Link-a-dink

It’s been a pretty crazy-busy week around here, mostly with one thing or another with various school things that have little to do with teaching or scholarship, including an all day meeting yesterday about NCATE, which I suspect is going to be the bane of everyone’s existence at EMU for the next few years.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to post here about a variety of different things during the week, but I haven’t had time. And just to complicate matters more, I’ve spent the last couple hours (off and on, and while listening to the radio) coming across even more cool links. So, with little commentary and no sorting, here are all of these things now in no particular order:

• BBC News: Computer games ‘motivate pupils.’
• “Bringing You Books on Podcast: Amateur readers are working together to record novels and other texts to be downloaded free from the Internet.” (Sounds like an interesting hobby….)
• “Teens’ Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools,” in the Washington Post. I had better download this before it “goes away,” though I don’t know if the Post does that practice….
• “E-Read all about it,” from the UK’s Guardian.
• “Internet users judge Web site in less than a blink.” This is from Reuters, which is too bad because a better article was in the journal Nature. But Nature is one of those web sites where they take articles off for all but subscribers after a few days. Bastards. By the way, this site compares looking at a page in 50 miliseconds and 500 miliseconds, which is a big difference. Thanks to Bill H-D for that link.
• The German version of Wikipedia is partly off-line. It’s a confusing story and the first thing I did was look up “Tron” on the English version of Wikipedia.
• Here’s a link from if:book called “the book is reading you,” which is about Google’s Book search functions.
• On the Professional-Lurker site, a CFP for a conference I might try to go to next year— I mean hey, Vegas and about history of technology? How could I go wrong?
• A good post from Jeff called “The Searchers,” which is also a critique of Jacob Nielsen’s complaining about search engines. And I totally agree with Jeff and Jenny. I feel like it’s getting to the point where I really need to educate myself (and ultimately my students) about PHP and MySQL at least as much as HTML and CSS.
• Larry Lessig’s presentation on Google’s Book Search funtion (I’m downloading it as I type, so I guess I’ll see what this is later.)
• Will Richardson has a book coming out that looks kinda cool.

Alright, enough of that. Now I’ve got to get back to my to-do list to get ready for a crazy week next week….