Columnists – StatesmanJournal.com

Columnists – StatesmanJournal.com—some interesting assumptions of the decisions that are being made and the reasons for those decisions (all w/o any info to back them up).

News from Reading Today Daily : PBS blog will examine how technology is changing education

News from Reading Today Daily : PBS blog will examine how technology is changing education:

“The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) yesterday unveiled a new blog called learning.now, which will address how new technology and Internet culture are significantly affecting the ways educators teach and children learn. Host Andy Carvin describes the new blog as being “at the crossroads of Internet culture and education.” Visit the new blog at http://www.pbs.org/learningnow.”

Researchers Find Internet Use Has Pros and Cons for Kids

Researchers Find Internet Use Has Pros and Cons for Kids—”The findings show that online interactions provide essential social support for otherwise isolated adolescents, but these online boards may also normalize and encourage self-injurious behavior and add potentially lethal behaviors to the repertoire of established adolescent self-injurers and those exploring identity options, said lead author Janis L. Whitlock of Cornell University.”

IRA Convention 2006: the prelude

I come to you this evening from the Hyatt Regency in lovely
Chicago. Tomorrow I am to attend sessions and whatnot. This evening we had a ReadWriteThink team dinner at Spiaggia, which was wonderful but so expensive. Nothing like food architecture to set off a meeting. I still don’t know how they cut the pancetta into little tiny curls for the pasta course. I would love to figure it out. It was remarkable. I wish that could have been my entire meal. Sadly, chefs do as they please.

My drive to Chicago was uneventful for the most part, except for the section when I drove by the Aurora/Joliet exit on 55 (yes, I took a very strange route, but I avoided all the construction). When my eye found the hotel that I met my father at when he was helping shut down an arsenal in Joliet, I teared up and wept in the car.

I was listening to the audio version of Don’t Think of an Elephant, which really doesn’t go well with weeping. Still there was a point in listening to the book where I thought that I might understand Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a system of reframing, and I thought that perhaps if I could just find the right freakin’ frame I wouldn’t be crying constantly when random things like a Comfort Inn in Joliet come into view.

Erasing your cell phone data – Lifehacker

Erasing your cell phone data – Lifehacker—given that my two years are up and I can get a new phone soon, I figured that I better save this.

TechRhet: Tag Literacy

Line56.com: Tag Literacy—now tagging is important and all, but I’m not sure that it’s a new and different literacy.

For Win or Mac: Rip a CD as one continuous MP3 in iTunes – Lifehacker

Rip a CD as one continuous MP3 in iTunes – Lifehacker—while I am not trying to rip an opera to my iPod, this could still be quite handy, especially for some partitioned audio books that I have that always want to play out of order.

CW2006 Presenation: Lakoff DVD

I’ve watched the companion DVD to the Elephant book, How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff, several times this evening—for lazy reasons, as it seemed much easier than slogging all the way through the book and I needed to feel like I was accomplishing something. The video is really to short to be very helpful. It’s as if Lakoff decided to read the outline to us. Very little explanation. I was hoping for more, especially for what I paid for it. Oh well.

Still much to figure out, and I’ve pulled a number of books off of the shelf. At some point, I acquired The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media by Raymond Gozzi, Jr., and apparently I need to skim through it. Ir worries me too that I don’t know how Media Ecology fits into my A/B scheme. I keep running into it,and it feels as if it’s just beyond what I’m doing. But it troubles me that it keeps coming up. How can I possibly work anything else into this craziness?

In the News: Beeks reading program is a success

NRVToday.com – Beeks reading program is a success—from the world of strange things from my hometown. Apparently, a bearded dragon is a lizard. While I’m sure that kissing such a lizard is harmless to the human, I do wonder what the hell that poor lizard thought.

TechRhet: Internet Debate: Preserving User Parity

NPR : Internet Debate: Preserving User Parity—isn’t it interesting that people don’t care to notice that there are fundamental race/class barriers to digital access, but if the conversation is about commercial access, everyone is outraged? Well, if you define everyone their way.