Sources and Methods #21: Lion Kimbro

Lion Kimbro 101:

Lion’s personal website

Kimbro’s Book - How To Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think

 

Show Notes:

Simple information architecture overview

14:15 - (on hypertext fiction) I think people want a sense of closure, like they know that they read the whole thing.

Overview of hypertext fiction

Amazon’s X-Ray feature for Kindle, a reference tool which functions as a concordance

17:34 - I have difficulty telling friends I’ve read books - what I’ve done is skimmed through to parts that were interesting to me and read them in detail, and that to me is sufficient to me to say I’ve read a book, though friends tell me that’s not enough, and yeah

18:59 - (my book) zooms in on creative thought. It’s focused on ideas. You can monitor your thinking in such - my thinking of thinking has expanded since then, but it focuses on creative thought and originality and ideas.

22:30 - when you look at something, we all think we just stare at things. But when scientists watch how we look at things, our eyes are moving all over the place, framing it. We do the same thing socially.

29:50 - There’s a big school of thought that says you need to write everything down and memorise it, but I’m a huge fan of forgetting the rules. Because when it comes, we can decide to do what’s best from here.

39:03 - A trick for reading and accessing information later: as you’re reading something, and you want to have it, or share it with a friend, just flip to the front of the book and write your friend’s name and the page number, or the idea and the page number, and you have an instant index. 48:54 - My biggest recommendation for people: use your computer to index things. It will save you an enormous amount of time.

51:55 - For collaborative note taking / sharing: Honestly, just text files and dropbox. It’s simple and you’ll get a little notification whenever it’s changed.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done

Kimbro’s preferred task management system: JIRAAnother recommendation: KanbanFlow

 

Kimbro’s Picks:

 

Book: Dying to Learn

Movie: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Song: Bohemian Rhapsody

Sources and Methods #20: Stephen Krashen

 
 

Stephen Krashen’s website

Stephen Krashen’s Wikipedia entry

Stephen Krashen’s blog / record of public commentary

Stephen Krashen on Twitter

Stephen Krashen on Facebook

01:53 - TPRS (Wiki) - TPRS Mandarin instruction

10:50 - Frank Smith - Ken Goodman - “The Goodman/Smith Hypothesis, the Input Hypothesis, the Comprehension Hypothesis, and the (Even Stronger) Case for Free Voluntary Reading” by Stephen Krashen

12:09 - Stephen Krashen’s letters to the editor

16:05 - Stephen Krashen speaking on language acquisition

18:10 - “The Power of Reading” by Stephen Krashen

  • 3-step plan

    • Lots of stories

    • Lots of light reading of stuff you like

    • Find an area you really like, read deeply and thoroughly in it to answer questions you have

20:30 - “Extensive Reading In English As A Foreign Language” by Beniko Mason / Stephen Krashen

24:00 - TPRS and the Turkish military

25:30 - Linda Li TPRS

27:15 - Lisa See - “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” (quote)

28:04 - “TPRS with Chinese Characteristics” by Terry Waltz - Terry Waltz (TPRS Mandarin teacher) - Where are your keys? - Language Hunters - TPR Storytelling - Blaine Ray - Fluency Fast // Karen Rowan - Judy Dubois

31:11 - The Natural Approach (wiki)

32:15 - “Susan you mafan!” by Terry Waltz - “TPRS with Chinese Characteristics” by Terry Waltz

38:10 - ESLPod (wiki) - ESLPod (official site)

40:30 - Ryan Higa videos

41:50 - “Shei haokan? Who’s Good Looking?” by Linda Li and Stephen Krashen

47:30 - Common Core (wiki) - “The Common Core: A Disaster for Libraries, A Disaster for Language Arts, a Disaster for American Education” by Stephen Krashen

48:00 - Opt-Out

56:00 - SD Krashen (site / blog) - Eric Herman

Sources and Methods #19: Naheed Mustafa

The Struggle Over Jihad by Naheed Mustafa

Naheed on Twitter (her account)

Naheed on Tumblr

5:54 - It’s easier to stay with a story when you have a character that you can associate yourself with. But I feel like that’s also become a bit of a problem. When, for example, you do what I just did - you refer to real people as characters, it in many ways diminishes the importance of the story because you end up in a place where you really work on the craft of storytelling rather than highlighting the actual issue or the problem.

8:40 - We’ve come to have this almost sort of fetish around technology, and using the technology to drive the story-telling rather than the other way around.

10:07 - It used to be that we (radio journalists) were competing with Youtube. Now we’re competing with Vine!

12:53 - When I start piecing stories together, I storyboard everything. Scene by scene, a flowchart almost. And then I write each of these blocks separately, and then piece it all together.

16:45 - Unless you’re Nelson Mandela, nobody cares about your opinion (inside of your own work).

27:01 - One of the problems that’s happened, and it’s been a shift for a variety of reasons...There’s been this shift of magazines and places that are looking for long-form writing looking to writers, so fiction writers, to write about politics. So you’ll get somebody who has written novels in Pakistan to write about the current political crisis in Pakistan. What ends up happening is you end up with these beautiful pieces of literature which may or may not be adding anything to the conversation about what’s happening politically, but what it does is it kind of games the system for journalists, because then we’re like, we’re being asked to submit work that can compete with that on a literary level but, well, we’re not that. That’s not what we do. It’s become quite difficult.

29:45 - (on her role as a journalist) What I’m trying to do is illuminate. I don’t see my role as trying to convince anyone of anything... People should have informed opinions.

32:06 - I think objectivity is a myth. We curate and distill and editorialize (even) through the process of creating… the problem comes when we pretend we’re objective.

44:30 - The second you end up representing something specific in a newsroom, you end up running that desk.

Naheed’s crowdfunding effort to fund her work - page here

48:02 - It’s become increasingly difficult in journalism to really make a decent living doing this work. And I’ve always worked freelance, so I’ve always had to grapple with this question. So what you’ll see now is that a lot of journalism schools will have programs for journalists as entrepreneurs, and try to get them some business skills to help. Most of the freelance journalists I know who really make a go of it spend half or three-quarters of their time doing corporate work. And most of the people I know find it a little soul-sucking. Corporate work, or getting a teaching job, this gives you the income to keep going. Again, it’s the work that you want to do and the work that you have to do.

56:47 - I use Twitter in a variety of ways. One of things I was surprised to learn is that people were actually reading my tweets... Another lesson is that people don’t read more than one tweet at a time. I use it as a source of news, what are people sharing. I also use it as a way to highlight the work of others, which I think is really important.

1:06:45 - I really am a deadline driven person. In terms of workflow, it really does shift according to project. I don’t have a specific way of working. My work really depends on the medium I’m working in - print vs. radio vs. research. I wish I had more of a uniform system, that I could really plug myself into.

Naheed’s Books:

Unless

Cities of Salt

Muhammad The Last Prophet

 

Matt’s Pick:

The Practicing Mind

 

Naheed’s Films:

Kill Bill - Volume I

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

 

Alex’s Pick:

Cortex Podcast

 

Naheed’s Music:

Soundtrack to Pakiza