Items to share (3 December 2011)

• Are we the teachable species?

• How to communicate about risk. From the Freakonomics blog.

"...I think lots of people are beginning to realize that accusing your audience, and depressing your audience, and guilt tripping your audience, and trashing your opponents is not a winning formula."

• The re-design of the BBC's weather pages: a great insight into how a serious player on the web goes about re-designing what was already a pretty good site.

• "In Our Time" on Judas Maccabeus (podcast download; webpage here.):

"...the most beguiling thing to me was the notion that had not Judaea come together and formed a nucleus of a serious Jewish state, then Judaism would not have thrived in the way it did and led to Christianity and then to Islamism, and the world would be a totally different place. It's one of the great "might not have beens" of history. (Melvyn Bragg's newsletter)

• Another spuriously precise and prescriptive model of learning contested.

• Kidnapper sues victims who escaped for breach of contract

• A useful cloud-based tool for students (or anyone) with sight impairment or reading difficulty.

• A step beyond the bland platitudes on "critical thinking". 

• And a continuing thread on Andrew Sullivan's blog about the "race" and intelligence debate--conducted in, as he puts it, a "surprisingly civil" way. Simply, is the issue too hot to handle? What are the conceptual and epistemological issues involved in formulating it? And what are its possible consequences? None of the answers are simple...  (Up-date 6 December--the wrap)

• Interesting discussion of the Khan Academy approach and its claims (see this post for earlier references).