lukegilman.com : High on the Hog Blog

Purveyor of Idle Observation

A bigger fan by the day.

• Charlie Rose: A conversation with Arne Duncan, United States Secretary of Education

The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS) has been diligently offering up some of the most interesting lectures regarding the influence of psychology, cognitive neuroscience and others in the social sciences on the understanding of law, policy making, and legal theory. By making these materials available on YouTube, they are creating nothing less than a treasure trove. See their YouTube Channel for more.

I’ve previously blogged on Philip Zimbardo‘s talk at the TED Conference. His talk at Harvard is longer and more in depth, elucidating the findings of his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil in the context of Abu Ghraib. See below for the videos in 11 parts. Read the rest of this entry »

But I’m starting to see what I’m missing.

TED Talks: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

In this unmissable look at the magic of comics, Scott McCloud bends the presentation format into a cartoon-like experience, where colorful diversions whiz through childhood fascinations and imagined futures that our eyes can hear and touch.

Common Craft: Saving Money in Plain English

I mentioned CommonCraft in a previous post, noting that they had shifted from promotional videos to educational content. I really like the direction this is taking and wonder how long it will take for teachers to catch on to the power of distributed instructional media in the classroom.

From Inside Higher Education, Unlikely Haven for Humanities Publishing, the University of Houston-Victoria and Jeffrey R. Di Leo, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences are profiled for an outsize presence in the literary world.

The University of Houston-Victoria is an unlikely hot spot for experimental fiction and the humanities. But this 3,200-student institution has, in just a few years, become host to a constellation of small but prestigious scholarly endeavors that needed new homes – including an independent press for “artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction,” and the 8,000-circulation American Book Review.

Houston’s literary reputation is an unfortunate secret outside of certain circles and has been fueled by an unusual confluence of academic support at public universities and real literary exploration, from Donald Barthelme‘s days at the University of Houston Creative Writing program (ranked #2 nationally, to the extent that says anything at all) and now Di Leo’s work at UHV.