Category: Reading
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[Podcast] Reading in the digital age
Digital books are now a common part of education, but concerns are growing around the problems of students reading on-screen. Marte Blikstad-Balas (University of Oslo) discusses the latest research around what it means to read on-screen as opposed to reading from ‘proper’ books, and why government bans on digital devices are not the best response.
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Semantic Reader update
A brief overview of some of the skimming features available in Semantic Reader.
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Trying to read a paper a day
I’m trying to re-commit to the practice of reading original research papers, instead of relying solely on summaries and overviews. I’ve reconfigured my daily schedule to build a daily reading habit that will enable me to engage with difficult ideas more deeply.
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Rebooting the reboot of the weekly digest posts
I’m going to make another attempt at publishing a curated weekly collection of artifacts that readers of this blog might find useful. The content will almost always have something to do with higher education, mostly technology, and usually AI.
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The New Beijing City Library Has the World’s Largest Reading Room
https://mossandfog.com/the-new-beijing-city-library-has-the-worlds-largest-reading-room/
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Link: Reading – It Can’t Be About the Numbers
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/01/26/reading-it-cant-be-about-the-numbers/ …attentive reading fosters a sense of self and individual philosophy. Allowing time for the slow absorption of long-form content pushes back against mindless societal acceleration. The hope is that the practice counters the effect of Orwell’s “group think”.
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Semantic Reader for intelligent skimming of academic papers
Semantic Reader is an “AI-powered augmented scientific reading application”. The problem that Semantic Reader aims to address are the “…many points of friction that break the flow of comprehension when reading technical papers:” “Semantic Reader uses artificial intelligence to understand a document’s structure and merge it with the Semantic Scholar’s academic corpus, providing detailed information…
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Poem: If librarians were honest
in ReadingBy Joseph Mills If librarians were honest,they wouldn’t smile, or actwelcoming. They would say,You need to be careful. Herebe monsters. They would say,These rooms house heathensand heretics, murderers andmaniacs, the deluded, desperate,and dissolute. They would say,These books contain knowledgeof death, desire, and decay,betrayal, blood, and more blood;each is a Pandora’s box, so whywould you want…
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Link: Stamps celebrate Terry Pratchett’s Discworld saga
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-66384781
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Link: Mesmerizing Bookstore Feels Like Walking Into an Escher Drawing
https://mossandfog.com/mesmerizing-bookstore-feels-like-walking-into-an-escher-drawing
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Reading isn’t a luxury or a reward
For academics, reading isn’t a luxury or a reward. It’s a core part of what we do. If you’re not able to set aside time for reading every day, something isn’t right.
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Tool: Wikiwand – a modern reader for Wikipedia
Wikiwand is a modern reader for web and mobile, that optimizes Wikipedia’s amazing content for a significantly improved reading experience. Fortunately, all articles on Wikipedia are released under a free license, which allows us to fetch Wikipedia articles and optimize them for maximum readability and enjoyment. At Wikiwand, we’re all about providing you with a…
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Thinking in public: From note to publication – A conversation with David Nicholls
Towards the end of 2021 I recorded a conversation with David Nicholls.[1] I wanted to talk to Dave about his process for converting incoming information into the kinds of outputs that so many in the health professions community find valuable. We talked about how we both try to limit the information we’re exposed to, how we…
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Thinking in public: A conversation with Tom Jesson
Tom Jesson is a physiotherapist, and self-employed researcher and writer based in Houston Texas, who I’ve wanted to speak to for a while. While I’ve always known Tom to be a thoughtful and careful writer, evident in his work that’s been published and shared widely in physiotherapy circles, I’ve not really thought much about how…
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On reading less, and reading with intent
in ReadingUpdate (28/02/2022): The conversation I recorded with Tom has now been published here. Yesterday I had a conversation with Tom Jesson (website, Twitter, newsletter). Tom and I have been emailing each other over the past few months, touching lightly on topics that fall within overlapping spheres of interest, and finally had enough space in our calendars (and…
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Comment: Audiobook listening as scholarship
I sometimes lose track of what I’m listening to, I start thinking over it in a way which almost drowns out the track. I might make a note to follow up a point from the audiobook but I don’t get to it for days by which point the intellectual urge has vanished and I can’t…
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Comment: Reading books vs. engaging with them
TLDR – I think the value of reading a book once (without active engagement) is awkwardly small, and the value of big time investments like reading a book several times – or actively engaging with even part of it – is awkwardly large compared to that. Karnofsky, H. (2021, October 20). Reading books vs. Engaging…
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Resource: An overview of note-taking workflow and tools from Ton Zijlstra
There are hundreds of resources on note-taking systems so don’t take this post as anything more than a collection that caught my attention. Once you go down the ‘zettelkasten’ or ‘digital garden’ rabbit holes, you may find that it takes a while to get out again. If you already have a sense of what the…