from Stephen Downes blog: ... On Reading and Learning !

Commentary #aboutREADING 

Your Assumptions About Reading Are Wrong
Tim Kastelle, The Discipline of Innovation, January 27, 2014

Way back in the 1990s there was a prevailing opinion that the internet would result in the end of reasing. This was (I guess) because most people thought of it as another sort of TV. But there was a minority opinion to the effect that the internet would increase reading, because so much communication (from email to discussion boards to blogs) was in text (you can probably find this discussion somewhere in the annals of OLDaily). So, who was right? The long term results are still to come, but as of 2014, the short term results are encouraging. An old (2005) Gallup survey shows rates of reading climbing to the highest levels in half a century. And a new (this week) Pew survey shows readings rates (especially of e-books) continuing to climb. So if you're still in the group that thinks internet use decreases reading, check your assumptions.

 

Books: Rome
Various authors, Project Gutenberg, January 27, 2014

Richard Seltzer has been pushing educational eBooks recently, for example this collection on the history of Rome. Which would be nice, but he is charging money for works that are available for free (he even borrows the descriptions of the works from Wikipedia). If you want to study the history of Rome (and you do, it's so fascinating!) then you should turn to the excellent and absolutely free works offered by Project Gutenberg.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Rome

Deep Learning
Hugo Larochelle, YouTube, January 27, 2014

I spent the better part of the day Thursday watching Hugo Larochelle's presentation on deep learning. This is basically the use of neural networks to support unsupervised machine learning. The morning covered deep learning basics, and the afternoon looked at text analysis using deep learning. This was really good stuff. Some of the mathematics I couldn't follow, but I got the gist of most of it. And anyhow, he's placed a mountain of videos online. My photo is from my 'photo-a-day' set, newly revived for 2014.