stevendkrause.com

From the site Webware, this info/review on a new blog directory and review service, Blogged.com. I dunno, this may or may not be useful. I will probably play around with it as a means of coming up with “quasi-random” blogs to solicit for my BAWS survey and I will admit that I don’t think there’s a very good service that does this now. Still, is it necessary?

From Improve Everywhere, a “mission” involving desktops being mobile:

On a less humorous note, I do sometimes wish I could/would do this. I’m working on a desktop now and will switch to a laptop soon to go and do some work elsewhere, and I know I will inevitably forget something….

While watching the Oscars tonight, I’m sorting through my RSS Feed Reader.

• CCE gave my The Process of Research Writing a shout-out. I haven’t really had a lot of time to do much with this since I put it up on line last year and it’s not exactly a site that is just burnin’ up the Internets, but I do know that hundreds people have at least looked at this thing, which is hundreds more than would have looked at it had I left it as it was with my previous publisher.
• Via jill/txt, girls apparently blog more than boys. A potentially interesting link to follow through on for teaching, but since my BAWS project specifically skips the under 18 year old crowd, not so much for my research.
• Blackboard wins patent case. I have to be honest, I don’t really quite know what this means in terms of what other CMS tools or open source tools or what-have-you, but it sounds like it could be significant. I suppose one option is to just not use Blackboard at all, which I’ve happily managed to do so far.
• 12 Screencasting Tools for Creating Video Tutorials, which is from a site I think I’m going to subscribe to called mashable.com. Personally, I am very partial to iShowU, but there are a couple of other Mac options that look pretty interesting, too.

Via danah boyd’s blog, I learned about The Future of Reputation, which is also available online. The TOC and the description that danah writes makes it sound like an interesting read.

Good Lord, Ralph Nader is running for president again, and as far as I can tell, he’s doing it because he’s kind of gone from being a really important consumer advocate and progressive politico into a kind of crazy and angry old man. Kind of sad, really.

I think he’s right when he says “if Democrats can’t landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form.” But I also think that Obama is right when he says that Nader is an egomaniac and “My sense is that Mr.. Nader is somebody who, if you don’t listen and adopt all of his policies, thinks you’re not substantive.”

This has made the rounds on blogs/etc/ lately, but it’s an interesting less anyway: Obsolete Skills.

I’ve come across a couple of different resources for teaching about YouTube: Henry Jenkins has parts one and two (will there be more?) parts of an interview with Alex Juhasz about teaching with and about YouTube. Yet another thing I link to without having actually read, but it’s on the list for this week.

One more post for now, in the spirit of posts that catch up on things I’ve been meaning to note here: Via one of the blogs I read listed below (I can’t remember which one), Merlin Mann at 43 Folders (a blog I haven’t read for a while now, but that perhaps I’ll get back to one of these days) has a favorable review of the writing software Scrivener. This post lead to this one, “NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps.” I haven’t read it yet, but will after I finish here.

You know, I’ve had a demo copy on both my desktop and laptop computers for over a month now and it has been on my “to do” list for quite a while to finish the tutorial/figure this thing out, and for whatever reason, I haven’t done so yet. Perhaps my writerly head is resisting new techniques; or perhaps that’s just evidence that I haven’t been writing enough lately. In any event, since we are entering winter break and this is going to be a chance for me to catch up on all sorts of things, maybe I’ll have some of my own thoughts to share on this by next weekend. But I do have probably 100 items on my current to do list, so….

Also via boing-boing and from the blog peer see, this entry about crazy Chinese building blocks for kids. Makes me wonder how our kids might be learning Chinese….

Via boing-boing:

Actually, there are a lot of things here that Tex et al seemed to get right: the house of tomorrow being built around the TV, ways to skip commercials, the fact that the same thing is on every channel, that TVs will be everywhere, etc.