"'The Book of Probes' is a collection of Marshall McLuhan's finest words culled from his books, his more than 200 speeches, his classes at the University of Toronto ... and from nearly 700 shorter writings he published between 1945 and 1980"--Jacket.
Media studies has been catching up with McLuhan over the last 50 years. These essays are drawn from themost productive quarter-century of his career (1952-1978), anddemonstrate his abiding interest in the materiality of mediation, from comic books to fashion, from technology to biology.Anchoring these essays are four meditations on the work of hisgreat predecessor, Harold adams innis, who first proposed thecentrality of mediation to every facet of our daily lives. McLuhan took this task literally; rejecting the specialist approachof academic study, he published in mainstream magazinessuch as Look and Harpers Bazaar on topics such as sexualityand the fashion industry, in each case bringing to these topics insights that remain startlinglyfresh. The essays offer a rare glimpse into a great mind as it works out the implications of theeffects of media not only on what we know but on how we are coming to understand our being.
This pioneering volume of essays explores the destruction of great libraries since ancient times and examines the intellectual, political and cultural consequences of loss. Fourteen original contributions, introduced by a major re-evaluative history of lost libraries, offer the first ever comparative discussion of the greatest catastrophes in book history from Mesopotamia and Alexandria to the dispersal of monastic and monarchical book collections, the Nazi destruction of Jewish libraries, and the recent horrifying pillage and burning of books in Tibet, Bosnia and Iraq.
How can an infinite number of sentences be generated from one human mind? How did language evolve in apes? In this book Donald Loritz addresses these and other fundamental and vexing questions about language, cognition, and the human brain. He starts by tracing how evolution and natural adaptation selected certain features of the brain to perform communication functions, then shows how those features developed into designs for human language. The result -- what Loritz calls an adaptive grammar -- gives a unified explanation of language in the brain and contradicts directly (and controversially) the theory of innateness proposed by, among others, Chomsky and Pinker.
The Handbook of Research on Writing ventures to sum up inquiry over the last few decades on what we know about writing and the many ways we know it: How do people write? How do they learn to write and develop as writers? Under what conditions and for what purposes do people write? What resources and technologies do we use to write? How did our current forms and practices of writing emerge within social history? What impacts has writing had on society and the individual? What does it mean to be and to learn to be an active participant in contemporary systems of meaning? This cornerstone volume advances the field by aggregating the broad-ranging, interdisciplinary, multidimensional strands of writing research and bringing them together into a common intellectual space. Endeavoring to synthesize what has been learned about writing in all nations in recent decades, it reflects a wide scope of international research activity, with attention to writing at all levels of schooling and in all life situations. Chapter authors, all eminent researchers, come from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archeology, typography, communication studies, linguistics, journalism, sociology, rhetoric, composition, law, medicine, education, history, and literacy studies. The Handbook’s 37 chapters are organized in five sections: *The History of Writing; *Writing in Society; *Writing in Schooling; *Writing and the Individual; *Writing as Text This volume, in summing up what is known about writing, deepens our experience and appreciation of writing—in ways that will make teachers better at teaching writing and all of its readers better as individual writers. It will be interesting and useful to scholars and researchers of writing, to anyone who teaches writing in any context at any level, and to all those who are just curious about writing.
How do you tailor education to the learning needs of adults? Do they learn differently from children? How does their life experience inform their learning processes? These were the questions at the heart of Malcolm Knowles’s pioneering theory of andragogy which transformed education theory in the 1970s. The resulting principles of a self-directed, experiential, problem-centered approach to learning have been hugely influential and are still the basis of the learning practices we use today. Understanding these principles is the cornerstone of increasing motivation and enabling adult learners to achieve. This eighth edition has been thoughtfully updated in terms of structure, content, and style. On top of this, online material and added chapter-level reflection questions make this classic text more accessible than ever. The new edition includes: Two new chapters: Neuroscience and Andragogy, and Information Technology and Learning. Updates throughout the book to reflect the very latest advancements in the field. A companion website with instructor aids for each chapter. If you are a researcher, practitioner or student in education, an adult learning practitioner, training manager, or involved in human resource development, this is the definitive book in adult learning that you should not be without.
The original idea for a conference on the "shapes of knowledge" dates back over ten years to conversations with the late Charles Schmitt of the Warburg Institute. What happened to the classifications of the sciences between the time of the medieval Studium and that of the French Encyclopedie is a complex and highly abstract question; but posing it is an effective way of mapping and evaluating long term intellectual changes, especially those arising from the impact of humanist scholarship, the new science of the seventeenth century, and attempts to evaluate, to apply, to reconcile, and to institutionalize these rival and interacting traditions. Yet such patterns and transformations cannot be well understood from the heights of the general history of ideas. Within the ~eneral framework of the organization of knowledge the map must be filled in by particular explorations and soundings, and our project called for a conference that would combine some encyclopedic (as well as interdisciplinary and inter national) breadth with scholarly and technical depth.
This unique volume offers an overview of the diversity in research on communication, including perspectives from biology, sociality, economics, norms and human development. It includes general social science and humanities approaches to communication, from systems theory to cultural theory, as well as perspectives more specifically related to communication acts, such as linguistics and cognition. The volume also features chapters on the participants and various elements in communication processes, on possible effects and on wider consequences of mediation (with technical media). The scope of the contributions is global, and the volume is relevant to both the empirical and the philosophical traditions in human sciences. Designed as a stand-alone collection to engage undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics, this is also the first book in, and an introduction to, the De Gruyter Mouton multi-volume Handbooks of Communication Science.
This book seeks to find an appropriate balance between thoughtful consideration of issues related to qualitative research in education - methods, stances and standards - and practical 'how to' advice for beginning researchers. It includes 'School Stories': a compelling, 56 page, and research-based 'novel' of classroom life reflecting on a year in the life of a group of teachers and students. It is of interest to graduate students and faculty in educational research.
War and Peace in The Global Village is a collage of images and text that sharply illustrates the effects of electronic media and new technology on man. Marshall McLuhan wrote this book thirty years ago and following its publication predicted that the forthcoming information age would be "a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest." Marshall McLuhan illustrates the fact that all social changes are caused by introduction of new technologies. He interprets these new technologies as extensions or "self-amputations of our own being," because technologies extend bodily reach. McLuhan's ideas and observations seem disturbingly accurate and clearly applicable to the world in which we live. War and Peace in the Global Village is a meditation on accelerating innovations leading to identity loss and war.