I just checked into my GMail and discovered I now had Google “Buzz.” I’m not yet exactly what it does, but here’s what Google says about it.

Common Craft’s latest video is Cloud Computing in Plain English.  Like all their previous video’s, this one is a masterpiece of simplification. They make something complex like cloud computing simple to understand. The only down side to this video is that, unlike many of their previous efforts, it’s not posted on YouTube (and is only on their site) meaning you can’t embed it in one of your own webpages. Even so, it’s quite cool.

As teachers we’re always told to vary our approach. Sometimes you should deliver content orally, sometimes visually and sometime bring the message across on paper. This is intended to accommodate different learning styles of the students.

If you’re trying to search for thing  on the Internet  presenting the material in different ways has been hard. After all, one search engine looks pretty much like another. It may be hard, but, thanks to Google, it’s not impossible. If you click on that Google link in the last sentence, it should open up into a search on our first PM, Sir John A Macdonald. That’s fairly standard stuff so far, right?

The cool thing that I’ve recently discovered was that if you click on the line at the top of the search where it says “Web +Show Options” it not only will let you change what’s highlighted in your search it will let you change how your search is presented. If you go down to “Standard View,” for example, and click on “Wonder Wheel,” you get a really neat visual representation of your search results. You can click on the various spokes of the wheel, and the relevant results show up to the right of the wheel.

And if you like that, you’ve got to try the timeline. That option is a wonderful thing for a history teacher.

Accommodating different learning styles doesn’t always have to be onerous.

I have to teach a course this fall on Microsoft Office. It’s a tough one to make exciting. I have to admit I just don’t know how to add a little pizzazz to Word or Excel. However, someone has done something mighty interesting with the whole concept in a movie called Office 2010: The Movie. The trailer makes this rather bizarre conept seem pretty exciting. I’ll have to show it to my students.

While I can’t say I like the Pirate Party getting a seat in the European Parliament, courts in the U.S. have swung in completely the opposite direction.

A U.S. court recently decided that a woman who illegally shared 24 songs over the Internet would have to pay damages of $80,000 per song for a grand total of $1.92 million. The songs she shared could have been download from the Internet for about 99 cents per title.

While I’m all in favor of punishing people who steal music (or provide it for others to be stolen) Biblical standards for restitution (such as Exodus 22) provide for damages of 4 or 5 times the amount stolen. While that is likely a general guideline and not necessarily and exact amount, 80,000 times the amount stolen seems a bit inflated

There has to be some middle ground between sharing files willy nilly and punitively penalyzing illegal file sharing.