links for 2008-07-13

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Summer Reading List

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Chris Lehmann tagged me with his Summer Reading meme, so below I have listed what I have been recently reading and what I plan to read over the summer.

Recently Read:

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson

Shakespeare, by Bill Bryson

Currently Reading:

A Schoolmaster of the Great City, by Angelo Patri
This weeks selection in the Gary Stager book club is quite frankly a remarkable book. I am about a third of the way into it, and am finding it fascinating to read the reflections of this man who wrote of his experience over 90 years ago. I believe that we who work in education do not think enough about those who came before us and this book is a good reminder that we need to take advantage of that knowledge.

Queued up in the Kindle, or soon will be, or on the coffee table...

The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It , Jonathan Zittrain
photo.jpgI have this on my Kindle, and also on my phone thanks to a Twitter post by Bud Hunt who alerted me to the fact that Zittrain has made electronic copies of the book available on the web. Recently I came across a great ebook reading tool for Mac OS called Stanza. Stanza has the ability to read and convert from several different ebook formats and one option is to convert a book to a .plist file, or basically a bookmark. It's an interesting way to put ebooks on an iPhone/iPodTouch. More about Stanza here...

The Post American World, by Fareed Zakaria

In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen

The Great Deluge, by Douglas Brinkley

Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
The story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and the eight ball players who threw the 1919 World Series...

Wanted to also note that I am really enjoying the ability to download a sample chapter to the Kindle before buying a book. I find myself listening to interviews with authors and then looking on Amazon for the Kindle edition of the book and then downloading the sample chapter. Quite frankly, Amazon makes the book buying process a little too easy... :-)

Video: Art at Lewis, Overview of Art, Music and Technology at Lewis Elementary

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Below is the second in a series of videos about Lewis Elementary School produced by Emily Chapman. The video below is a piece edited down from the original that focuses mainly on the arts at Lewis The second one is an overview of the art, music and technology programs at Lewis.. A third video will have a focus on the technology program at Lewis and will be posted soon...
Art at Lewis from timlauer on Vimeo.


Lewis Elementary School from timlauer on Vimeo.

links for 2008-06-30

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Playing with Friendfeed vs. Twitter

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What with the flaky nature of Twitter of late, I've been playing around with Friendfeed, the social networking tool that allows you to build a customised feed made up of content that friends on other collaborative sites have shared, including news articles, photos, Twitter posts, and weblog postings. Basically it is a web presence stream catching tool.

In addition to displaying the content, the FriendFeed interface on the web, and on clients such as Twhirl or MySocial 24x7, allow you to comment on an item. For example in Twitter if you want to comment you @reply to the individual. The item is posted chronologically, and this makes it difficult to follow conversations. For example this morning Steve Dembo and Ryan Bretag are having a Twitter discussion about the merits of interactive clicker type tools in the classroom. It started last night and continues on this morning, but it is hard to follow on Twitter. In FriendFeed comments are nested with the original Tweet/post. As others comment on the posting they are added along with yours. You also have the option of sending an @reply directly to Twitter. Kind of a foot in both worlds. (the Friendfeed web interface and MySocial 24x7 allow this, Twhirl has not yet implemented this feature.)

I also like that you can follow a friend's web contributions. For example FriendFeed allows you to aggregate posts to sites such as YouTube, Flickr and over 40 other web sites/tools. I am finding that I like following friends and collegues in this manner, rather than jumping around from various sites to see if they have posted anything new.

Update: Another feature of FriendFeed is something they call Rooms. Basically private spaces that a team or workgroup could set up to have a Twitter like discussion area, but only viewable to those that you allow in. Might be useful in a school or classroom setting...

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