Author Archives: oook

Re-encountering George Orwell

Inspired by a recent Radio Open Source program on Orwell’s legacy (including informed speculation on what Orwell would think about the world of today), I picked up a copy of The Orwell Reader at a nearby used bookstore and dove in, starting with the remarkable essay “Shooting an Elephant” (available in various places on the Web). Whew. I can’t think of too many writers so unputdownable. If you haven’t tried Orwell recently, I recommend the exercise.

Using Hotspots

I’ve been getting more and more interested in the complexities of READING images, be they photographs or maps or whatever. Alan Levine is onto something here with Flickr’s Hotspot feature, which I hadn’t explored until this posting nudged me to do so. Take a look at this image (one from the Joe Wilner exploration)

Levine is startlingly obviously screamingly RIGHT about this as a tool that has all sorts of applicability in teach/learn situations in just about EVERY discipline, wherever there are images or visualizations.

links for 2006-02-14

Glogowski does it again

Here’s another of those trenchant distillations, from Konrad Glogowski at Blog of Proximal Development:

I want them to see their writing as an attempt to capture the current state of their engagement with ideas not the final pronouncement on the assigned topic. Writing and learning itself are not about coming to immutable conclusions. They are about negotiation, about branching off into other avenues, about exploring possibilities.