Just another Learnerblogs.org weblog
This is a fascinating article about the One Laptop per Child initiative that is coming out of MIT. The first shipments of the laptops have now gone out and are being used by impoverished school children in third world countries. This article discusses the use of the laptops in Peru. I occasionally wish that some of my students would have the enthusiasm about learning that is present in these Peruvian children.
Here is a scary article about the possible future of ad services on the Internet. This article raises major privacy concerns. I am particularly curious if there would be any way for a data thief to put all the records together if they were stolen. To me, this feels like one group is recording too much information that would be available to people for the right price. What do you think?
How many of you HATE lugging around your textbooks? Did your hands start hurting this summer when you were reading/holding the new Harry Potter book (1.8 pounds)? Well Amazon.com has come out with the first digital book reader. I am amazed by it and cannot wait for it to replace all the textbooks in school. I can imagine the day when I would check out a digital copy of the book to you and it would be on your Kindle for the semester and then disappear. Please read the article that is below and prepare to be amazed.
Amazon debuts Kindle e-book reader | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
There isn’t much to comment about here, but I thought that you guys might be interested in reading what one of your peers is doing.
As many of you know, most big bands have MySpace pages where they tout their upcoming albums, singles, and tours. Recently, several bands have found their MySpace pages hijacked by malware (see this article from the New York Times.) As this article from PC World points out, not every musician or band had their pages fixed as quickly as Ms. Keys did. Why do you think that hackers were interested in hijacking the band pages on MySpace? Do you agree with the way MySpace corrected the problem, according to PC World?
Today there was an interesting article in the New York Times about the use of technology in education. I usually find myself arguing for more use of technology in our school, but this article takes quite the opposite view. I am curious what all of you think. Can you see ways that cell phones and laptops could be beneficial to you in your classes? Do you think that you and your peers could learn to refrain from surfing or IM’ing when you need to be paying attention to new material? Please read the article and leave your comments.
Dr. Pausch is notable for his many accomplishments in the field of Computer Science. First and foremost is the creation of the Alice programming language. He is 47 years old and is dying of pancreatic cancer. He recently gave his “Last Lecture” at CMU. Thankfully somebody there videotaped it and has posted it online. Since it has been posted it has been viewed over a million times. If you have not yet checked it out please do so. The link below will take you to a page about his last lecture.
Randy Pausch’s Home Page
[googlevideo]-5700431505846055184[/googlevideo]
Technorati Tags: education pausch lecture CMU
In class today we talked about our friend Dimitri throwing a penny off the top of the Empire State Building. Some students in the class noted that the penny has a maximum speed that it could reach when thrown off of a building. This top speed is called terminal velocity. I am curious what the top speed is of a penny being thrown from 1256 feet in the air. Hopefully somebody can provide me with the correct answer along with some proof (so don’t just give me a number). In the meantime, here is a fantastic video about terminal velocity from PBS.
Download Video: Posted by lcrosswe at TeacherTube.com.
In class this week we have been talking about quadratics. We spent some time looking at the golden ratio. You can find a definition of it either at Math World or Wikipedia. We spent some time discussing this ratio in the art world and in the architectural world. Do you really think that the golden ratio is more pleasing to the eye than a square (or other proportion)? Is there any research out there to support your hypothesis? Please feel free to comment.
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