Robert Paterson's Weblog:- What really killed the old music business was not downloading per se - but a new tool and a new supporting system. It was the iPod and iTunes. They made it easy and respectable for the mainstream to do what the hackers had been doing.This Christmas I have been using 2 new tools that I think will do the same to radio as we know it and also to TV.

Random Thoughts:- If you haven't seen them yet, these teacher training videos by Russell Stannard are really cool. Thanks to Darren for the link.

Remote Access:- Wordpress.com has posted some year end information about their service:

Scripting News:- How are you getting the latest news on the Apple keynote on Twitter?

Blue Skunk Blog:- This came in my e-mail yesterday and want to encourage you Blue Skunk readers (being above average in both taste and intelligence) to consider nominating yourselves for the ISTE Board. Librarians and Minnesotans are particularly needed to bring balance and grace to the organization.

Stephen's Lighthouse:- Here's Gartner's 2009 list of The Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009:

Stephen's Lighthouse:- TechCrunch is publishing a few predictions and of you're still listening to Wall Street prognosticators, here's the faceoff between J.P Morgan Vs. Barclays Capital:

Stephen's Lighthouse:- ALA suggested to the Obama transition team that they add $100 million to the economic plan for libraries. I quibble but a $billion would be better since libraries probably support lots more employment that people who assemble cars (grin).

Stephen's Lighthouse:- This is only for streaming video but it's still impressive growth. I suspect that it can be argued that this 'format' is gaining at the expense of broadcast network television (movies and non-current event programming) and DVD/VHS hard copy formats (owned, borrowed or rented). Talking to my own kids, nieces and nephews and other kids over the holidays, I was taken by how much they timeshifted their viewing habits to online and assumed their favourite shows would be available there. Add the impact of set-top boxes, TiVo and NetFlix's new methods and we're already well into a major shift.

Stephen's Lighthouse:- Here's 10 trends for personal tech stuff from JWT:

AssortedStuff:- This morning’s Post tells me that the six people who want to be the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) recently had public forum to trumpet their qualifications. The proceedings were only really interesting for political junkies (not me) but this part, in which the candidates discussed their social networking savvy, caught my eye. … he [...]

Educational Technology:-

Educational Technology:-

Educational Technology:-

BLOG-EFL:- In Japan, 30% of those surveyed by Goo Research’s online monitor group would like to. Or at least that's what was said in April this year (I've only just seen this now) - I wonder, if you asked the same people now, would the answer be any different? How many of those people have tried to study English in Second Life? And, Perhaps the answer would have been different if they had used a different verb instead of study - learn or practise, for example.

Moving at the Speed of Creativity:- One of our “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” digital storytelling project participants asked a good question today on our learning community forum: Does anyone have any suggestions for websites to safely download pictures off the internet? This was my answer. Julie: Great question. Flickr Creative Commons is one of the best and one we recommend in our COV workshops, as you know. [...]

Moving at the Speed of Creativity:- Twits beware. Twitter phishers and spammers are out on the prowl, and more than a few unsuspecting educators have fallen prey to their clever ruses and hacks in the last two days. The posts on the official Twitter blog “Gone Phishing” from Saturday and “Monday Morning Madness” from today provide more insights. Even Barack Obama’s Twitter [...]

ReadWriteWeb:- Yesterday, I was with my wife in the L'Occitane store. The shelves were filled with fragrances, soaps, lotions: all sorts of handcrafted beauty products. It occured to me while looking at the labels that I have no idea how these products were made. I am reasonably versed in chemistry, but the process of manufacturing perfume is not something I know anything about.

ReadWriteWeb:- We are still hoping to see a full office suite on the iPhone, but while there are already some apps that allow you to edit documents on the phone, the device's size currently makes it more useful for reading documents than actually creating them. Today, Soonr launched an application in the App Store (iTunes link) that allows you to sync files from your desktop to Soonr's online storage and then view them on your iPhone. Soonr can handle over 40 different file types and provides you with 500 megabytes of free online storage.

Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education:- A subtle problem for predicting the future comes from Martyn Smith, who reminds us about the formation of new subcommunities. Smith is considering the Reformation:We could lose ourselves examining the doctrinal details of the various camps (Calvinism, Lutheranism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism),...

ReadWriteWeb:- In the first RWW Live of 2009, we tackle an issue that is of vital importance to all startups right now - how to navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. Join the ReadWriteWeb authors and special guests on our live podcast show. Our guests are entrepreneurs from BrightKite and Zoho, two startups that were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'.

Adventures in Educational Blogging:- Has anyone used Search-Cube with kids? I can see that it might work really well for them when they are doing research. It is powered by Google, but instead of returning pages of hits as text, it gives you a virtual 3-D cube of hits as thumbnails. You can use the arrow keys to rotate the cube to view all the hits. Hovering over a thumbnail pops up a larger copy of the image. Clicking on an image opens that site in a new tab or window. Here is a search-cube of hits for a search of the word knitting.

Robert Paterson's Weblog:- The Times gave Michael Lewis and David Einhorn a massive amount of space today to both analyze the problem facing us and to offer a coherent set of solutions.At the heart of their questions about the bailout is this - really it is designed to take us back to 2007!!!Rather than tackle the source of the problem, the people running the bailout desperately want to reinflate the credit bubble, prop up the stock market and head off a recession. Their efforts are clearly failing: 2008 was a historically bad year for the stock market, and we’ll be in recession for some time to come. Our leaders have framed the problem as a “crisis of confidence” but what they actually seem to mean is “please pay no attention to the problems we are failing...

BLOG-EFL:- WEBHEADS DISCUSSION TOUR #2

The Strength of Weak Ties:- Digital Citizenship in a Global Economy: The Internet Revolution and Its implications for Education

The Strength of Weak Ties:- Chatcast with Chris and Christian:

The Strength of Weak Ties:- I guess that I'm envious of your decision to go back to teaching. I don't know if that was a hard decision for you or not, with the obvious success you've had in the business world. It is something that pops into my mind from time to time, but I'm not sure about it-not sure I'm quite ready yet. But what you are doing takes a great deal of guts and it's something to admire.

Remote Access:- Preparation time, non - contact time or whatever the time is called in your system when, during the school day, your students are elsewhere and you are free to correct things that have been turned in, find new resources, prepare lessons, etc is always a hot issue. In some systems people have sufficient time. in some systems, people have absolutely none.

Remote Access:- I usually am a pretty early riser. Often out of bed by 5, my day ends someplace around 10:30. During the 17 hours or so that I am at least fairly conscious, if I am at home on a regular routine kind of day, my laptop is open for a lot of those hours. I may not be sitting in front of it or possibly not even paying attention to it, but it runs for much of the day. While I am at school it sits on the little table that I use for a classroom desk and when I occasionally get to wander by, I'll take a quick look at my email or the stream that Twitter is.

AssortedStuff:- Have you heard the buzz about 21st century skills? Forget it. According to Jay Mathews, writing in this morning’s Post, the idea is doomed because millions of students are “still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math”. Today on this page, we are ushering in the new year with the hottest trend in pedagogy, [...]

Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education:- An expensive sculpture vanishes from one of Bernie Madoff's houses. But this is no ordinary theft. Instead, it's an exercise in teaching, and in politics:[S]ome pesticide workers found the statue on December 31, unharmed, in the shrubbery near a local...

ReadWriteWeb:- Music mashup site shows how User Experience is done.

Scripting News:- The Internet has many wonderful applications, but I doubt if people think of it as a romance platform, but it is.

ReadWriteWeb:- Every year old-school web design guru Jakob Nielsen releases a survey of the world's top Intranets. This year's report has some interesting comments on the use of 'web 2.0' techniques in company intranets. However Nielsen continues to take petty shots at the latest social web technologies. We were critical of this last year, but frankly it's just tiresome now. Thankfully his report has some very useful information for enterprises especially, so let's check that out.

Weblogg-ed:-

ReadWriteWeb:- Ever since Apple finally lifted the NDA covering the iPhone SDK, a small number of developers have started to open source their native iPhone apps. Today, Freshbooks, a popular online time-tracking and invoicing service, joined this group by open sourcing its native iPhone application. Other open source iPhone apps include Wordpress, the applications from Apps Amuck's 31 Days of iPhone Apps, and a collection of source code for handling the iPhone's touch controls.

Library Stuff:- More on the new book at Jacket Copy.

Library Stuff:- Curtis Rogers - “The South Carolina State Library has launched a new campaign to let state agencies and their employees know more about the host of free services it offers.”

Library Stuff:- Infomancy - “According to the results of the 2008 School Library Journal Job Satisfaction Survey, at least $10,000.”

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Longer article posted in my Half an Hour blog. My sort of environmental scan is a bit different from what you'll get from consultants and venture capitalists. Don't ask me what companies are developing what products, how industry stocks are performing, or where all the 'smart money' is going. I don't know and I don't care. What I can tell you, though, is what technologies are working, what technologies are flopping, and what technologies are fads. So, here is my advice on what not to build. Actually, it's a bit more than that: it's a list of what not to build, a list of some things that people are working on now, some fads to avoid, and some indication of what's out there for the taking, if you can get your act together in a hurry. And what lies beyond that? The domain of real innovation and progress. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, January 5, 2009 [Tags:

ReadWriteWeb:- In March 2008, Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails released the first part of Ghosts I-IV via BitTorrent, and released all four albums under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Even though fans could easily get free versions of the album, Ghosts actually went on to become the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Neat. No login, no muss, no fuss. Create a chatroom by clicking on a button, share the resulting URL with your friends. The chatroom disappears a few hours after you've finished using it. Doug Dickinson, Dougmuses, January 5, 2009 [Tags: Chatrooms] [Link] [Comment]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Seb Schmoller links to Leo Pollak, who argues in favour of open education. "Without intellectual property, a significant amount of innovation still occurs and welfare may actually be higher than with intellectual property." Schmoller, though, also cites Michael Feldstein, who argues that "access to course materials is not the same as access to education." Maybe not, but is this enough to make us open education sceptics, as Feldstein suggests? I take up the case in the comments, and Feldstein replies. Seb Schmoller, Fortnightly Mailing, January 5, 2009 [Tags: Patents, Open Content,

Infomancy:- What’s in a name? According to the results of the 2008 School Library Journal Job Satisfaction Survey, at least $10,000. As seen in the chart, the average salary for “teacher librarians” in the survey was $10,000 more than the average for “library media specialists” and $15,000 higher than “school librarians.” While it would be nice [...]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- This - and not closed worlds like Second Life - is the way forward for 3D software: "Cobalt is a free and open source metaverse browser and construction toolkit for accessing, creating, and publishing hyperlinked multi-user virtual worlds. Powered by Croquet technology, Cobalt uses peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers and makes it very simple to create and securely share deeply collaborative virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems." Paul Hamilton, Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education, January 5, 2009 [Tags: Operating Systems, Second Life,

Library Stuff:- NYTimes - “China warned Google and other popular Web portals Monday that they must do more to block pornographic material from reaching Chinese users, the latest in a series of government crackdowns targeting Internet content.”

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- The very first sentence in the very first step in this Forbes article is, "Admit our mistakes." The author then proceeds to recommend exactly the same sort of thinking that led to the downturn in the first place (a far more sobering - and sober - reflection can be found in the New York Times article by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, as well as this column from Paul Krugman). After a paean to tax breaks, cuts to medicare and welfare, drill baby drill, and xenophobia, Rich Karlgaard addresses education: "we'll have to break the teachers unions." As though underpaying teachers will really solve any sort of economic (or educational) problem. Isn't this sort of vindictive, partisan, narrow-minded...

Library Stuff:- CNET News - “I’ve not traditionally been much of a Twitter fan, once deriding it as “Wonder Bread.” I managed my Twitter existence by deleting my account. 

Library Stuff:- How Appealing - “Another month, and another Freedom of Information Act loss for The Associated Press before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.”

EdCompBlog:- I was very sad to hear the news of Tom Conlon's death. I only worked occasionally with Tom but when I did meet him, I enjoyed his company. He was stimulating, fun and challenging - a good combination as far as I'm concerned.