House parties for Obama

Ning member badge

View my page on ACE e-learning network

Cover It Live

For live coverage of an event...

Susan Greenfield: The Quest for Identity

Yesterday, I went to hear Susan Greenfield speak at the State Library of Victoria. Her latest book is ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. She posed the question: Is individual identity in crisis? In other words, instead of being SOMEONE or ANYONE, could we be heading towards being NO-ONE? In exploring these questions, she differentiated between 'People of the Book' and the 'People of the Screen'. To explain the latter, she listed the effects of screen culture on thinking, identity and risk-taking. She believes that an emphasis on sensory stimulation and sensational fragments leaves little room for a continuous narrative, a characteristic of book culture where cognitive meaning-making develops a conceptual framewok for navigating the world. She sees a focus on creativity as vital for the future...

Two of many reviews of her book and ideas can be found at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/31/scienceandnature.society

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3901315.ece

Delia's family

Here is Delia's family, photographed in 1907.

My father is the youngest child,

sitting on his father's knee.

Homage to Delia Bannon

I am back writing letters to Delia Bannon,

my Irish Grandmother.

This fuzzy photo was taken in 1912.

I love it.

The fountain is flowing again

First sign of Spring 2008

I took this photo yesterday,

at the entrance to my upstairs studio.

It is the first leaf on the vine.

Thirst

This is an educational Slideshare presentation made by Jeff Brenman exploring humanity's water use.

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

Organ Pipes National Park

Mildura sculpture

Russian icon

Many scholars consider Rublev's Trinity

the most perfect of all Russian icons

and perhaps the most perfect of all the icons ever painted.

I prefer to call it 'The Three Graces'.

clipped from http://www.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/trinity.html

The Anthroplogy of YouTube

This was presented by Michael Wesch at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. It is 55 minutes long and WELL worth a look.

Society hard-wired for a fall?

Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent
The Australian
June 14, 2008

Here is a sample of an article on Susan Greenfield, ‘a passionate advocate for taking science to the masses’. It can be read as a companion article to my previous post:

People who spend many hours a day in front of computer screens and televisions, she warns, are going through an unprecedented process in which the brain is churning out and consuming excessive amounts of a natural chemical called dopamine. Other brain scientists agree that heightened levels of dopamine could produce important changes in the fine wiring and functions of the brain, suppressing certain types of more sophisticated thinking.

The hard scientific evidence is limited but Greenfield believes the result of all that screen time and addictive dopamine will be the biggest physical changes to the human brain since the Neanderthals 100,000 years ago, producing changes in behaviour and thought patterns that amount to nothing less than a different type of person.

Older generations - she describes them as "the people of the book" - have developed powers of imagination, empathy, context and meaning which she fears will be much reduced in "the people of the screen".

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23858718-28737,00.html
previous

Is Google making us stupid?

Nicholas Carr
Atlantic Monthly
July/August 2008

Here is a sample of this extremely important article subtitled 'What the Internet is doing to our brains':

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

HOPE

Hope is a film that documents the fate of the people-smuggling vessel SIEV-X and the 353 people who died when it sank en route to Australia. Here is the link to the official website: http://www.hopedocumentary.com.au/hope/index.htm

For the past three years Steve Biddulph has been working to build a suitable memorial in Canberra for victims and survivors of the SIEV X sinking. The photo above that shows a few of the 353 memorial poles is taken from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIEV-X#SIEV_X_Memorial

The Medieval Imagination

There has been a a marvellous series of free lectures at the State Library of Victoria around the event, 'The Medieval Imagination', an exhibition of medieval manuscripts. The above video reminds us of the disruptive nature of the new technology of 'the book' and this link gives a taste of the exhibition, including a gallery and audio tour,
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/programs/exhibitions/kmg/2008/medieval_imagination

Aramaic

This is the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke. It illustrates so well the distinctive sound and flavour of Eastern Christianity, much of which has been forgotten and lost in the West. When I listen to this being chanted, it reminds me of the whirling dervishes, both their music and movement. I read once that prostrations were a common practice in early Christianity, something associated with Islam today.

The tree is blooming

These purple flowers symbolise the growth so far

and the promise of growth to come.

From little things...

A Tree of Knowledge

This 'Tree of Knowledge' was made

by the 2008 BALD students.

Season of mellow fruitfulness

Right now, the deck still looks much like this but soon...

It will look like this, a photo taken on our deck last autumn...

My third Jing/screencast.com combination

I took this photo in Janey's kitchen last week.

My second, this time still, Jing

My first Jing screencast, a video

New Year's Breakfast 2008

THE INVITATION

NEW YEAR’S BREAKFAST 2008

Journeys: Past and Future

Journeys change us - emotionally, intellectually, politically, aesthetically and spiritually - so that we are never the same as before.

Australia is now embarking on a new journey.

From our experience of journeys, what message do we have for our fellow Australian citizens for 2008?

As a starting point, we suggest you bring A PIECE OF WRITING OR IMAGE related to travel – to any destination, for any reason. This might be a postcard (sent or received), a photo, a letter, a journal extract or aerogram.

WHEN: 11am, Tuesday, 1st January 2008

THE BREAKFAST TABLE -

before and after

Different seasons in my garden

In our water-deprived garden, this lush mosiac made in the middle of last year feels especially precious...