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Our lives are full of distractions: overheard conversations, the neighbor’s lawnmower, a baby crying in the row behind us, pop-up ads on our computers. Much of the time we can mentally dismiss their presence. But what about when we are reading? I have been studying how people read with printed text versus on digital devices.

The post Concentrate! The challenges of reading onscreen appeared first on OUPblog.

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So here’s a question for you because I am always curious about how readers organize their reading and their time. We all read books but I know, if you are reading this, you also spend time on the interwebs and you probably spend time reading blogs but I also know you spend time reading other things online too. At least I am assuming you do because I know I do. I’m not talking about news, but longer stuff. Let’s call it long-from internet writing whether it is a long book review essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books (if you don’t read LARB by the way you are missing out I actually tend to like them better than NYRB because they have more variety and are less pretentious and know the world does not revolve around New York or Los Angeles) or maybe an article at Slate or The New Yorker or Bicycle Magazine or any number of the many places you like to visit on your internet rounds.

I’m going to bet that you are also like me in that you often find interesting long-form writing but gosh darn, just don’t have the time or brain power when you come upon it to read it right then and there. So you save it for later.

First question: Where/How do you save your read laters?

Since I am asking you, I will reciprocate and tell you that if something comes up in my feed reader (Feedly) I will save it for later there. I have a Mac and use the Safari browser that has a handy “read it later” feature where it will save articles in the browser but not as bookmarks. It’s hard to explain, but it is a useful feature for anything I come across through channels other than my feed reader. I have tried other methods like Delicious and Reddit but those are so out-of-sight, out-of-mind that I forget about them. Plus, no offense, but I really don’t care about the social aspects of those sites — what everyone else is reading, nor am I particularly interested in sharing what I am reading (or saving for later as the case may be).

Inevitably, the number of items I save for later pile up because I never have enough time later to catch up with them all. Just like books piling up on my reading table, I think I have more time and opportunity to read everything I want to read than I actually do.

Second question: What do you do with all your saved for later reading when you realize that later is not going to come?

Sometimes I might unsave an article or two but most of the time when I scan my lists I still want to read what I have saved so I end up hardly ever deleting anything unless I actually read it which, as I mentioned, is not as often as I expect. And then of course the saved things end up becoming a big, unwieldy mess. When that happens I am tempted to just delete it all and start fresh but then I see all kinds of things I still want to read and, well, you can guess what happens then, or doesn’t happen is more like it.

Eventually, like now, I start to feel overwhelmed by it all and I hold extensive debates with myself over what I should do. Before I allow myself to get sucked into another one my pointless internal debates, I thought I would ask you my two questions. So lay it on me, share your wisdom. How do you manage it all? Or maybe, like me, you don’t, and that’s okay too. I’ll be happy to know that I have company.

Filed under: Books, Reading Tagged: online reading, organization, time time I need more time

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The last TedTalk to make a big impression on the home education blogs and groups was Ken Robinson's, on how schools educate children to become good workers rather than creative thinkers.

The next TedTalk to start making the rounds and already making a splash is Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do by Gever Tulley of The Tinkering School, a summer program to help kids ages seven to 17 learn to build things. The talk comes from Tulley's book in progress, Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do; click the book link and you'll find some of Tulley's labels which should be familiar to Make fans; we here at Farm School are always keen on subversive labels and stickers. As I once quoted Charles Darwin,

"Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life as one can, in any likelihood, pursue."

Gever Tulley and Matt Hern, author of Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better (and whom I wrote about here) certainly seem to be on the same wavelength.

Oh -- those five (really six) things? Not including playing with power tools at age two, which Tulley mentions at the beginning of his talk (and one of these days I'll have to write about my daycare program for Laura when I was pregnant with Daniel; it consisted of sending Laura to work with Tom, her father the builder, six days a week to build a house for a client. Power tools, scaffolding, ladders, and openings to the basement without stairs, were a given. Needless to say, they're all whizzes with power tools by now.)

1. Play with fire

2. Own a pocket knife (better yet, two or three or four, one for each pair of pants)

3. Throw a spear (or a paper airplane, or a baseball)

4. Deconstruct appliances (Tulley suggests a dishwasher, but radios and toasters are great good fun, and if you don't have a dead one of your own, you can find them cheap and ailing at your local Goodwill or Salvation Army store)

5. Break the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which we apparently do routinely)

6. Drive a car (or truck or tractor if you have no cars about)

Some helpful related links

Interview with Jean Liedloff, author of The Continuum Concept

Kitbashing in the homeschool with Willa at Every Waking Hour and Mama Squirrel at Dewey's Tree House

GeekDad, where I first read last week about Gever Tulley's TedTalk

Boing Boing

Make Magazine and Maker Faire (where the motto is "Build, Craft, Hack, Play, Make")

Make Blog

Craft Magazine

Craft Blog

And, of course, the usual Farm School ramblings about childhood fun, danger, acceptable risk, responsibility, and independence.

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From tomorrow's London Times:

BBC hopes youth of today will thrill to Swallows and Amazons
by Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter

It’s as far from a toxic childhood as you are likely to get. Captain John, Able Seaman Titty and Ship’s Boy Roger are to set sail again in a big-screen adaptation of the Arthur Ransome classic Swallows and Amazons.

Inspired by the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys, the BBC is betting that camping, fishing and messing about in dinghies will seem as thrillingly exotic to modern children as any special-effects-laden superhero movie.

The producers believe that the resourceful young heroes of Swallows and Amazons and the book’s idyllic Lake District setting possess an allure that they did not have when the tale was last filmed in 1974, before childhood hobbies became as sedentary, solitary and technology-driven as they are today.

It is a hope backed by the National Theatre, where a musical of Swallows and Amazons is in the pipeline, and at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, where an exhibition on Ransome’s work will open later this year.

There are 12 Swallows and Amazons adventures and BBC Films is close to acquiring options on all of them. Jamie Laurenson, executive producer for BBC Films, is hoping for a cinema release next year. He said: “It’s a great story and a fantastic adventure.”

If Swallows and Amazons is to work, Mr Laurenson said, it also needs to make the natural world genuinely frightening. “For a modern audience you need to bring out that feeling of danger. It’s only implied in the action because of when it was written, but it’s about children taking on adult responsibilities. The youth of today are cosseted. We rail against couch potatoes and obesity in children but ban conker fights [see aforementioned Dangerous Book], so I think this is very timely.”

Ransome would have agreed. He was a charismatic man with a love of the outdoors. In a life packed with adventure he married Trotsky’s secretary and may have spied for the Bolsheviks before settling down in the 1920s to work as an occasional foreign correspondent and angling columnist for the Manchester Guardian. He made his breakthrough as an author with Swallows and Amazons, which was published in 1930. ...

Purists should be reassured that they will still be set in the prewar years, he added. “I think that period feel is part of their charm.”

Geraint Lewis, chairman of the Arthur Ransome Society, said that the modest nature of the stories themselves was an important element of their appeal. “Ransome was a very good writer and his deceptively simple style has endured. They have never gone completely out of fashion but there does seem to be a welling of interest in them now,” he said.

And the related leading article, also in tomorrow's Times,

No Duffers
Don’t just watch Swallows and Amazons — be them

From an ancient farmhouse on a peaty fellside, into the jump-cut mayhem of X-boxes and preteen blockbusters, come John, Susan, Titty, Roger and a gaff-rigged dayboat called the Swallow. They’ll fill her up with bread and cheese and tents stitched by their mother. They’ll sail her from a Peak in Darien to an island in the “great lake in the North”. They will find a secret harbour and the perfect campsite. Nearby, still warm, there will be embers. Undeterred, the Swallow’s crew will unroll their sleeping bags and wake to the hearstop-ping sight of an arrow in the gnarled bark of the great tree at the high end of the island.

Oh, to be under surveillance by a faceless enemy armed to the gunwales and master of the timing of her attack! Yes, hers, because the Amazons will soon reveal themselves, not just to the Swallows but to a global audience of millions courtesy of BBC Films. The rights to Arthur Ransome’s books may not be in the bag but they’re being hotly pursued. A feature is planned, and possibly a franchise. Time’s wheel has alighted on the most wholesome of all parallel children’s universes as the best bet for a filmic expression of everything that Nintendo is not.

Good luck to the producers. What greater thrill can there be for any child, in any age, than to create her own world in the real world and be allowed to risk her life in it? For that is the explicit premise of Swallows and Amazons, set out in the children’s father’s legendary telegram sent from his naval ship on service in the Far East: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN. Tough love was never since so tough (and in any case has long since been outlawed by social services). But this was the green light that sent Roger hurtling down towards a mythic Coniston to tell his siblings their great adventure was a “go”. Let the film version spawn thousands more like it – real ones, rich with the smell of wet rope, burnt camp-fire sausages and lichen on granite. Because Tomb Raider takes some beating.

In other words, paddle your own canoe, and mess about in your own dinghy.

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This came across my Google Alerts, and strikes me as worth reprinting. From David Phillips, the publisher of The Spring Grove Herald in Minnesota (additional links are mine, not Mr. Phillips'): PUBLISHER'S NOTEBOOK: Do children need a manual for childhood? by David Phillips As the Christmas shopping season kicked off a few weeks ago, I recommended buying a book as a gift. That's because,

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It turns out, according to The Telegraph, that the Forbidden LEGO book I looked at the other month is a "surprise Christmas bestseller"* (no, I decided against it for Daniel this year -- in my head I sounded like Ralphie's mother: "You'll put your eye out" -- instead biting the bullet and trying Sploids, which join Lego and K'Nex, though I still haven't heard from anyone I know who has actually

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From the editorial pages of today's New York Times: Childhood for Dummies Nostalgic parents who made a best seller of a faux-1920s rough-and-tumble manual, “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” may soon do the same with its just-published companion, “The Daring Book for Girls.” ... Having read both books, we can assure you that very, very little in them is remotely dangerous or daring, and that

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Not to mention lead-filled toy soldiers. "Hasbro gets Dangerous", Toy News Online reports. But no fear of boys putting their eyes out or requiring stitches, because Hasbro's idea is to "develop board and travel games based on the hugely successful book brand": Andrew Lane, licensing director at Hasbro, said: “The book is fantastic, a fabulous concept and rich in material with which we can

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Davy and Daniel realize that their warm summer glory days are numbered -- they've figured out a system where they finish all their school work by lunchtime, so I'll let them head outdoors to the shop where this past week they built themselves a workbench, complete with bookshelf -- and they're frantically coming up with projects to fill the remaining days. Which is why Daniel's copy of The

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Listening to CBC Radio's "Sounds Like Canada" show last week (podcast here; let me know if the link doesn't work), I heard summer host Kevin Sylvester interview Matt Hern about the new U.S. edition of his book, Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better, out last month in paperback; it was published in Canada last summer, but both Amazon.ca and Chapters list it with 4-6 week and 3-5 week

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Ok for those who love book and love freebies here is a site for you. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page This website has tons of free books to download. They aren’t pretty but the information is there. For example type in the search box “paintings” and you will find at least 8 books. Try “How to” and you will find loads of listings. All yours Enjoy

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Dangerous Book for Boys to Hit Screen: "Disney has snapped up the rights to the bestseller after a fierce bidding war." It will be more than interesting to see how the folks at Disney plan to make a movie of a politically incorrect how-to-book that includes instructions on skinning a rabbit. We'll stick to the print version. And the UK edition at that.

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For Daniel's eighth birthday last month, his grandfather sent him the UK edition of The Dangerous Book for Boys by brothers Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden. The book, an oversize red-covered tome, is an appealing jumble of activities and projects (make your own battery or tree house or the greatest paper plane in the world, learn basic first aid, five knots every boy should know), as well as

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