Presenters Everywhere Beware? Or Embrace?

How would you react if you were making a big presentation and everyone in the room was chatting and having sidebar conversations? With all the blog, microblog, and chat websites out there days, how do you know they are not? CNN reports even without WiFi, the comments may be pouring down while you speak.

Information Security video games

A GCN article posted today is reports on an information security game called Cyberciege created by the Naval Postgraduate school and a video game developer. Non-traditional training and education continues to march on.

Career Networking Made Easy

LinkedIn is a fairly new service to help manage your business and career contacts. The interface reminds me of an Amazon.com page only the product is you as a valuable human capital tool instead of a book or a movie.

iPod not just for music

Several podcasts are now running to help teach a foreign language. The Open Culture blog recently posted a list of podcasts to teach Arabic, Cantonese, Russian, Spanish, and more. Several of these sites use some mechanism such as daily news broacasts in simplified and slow format along with a transcript to follow along with what you hear allowing listeners to keep up with the news while learning a new language (see Le Journal en français facile for French).

Great short story

The Last Question is a great science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. In his own words:

"This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.
After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should. "

Potential

This autistic man shows the human brain's potential for memorization. I think it would take a couple millenia of brain exercises just to help me remember where I put my keys... wait, what was I saying?

National Archives Online

According to a recent USAToday article, the National Archives are steadily offering more and more public records in a digital format. The website is still a bit difficult to navigate, but a great place to start is the America's Historical Documents page.

The five dollar lawn

There is a wonderful story about a boy learning the intangible benefits of working hard and doing a job well titled "The Countess and the Impossible" by Richard Thurman. The story appeared in the Reader's Digest in 1958. Apparently, many people have had trouble locating it online. I found it by searching for the term "five dollar lawn" in the Search only Conference Talks box on the search page of lds.org. The result is an address by Elder Vaughn J. Featherstone titled "The Gospel of Jesus Christ Is the Golden Door" in which the story appears to be quoted in full.

You can also view the story quoted in full by clicking on the comments for this post.

Virtual Education

Harvard Law and several other colleges are now experimenting with the concepts of open models for education. This means that many of the course materials are available for public use. I found out about this from an article on CNN about how some online classes are using the game 2nd Life to provide class members in diverse locations the opportunity to meet together for class discussions. Here's the story from CNN http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/11/13/second.life.university/index.html.

Here's the Harvard Law course wiki: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/wiki/Main_Page.