Teaching at a Fairbanks, Alaska, elementary school offers educator Doug Noon a distinct advantage: "Living where I do, I have a critical distance from the mainstream that gives me the opportunity to look at things from a fresh perspective." For Doug, this fresh perspective means creating innovative ways to use technology the classroom, a perspective he shares with teachers far and wide on his highly-respected blog, Borderland. And it's a perspective he puts to work with his students, 4th graders who publish a website of their own called Tell the Raven. Doug graciously talked to us about his experience applying technology to teaching.  Continue reading...

Effective corporate communications means effective use of language -- not the "let them eat cake" model of discourse! These three blogs take a look at a trio of often-fumbled sides of business communications:

Crisis Manager is "for those who are crisis managers, whether they want to be or not." Scroll down to the post about a restaurant and a police department for a taste of disastrous crisis management -- and what you can learn from it.

ReputationXchange is written by a global public relations company's "Chief Reputation Strategist," who has studied how corporate and CEO reputations are shaped -- and shattered.

Spinfluencer looks at how PR and emerging technologies mix to influence public perceptions, written by a specialist on online public relations.

You've probably heard the PowerPoint jokes. You know: "Death by PowerPoint," and "power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely." It certainly gets a lot of stick. It also has some surprising defenders. (Full disclosure: Microsoft is a client of mine but I don't work for the PowerPoint team.)

For example, Edward Tufte, author the beautifully named Beautiful Evidence, wrote a blistering article in Wired titled PowerPoint is Evil. Not exactly a neutral point of view. He said "The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch." He also complains that it reduces data to meaningless infoporn with little statistical validity.

 Continue reading...

These books track the linguistic games politicians, companies, the media -- and yes, you and I -- play to hide what we really mean. Part dictionaries, part social commentaries, altogether intriguing:

The Evasion-English Dictionary by Maggie Balistreri

How Not To Say What You Mean by R. W. Holder

Slam Dunks and No-Brainers by Leslie Savan

The Phobia List contains over 500 entries of phobias that have "all been found in a reference book or medical paper." It was started by an etymology hobbyist who was fascinated by their elaborate names. To look up Alektorophobia to Ephebiphobia to Zemmiphobia, just click on the above link. To see a reverse index, please click here.

To create a good name, you need to create a lot of names. Okay, I'm cribbing a bit. It was the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling who originally said, "To come up with a good idea, you need a lot of ideas." But his observation bears repeating and paraphrasing. In creative endeavors, quantity often begets quality.

 Continue reading...