Steve Ersinghaus

One of the most difficult elements of learning (and teaching) is abstraction. The real down and dirty knowledge stuff is typically abstract material, whether it be related to numbers or relations. I’ve noticed this in children. Ask five year olds to think back to the year 1976 and typically they wont know what [...]

Josh Radke and I have been going on about issues in publishing and the markets, a topic we will be talking about at our upcoming Narrative’s meeting. The conversation has looked like this:
I agree that assigning blame doesn’t help anyone involved. I thought the problem was the Agents. Having read that thread (http://www.sfreader.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1313), it’s [...]

I referred to the 24 hr classroom in this post, but I think this notion of “learning time” needs further explaining because I don’t want to imply that I want people to be “in school” for 24 hrs. Far from it. Thus the title of this post gets archived under the “on reading” series.
The [...]

I’ve basically given up in trying figure out why I like some books over others. I know that I’ve been influenced by lots of variables. I like the Gran Turismo series of simulations because I like to win races, money, and I love that heart-race when I just barely beat the oppenent. The hands shake [...]

Some remarks have been made here about the politics of choice concerning human knowledge. It must be made clear that this subject is tricky. What to view and what to see in order to take into consideration human knowledge is a considerable issue. To help, I could be evasive and claim that dogs don’t write [...]

In reviewing the reading series in development here, I think I can come to a few major conclusions: I’m considering reading in two senses:
1. Reading as everyday (existential) activity: reading the self, environment, and landscape
2. Reading as cultural act and agency–multiform(al)/function(al) literacy
Literacy is applicable to both, but I would argue that literacy in its presence [...]

Nerd journalist Mark Anastasio reads the city:
Stepping out into the steets of San Diegos’ Gas Lamp Quarter this morning, we were taken aback by the smell of freshly scrubbed streets and the lack of pastey white geeks(not unlike myself) milling about in a merchandise induced stupor. Along the sides of the road lay the foamy [...]

I’m currently working on a reading list for a friend. It’s a list of suggested readings build on two parts, foundational texts and advanced. The foundations include such authors as Augustine, Saîkaku, Montaigne, and Julius Caesar, while the advanced (in time) include Kristeva, Ong, and Feynman. The readings are world-oriented and cover intellectual [...]

Everyone needs money to live. Saying that reading often involves quality depends on who you ask.
Certainly the cashier at McDonalds makes less money than the doctor. But it could be true that the fry cook at the local diner enjoys his job more than the surgeon, who has a secret fear of the color [...]

Here’s Susan Gibb on reading
As I weed, I am thinking about how I am reading the soil, the dill, the crabgrass. All the years of gardening have taught me to recognize most weeds and vegetables from the time they are only about an eighth of an inch high. I know that weeds sprout [...]

In higher education the teaching of reading is woven into its own curriculum and throughout the academy. Biology teachers are concerned that their students are able to read the text book, thus the sciences have made prerequisites that involve reading instruction a part of their own. This is a good because it reinforces the practical [...]

In the current vein of things, it will be interesting to see what conclusions Noah Wardrip-Fruin draws in his examinations here.

One of the things I want to stay away from in this series on reading is the idea of a Victorianesque high and low quality to the act and object–good books, bad books, good poetry, bad poetry. That there is high and lowbrow, and for those who would take issue with this, then you can [...]

In a prior post, I’d written that my friend Susan Gibb might have been referring to a thing called “skilled reading.” But I must retract the use or implications of such “quality” terminology. Why, because “skilled reading” may imply too much of the “object” in its interpretation. Here’s what I mean: let’s say [...]

In a comment Susan Gibb writes
Often on a physical journey, we see things that are caught and stored but not dwelled upon until they float up in flashes of memory. Is that sometimes what happens in reading? I’m not used to, nor quick nor skilled enough to “catch” a theme as I read, but will [...]