Something To Ponder On Labor Day

From the U.S. Census Bureau, a cross-section of information related to the American workforce as we spend a day paying tribute to the many that labor on our behalf in this country. Click here.

The Rebirth Of The World Trade Center

Project Rebirth -- Chronicling the Rebirth of Ground Zero in New York City -- is a site devoted to capturing the rebuilding and transformation of the World Trade Center.

Made possible by a dedicated team of individuals, the project is lead by Jim Whitaker. There are multiple cameras stationed around the site that take pictures at a set interval -- I believe it is every 5 minutes. Images are then assembled into montages that show the changes.

As we approach the third anniversity of September 11, this is a wonderful site that both reflects the sorrow and shows the hope as new rises from the ashes and destruction.

Is Multi-tasking Really More Productive And Efficient?

Maybe I show my age or generational bent by wondering about the buzz about how people (including our students) can do multiple things at once -- watch TV, play a computer game, IM with friends, make an entry into their blog -- and do them all well. Not that I underestimate what the human (amazing) brain can do, but I do wonder how much quality attention can be paid to multiple activities at once without something not getting its due.

Click here for an interesting article from AZ Central.Com that explores this issue.

YouSendIt -- A Solution For Sending Large Files?

YouSendIt offers a service where, apparently for free and not even requiring a registration and/or exchange of registration information, you can send attachments of up to 1 GB to anyone you want.

You type in the recipient's e-mail address, browse to the file you wish to send, and then click Send.

YouSendIt puts the file on their server and sends a note to the recipient notifying them that this attachment is waiting for them to download and gives them the link to retrieve it.

This may be handy, especially if you're interested in sending something to someone whose e-mail provider has low-ish limits on attachments it will allow on its service.

I have tried it a couple times and it worked like a charm.

Webby Awards 2004

Each year The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences presents The Webby Awards designed to showcase the best there is out there on the web.

For this year's nominees and winners, click here. You'll find a wide range of categories, some of which include: Best Practices, Community, Education, Film, Finance, Government/Law, Health, Humor, Living, Music, Print+Zines, Politics, Children, Science, Travel, and more.

Also, don't miss a whole category of winners chosen in the People's Voice Awards. A lot of great sites!

More About Schools And Schooling

As an educator, it's impossible not to include some sites having to do with schools, student, teachers, education, and learning. As someone who works in technology in schools, it's also hard to resist looking at all the things revolving around how we teach and how our society views education.

The PBS site, The Story of American Public Education, is quite wonderful. As bright and exciting as our future is, there is much to learn from the path we've already trod.

Halloween Already?

Here it is August 27 and I just have returned from a local grocery store that already has major Halloween candy displays out as you enter the store. Halloween is still months away. I can't believe it!

But if it is really time to start thinking about Halloween, I thought I'd better supply you with an online resource for those of you who want to make sure you identify all those pumpkins correctly. And, as a bonus, these are organic pumpkins, yet.

Go to The Organic Pumpkin ID Chart.

A Sobering Moment For Boomers

For those of us entering the phase of our life when the former belief we held that not only were our spirits immortal but so are our bodies, getting older is having a way of bringing a new sense of reality to that optimism. I have the feeling that a number of folks in their 40's - 60's are discovering those gradual changes in what our joints and muscles can and can no longer do. Another dose of reality will come in the filling out of the online survey at the Living To 100 Calculator. When you're finished answering the questions, the calculator will give you your lifespan prediction.

I just completed mine and was pleased to get the result of 88.1 years. As encouraging as that number is, going through the process of answering the site's questions can't help but get you thinking about your lifestyle habits such as exercise, diet, and stress along with the influences you inherit and have no control over, such as your family health history. Responding to those questions also reminds you about what your daily habits and lifestyle are. It's not difficult to be reminded about the things you might be doing that aren't really that helpful in terms of sustaining long-term health, not to mention 100-year lifespans.

Again, it was somewhat a relief to find out at least someone thinks I'm going to head out well into my 80's. But maybe, just maybe, if I change and improve some of my habits, I have enough time to improve my changes of making it into my 90's. It's certainly worth giving it a try!

A Resource For International Study

The Library of Congress is one of the world's largest collections of knowledge and much of this wealth is accessible via the Internet.

Many sections of the LOC's web presence is focused on making available treasures from our American history.

But the LOC also has a great deal of information about the world beyond our shores. Visit LOC's Global Gateway: World Culture and Resources.

Just The Facts, Please

As much as it is my intention to steer pretty clear of the whole realm of politics even though when knee-deep in a very partisan presidential race, there's a site that takes on politic questions -- including advertising and claims made by one or many candidates -- and tries to look at the facts in a non-partisan manner.

Sponsored by the Annenberg Foundation, a site you may find useful as you're trying to separate the truths from the half-truths from the no-truths is FactCheck.org.

A useful resource in this period of many claims and counter-claims.

Oh, The Words We Use

If you've ever wondered what the most often-used words are, the Word Count site is for you. Not only do you see a list of words ranked in their exact order of common use and repetition, but you can search for your favorite word to see where it fits in, or you can type in a number and find what word ranks at that point in order. And, of course, you can simply click through the list and see the words, one by one, in numerical order.

The presentation of this information is also quite artistically done:

By the way

the most common word: the

last word on the list (86,800th place): conquistador

It's Time To Blog A Blog

I figured the time was right to blog a blog here at the Motley Miscellanea. One called Future Now is out there to track "emerging technologies and their social implications" and seemed like a good place to start.

The three contributors to this blog are: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Bill Cockayne, and Franz Dill. Each is associated in one way or another with the Institute For The Future.

These guys obviously have a wide range of interest and explore all sorts of developments out there. Both these sites are worth checking out.

Legal Decision in Realm of P2P File Sharing

The two lead sentences from the summary at Wired.com of the decision rendered yesterday by a federal appeals court is:

"Peer-to-peer file-sharing services Morpheus and Grokster are legal, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The decision is a blow for record labels and movie studios which sued the peer-to-peer operators claiming that the services should be held liable for the copyright infringement of their users."

Click here for the full article.

I'm Going To Miss Julia Child

Of the many tribute and remembrance articles and sites devoted to the late Julia Child, I've taken note of three.

From PBS: Julia Child: Lessons With Master Chefs

From NPR: Collected stories and remembrances

From the Smithsonian Institution: What's Cooking? Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian

I'm not a great cook or all that interested in cooking, but I was a big fan of her TV shows on PBS in the '70s, watched them religiously. I found them interesting and informative, yes, but also entertaining and sometimes quite funny. She made a great impression on me during that time and I will miss her.

Special Report on Schools and Their Future from CNN

I'm not a constant viewer of CNN but I came across this special report about teaching, schools, students, and future prospects called America's Changing Classrooms.

The major categories include Exploring Options, Then And Now: Timeline and Gallery, and Alternative Schools. Much fascinating material to read here.

Google Equals Billions?

The day of the final stock price and offering is here. Producing billions of dollars in an IPO is pretty heady stuff. This article by John Markoff at the New York Times lays out some of the heightened expectations that grow out of all the attention that's been directed toward Google as it has finally arrived at its date of its stock going public.

And Now For Something Completely Different -- Part II

If you have a few extra minutes (yeah, right), check out the Museum of Hoaxes. Lots to investigate....some funny and light-hearted......some questionable......some serious....most, well, kinda interesting.

A Vast Treasury of Art Just a Click Away

Thanks to this article in the New York Times -- "For Art History Scholors, Illumination Is a Click Away" -- I've learned of ARTstor, a fantastic online resource for viewing and learning about works of art.

Underwritten and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ARTstor makes available 300,000 images online (!). And, according to the article by Karen W. Arenson, ARTstor is designed to be particularly useful for educators and students studying works of art, offering well thought-through cataloguing and search systems. Their mission is "...to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields."

Another amazing resource to explore!

Home Again

It certainly is great being back in Seattle. San Diego was a wonderful place to visit but, as they say, there's nothing like home.

In the spirit of...."and now for something completely different".....I offer you the, uh, various fascinating -- or should I say, unpredictable -- sites listed in the Museum of Online Museums.

As you might expect, you can find links here to the -- uh -- conventional museums such as The Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art.

But MoOM offers much more and much less. Much more of interest and much less of the predictable.

For example, MoOM has links to:
The Fading Ad Collection
The Essential Vermeer
The Museum of Fred
Ansel Adams At 100
The Museum of Temporary Art

Interesting, yes....but there's more! Such as:
The Treasury of IBM-manufactured Clocks
The World's Largest Collection of the Smallest Things
The Candy Wrapper Collection
The Dome-A-Rama Gallery of Snow Globes

.....or...

The Gallery of Amish Buggy Plates
The Museum of Obsolete Computers
The Museum of Coat Hangers
and The Catalogue of Less-Known Superheroes
(and for the especially adventuresome among you: The Circus of Disemboweled Plush Toys!)

Now that's what I call a whole bunch of "somethings different"!

ESRI Conference -- Looking Back

As I think back on these four days of concentrated focus on geography, cartography, databases, GIS, and ESRI, I come away pretty excited. The thing I came away with that is crystal clear is that GIS is a very real tool for studying and learning about our world. It is also obvious that there are many ways in which this approach to studying our world can be of great benefit to our work in teaching our students about the world they live in and preparing them for the stewardship of that world that they are going to inherit.

It seems that GIS can and should be an important tool as we work to fulfill Lakeside's Mission Focus. Certainly GIS is well-suited to show us much about countries beyond our borders. It is also a powerful tool for us to learn more about our own country and culture. Part of the process of our reaching out to the global community will all the more effective when we know ourselves well. GIS can have a crucial role in helping us fulfill our goal of becoming a school with a global focus.

The educational side of ESRI does still seem a little like an add-on. It's not just because there were 800 of us attending the Educational User Conference and 13,000 at the International User Conference, although it was not easy to lose sight of the differences in scope represented by those numbers. Though the commitment that ESRI has made to the educational community (market?) is definitely there, their software and the availability of database information still has layers of complexity that result in a very steep learning curve for teachers and students.

It didn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that a lot of the jobs represented in those 13,000 users were civic planners and engineers from all over the world. Many of these people sit in front of computer monitors for hours (or maybe days) at a time collecting and manipulating data. They use GIS day-in and day-out. This is not the typical scenario for a teacher. I believe that ESRI sees the need to make their products more (I hate to use the term) "user friendly." I also believe they see the power unleashed by making these resources available online with GIS tools built-in, saving teachers and students the very time-consuming task of collecting data, shaping the data, and then constructing an effective lesson using that data and GIS software. Some of the sites I have listed in previous postings offer exciting examples of how this potential can be realized. Again, the prospect of more and more these tools coming along seems very real and quite exciting.

It's a natural response to the markets ESRI has to support that their greater effort has been in new applications and features and less in simplifying how to get from raw data to usable databases to easy user interfaces and logical structures. At the same time, I know that people at ESRI see his need and are working to address it.

We'll see how the actual implementation of projects using GIS at our school pans out in the coming year. The colleagues that attended this conference seemed to leave energized and interested in building GIS into their curricula. I will do whatever I can to support that effort. With the complexity of using the Arc/ESRI products such as it is -- bearing in mind the oft-cited (and true) principle of "use it or lose it" coupled with the competing demands on our time in working with kids -- we'll need a few months to see how the greater integration of GIS into our school goes.