as guilty of treason.
pullum - April 11, 2012 at 11:59 am
Yes, this is fair: I was merely repeating the allegations that Oldfield’s enemies appeared to be clutching at, not endorsing them. You don’t quite know what’s so offensive about elitism until you’ve been there, so in fact attending a posh school until the age of 16 and then becoming disgusted with poshness is quite plausible. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
By the way, anyone who looks at his Web site closely will find that indeed his writing is atrocious and there are other signs of extremely hasty and slapdash putting together of the site. He is vulnerable there. But that was not my topic. My theme was not the politics; it was the tendency of people to go hunting for grammatical or orthographic or punctuational or typographic evidence of stupidness when they are on a mission to discredit someone politically.
magyar - April 11, 2012 at 2:49 pm
What is so wonderful about the Zimmerman article (and typical of this kind of thing, in
my experience) is the sheer hypocrisy. He appears to agree that the ‘rule’ prohibiting starting a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’ is spurious, and a matter of stylistic choice, but seems to cling to the belief that sentences shouldn’t end with a preposition. He declares that the use of punctuation marks outside of quotation marks is ungrammatical but isn’t that a style issue too? It certainly isn’t a question of grammar.
He is inconsistent and idiosyncratic: ok with sentence fragments (“Especially when fending off accusations of murder”) but insisting on the that/which distinction; he baulks at I/me confusion but offers reflexive ‘myself’ as a solution when ‘me’ is the object pronoun; he treats the commas in dates as settled grammar when they are merely a matter of convention. I could go on…
Finally, in a breath-taking leap of logic, he says, “Zimmerman is accused of being a careless vigilante who played fast and loose with the law; why would he want to give credence to that argument by playing fast and loose with the most basic laws of grammar?” what possible connexion is there between his level of literacy and his guilt or innocence? Or is he making a different point: that educated people assume that less well educated people are more likely to be guilty?
leo_ladenson - April 17, 2012 at 5:26 pm
“Even Microsoft Word’s appallingly stupid grammar-checking capabilities can spot a restrictive relative which with no preceding comma and switch on the wavy green line.”
If MS Word could spot a truly restrictive relative “which” (which may not be an error but is certainly poor style), then it would know that it doesn’t need a preceding comma.
dank48 - April 18, 2012 at 1:15 pm
The lack of preceding comma (or other punctuation; see your second sentence) is one clue to the clueless Microsoft Word grammar checker that this is a restrictive which, which is no more an error than it is poor style, but which is one of those superstitions passed on to us by Fowler, Gowers, et al.
The persistence of this silliness is amazing. Foreigners learning English learn it as it’s used, not as little old ladies of whatever gender think it should be used. I remember the striking example provided by the textbook:
The new vicar said he would wear no clothes, that would distinguish him from others.
The new vicar said he would wear no clothes, which would distinguish him from others.
The new vicar said he would wear no clothes that would distinguish him from others.
The new vicar said he would wear no clothes which would distinguish him from others.
The first is simply wrong, a run-on sentence: no problem.
The second is nonrestrictive, which everyone agrees about: no problem.
The third is the restrictive form that everyone agrees is okay: no problem.
The fourth is the restrictive form which some people object to, whether because Fowler did or because somebody else did.
The fact is that people use restrictive which all the time, and yet the heavens remain in place. English would be neater and tidier if in fact which were always nonrestrictive and the restrictive were always adequately served by that and the distinction were always so clear, but that just isn’t the case. Since when have neatness and tidiness been salient features of the English language?
But this doesn’t convince true believers in the phony rule; nothing will. Let them explain how that could have saved “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced” from being the unintelligible gibberish it so unfortunately is.