What happens when Americans lose faith in the democracy?
As part of a month-long campaign called the Purple Project for Democracy, (a strictly non-partisan, apolitical effort that a number of other large news organizations have also contributed to) we are featuring a series of conversations about an alarming loss of trust, faith and devotion by Americans for American democracy -- and what to do about it. Bob is one of the Purple Project organizers.
Democracy is in trouble. Not necessarily because of our current political mayhem, or even because of the accumulated sins and failures of American society, but because vast swaths of the public are giving up on the system that has governed us for 243 years.
Here are some alarming data points: One, in 2018 only 33% of the general population expressed trust for government. Two, among 1400 adults asked about the importance of democracy, only 39% of younger participants said “absolutely important.” Three, in a 2018 Democracy Fund survey of 5000 Americans, 24% of respondents expressed support for “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections,” and either a “strong leader” and 18% for “army rule.
The more complicated question is what as a society we are to do about it? In this mini-series we’ll be talking that over, but we’ll begin with the actual state of public sentiment and public participation. Eric Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University and Co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. He and Bob discuss potential solutions for taking on widespread disaffection.
Category: Listen
Manton and Daniel celebrate episode 400 by inviting Oisín Prendiville to join them for a conversation ranging from Oisín’s podcasting app Castro and the virtues of selling it to Tiny, to the state of the podcasting industry, to a story of bicycle theft and recovery.
–Originally bookmarked December 21, 2019 at 10:51AM
Witness language change in action as English shifts from an inflected to a relatively uninflected language, and as word order takes precedence over case endings and the determiner of meaning. Also, consider how a language builds and forms its vocabulary through building new words out of old ones, or by borrowing them.
Syncretism
Emphasis of archaeolinguistics based on the barely literate. What are they writing so as to capture the daily change of language over time. Linguists look for writing that can be dated and localized.
- example: Peterborough Chronicle showing changes over time through the years
“word horde” is kenning for mind, so unlocking one’s word horde is to speak one’s mind (example from Beowulf)
Sound changes hl-, hr-, hn-, and fn- level out to l-, r-, n, and sn-
Compression of syllables occurred in such terms as hlaf weard, the guardian or warden of the loaf, which was shortened to become Lord.
“Who is the guardian of the loaf? The hlfaf weard << The hlaweard << the laword << the lord. This is the etymology of the word lord. Lord is the guardian of the lord, the mete-er out of bread in a cereal society.”
metathesis (/mɪˈtæθɪsɪs/; from Greek μετάθεσις, from μετατίθημι “I put in a different order”; Latin: trānspositiō) is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis[1] or local metathesis:[2]
- ask / aks in modern English (Southern US)
- brid / bird
- axion / ask
- thork / through
- The Old English beorht “bright” underwent metathesis to bryht, which became Modern English bright.
The Owl and the Nightingale[edit]
- early middle-English poem c. 1200 in 2 handwritten manuscripts from 13th c.
- octosylabic rhymed couplets
- Old English words held in a francophone container (French style poetic structure)
The focus of this lecture is the loan words that came into the Germanic languages during the continental and insular periods of borrowing. You'll also see how the first known poet in English, Caedmon, used the resources of his vocabulary and his literary inheritance to give vernacular expression to new Christian concepts.
Compounding
Four kinds
Determinitive compounding
- bone locker
- middle Earth (Tolkien)
Kenning noun metaphor that exppresses a familiar idea
- road of the whale – the sea
- road of the swan
- bath of the gannett
- sea steed – ship
repetitive compounding
going about weaver – the swift moving one – spider in OE
Caedmon’s Hymn
- West Saxon version
- Known as the first English poem
In this episode Terry Greene chats with @JohnStewartPhD, Assistant Director for the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma. The main topic of discussion is the wonderfully successful Domain of One’s Own project, OU Create, which has produced thousands of openly shared web sites and blogs from students and faculty across the University.
Terry definitely has mentioned show notes with links, but I’m beginning to wonder if I should be following a different feed because I’m not seeing any of the great links I was hoping for recently from these episodes?
Terry Greene (@greeneterry) speaks with Helen DeWaard. One of Canada’s openest of open educators, they chat about Helen’s plans for her winter courses in Lakehead University’s Faculty of Education, her involvement in Virtually Connecting, and her eCampusOntario Open Education Fellowship.
There’s a great description and some history of the idea of Virtually Connecting here.
Helen mentions her one word projects and it reminds me that I should ask Aaron Davis how his 2019 word has been going. I should spend some time thinking this week and next to see if I can’t pick a word for 2020. I’m sort of thinking that “memory” may be an apropos one.
Terry Greene (@greeneterry) speaks with Alan Levine (@cogdog) about the endlessly amazing work Alan has done in the open over the years, including his involvement in the Ontario Extend project and where that work is headed.
Terry puts a hard out at about 30 minutes and teases the audience by saying to the guest something like “I want to have you back again, our time was too short.” Some of the older episodes are old enough, he’d surely have had guests back by now. What he’s doing is great, but I have to inure myself against the disappointment of great guests coming back (any time real soon.)
Mia Zamora (@MiaZamoraPhD) is Associate Professor of English and Director of the MA in Writing Studies at Kean University in New Jersey (@KUWSP). She studies the dual layer of electronic literature, words born in an electronic environment, among other things. In this episode Mia describes innovative and open projects and courses that she has worked in like the #NETNARR Networked Narratives course at Kean.
Jim Luke (@econproph) is an economics professor at Lansing Community College and pioneer of their Open Learn Lab. Jim is Running errands for ideas at the intersections of economics, org theory, higher ed, and open pedagogy. His economist’s take on Open Education, higher education and how we can use The Commons for the good of learners is truly fascinating.
They took a reasonable stab at defining the commons, but never quite got it concretely for those who’ve not come across it before.
I also appreciated Jim’s idea about the commons being needed to be applied to smaller groups around the size of the Dunbar number. Larger groups definitely seem to have issues as things scale up, not the least of which is the potential for free-riding. Colin Woodard’s book could be looked at from an economics perspective particularly as different nations within America have different approaches to the commons and who pays for what and how much trust those groups have with each other.
Journalist Jessica Grose, linguistics professor Penny Eckert and speech pathologist Susan Sankin discuss upspeak, vocal fry and why women's voices are changing — and whether or not that's a problem.
Journalist Jessica Grose is no stranger to criticism of her voice. When she was co-hosting the Slate podcast, the DoubleX Gabfest, she would receive emails complaining about her "upspeak" — a tendency to raise her voice at the end of sentences.
Once an older man she was interviewing for an article in Businessweek told her that she sounded like his granddaughter. "That was the first moment I felt [my voice] was hurting my career beyond just irritating a couple listeners," Grose tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
Justice Ginsburg says she wishes it had been another case, not Roe v. Wade, that SCOTUS heard as the first reproductive rights case. On the Media and The Guardian take a closer look.
A majority of Americans polled by CSPAN last year couldn't name a Supreme Court case. Of those who could, Roe v. Wade was by far the most familiar, with 40 percent able to name it. (Only five percent could name Brown v. Board of Education.) And since it was decided in 1973, a majority — roughly 70 percent — have consistently said they want Roe upheld, albeit with some restrictions on legal abortion.
But what do we really know about Roe? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has often said she wishes it had been another case that the Supreme Court heard as the first reproductive freedom case instead. It was Susan Struck v. Secretary of Defense, and it came to the high court during the same term as Roe.
The year was 1970, and the Air Force (like the other branches of the military) had a regulation banning female service members from having a family. If a servicewoman got pregnant, she would get discharged. Captain Susan Struck was a nurse serving in Vietnam, and she challenged the decision in court with Ginsburg as her lawyer. However, the court never heard the case because the Air Force changed their policy first. For this week's show, we partnered with The Guardian (read their story here) to learn more about Susan Struck’s fight and its bigger lessons for reproductive freedom and for women in the workplace.
Our producer Alana Casanova-Burgess and The Guardian's health reporter Jessica Glenza spoke to Struck about the difficult decision she made to give her baby up for adoption in order to fight the regulation. Plus, we hear why legal scholars think this case "deserves to be honored by collective memory," and how Ginsburg's arguments to the Supreme Court differed from what the justices decided in Roe.
Then:
- Slate's Dahlia Lithwick explains the threats to reproductive rights in the court right now;
- Neil Siegel of Duke Law School puts the Struck case in context and discusses what better questions we could be asking about women's equality;
- activist and scholar Loretta Ross explains the tenets of reproductive justice and how they expand the frame beyond Roe and abortion;
- and Reva Siegel of Yale Law School tells the story of how abortion was discussed before 1973, including during the Women's Strike of 1970. And she describes the framework of ProChoiceLife, which expands the idea of what pro-life policy is. She is also the co-editor of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories.
Read The Guardian’s print version here, and share your story with Jessica Glenza if you were a woman serving in the military before 1976.
Music by Nicola Cruz, Kronos Quartet, and Mark Henry Phillips
A few weeks ago, All Tech Considered asked the audience to send voice samples to analyze. Those samples were put through an algorithm to figure out what kind of voice would make an appealing radio host. NPR's Audie Cornish explains how this experiment turned out.
Our guest this week is Nelson Dellis. Nelson is one of the leading memory experts in the world, traveling around the world as a Memory Consultant and Keynote Speaker. A four-time USA Memory Champion, mountaineer, and Alzheimer's disease activist, he preaches a lifestyle that combines fitness, both mental and physical, with proper diet and social involvement. For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/nelson-dellis-usa-memory-champion
What if the early Web adopters in higher education had imagined Domain of One’s Own instead of Course in a Box? Why didn’t they?
On Friday, 12 August 2016, Martha Burtis gave one of two closing keynotes at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute held at the University of Mary Washington. Below is the text of her talk; the audio above is edited from the video recording of that morning’s keynotes.
She does make some great points about how uncreative things can be with the sterile big box LMS solutions. School administrations shouldn’t be trying to coop everyone up in neat tidy little boxes. As much as they may want to “disrupt” the space and make things better, easier, cheaper, and more streamlined, limiting creativity and innovation is the surest way to not get there.
Originally bookmarked on December 17, 2019 at 01:35AM
To what extent should we give students the opportunity to create their own presence and, dare we say it, brand online?
On the college level, that’s being done with the project “Domain of One’s Own” which was started at Mary Washington University a few years ago and now has expanded to many other universities. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the school provides every student with a personal space on the web, hosted by the school, and administered by the student. It’s a way of teaching both digital literacy and digital citizenship in an age when being online is more and more a requirement for learning, for business, or just about anything else.
But what if we moved the idea of a Domain of One’s Own down to the high school level? Can we wait until college to provide students with a space online? That’s the question that Bruce and Will discuss in this podcast. Specifically, they talk about a must read post by Martha Burtis, one of the originators of DOOO. You’d be well served to check it out before listening to this episode. (You might also check out Audrey Watters’ great riff on the project as well.)
What are the tensions between having students publish their work online and making sure they act responsibly and safely? To what extent do teachers and leaders have presences online that they can use as models? What are some first steps that schools and individual teachers can take to begin to help students build their “findability” online?
Originally bookmarked on December 17, 2019 at 02:05AM