Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Your Religion May Not Understand Evolution - Do You? Will You?. Throughout life one must constantly challenge ones understanding of issues and reassess one's beliefs. This is learning. It's easy to surround ourselves with people that will tell us what want to hear or feel comfortable with - but such a practice is pure ignorance. Being objective is a monumental task and it is often uncomfortable - but without it we humanity makes no progress. Paul Myers at Pharyngula writes: I've been reading a marvelous resource, Understanding Evolution, a web-based tutorial on basics of evolutionary biology assembled by a whole lotta good people, including Carl Zimmer and the gang at NCSE. It's great stuff—lucid, succinct, and cutting straight to the heart of the issues in simple language. I see myself using this page quite a bit in the future; I don't like to spend much time on what ought to be remedial evolution stuff in the college classroom, so it's going to be good to be able to steer the growing number of students who don't have a clue about the science to that page, where they can get the story straight first, and then they can come to me with informed questions. This site was created by the University of California Museum of Paleontology with support provided by the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and covers a few major topics: Nature of Science: Review the essentials of how science works. Evolution 101: Explore the central ideas of biological evolution. Evidence: Examine the evidence relating to evolution. Relevance of Evolution: Discover the importance of evolution in our daily lives. Misconceptions: Delve into the misconceptions that cloud public understanding of evolution. History of Evolutionary Thought: Trace the history of evolutionary concepts. Here is the link to it. I like Paul's conclusion at Pharyngula: All we can do is speak plainly what our government and mass culture seems to consider unthinkable. Some religious ideas are wrong. Some religious ideas are just plain bad. Some Christian ideas are wrong and bad. Because someone cloaks themselves in the pretext of faith does not mean that they can't be stupid or ignorant. Does that paragraph bother you? OK - now is it a fair statement? If so - it can't possibly apply to YOUR religion can it? Of course not. It's someone elses right? So what do you do now . . . read the site, reflect on it, learn and grow? Or do you stay in that comfy, blissful ignorant place? [What Do You Think? Comment on this Post!] [Father Dan] 6:43:03 AM

The Holy Bible is now available as an RSS feed. [Scripting News] 6:42:00 AM

What do Instructional Designers Design?. Good resource (except for the .pdf powerpoint note format)What do Instructional Designers Design? ...love this quote: "What do you get when you cross and Instructional Designer with a Mafioso? Someone who makes you an offer you can't understand." Maish offers some comments: "He touches many aspects of ID, like sequencing, that rarely get analyzed. Here's an anecdote from the article that I will be using often: Back in the 60s, French director, Jon-Luc Goddard was sitting on a panel of film luminaries at some or other film festival. A film critic on the panel felt obliged to defend traditional film narrative in the face of an onslaught by the French Nouvelle Vague, "Surely, Mr. Goddard", opined the critic, "A film needs a beginning, a middle and an end."" [elearnspace blog] 6:41:31 AM