Yoda Backpack:
Stay on target! Star Wars nerds can add one more scene of the original trilogy to their re-enactment list. Inside this Yoda backpack you can place your lightsaber, your MacBook, and a cellphone to call mom to pick you up when you’re all done. If they’d only make a slave Leia full-sized plushie. – Jason Chen

Plush Yoda Backpack [Thinkgeek via OhGizmo]

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i’d like one of these….

Teaching and Developing Online.: June 2006 Archives:
Quote of the Day

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled and no-one dares criticize it.

Pierre Gallois
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yes, i think David Noble and Langdon Winner both made similar arguments. However, as any technologists know…. GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.

Teaching and Developing Online:
Teaching is Dead, Long live learning is a similar iconoclastic statement aimed at the traditions of modernist education. It uses the sociological and economic impact of media technology, in particular the Internet and its strengthening of informal and networked learning, and calls the foreseeable end of the traditional roles of teachers and ultimately the school system. It is in this day and age that the ideas of Ivan Illich become more realistic…
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I think illich is becoming more and more important in our own day. the focus on learning notwithstanding.

Florida weighs in on post-modernism:
(g) The history of the United States, including the

2 period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence,

3 the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its

4 present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights

5 movement to the present. The history of the United States

6 shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the

7 revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth.

8 American history shall be viewed as factual, not as

9 constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and

10 testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation

11 based largely on the universal principles stated in the

12 Declaration of Independence.
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another example of our nations educational system, specifically florida, legislating away the truth of history and historiagraphy in favor of the mythologically true version.

Alex Halavais » The Hyperlinked Society:
Joseph Turow at the Annenberg School for Communication (U. Penn) is organizing a conference called The Hyperlinked Society. He’s managed to invite some really cool people to come and talk, and somehow I managed to get invited too. I grateful for the opportunity to get to talk with these folks.

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i’ll be in philly for this conference/event tomorrow. I think i might do a bit of conference blogging… we’ll see.

How MySpace Works:
From How Stuff Works check out this well-written and simple-language explanation of how MySpace works, including a section on safety issues.  This is a good resource to point parents (and fellow library workers) to when the issue of MySpace comes up.
found through LII’s New This Week, May 18th issue (I know, I’m behind)

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interesting, if a bit simplistic analysis from how stuff works.

roanoke.com – Golf Stories-Bigwigs dedicate River Course:
Virginia Tech president Charles W. Steger couldn’t seem to stop smiling early Monday morning. Ditto for the rest of the school’s bigwigs and heavy-hitter contributors on hand for the formal dedication ceremony of the recently renovated Pete Dye River Course at Virginia Tech.
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ahhh, we have priorities at least.

Line56.com: Wikis, Blogs Won’t Survive:
Mark Harrison, a partner with consultancy Kineo, recently made a presentation on the topic of “E-Learning 2012.” The presentation, made at the E-Networking Event in London, was fairly bold, with Harrison predicting that, “I personally don’t believe wikis and blogs will survive.”
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this line of argument fails. the reasons why blogs and wiki’s will change and transform over time is that humans will find better ways of accomplishing what blogs and wiki’s accomplish.