These days, as I become increasingly submerged by journal articles and text books, I don’t have the time, nor often the inclination, to read much fiction. However, walks into University and bus rides can be usefully spent snatching brief opportunities to listen to audio recordings of books.

I’ve long been a supporter of LibriVox, an outstanding non-profit organisation that campaigns to “acoustically liberate” books in the public domain, by releasing volunteer recordings free of charge on the web. The book readings are broken up into sizeable mp3 audio files available through downloads, weekly podcasts, and iTunes subscription. Not surprisingly perhaps, most of the books in the extensive catalogue feature multiple readers sharing chapter duties. However, root around and you’ll find plenty of single-author readings. Personally, I prefer these, they allow you to build trust with the reader as the narrative develops to create a sense of shared experience. A particular favourite is John Greenman’s lyrical reading of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Librivox reminds us how a relatively old technology, the global distribution of the web, and people’s willingness to share their time, can combine to provide some of mankind’s finest thoughts free of charge.

The death of J D Salinger this week gave me an excuse for digging out my old copy of The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a few years since I last read it but, along with Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s probably the novel I’ve re-read the most. Indeed for several years it became a ritual to read it on my way home for Christmas, in homage to Holden Caulfield’s narrative.

As I’ve got older, I’ve increasingly warmed to Mr. Antolini – Holden’s empathetic highball-swigging ex-English teacher. Debates on his ambiguous homosexuality in Chapter 24 often overshadow his eloquent words on the painful transition to adulthood, and the values of scholarship and learning:

“Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

Howard Gardner – well-known for his multiple intelligences theory – discusses his new book, 5 Minds for the Future, in a lecture at the RSA. Shifting from the purely cognitive, towards a social policy response to globalisation and technological innovation. he argues today’s learners need to adopt to flexible, inter-disciplinary ‘outside-the-box’ thinking by cultivating five key mental capacities:

• The Disciplinary Mind
• The Synthesizing Mind
• The Creating Mind
• The Respectful Mind
• The Ethical Mind

The Disciplinary Mind

Here, Gardner refers primarily to the academic disciplines. Whilst acknowledging the necessity to achieve mastery in one discipline (which usually takes a minimum of 10 years), he stresses the need to recognise the distinctive (and essentially unnatural) ways of thinking in other major schools of thought.

The Synthesizing Mind

Quoting physicist Murray Gell-Man – who proposed the synthesizing mind will be the most important in the 21st century – Gardner suggests this is the most urgently required of the five minds, yet remains the least supported in formal education. Synthesis requires the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines into a coherent whole that is communicable to others. Gardner argues the best synthesizers are those who can cultivate and master synthesizing methods or strategies using a range of formats – maps, taxonomies, narrative etc., – which are best developed through goal-driven and feedback processes.

The Creating Mind

The capacity to identify new problems, questions and phenomena. Creativity is not just a cognitive process, but is reliant on personality traits of temperament and attitude, and on feedback from others in the field.

The Respectful Mind

The ability to empathize; to acknowledge, understand and eventually contest the views of others.

The Ethical Mind

The fulfillment of one’s professional responsibilities and moral obligations as a citizen.

Gardner acknowledges integration of the five minds is prone to tensions, and that most individuals will have a tendency towards some over others, He concludes by emphasizing the need to expose students to communities and societies in which the qualities derived from these minds are both encouraged and prevalent.

I had assumed there was only one model of distributed cognition; that which is largely associated with the work of Edward Hutchins and which describes how individual human knowledge can be distributed across a group or network of people, tools or environments. So I was somewhat taken aback when Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University introduced four more in her lecture “How We Think” at the Lakeside Arts Centre earlier this evening. She outlined the embodied, extended, autonomous, and appropriated perspectives alongside the embedded model to which I am familiar. She then went on to explain how these are used to varying degrees by writers, artists and designers working in the digital domain; highlighting the print-based work of authors Mark Z Danielewski (‘House of Leaves’), and Steven Hall (‘Raw Shark Texts’), the electronic and interactive texts of Deena Larsen and Steve Tomasula, and an algorithmic engine from multimedia artist Talan Memmott. She discussed the roles of narrrative and spaciality (of texts / images etc.), and the temporality of embodied reading, and concluded by referring to Lev Manovich’s notion that narrative is in direct conflict with what he terms ‘database’ (i.e. that which is relational, spatial or conceptual).

The open access imprint Bloomsbury Academic have released Lawrence Lessig‘s new book, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy through Creative Commons. The book is available as a free pdf download along with a NPR audio interview with the author. Lessig explores emergent cultural activities on the web, arguing outmoded forms of copyright need to be radically updated as the copying, remixing and redistribution of creative and informational content become increasingly criminalised. It seems like they are doing just that in New Zealand.

I’ve just started reading Yochai Benkler’s acclaimed The Wealth of Networks – a book I’ve been meaning to catch up with for some time. The full text is available through the Books Unbound site; a free digital initiative from Yale University Press. You can also download a PDF version from the wiki site.