After a very long week of school district meetings, with miles of PowerPoint presentations, I always find it refreshing to take a look at Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen weblog.... Ricks discusses the use/abuse of PowerPoint as a briefing tool and how print outs of PowerPoint slides have started to be used instead of printed documentation, or in this case instead of documented orders.

O'Reilly Radar > Blackboard E-Learning Patent: Tim O'Reilly talks about the Blackboard patent and the response from the education community. He notes how Wikipedia is being used to document the history/prior art of virtual learning environments.

// This is your call to flickrshow // The parameters are photoset ID, ID of target and colour // Repeat this call to have multiple flickrshows on a page fs1 = new flickrShow("72157594201929815", "fsDemo", "blue"); A slide show will appear here shortly.

Kilgour, a distinguished librarian who nearly 40 years ago transformed a consortium of Ohio libraries into what is now the largest library cooperative in the world, making the catalogs of thousands of libraries around the globe instantly accessible to far-flung patrons, died on Monday in Chapel Hill, N.C.... For example the links described below would take me to the entry for Will Richardson's book: Book: Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms http://worldcat.org/oclc/62326782 By adding geographical limiting information to the link I can limit the results to a certain zip code or state Book: Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms http://worldcat.org/oclc/62326782&loc=97215 http://worldcat.org/oclc/62326782&loc=Oregon You can also access Worldcat from within Google and Yahoo.

Google Maps has added a nice feature which allows you to save personal addresses on Google Maps. A Saved Location link has been added to the right corner of the site.

The Chicago Tribune has recently published a special report by Paul Salopek that traces the gasoline sold at a suburban Chicago station back to its origins.... The site also includes a great little ticker that counts off US oil consumption while you are visiting the site.

Barcelona airport strike strands 10,000 Britons - Times OnlineThe strike was sparked by the decision by Spanish airports authority AENA not to renew Iberia’s baggage handling contract.Workers blocked one of the airport’s three runways this morning to protest at possible job losses.How I spent part of my summer vacation...

Andy Carvin has set up a site - DOPA Watch - that automatically aggregates the latest news and blog posts about the DOPA (interesting acronym) legislation.... It will be interesting to see if the owners of the types of sites targeted by the legislation will begin to lobby Congress to counter some of the perceptions inherent in the legislation.

A few months back I wrote about Gizmo, a voice over Internet service that has many nice features including the ability to record phone conversations (great for student interviews and such...)... While this can be seen as a marketing move by the company, the result is that with a bit of organization and effort you can make voice calls to 60 countries for free.

Google Video has a nice feature that allows you to link to a specific section of video stored on their system.