ijohnpederson

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Click for context. (thanks, Autumn)

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Thanks to @shareski for completing my life quest.

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Classic.

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MTV seems pretty tame and manageable compared to what we are dealing with today.

Source: Dealing with My/Our Attention and Information Issues

Managing your own filter is critical. The other kind of filter that lets things in vs. preventing things from coming in.

Turn it upside down and you get 60-60-60. Remove the zeros and the hyphens and you have 666 – the number of the beast.

Source: The J-Walk Blog: 09-09-09

What I am sensing, though, is that more schools and districts seem to “get” that the Web is affording some new opportunities for learning, and that they are willing to seriously consider what the impacts are for their schools. The problem is, and this is just my take on it, that most still see it as a conversation about technology as opposed to a conversation about change.

Source: Opening Day(s)

Jon Leibowitz, Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, back in 2005.

Imagine if Borders and Barnes & Noble, claiming it was killing their book sales, asked lawmakers to ban cities from building libraries. The legislators would laugh them out of the State House. Yet the same thing is happening right now with respect to Wi-Fi and other municipal broadband plans, and it is being taken all too seriously. In fact, although it is almost universally acknowledged that broadband access is essential to economic growth and education, phone and cable companies are lobbying furiously to prohibit municipalities from providing free or discounted broadband to their residents.

Silliness I’ve learned first hand over the past few months.

iPhone Unit Conversion App Makes $20,000 a Week

Source: iPhone Unit Conversion App Makes $20,000 a Week

Friendly and readable, but a little bit simple, in the way you’d say a person is simple, but only behind his back. A good listener, but not much of a talker. I guess what I’m trying to say is I want a typeface to take control of a situation. Smack me around a little and tell me what’s wrong with my body, then sell me a TV stand and make me assemble it myself without any tools or clothes, all the while throwing meatballs and lingonberry at my problem areas.

Source: IKEA abandons Futura for Verdana

Source: Smarterware by Gina Trapani

You can permanently affix the Gmail and Reader tabs in your tab bar, reduce them to show the tab favicon only, and display the number of unread items in each using a collection of Firefox add-ons.

Come back when you are finished and subscribe to This Week in Google with Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and Jeff Jarvis.

Check out this use of a pullquote. This is what makes the Interwebs awesome.

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Today brings an interesting new twist in the saga: AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the US, tells the FCC that it had nothing to do with Google Voice being rejected. Meanwhile, in a separate statement, Apple says that “contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.” [From ODD: AT&T and Apple Both Deny Rejecting Google Voice From App Store]

Ok. So AT&T didn’t kill the Google Voice application on the iPhone. But Apple leaves the door open.

I predict Apple approves the Google Voice app in short order, completely throwing AT&T under the bus by allowing everybody text-messaging for free over Google Voice instead of paying for AT&T’s criminal text messaging rates.

There. Apple, while you are at it, enable that one tethering application from a while back. And iChat.

For me, the set went by like a freight train. Later, all I remembered is an awkward record company party, that “what just happened?” feeling, and thinking we hadn’t played that well. I was wrong. With the keys to the kingdom dangling in front of us and the knife at our neck, we’d gone for broke. Whatever happened, it became one of our “legendary” performances, marked only in memory, bits of bootleg tape, and “I was there when” stories. It was the show that put us on the map in England and began a long and beautiful relationship with our fans overseas.

I’ll listen to anything sung with this sort of passion.

From Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road – Live November 18, 1975

As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense. [From some thouggo read the rest of the article hts on technophilia]

Source: danah boyd

Now go read the rest of the article. At first glance, among the most important pieces on the topic I’ve seen in years.

If I were going to wager, I’d say that the free, abundant learning combination is the one that’s going to change the world.

School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards.Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists. [From School Was the Big Thing for a Long Time]

The idea of customer-owned fiber may seem odd, but it is important to remember that many items that consumers buy today would have seemed very strange not long ago. Until the personal computer, a computer was something that only large companies owned. For decades, telephones were available only for lease, not for purchase. Home fiber could be the next technology that moves into the realm of consumer property.

[From Homes With Tails | The New America Foundation]

Agreed. I hate calling them “customers” though. Everybody deserves fiber.

In the 2008 national Campus Computing Project (CCP) survey, 42% of schools reported that they had already migrated or were about to migrate to an outsourced student e-mail service. Another 28% said they were considering switching. CCP founding director Kenneth Green says many of today’s first-year students like to use the Web-based e-mail they grew accustomed to in high school, just as many stick to an existing cell phone number rather than get a new dorm number.

[From Google and Microsoft Battle for College E-Mail]

I wonder what these numbers are like at the K12 level.

What next? Giving away office suites? Web pages? Where will teachers get their clip art?

Seth Godin.

School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.

For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning. For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally different activities.

[From Seth's Blog: Education at the crossroads]

Joi Ito on the topic of “agile development”, mixing in a bit of what others can learn from software programming practices.

It was very interesting to me that the government folks perked up when we got into this discussion. I remembered a comment by someone at an conference (…) The idea was that in big software and in government policy, it was easier to add features (lobby for things to be added into a law) than to remove features. Everyone has their favorite feature that needs to be added. There was very little incentive to remove features and complexity once it was in the law or the code. You end up with things like Windows, some modern cell phones and many of our government policies, turning into bloatware that’s huge, too compliated for normal people to understand which doesn’t really even do well what it was originally intended to do. I think that keeping units small, proper test suites (accountability at the object level), and agile development can help mitigate some of the causes of bloatware that loses touch with why it exists in the first place and ends up sucking almost all management energy into process.

Source: Joi Ito: Agile Development, Startups, and Government Policy

It might surprise you to learn that students from New York City’s most impoverished neighborhoods arrive at school each day with personal computers. The problem is that they deposit these powerful learning tools at the nearby bodega — where they’re held like a coat check service for a dollar a day — because their personal computers are cell phones, and they are banned by New York City’s school chancellor, Joel Klein. Many students will circumvent the ban by blind-texting from their backpacks or from the bathroom. But it’s not that simple for those who have to pass through metal detectors and scanners to gain entry into the school building each day.

Source: Please Turn on Your Cell Phone: Change Observer: Design Observer

Update: James, a native New Yorker new to WiscNet, caught this story. A) Confirmed. B) “It’s not all that bad. A few years ago it used to be knives they checked at the bodegas.” C) Worse, “…they didn’t use the metal detectors every day. You knew they were checking when long lines developed outside of school. On those days, I just went back home.”