Recommended: The Glamour of Grammar
I came across The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark while looking for an approachable guide to grammar for my graduate students. Grammar is something that everyone struggles with, regardless of whether you're a native speaker of English or not. Many things you've learned as a student may or may not have changed over time. Any student of language would also realize that grammatical rules evolve, so rules such as "never end your sentence with a preposition" are one of those rules that are falling out of use. (I also read this right after Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable's brilliant A History of the English Language, which went in depth into many other issues, and focused a lot more on the historical evolution of language since its beginnings, and its foreign influences over time.)
Ben Goldacre's energetically scathing book Bad Science highlights a series of problems underlying scientific work, such as bad studies, bad experiments, bad analysis, and bad reporting. Goldacre is himself a medical scientist from the UK so much of his criticism is leveled against the British media and medical establishment, although it still applies to other fields of study. His key targets are alternative medical practitioners, especially homeopathics and nutritionists, as well as other fads that celebrities and their favorite doctors pedal in the mass media.
Interest in the research and design of digital games for learning has been accelerating over the past ten years. Various groups—including private corporations, the MacArthur Foundation and the White House—have provided incentives for researchers to tap into the immense success of the video game industry and find ways of using games to re-invigorate the waning motivation among students in schools today. Among the arguments in support of using games is that games are simply better suited for the Millennial generation who has grown up with technology. At the same time, integrating games into a traditional schooling environment can be challenging because games do not fit easily into the school’s institutional system, which has its own concerns for evaluation, grade benchmarks and other accountability measures. It is against this backdrop that Mizuko Ito’s Engineering Play is set.
The premise of the book is simple enough. Basically, his thesis is that we think we know more about the world than we really do, and that there are “Black Swans” out there that exist beyond any models of forecasting we can build. The Black Swan notion comes from the belief people had for centuries - that all swans were white because no one ever saw a black swan, until they discovered it in Australia. Because people tend to imagine the world based on their empirical observations, people tend to have a “confirmation bias” that makes them notice things that fit their worldview, and ignore what they can’t fit in.