My Director attended the Tampa Bay Library Consortium Annual Meeting last week and came back with an interesting flyer. bq.Web 2.0 is all the buzz. Library literature and conferences, the general news media and the internet at large are focusing on these new integrated technologies. Typically Web 2.0 technologies are “supposed second-generation of Internet-based services [...]
Everyone once in a while, there is a story that just makes me angry. This is one of those. bq.Pluto, beloved by some as a cosmic underdog but scorned by astronomers who considered it too dinky and distant, was unceremoniously stripped of its status as a planet Thursday. The International Astronomical Union, dramatically reversing course [...]
Last night, I attended an open house at one of our local places of learning, Sebring Middle School. The vast majority of the time was spent voting in the FutureReady Mobile Computer Lab Contest. When last I looked in on the voting, which ended at 12 am CST, they were firmly in fifth place. I [...]
Anyone who has ever had to manage any number of public computers knows what an ordeal it can be. It is also something of a running battle betweens administrators and users. bq.The trouble began last fall after the district issued some 600 Apple iBook laptops to every student at the high school about 50 miles [...]
I have always felt that the true appeal of e-books lay in replacing textbooks. bq.Fifty-four 11-year-old students are willing guinea pigs in an extraordinary experiment aimed at using technology to deliver education across the continent. In the Eduvision pilot project, textbooks are out, customised Pocket PCs, referred to as e-slates, are very much in. They [...]
SanDisk has introduced FlashCP, which amount to a sort of text book on a stick system. This could be huge if the companies involved realize the potential of what they have. People will be willing to put up with a limited amount of DRM if they seem enough benefit. But based on past experience, I [...]
I learned a long time ago that most Europeans shared a common ancestry. But what I didn’t know was the similarity between Hindi and Welsh, since apparently it was only discovered recently.
Remember when I complained about the class-size amendment here in Florida? As you may recall, it passed, anyway. Of course, as I complained at the time, it is one thing to pass such an amendment and another to pay for it. Yesterday, we had a local referendum in order to increase sales taxes by .5% [...]
One thing about Universities is they usually have lots of money. My dear old Alma Mater is getting ready to spend 50 Million on sports facilities. And I sure that Opera has firm marketing data for giving them a free browser. But they might want to think about all marketing opportunities to public and school [...]
I was at a meeting yesterday and ended up getting a copy of the 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but it does have some very interesting information. If you are interested in libraries and have some spare time, you might want to take a look at it.