Passing the towering bookshelves at home it often strikes me that there is more reading matter there than I have hours left on Earth. The sands of time continue to flow while I visit websites and blogs. Why then do I compromise further by dallying with websites boasting massive archives? To paraphrase the ego-centric shampoo ad – because it’s worth it.

Such a site is Edge whose stated aim is to ask leading thinkers the big questions. Some of these annual questions end up as the titles of books edited, like the website, by John Brockman Titles include: What We Believe But Cannot Prove? What Is Your Dangerous Idea? & What Are You Optimistic About? The towering shelves at home boast a couple of these and I can thoroughly recommend them. The essays are all very short, punchy and thought-provoking.

Of those remaining solely in electronic form, one which intrigued me was 2001’s What Questions Have Disapered? Some hark back to the ancients, wondering why relevant, modern versions of unsolved queries fail to grab our attention. Others cite issues which history has negated. I was struck by two particularly prescient examples which mirror debates currently taking place in the educational blogoshpere:

Stephen M Kosslyn on How do people differ in how they think and learn?

Raphael Kasper on What Does All The Information Mean?

Another dimension to this Edge is The Third Culture whose name, rather than implying a secret society, hints at a desire to heal the split between Science and Art described by C. P. Snow in his 1959 Rede Lecture. The cast list is a who’s who of names associated with science’s reaching out to a wider public. There is even an online version of Brockman’s book The Third Culture.

If you haven’t already come across the three books mentioned above, you can get a flavour of them by accessing the archive which goes back to 1997.

Categories: Digital Literacy, Enquiry-based learning, International, Science